HNHacker News
TopNewBestAskShowJobs

dsjoerg

2,172 karma · joined August 17, 2011

Chess.com, Two Sigma, GGTracker, Vindigo, stuff like that

linkd.in/dsjoerg

submissionscomments
dsjoerg··on Using thousands of AI agents to uncover new leads in biological data
More to the point, what if the button gives a 10% quarterly boost in productivity for the next 100 quarters. But 80% of the professionals get fired and the other 20% have harder jobs that feel more managerial. Then, yeah I would press it.
dsjoerg··on I know why the mathematicians weep
Bankers did not exist in 10,000 BC
dsjoerg··on Do dentists know what they're doing?
Is there any meat to this or is it just one anecdote after another? I came to comments to find out and got hit by just more anecdotes
dsjoerg··on I'm sorry, but you still have to think
When you read the article you’ll see it gives numerous examples. Eg “The Rust version doesn't maintain 100% backwards compatibility, for example it drops the CSRF token so that caching is easier”
dsjoerg··on Computers Cannot Make Decisions
Ironically this piece makes the same type of error that it is criticizing!

The piece: "Anthropic COULD stop their models from doing what they are doing, and they are actively choosing not to"

As if _Anthropic_ could make a decision.

Companies cannot make decisions! All of these incidents are the fault of people. Companies are not deciding to do this, people are. There is little more to it than that.

dsjoerg··on “Math 2.0” will need to value mathematical progress more holistically
My university math teacher considered his job done when he showed me the proof. He literally said "I gave you the proof, what more do you want?". That was the end of my math education.

So, now he can join the club. The AI gave him the proof, what more does he want?

dsjoerg··on Who wrote Elizabeth I's most scathing letters?
The podcast "The Rest is History" did a series in the past year on Elizabeth I. Highly recommended, and their take is highly compatible with this research take -- Elizabeth seems to have been quite masterful and deliberate both in her choice of what she would communicate, and in composing and marshalling her team.
dsjoerg··on A misalignment of AI in mathematics
Uh I was literally on math team
dsjoerg··on Marketers are Addicted to Bad Data (2020)
Some people are in business to get paid by creating actual real value all the way down the chain to the ultimate customer. Those people are the ones you'd rather work for, and those are the ones who will care about "science purposes".
dsjoerg··on The development pipeline is a production system
True. So you're talking about allocating resources (teams) across priorities. Which have to be prioritized. Which is the reality the article doesn't wrestle with at all.
dsjoerg··on The development pipeline is a production system
There's more to making an argument than stating your conclusion forcefully and repeatedly.

EDIT. In particular the author hasn't acknowledged the prioritization problem, hasn't explained what factors might go into the necessary cost benefit analysis. The author merely points out "developer productivity is important!" You might as well say "invest in your tools!"

dsjoerg··on If coding has been solved, why does software keep getting worse?
Customers speak with their wallets, and OP doesn't like what they're saying.
dsjoerg··on 98% Isn't Much
Decisions are about tradeoffs. 2% of users staring at a broken screen is bad, of course. But what is the _cost_ of not using nested CSS? The responsible way to make a decision is to consider both sides of the tradeoff.
dsjoerg··on Why software engineers are grieving
Those who pay no attention to history are surprised when things change. It's the temporal equivalent of never leaving your home town. Very provincial. Then one day change comes and they're all shocked pikachu face.
dsjoerg··on The Exhaustion of Talking to a Tool
I feel the opposite. Interacting with humans, I definitely pay a social tax - I have to negotiate the feelings of the people involved. With LLMs there is no social tax, I can be as blunt as I like. But there are other taxes to pay with LLMs; they don't learn, they BS relentlessly, there is less fun and camaraderie.

But "social tax"? No, there is not a social tax.

dsjoerg··on Ford AI hiccups push carmaker to rehire ‘gray beard’ inspectors
If you allow a likely guess with no evidence to play the role of fact, you're just as bad as the AIs
dsjoerg··on LastPass notifies users of yet another data breach
it's "trivial" in the sense of "I can launch the app in 2 minutes," but "non-trivial" in the sense of "I have a working, synced password manager across my devices with good security practices."
dsjoerg··on Ford AI hiccups push carmaker to rehire ‘gray beard’ inspectors
> Interestingly, there were no consequences for the execs that made this 'mistake'

The article makes no such claim. What is your source? Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence. Or, are you just making things up that you believe are likely, like an AI would?

dsjoerg··on A jacket that harvests drinking water from the air
This is good, however that first sentence needs to be removed, it's too factual and orients the reader too much.
dsjoerg··on Artificial intelligence is not conscious – Ted Chiang
This is very jumbled argumentation.

Is his claim "nobody has proven LLMs are conscious" or "I can prove that LLMs aren't conscious" ?

He goes back and forth.

Proving a negative about consciousness would require a settled theory of consciousness that nobody has, including him.

dsjoerg··on The Global Fertility Crisis Is Worse Than You Probably Think
There are no countries that come close to actually paying for it. There are countries that pay for 5% of it, and in those, indeed they don't have significantly higher fertility rates.
dsjoerg··on The Global Fertility Crisis Is Worse Than You Probably Think
Yes. Societies have been using their women's children as a positive externality for generations, but now the logic of capitalism and societal freedom has caught up, and now societies would rather collapse than support women and families economically for the work of childrearing.
dsjoerg··on Classification of amino acids
I don't understand, why post to HN a link to a Khan academy class that's at least 13 years old?
dsjoerg··on "People who don't use AI will be left behind"
That's why I write my own assembly language. Compilers just atrophy your skills!
dsjoerg··on Folk are getting dangerously attached to AI that always tells them they're right
don't hate the player, hate the game
dsjoerg··on France's aircraft carrier located in real time by Le Monde through fitness app
the location of the ship of course is not secret. but there is finer grained data about the people, the devices and what they're doing that could be gathered. and inferences made from that data. i would only allow this data to leak out if i could somehow use it to deceive my enemy.
dsjoerg··on France's aircraft carrier located in real time by Le Monde through fitness app
it's mind boggling. personal mobile phones have potentially anyone's software running on them and that can connect to the internet means that literally anyone could be tracking and gathering who knows what data from your operation. it's an indication of the greatest unseriousness.
dsjoerg··on Reverse-engineering Viktor and making it open source
"just" is doing a lot of work there. There's a stack, and everyone is fighting and racing to figure out which parts of the stack are commodities and which have protectable IP.

For example, years ago someone might have said: "Software programs are "just" some instructions on top of a computer, which does the actual computing work. The software companies don't own the computer. The next version of the computer might not even be capable of running the software." And for some kinds of software, they'd be right. Some programs turned out to be more replaceable than others.

I assume the GetViktor folks are hoping that some combination of know-how and learnings from real customer interactions and data will help them build or find a sustainable competitive advantage in some niche.

> They don't own the LLM model. You're just one silent update from not delivering what you promised.

This is true but a small risk IMO. Worst case they can shift to open-weight LLMs for inference. I would bet on LLMs being an increasingly commodity part of the stack.

dsjoerg··on Reverse-engineering Viktor and making it open source
It's because of this hard problem that I'm thinking I should keep using Viktor (getviktor.com) instead of running this OpenViktor.

The company may not do a perfect job of security either, but I figure they'll do a better job than I can as a solo practitioner.

dsjoerg··on Reverse-engineering Viktor and making it open source
it's not viktor.ai it's getviktor.com
Page 1 of 20Next →