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erehweb

4,155 karma · joined February 8, 2011

I have a blog at http://erehweb.wordpress.com
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erehweb··on Restaurants Are Using AI to Advertise Their Food and people don't like it
I don't think so. The article notes that bad AI produces pictures of food that doesn't look like real food, and is unappetizing - something different to what you're talking about.
erehweb··on A succession crisis that tore England apart (2023)
See also the BBC kids show "Horrible Histories" which gives an Abba-song parody of this https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uuZsueUBvdU
erehweb··on OpenAI’s head of ethics leaves less than a year after joining
Crucially, the FAA is not a part of United Airlines, and the FDA is not a part of Pfizer. If there weren't any FDA, then the safety group in Pfizer would be a lot weaker.
erehweb··on Truth is not a direction: a Tarski attack on LLM probes
As the article notes, the sentence "This sentence is written in English" is well understood, and true. "This sentence is written in French" is also well understood and false.
erehweb··on The Doorman's Fallacy in action
It's difficult to tie changes in customer retention to not having a doorman in a "hard data" way. Ideally you'd want to do an A/B test of doorman vs non-doorman, but you'd need multiple hotels for that to work.
erehweb··on Artificial intelligence is not conscious – Ted Chiang
This seems like a logical error. I don't understand how an internal combustion engine works, but I know it doesn't come from goblins jumping up and down inside.
erehweb··on How many chess games are possible?
This link https://wismuth.com/chess/longest-game.html from the article talks about the 2014 changes (75-move rule and draw by 5-fold repetition) that make it no longer infinite.
erehweb··on If AI replaces workers, should it also pay taxes?
Looking at the actual article, the people suggesting taxes on AI are American Nobel laureate Edmund Phelps, and Bill Gates, founder of MSFT. The Europeans suggest more general taxes on capital instead.
erehweb··on Eels are fish
See (listen?) also the Radiolab episode https://radiolab.org/podcast/slippery-mystery
erehweb··on An engineer's perspective on hiring
The OP thinks that candidates spending a lot of time on applications is OK, as long as the company shows respect by spending a lot of time themselves. I think this is mistaken - I care about how much time I have to spend, and am a lot less concerned about how much time the company takes.

There's a trade-off: if a company spends more time / requires more effort on an interview process, they can get a better signal on the candidate's abilities, but then they'll lose out on candidates who are unwilling / unable to commit this time. This might just be a hard trade-off in recruiting.

erehweb··on The King and AI: A humanoid robot painted a picture of Charles. How did it do?
This is an interesting use of AI. If we just want to know what Charles III looks like, photography has solved that problem. So a portrait is interesting because it's saying something about him, rather than being a photo-faithful likeness. But what is the robot (or rather, the robot's programmer) trying to say here? Any ideas?
erehweb··on Congestion pricing in Manhattan is a predictable success
Trivially, the measure of how much it costs in dollars to drive into Manhattan along the affected routes has gone up. So there are likely some people who are worse off. It's rare to have a completely free lunch, but this one looks pretty cheap.
erehweb··on "Microsoft Locked My Account – I Lost 30 Years of Photos and Work"
Number of people saying that you should just make sure you have backups. That's true, but there's still a role for government to play to prevent this sort of thing. We don't let companies sell poisonous food - why do we let them offer digital services that can be arbitrarily frozen?
erehweb··on Cows get GPS collars to stop them falling in river
We've heard of Chesterton's fence. This is a rare example of Chesterton's non-fence.
erehweb··on Sorry, grads: Entry-level tech jobs are getting wiped out
There are a number of industries where you may need experience to become more productive than AI, but nobody wants to hire you when AI is more productive in the first couple of years. Is there a good equilibrium for this, or does it end up with each company saying "We won't hire the juniors, just the experienced people" and then finding there aren't enough experienced people around?
erehweb··on I'm Peter Roberts, immigration attorney, who does work for YC and startups. AMA
Peter already replied to this elsewhere in the thread. To a question

"Maybe a dumb question, but... I'm a Canadian who would qualify for a TN visa if I worked in the States, but don't currently have a visa or green card. On the online submission form for job openings, it always asks 'Are you legally entitled to work in the US?'. Am I meant to answer yes or no to that?"

Peter replies:

"Unfortunately, the correct answer is No because until you have the TN, you are not legally entitled to work in the U.S. Of course, this means that you will be excluded automatically for consideration of certain jobs."

erehweb··on All BART (Bay Area rapid transit) shut down due to computer networking problem
From 0511 local, originally posted on X: "Due to a computer networking problem BART service is suspended system wide until further notice. Seek alternate means of transportation. Find more info at http://bart.gov/alternatives"
erehweb··on Why I Am Not Going to Buy a Computer (1987) [pdf]
Your first sentence is false in US at least. Census says that 81% of households have a desktop or laptop https://www.census.gov/newsroom/press-releases/2024/computer...
erehweb··on Why I Am Not Going to Buy a Computer (1987) [pdf]
Harper's (where the article was originally published) requires you to submit by snail-mail, but many places require email submissions. Guessing that computers won partly because they are a lot more convenient for publishers - if you're typing something up then the publisher has to type it again on their end.
erehweb··on Why Do Domestic Prices Rise with Tarriffs?
See also Krugman's paper on the theory of interstellar trade https://www.princeton.edu/~pkrugman/interstellar.pdf
erehweb··on Purple exists only in our brains
I think you are misunderstanding the purpose of a headline. "Purple exists only in our brains" is a reasonable summary. Your last paragraph is not a headline.
erehweb··on I don't discuss politics with friends
It looks like unintentional moderate and intentional moderate on chart switched, unless I'm misunderstanding?
erehweb··on Ask HN: What $1 can spend to make someone's life easier within a month?
Doctors Without Borders has a page showing examples of this https://donate.doctorswithoutborders.org/c3-give-now - various vaccines and treatments available for under $1 / person and making their life easier. So donating to DWB seems like a pretty easy approach.
erehweb··on Preschoolers can reason better than we think, study suggests
Lots of people saying that this is completely obvious. I'm not so sure, but the article summary is not much help there - we are almost at the end when the researcher explains what she claims the advance is. A better article would start by explaining the advance, diving deeper into it, and then following up with how she showed this. Something to think about when we're trying to communicate complex ideas.
erehweb··on A glitch in an online survey replaced the word 'yes' with 'forks'
As Ionesco may have said, the French for London is Paris.
erehweb··on Borne Back Ceaselessly into the Past: Fitzgerald, Gatsby and WWI
The article mentions that Gatsby's stories are a little inconsistent, and that Nick would have realized this. Do critics generally think that Gatsby fully made them up and perhaps bought a Montenegro medal, or is he just being loose with details?
erehweb··on Business While Working at FAANG
Are you saying that your have your FAANG employer's approval for your entrepreneurial activities, or that you don't need it? I'd be suspicious of the latter.
erehweb··on Why Vermont farmers are using urine on their crops
Pecunia non olet. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pecunia_non_olet
erehweb··on But good sir, what is electricity?
There is a story of a student taking an oral exam at Oxford or Cambridge many many years ago.

Examiner: "What is electricity?"

Student: "Oh, I do know, I mean I used to know, but now I've forgotten."

Examiner: "How very unfortunate. In the whole of history only two people have known what electricity is - the Creator and yourself. And now one of the two has forgotten."

erehweb··on Why the Number Line Freaks Me Out (2016)
See https://math.stackexchange.com/questions/4216831/what-does-c... for some discussion on convergence using constructive mathematics.
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