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izzydata

4,092 karma · joined December 31, 2013

Some guy on the internet.

https://izzydata.xyz

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izzydata··on Byesky: Wipe your Bluesky account clean
I am not seeing anything that can hide or delete posts on HN. If you are talking about the minus button that is to collapse post threads. Other people can still read your posts.
izzydata··on Byesky: Wipe your Bluesky account clean
Can we get the ability to delete posts on Hackers News?
izzydata··on Show HN: HackerBooks – HackerTube, but for books mentioned on HN
Permutation City, Greg Egan
izzydata··on New iPad mini
All phones are just rectangles. The no camera bump is the most important part. It is completely flat on both sides.
izzydata··on Solar power is becoming bigger than nuclear
I suspect a huge chunk of that is labor costs rather than materials.
izzydata··on New iPad mini
This is why I believe the Pixel 10a is the best designed phone to date.
izzydata··on Tesla Roadster
I've never been so convinced by dead internet theory than I am today with this huge wave of bots advertising for Tesla today.
izzydata··on I Know Why the Mathematicians Weep
Perhaps they could some day. I'm basing my understanding on the current day capabilities. Once that changes I will update what I think.
izzydata··on I know why Mathematicians weep
I would be curious to see the end result of letting it endlessly update its inputs from its own outputs. I was under the impression that eventually this would cause delusions and if you let it do this long enough and it is solving problems that no humans can verify as correct that it isn't useful.

Maybe that is the limits of my imagination, but it seems unwise to take humans completely out of the loop. Having mathematicians around that can understand what it is doing so that we can utilize that knowledge in a way that we can have some confidence in seems important.

izzydata··on I know why the mathematicians weep
I don't see how its output possibilities could be infinite given a finite set of data. Taken to the extreme if you give an LLM only a single piece of information then that is going to be the only thing it can produce. Given it two pieces of information and maybe it can produce every combination of those two things. Given all of the worlds knowledge I'm sure its possible outputs are incomprehensibly large, but still not infinite. Then having its outputs match a set of really specific instructions is going to be a small subset of that.
izzydata··on I know why the mathematicians weep
I still think mathematicians are going to be as important as ever. The LLMs are only finding what was technically possible given our current breadth of knowledge after brute force solving problems. Eventually it will run out of things that it can do with its training and the only way to get it to do more will be training it on new human found knowledge.

Finding that new knowledge may be exponentially more difficult, but it will be much more valuable.

izzydata··on Research Firm Calls Anthropic's IPO 'Unprecedented Test of Investor Gullibity'
You would think any investor would prefer to be informed that the numbers don't match expectations even if they then decide to go ahead anyway. People like to gamble sometimes even though the likelihood of losing money is very high.
izzydata··on A coffee shop owner used AI to make a menu poster. Then came the angry DMs
A coffee shop is more than just the coffee though. There are other considerations to be made such as location and the environment. I'm not sure you can really be a "bad customer". The customer wants whatever they want.
izzydata··on A coffee shop owner used AI to make a menu poster. Then came the angry DMs
Threatening people is unwarranted, but of course people are allowed to choose where they buy coffee for whatever reasons they see fit. If the market decides that stores with AI posters aren't the place to be then the business has to adapt.
izzydata··on Texas judge rules TikTok misled users on child safety feature
I agree that probably won't happen that way. There also won't be much in the way of regulation until society slowly realizes the dangers.

I think we are currently in the process of finding out now that there have been people on social media from birth and are now adult members of society.

izzydata··on People who can't picture anything are rewriting the science of imagination
I think a lot of people that can "see" in their mind are over-estimating their ability and a lot of people who can't are under-estimated their ability.

It's probably a spectrum like a lot of things are, except in this case it is exceptionally hard to to know where you fall on it. The gap may not be as wide as it sounds. Almost everyone is still a functioning thinking human afterall. If the gap were so wide it seems like there would be more obvious giveaways in human behavior.

izzydata··on Texas judge rules TikTok misled users on child safety feature
5 years old is crazy, but by the time they are 15-16 it becomes difficult to restrict them from things their peers all do. There needs to be a wider push from all parents or more of a consensus from society that these platforms are dangerous.
izzydata··on List of references on Sony websites to players "owning" their digital games
Especially not full price. The value of buying a license for a digital download can't be $60 if the value of owning the physical version is also $60.

Personally to me the value of a temporary license to a game is at best $10. Why would I rent a game for $60?

izzydata··on Introducing Ad Blocker for Firefox on iOS
I inherently disagree with the ad model of business. Intentionally worsening a product with ads to convince people to pay to remove them is just rewarding them for enshitification.

So on that front I'd prefer YouTube go out of business so that something like Nebula can take its place. Or the only videos left at\re the ones doing it as a hobby and not as a job.

izzydata··on Coding expertise is going to collapse from AI reliance
The fact that they sometimes can't means you can't have someone who is not a software engineer. Otherwise there is no way to verify whether the LLM wrote correct code or not.
izzydata··on Where did all the public bathrooms go?
I am going to start calling the reduction or removal of minor things that helped society "micro regressions".
izzydata··on Illinois just passed a law that puts Linux on the hook for age verification
In the sense that a website could just ask your OS if you are over a certain age and that age was self declared? That seems fine to me, but why can't the websites just ask me for my self declared age?

That's how things used to be and that makes more sense in my opinion because an OS isn't the thing displaying content. It just run whatever it is told to run.

izzydata··on Xbox goes down. You can't play games you own on disc
This is why I only purchase digital games at high discounts. It might be worth $60 to own a piece of physical media that can be played at any time without internet. However, to me the value of a DRM license that can possibly be taken away at any moment is very little. It is ridiculous that they attempt to sell digital games at the same price as a physical game.
izzydata··on A graph that should be front-page news
At that point it will be a self correcting issue when huge swaths of the human population dies from starvation due to not being able to produce enough food. It is preferable to do something prior to then.
izzydata··on Humanity isn't ready for the coming intelligence explosion
The tools can definitely go away. They could get exponentially more expensive to where it is no longer financially possible to keep it subsidized. The bubble could pop and most of the companies could go bankrupt. It's not exactly like a calculator because it requires such an astronomical amount of resources to keep running.
izzydata··on UK set to announce social media ban for under-16s
Better than if it weren't illegal I'm sure. Also I think it is that it is illegal to sell kids vapes. It's not illegal for the kids to vape.
izzydata··on Forever Young: how one molecule can lock plants in a youthful state (2025)
This is the start of the plot of the book Postmortal by Drew Magary. Not to say that the book accurately depicts what would happen if everyone could freeze their aging, but it does bring up some questions that would need to be answered.
izzydata··on The dead economy theory
This is making an assumption that LLMs are even capable of doing what these companies claim they can or will do in the future. Stop doing the marketing for them by believing what they tell you at face value.
izzydata··on Uber president says AI spending is getting 'harder to justify'
My impression of companies pushing AI so heavily is that they are basically being forced to do it by it merely existing. Imagine if AI really is as powerful as it is suggested to be and you didn't jump on the bandwagon. Then you would be behind. So by it existing and other companies using it, you have to as well because even if it turns out to be a failure at least everyone else will have failed too and you are on an even playing field.
izzydata··on Spain blocks prediction markets Polymarket, Kalshi over lack of gambling licence
Can you further explain the semantics you are talking about here? Are people not trying to predict things? Thus it being a market for people making predictions?
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