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davemp

2,612 karma · joined July 28, 2017

email: hn-at-dmpfeiffer-dot-com
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davemp··on How to earn a billion dollars
Just because it could be worse doesn’t mean it couldn’t be better.
davemp··on How to earn a billion dollars
> Would you want to take a pay cut if your employer was having financial problems?

This happens constantly in the form of layoffs…

davemp··on AI is slowing down
Ah yes. Just need to displace 16 million people’s livelihoods. No big deal.
davemp··on Nvidia is proposing a beast of a CPU system for Windows PCs
I assume because most windows installs are corporate IT garbage that if anyone cared about performance they could just turn off one of the three endpoint protection services or tune the backup service down and get better results than processor upgrades.
davemp··on Can the stockmarket swallow Anthropic, SpaceX and OpenAI?
> One third of all software code is written by AI.

I find it interesting that using lines of code as a metric is making a comeback.

davemp··on Can we have the day off?
I’m pretty certain there are physiological limits that you can’t just muscle through and stress _can_ be an indicator that you’re reaching said limits.
davemp··on Eric Schmidt speech about AI booed during graduation
usage != positive opinion

I don’t like driving in traffic yet I do it pretty much every day. Why don’t I simply not drive?

davemp··on Eric Schmidt speech about AI booed during graduation
Kind of goes to show how out of touch and insular the tech exec sphere can be. Almost everyone I interact with in reality has a deep distain for LLMs and their touted trajectory.
davemp··on Rewrite Bun in Rust has been merged
It’s not a public study though. We’re not going to get trust worthy numbers about labor or token cost.
davemp··on Claude for Small Business
So they can get training data I assume.
davemp··on Google Cloud fraud defense, the next evolution of reCAPTCHA
I think it’s becoming hard to ignore that the Internet has fundamental flaws from a game theoretical view. I hope that we can skip the step of having Google as the feudal lord who saves us from anarchy though.

How about we start with some accountability for entities that host fraud? The main reason we can have relative anonymity in public is part trust and partially because you can get physically taken out if you cross the line. I understand there are some real limitations with enforcing accountability on the Internet, but perhaps that’s where we should be focusing.

davemp··on BYOMesh – New LoRa mesh radio offers 100x the bandwidth
The FCC or whoever is almost 100% just looking at power/time/location. Those 10 devices will look like 1 device.
davemp··on BYOMesh – New LoRa mesh radio offers 100x the bandwidth
> What -apart from cost- prevents a user who wants more bandwidth from installing 10 devices in parallel and alternate each radio so none of the radios exceed their allowed transmit duty cycle?

Folks with badges knocking on the user’s door. It is pretty trivial to locate stationary signals.

davemp··on Southwest Headquarters Tour
I’m not sure how you could suggest starbucks and mcdonalds outcompete based on product quality or ambiance. Have you been to a random mom&pop coffee or burger spot recently?

Chairs aren’t magic, we know roughly what’s good or not. You don’t need a PhD to choose a good chair. A mom and pop could just copy the chair too.

The chains outcompete on marketing, leverage with vendors, etc.

They put a huge amount of effort into baseline quality because it’s incredibly hard to pull off across 1000s of stores staffed by people who don’t have any incentive to care.

davemp··on Embedded Rust or C firmware? Lessons from an industrial microcontroller use case
I'll start of by saying I really hate C (also love it), and welcome improvements; but I have a few criticisms:

- Sensor agent is such a rancid name for a remote sensor that I feel a need to public say so. Please don't use marketing names for things that already have more descriptive names.

- Rust uses a full RTOS and C uses the mediocre ST HAL (vendor specific). Immediately apples to oranges. Also I've never heard of the C JSON library and it looks sketchy at a glance so that will also hurt the comparison.

- Streaming slow sensor data with a 160MHz 786KB/2MB MCU is not a good test in the slightest. You could probably use something like micro python here and be done. No one is reaching for bare metal C here. Also no one serious about performance is using JSON serdes. If you're using bare metal C, you're likely trying to push the limits of your hardware or doing something so simple that you won't be tempted to reach for terrible third party libraries.

- Does the Rust code base use the 'unsafe' keyword anywhere, including the RTOS? If so, it's not memory safe without additional formal verification.

Overall I'd say this paper has approximately zero value wrt its stated goal of comparison.

davemp··on Functional programmers need to take a look at Zig
Good for you? I’m glad you have languages that fit your needs.

In the realtime/high assurance systems world, where garbage collection can be a huge source of non-determinism and overhead; we don’t have great options.

Zig is really the only language (idk about Odin?) trying to take the same approach that C did in giving you absolute control over a minimally abstracted CPU model. Us folks who need/want maximum control/performance should be allowed to have nice things too.

davemp··on AI should elevate your thinking, not replace it
> It's not by writing syntax that you get there. It's by creating software and gaining the experience of seeing it go wrong.

I’m not sure there’s any data to support this statement. Maybe if you hedge with “not by syntax alone”.

I am aware of studies that showed the act of physical writing letters improves retention.

I would not be surprised if this extended to physically typing out your curly braces, naming functions, etc.

davemp··on ChatGPT Images 2.0
> The argument that training AI on scraped data is "fair use" and the resulting model outputs are "transformative works" has held up in courts.

Nope. Nope. Nope. That has explicitly not been ruled on yet. Transformative means that you don't need a fair use defense. Anthropic has only gotten away with their outputs being called transformative so far because they put a dubiously effective filter in front to block the most egregious infringing outputs. No one has actually challenged this afaik.

davemp··on Thoughts and feelings around Claude Design
> Under that logic is a free trial a bait and switch? How about a 1-month free deal? How about what Adobe (and many others) do where they license to the school and students get it free until they graduate?

No. The key difference being transparency. You know when signing up for a free trial what the actual long term costs will be and can plan for it.

We might be talking about different things. I was mostly replying to this line from the OP:

> But I think it's part of a larger mistake Figma is making: they seem to have shifted to an extraction mindset too early

I’m not sure if this was just awkward wording that seems to condone these type of strategies.

All these loss leading, vendor lockin strategies have distorted markets heavily. Complex tools cost a lot of money to develop; and if another player is just going to burn piles of cash from elsewhere to undercut you, it becomes a game of capital allocation and not individual product quality/costs. It’s terrible for consumers and a big reason why even common chat apps are barely functional.

davemp··on Thoughts and feelings around Claude Design
> The big tools that won on collaboration (eg. Google Docs) have understood that low-friction sharing is critical to becoming the default choice.

Google docs is a heavily subsidized product and not representative.

Also tool pricing seems hard, but I can’t really get behind saying that a company should bait and switch with their pricing models harder.

davemp··on Bring Back Idiomatic Design (2023)
> Tell me you know nothing about web development without saying you know nothing about web dev

This Twitterism really bugs me.

You took the time to write a really detailed response (much appreciated, you convinced me). There’s no need to explicitly dunk on the OP. Though if you really want to be a little mean (a little bit is fair imo), I think it should be closer to level of creativity of the rest of your comment. Call them ignorant and say you can’t take them seriously or something. The twitterism wouldn’t really stand on its own as a comment.

Sorry for the nitpicky rant.

davemp··on Bring Back Idiomatic Design (2023)
I’m a decade+ linux power user and I still do insane things like pipe outputs into vim so I can copy paste without having to remember tmux copy paste modes when I have vertical panes open.
davemp··on AI Will Be Met with Violence, and Nothing Good Will Come of It
Sounds promising honestly. One of the scariest parts of the big AI labs is all of the exclusive training data they get through their UIs. (It’s unclear whether distillation is a feasible way to close the gap).

If there were another party involved, that would (hopefully) diversify power that (potentially) comes with those streams of data.

It’s a bit ironic that the USA has mostly abandoned interoperability after being one of the pioneers with the American manufacturing method. [0]

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_system_of_manufacturi...

davemp··on Sam Altman's response to Molotov cocktail incident
I intentionally said “modern civil society” instead of the USA to avoid talking about specifics.

Whether the USA has a sufficiently functional justice system is another topic. My intuition is also that, in the presence of a disfunctional social system, fixing (or replacing) the system will usually lead to better outcomes than side stepping it. Not that I really want to talk about the minutia and challenges of fixing the USA’s justice system.

davemp··on Small models also found the vulnerabilities that Mythos found
> Across a thousand runs through our scaffold, the total cost was under $20,000

Lots of questions about the $20k. Is that raw electricity costs, subsidized user token costs? If so, the actual costs to run these sorts of tasks sustainably could be something like $200k. Even at $50k, a FreeBSD DoS is not an extremely competitive price. That's like 2-4mo of labor.

Don't get me wrong, I think this seems like a great use for LLMs. It intuitively feels like a much more powerful form of white box fuzzing that used techniques like symbolic execution to try to guide execution contexts to more important code paths.

davemp··on Sam Altman's response to Molotov cocktail incident
I’m falling into the Socratic hole [0], but in a modern civil society there is a justice system through which people seek recourse. This has all sorts of desirable effects for societies.

Please educate yourself on the basics or at least put more effort in before participating in conversations.

[0]: It’s easy to abuse the Socratic method and devolve a discussion into one of first principles. It’s extremely tiresome and a huge waste of everyone’s time.

davemp··on Sam Altman's response to Molotov cocktail incident
Yeah a company causing mass death or other disasters is maybe the single clearest signal that they should go bankrupt and someone else should take over (if the tech is really that important).
davemp··on Sam Altman's response to Molotov cocktail incident
“Very likely yes”, I reply to an account that <1yr old with mostly comments in AI topics many of which violate the HN guidelines (including the one I’m responding to).
davemp··on AI assistance when contributing to the Linux kernel
> We're well past the Turing test now

Nope, there is no “The” Turing Test. Go read his original paper before parroting pop sci nonsense.

The Turing test paper proposes an adversarial game to deduce if the interviewee is human. It’s extremely well thought out. Seriously, read it. Turing mentions that he’d wager something like 70% of unprepared humans wouldn’t be able to correctly discern in the near future. He never claims there to be a definitive test that establishes sentience.

Turing may have won that wager (impressive), but there are clear tells similar to the “how many the r’s are in strawberries?” that an informed interrogator could reliably exploit.

davemp··on AI assistance when contributing to the Linux kernel
Interesting. That seems to suggest that one would need to retain the prompts in order to pursue copyright claims if a defendant can cast enough doubt on human authorship.

Though I guess such a suit is unlikely if the defendant could just AI wash the work in the first place.

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