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irl_zebra

1,032 karma · joined May 6, 2015

irl a zebra
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irl_zebra··on Flock cameras gifted by Horowitz Foundation, avoiding public oversight
Did you make this account to post this comment?
irl_zebra··on Americans are destroying Flock surveillance cameras
If shame were a motivator for this administration or the current grifter class, neither of these things would exist to the current Armageddon-level they currently do. That is to say, completely agree with your take here. There are plenty of government-entity examples of this, but my favorite I've seen recently was a video montage of Elon saying annually, like clockwork, that sully autonomous driving would be here in 2-3 years for the last 12 years or so. If these people had shame, he wouldn't be doing that, as an example.
irl_zebra··on Over 80% of 16 to 24-year-olds would vote to rejoin the EU
Covid in the USA was a bit like this.
irl_zebra··on I found a useful Git one liner buried in leaked CIA developer docs
"It's not about saving time, it's about eliminating the mental toll from having to context switch"

This broke my brain! Woah!

irl_zebra··on DOGE Track
Lots of organizations have massively increased government efficiency in the USA. 18F comes to mind as one.
irl_zebra··on DOGE Track
If nothing else, the "Political Operations Abroad" section of USAID's wiki has some links and background.
irl_zebra··on Tesla 'Robotaxi' adds 5 more crashes in Austin in a month – 4x worse than humans
Elon definitely has this cult of personality around him where people will jump in and defend his companies (as a stand-in for him) on the internet, even in the face of some common sense observations. I don't get the sense that anything you've said is particularly reasonable outside of being lured in by Elon's personality.
irl_zebra··on Why I'm Worried About Job Loss and Thoughts on Comparative Advantage
I will consume less of it, and have actively blocked or unsubscribed from orgs that promote it, but the generation behind us won't have these scruples.
irl_zebra··on Claude Code for Infrastructure
I've noticed a lot of LLM-based tools that are essentially this sort of thing. Just a slightly more specific prompt wrapper around the core capability that can already do the thing. It's so bad.
irl_zebra··on X offices raided in France as UK opens fresh investigation into Grok
Text on the internet and all of that, but you should have added the "/s" to the end so people didn't think you were promoting this line of logic seriously.
irl_zebra··on Waymo seeking about $16B near $110B valuation
I take that reply as a "bar raiser" that HN commenters should be better, not as a low quality/effort reply.
irl_zebra··on Waymo seeking about $16B near $110B valuation
I love, love, love Waymo and am so excited about their success. Uber and Lyft were the heroes for a while, but became the villains. If Waymo is available anywhere I need a cab, that is absolutely my first choice, even for the premium cost.
irl_zebra··on Margin Call
A device manufacturer/company that makes people who have iphones seriously consider swapping to the new company's offering. It is such a small tail of people who have an iphone and seriously consider moving to Android, with maybe Samsung being the highest quality and most attractive with Pixel also being pretty cool. I don't know what HarmonyOS is and I am pretty tech savvy. I think any company can make an ultra low spec phone and ship Android on it and get people to buy it on the basis of cost alone, but those people aren't cross-shopping iphones, so they're not a notable comparison. Arguably, with the exception of maybe high end Samsung and Pixel phones, Android phones and others are basically a whole different product category.
irl_zebra··on Margin Call
imo the app store thing is very niche and only affects a small, vocal group that tends to sit on hacker news and pay attention to these things. Can almost guarantee that 95% of the iphone-having population does not know/care about the app store "issue." I do think the general decline in quality and uptick in bugs will bite them slowly, at least once there's an iphone competitor of note.
irl_zebra··on Show HN: I trained a 9M speech model to fix my Mandarin tones
I am a huge, huge AI hater. I hate, hate, hate all the "Show HN: My Latest AI Slop App That Sucks and Required No Creativity to Think Up or Vibe Code and is Useless and I am a Useless Void of a Person for Having Created It." I say that to give context to say that this is the first legitimately useful "Show HN" I have seen in this AI sphere. It's really great, it seems to work quite well (I am an amateur mandarin speaker, I "know" about 5,000 words, so can vaguely judge) and fulfills a legitimate use case. I would pay you to use this once the model improves a little bit. It's really fantastic. You did well.
irl_zebra··on Show HN: Only 1 LLM can fly a drone
LLMs are indeed the definition of trendy (I've found using Google Trends to dive in is a good entry point to get a broad sense of whether something is "trendy")! Basically the right way to think about it is that something can be promising, and demonstrate emerging capabilities, but but those things don't make something SOTA, nor do they make it trendy. They can be related though (I expect everything SOTA was once promising and emerging, but not everything promising or emerging became SOTA). It's a subtlety that isn't super easy to grasp, but (and here is one area I think an LLM can show promise) an LLM like ChatGPT can help unpick the distinctions here. Still, it's slightly nuanced and I understand the confusion.
irl_zebra··on Show HN: Only 1 LLM can fly a drone
SOTA typically refers to achieving the best performance, not using the trendiest thing regardless of performance. There is some subtlety here. At some point an LLM might give the best performance in this task, but that day is not today, so an LLM is not SOTA, just trendy. It's kinda like rewriting something in Rust and calling it SOTA because that's the trend right now. Hope that makes sense.
irl_zebra··on ICE using Palantir tool that feeds on Medicaid data
> I’m fine ICE can see my data, as long as there are process enforced to track those usage and I have a right to fight back for their misuse

I agree with this in theory, but its a fantasy to think they have this restriction at this point. ICE seems to be taking all comers, the lowest of the low, the vilest of the vile, giving them "47 days of training," and sending them off armed into the populace. I have seen no evidence they believe they have any restriction on anything. It's basically DOGE but with guns instead of keyboards.

irl_zebra··on A flawed paper in management science has been cited more than 6k times
They are very related concepts. Lack of remorse? Malicious act? Particularly heinous act? Both morally blameworthy and bad person! Isolated incident? Not a pattern? Morally blameworthy but not bad person.

This is pretty standard virtue ethics we all learned in school. Your statements that morally blameworthiness and badness are "[n]ot the same thing...[a]t all" and that we should "[n]ever qualify the person, only the deed" make me think your moral framework is likely not linked to millennia of thought in this area from Socrates on down, so it's unlikely we will get anywhere and should "agree to disagree."

irl_zebra··on A flawed paper in management science has been cited more than 6k times
> Because we are all capable of the same actions, some of us have just not done them

> And yes, I am saying that I have the same capacity for wrong as the person you are thinking about...

No one is disputing any of this. The person who is capable, and who has chosen to do, the bad deed is morally blameworthy (subject to mitigating circumstances).

irl_zebra··on A Lament for Aperture
This sounds like a great half-day project. Just use Gas Town and create a team of product managers, senior and junior developers, designers, and architects and have them get on it. (I recommend keeping Opus as the senior, and Sonnet as the juniors). Once you do this, you can release it and you'll be a (very financially successful) hero!
irl_zebra··on Doing gigabit Ethernet over my British phone wires
I was resigned to running cat6e up three floors because there was only coax and I needed a wifi AP up there. Came across the moca solution and it's great. I get flawless 2.5gbe from the basement switch to the third floor over coax. It's basically a little device that connects at each end of the coax and cat6 goes in and out.

Cat 6 would be better though so I could run POE from the basement switch to power the wifi AP, and instead I need to go do a much more complicated switch (cat6) -> moca adapter + power brick to power moca adapter -> coax -> moca adapter + power brick (cat6) -> POE injector (with power brick) -> wifi AP. SO I'm adding at least three power bricks to the setup, which is annoying. Otherwise it would be one cat6 drawing POE from the switch and powering the AP.

irl_zebra··on Confer – End to end encrypted AI chat
Looks like using Google for login. You can also "Continue with Email." Logging in with Google is pretty standard.
irl_zebra··on The Palantir app helping ICE raids in Minneapolis
Slamming people into the ground, firing tear gas canisters into their faces, or killing them are not valid remedies for the state to take even if obstruction is happening. (even if they're being like really annoying with whistles and stuff!)

edit: even if they referred to the ICE agent as "fatty fat fat fat" meanly

irl_zebra··on The struggle of resizing windows on macOS Tahoe
imo this comment wasn't worth creating a new account for
irl_zebra··on Start your meetings at 5 minutes past
Well, yes, but also the critical attendees (people with something substantial to add) of the meeting aren't there on time, so the meeting cannot start on time, which leads to a culture where no one shows up on time. I was flummoxed yesterday when an SVP scheduled a large meeting and was the only critical attendee, and started exactly on time, within seconds. I showed up at the top of the hour + 49 seconds and missed at least 30 seconds of content.
irl_zebra··on US Job Openings Decline to Lowest Level in More Than a Year
True. I have not ordered a single product from the Heard Island and McDonald Islands since the tariffs were levied on them. I am champing at the bit for these to be reduced.
irl_zebra··on Google Opal
Yeah hate to say it, because I am an AI hater, but I love the AI results in Google and Kagi. I barely click results anymore for basic questions unless it's something important enough for me to need verification to ensure the AI-gen answer wasn't a hallucination. It's been so nice not having to pick through the cesspool that is StackOverflow to find answers to quick cli questions, or wade through SEO-generated, Amazon-affiliate link garbage for more general questions.
irl_zebra··on Nvidia to buy assets from Groq for $20B cash
I pay $20/mo for Gemini, so they're generating at least that much in revenue!
irl_zebra··on Nvidia to buy assets from Groq for $20B cash
I don't know specifically, but I think they're referring to the current USA administration's posture of approving anything, or pardoning anyone, in exchange for some cryptocurrency or similar big favour.
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