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guywithahat

1,074 karma · joined December 13, 2017

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guywithahat··on It's not a fear of "AI communism"; it's a fear of competitive market capitalism
It doesn't have to be gender ideology, it could be anything, it just has to be a real political ideology people actually discuss with a real moral quandary. Saying "these models aren't communist thus they must be right-wing" is a bad argument in my opinion, because there are no communists and on national surveys nobody wants that.
guywithahat··on It's not a fear of "AI communism"; it's a fear of competitive market capitalism
I would argue the only real boundaries for right vs left are what people actually believe. If pools said 55% of people wanted government to own the means of production, and no AI suggested it, that would suggest they may be right-leaning. Since almost nobody wants that, as it's killed ~100 million people, the fact LLM's don't argue for it is not odd. In the same vein would not set the bar for a right-wing LLM to be wanting to purify the country down to a single race.

A more realistic comparison would be gender ideology. Something like 65% of voters believe gender is assigned at birth (ie biological), including ~39% of Democrats (https://www.pewresearch.org/politics/2024/06/06/gender-ident...). While I'm not here to say which is morally correct it is a normal opinion, which is supported by facts, and has been held for decades before being transgender was invented. An unbiased model should reflect the political views of the people, but they effectively all don't, and instead push the left-wing ideology. I don't think you could draw a conclusion from a single topic but the best way to gauge political bias in my opinion would be to find contentious topics, and see where LLM's land. I would be shocked if you found a major LLM which didn't lean much further left than the average American or European.

guywithahat··on It's not a fear of "AI communism"; it's a fear of competitive market capitalism
> that means that they've been trying to impart a right wing ideology to further the goals of the American ruling elite

I agree in principle, but it's pretty widely understood that LLM's lean heavily left. Zuckerberg as well is pretty left wing, and donated hundreds of millions fighting Trump. I think the issue they're running into is that as these models are used by more and more normal people, and those normal people are having trouble using the models because they don't align well with reality.

guywithahat··on Amazonian civilization had estimated 3M people in 3% of forest area
There’s an incredible story about Orellana, who captained the first journey down the Amazon River in the 1500’s with Gaspar de Carvajal taking notes. They described cities of hundreds of thousands of people, and sailing for days going through city after city.

Decades later people tried to repeat the journey and didn’t find major cities, ultimately calling Carvajal a liar. The reality was everyone died due to new diseases. It’s hard to imagine the impact disease had on South America in particular

guywithahat··on The Silicon Valley Founder Meat Grinder
This gets to a point my dad always made when I was neck deep in startups; so many of them felt unserious. People go to the most expensive west coast city, raise money, and then move to the next most expensive east coast city and open a second office. A lot of founders are clearly inexperienced, and to defend their inexperience, hire under experienced teams. It all sort of gets back to the root of the issue, which is that the hardest part is never the engineering, it’s networking and finding product market fit. Finding people who actually get up and do meaningful things is hard, and so Jim’s sneak in under the guise of being an outsider who understands a market and can make things happen.
guywithahat··on 13 Models and 4 Agents on SWE Tasks: Go, Java, Python, Rust, TS
Consistently impressed with the performance of Grok, given they started so much later than everyone else and, in some ways, are less well funded compared to OpenAI and Anthropic. I wonder how much of this is just luck, name recognition, or management style. Marc Andreesen likes to talk about how Elon companies have a unique engineering-heavy management structure, which contrasts the research heavy cultures of OpenAI and other labs, and it makes me wonder if that sort of thing could be behind their relative success.
guywithahat··on US citizen charged after GrapheneOS phone wipes during airport search
> US prosecutors charge Atlanta man after GrapheneOS phone wipes itself during airport search

I really don't like this title. Officers asked him to open the phone, which he pretended to do, but instead wiped the device

> During the questioning, agents repeatedly asked Tunick to unlock his phone and warned they would seize it if he refused. When he finally provided a passcode, the phone appeared to restart. The defense motion states that "the screen went blank, flashed several times, and the phone appeared to restart," resulting in the loss of data.

The title implies the agents maybe entered too many pins by mistake and the device auto-wiped, or that it reset itself with no human intervention, which isn't what happened. This is more like shredding paper when the FBI arrives at your office, which most people would attribute to destroying evidence. I hope he wins the case in principle (I think there's a risk of a slippery slope here) but it wouldn't be a moral tragedy if he lost.

guywithahat··on New rental trend? A $200 'work-from-home fee' tacked on to Bay Area lease
> it isn't the landlord's business what a tenant is doing inside, working or sitting around watching TV

Unfortunately the government is extremely interested in what you do in your property, and this makes it the landlord's business. That said in this case, it seems more like homeowners are renting out a small unit behind their home, and want to disincentivize people who will be there more. Personally if you can work from home I'm not sure why you'd live in a bay area suburb, especially not walnut creek, but to each their own I guess.

guywithahat··on Ask HN: Why are US tech workers so pro open borders?
I'm not sure they always are. Certainly employers/managers are pro-US tech workers because it gives them access to lower-cost talent, and many H1B's/immigrants are supportive of it because they want more people like them. This is a common complaint of Indian H1B's and something I've experienced myself, where, especially before the H1B fee, they would only seriously consider other Indians/people of their nationality.

If you go into the midwest though there's more animosity about being replaced by lower-wage foreign talent. In my experience when US-born engineers support immigration strongly it seems to be a holdout from their college years, and not something they picked up since starting their career.

guywithahat··on AI Companies Are Trying to Hide a Staggering Amount of Debt
You say this as though every company doesn't take on debt, and all debt isn't a risk. I'm sure you have some much riskier debt than ChatGPT already in your portfolio, and interest rates are adjusted by relative as judged by the market. I'm sure some debt will fail, but certainly all of it won't, and while anything could cause a market crash saying "when these fail" holds a lot of incorrect assumptions.
guywithahat··on AI makes programming differently difficult
I do a lot of embedded C++ work and byte stream work where packing matters, but I agree with you. For most development it’s irrelevant, and in the future I expect it to be even less relevant.
guywithahat··on AI makes programming differently difficult
I wonder about this. One would think new programmers, like old, will learn through experience to care most about the things that matter, and ignore things that don’t. In 10 years my pre-AI experience may condition me to waste time thinking about struct packing, while younger developers simply won’t know or care
guywithahat··on Mark Cuban: fight inequality by giving all workers company stock
UBI's have been tried repeatedly and have never worked. They have a bad incentive structure and are simply unaffordable. Unfortunately if you want money you will have to get a job
guywithahat··on How we measured AI writing across arXiv, and where the measurement breaks
Yeah but that's an issue with the researcher putting out a bad paper, and it suggests you'll have to reject more papers. We wouldn't ban email because many of the emails are spam, it just means we need new tools to filter out junk. AI will allow researchers to be more productive all together and take less time to publish a paper, which is good.
guywithahat··on How we measured AI writing across arXiv, and where the measurement breaks
People are saying this is a bad thing but is it really a problem? The compelling aspect of research is the data and/or description of work, not the writing. Papers probably should be written by AI so that they're clear and well presented, while the researchers should focus on generating good data. If there is no data or work behind the paper, we should question whether the research group needs funding.
guywithahat··on How Our Rust-to-Zig Rewrite Is Going
I've sort of thought this too. Rust adoption feels a lot like Haskell to me in that it's centered around ideological things that don't really improve the final product and arguably slow development. If your goal is to write a bunch of LLM code there are better languages than rust, and rust development is often regarded as too annoy for anyone not enthusiastic about the ideological improvements.

There are cool ideas in the language but I don't see it enduring over time.

guywithahat··on Show HN: Clawk – Give coding agents a disposable Linux VM, not your laptop
Funny that they're both written independently and in Go. Sometimes there's just a best way to do things I guess
guywithahat··on Claude Code sends 33k tokens before reading the prompt; OpenCode sends 7k
We've started using claude code at work and I don't understand the hype. I've been using codex and grok build at home, and they're both faster and in some cases better. Claude has a tendency to do too much. If I don't ask for unit tests and they're not in my agents.md file, then I probably don't want them. It'll try to make new libraries and classes for things that should just be a new function or a comparison check.

In our case the alternative was nothing so I'm happy to have it, but currently claude is not as competitive as I'd have maybe expected given the hype

guywithahat··on Mistral's Robostral Navigate: a state of the art robotics navigation model
Technically OpenAI has a robotics development team. In the past they were the creator and maintainer of the Gym reinforcement learning library, and they continue to do work and hire for it. It's just not the star of the show
guywithahat··on China sentences official to death for taking $325M in bribes
I think your confusion comes from the fact this wasn't a protest gone awry, it was an organized domestic terrorist attack. It was a small group of armed people in body armor who privately organized a domestic terrorist attack intending to cause damage and hurt/kill federal officers in an ambush. The only reason the officer lived was because Song's gun jammed before he could kill people and get away.

Certainly if this was a jihadist attack, a lifetime sentence would be appropriate. Why should it be different just because they're white?

guywithahat··on China sentences official to death for taking $325M in bribes
For anyone else curious as to what OP is talking about, I had to look this up:

> The protest was a late-night/noise demonstration (involving fireworks) against immigration detention policies. It turned violent when a shooting injured a police officer. Prosecutors described it as an "act of terrorism" linked to an alleged antifa cell; defendants and supporters denied organized antifa ties and framed it as protected protest activity

https://x.com/i/grok/share/87352ef0ac4b454aba924157c44f476f

It sounds like they arrived in tactical gear, started destroying property, and when cops arrived opened fire.

This seems like a bad example on your part, as the people opposing ICE are some of the most misaligned people in the country. That said, we have a right to protest in traditional public forms, you don't have a right to shoot up an ICE facility.

guywithahat··on OpenWrt One – Open Hardware Router
I don't disagree, however using an old PC as a router almost certainly wastes an enormous among of power. An old non-gaming PC could use 70kWh of power a month if running continuously (as a router would), which is around 11 a month and almost 140 a year. At that price you could just buy a nice router, or an OpenWrt One which will possibly also have newer, faster WiFi standards (WiFi 6)
guywithahat··on University of Oxford Is Older Than the Aztec Empire and Other Facts of History (2013)
In New Zealand the Maori act as though they're some indigenous population who deserves reparations, however they were really more like a colonial people who lost to a more powerful colonial nation.

It's a little like the UK claiming the Falkland Islands. The British were the first to discover the islands and the first to inhabit them, however I wouldn't call them indigenous to the Falkland islands in the same way they might be indigenous to England. Certainly they wouldn't deserve reparations if Argentina someday captured the islands

guywithahat··on Wicklow hotel cancels 'secretive' Peter Thiel group conference
Aren’t most events at hotels “secretive”? Our company all hands certainly isn’t a public event. It’s seems reasonable that defense companies may not always want their events to be public and in newspapers
guywithahat··on Job seekers giving up: Labor force participation falls to lowest in 50 years
What a horribly dystopian thing to say
guywithahat··on The US Government Is Now a Shareholder in 26 Companies
I mean they could, they aren't a democracy and could easily fall back into Maoism with the next regime change
guywithahat··on Why jet engines aren't made in China
That was my thought too. You can absolutely enter the industry, and big players do as the industry becomes profitable enough to sustain more competitors, it's just not available to the average person in the same way the average person can easily compete in the todo app industry.
guywithahat··on Cursor now has a mobile app for guiding your coding agent on the go
Maybe not for maintainable production code but I've definitely built apps/games for friends and this kind of thing would come in handy. I leave for work, I think of something I want to do, and this way I could just text the agent to do it.

There's also a lot to be said about planning modes which don't write anything, but rather just generate text files to be implemented later when I can watch over the repo more closely.

guywithahat··on U.S. government will decide who gets to use GPT-5.6
The tragedy is the Trump admin is setting the precedent and creating the framework which will be abused in the future. For all the complains he made about the deep state, he's just creating a new avenue for them to abuse power
guywithahat··on The AI industry is pouring millions into US elections
I mean many of these companies are doing tens of billions in revenue each, meanwhile their home state is becoming increasingly hostile to their presence. That said this article shares no numbers so I have no idea what the scope or scale of their impact is.
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