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j_w

404 karma · joined January 23, 2025

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j_w··on The Megadonors Who Have Poured $1.2B into the Midterms
For US politics to go back to normal voters need to understand political fundraising.

SUPER PACs are the "issue." These are outside entities which are "campaigning" in some way (see: advertising). These are legally entities outside of the candidates campaign. You simply cannot stop an entity from saying "Vote for x candidate" or "Y candidate wants to kill your puppies" without violating the 1st amendment.

j_w··on Anthropic reports $17B in Q3 revenue, commitments of $895B in revised S-1
> Aren't there better stocks to YOLO on if you think you could maybe 10x?

This is why any [consumer] investment in ANT is bad. If ANT goes 10x then congrats, we [the citizens] are in a crisis. If ANT goes 1/10x then congrats, holders of ANT are in a crisis.

j_w··on WTF Ubuntu?
The obvious difference is that version N-1 has a known vulnerability that could potentially be exploited, and everyone now knows about it.
j_w··on Wealth Inequality in America drawn to scale
I think that instead of a wealth tax it makes more sense to change how we tax in relation to the financial instruments the wealthy use.

Capital gains: this should just be income.

Unrealized gains: The argument against wealth taxes are often related to unrealized gains needing to sell blah blah. If you get a loan on your stock value, at that moment the gains should be considered realized and you should be taxed via capital gains (which would be at the level of income tax). Ultra-wealthy use loans against their portfolio to avoid realizing their gains. Make that not possible.

j_w··on Danish Government silently drops plan to dump MS Office
LLMs can't "clean room" so they are just "copies."
j_w··on What's Getting Pwned
No just with BTC you have to worry about your money not being insured, high transaction fees, and when you do lose your wallet the only one you can blame is yourself for being an idiot.
j_w··on Paramount Skydance has completed its $111B merger with Warner Bros. Discovery
The article is a bit foolish.

Hypothetically California could have done something to prevent the merger. Then they [Paramount] leave California, as threatened, and then complete the merger.

The Federal government is the entity which needs to be the enforcer of antitrust. Otherwise major companies like these WILL pick and and leave the state blocking them. It's a 111 billion deal - this is worth moving states for the parties involved.

j_w··on The Download: why AI's latest breakthroughs and fears may be more hype than rea
Not sure why you linked an axios article that just immediately refers to a times article.

https://archive.ph/xaImK#selection-8311.59-8311.77

> The company is expected to reach more than $100 billion in annualized revenue by the end of this year, according to four people familiar with the matter.

It's not really interesting if it's not according to Anthropic themselves. It's also revenue not profit.

j_w··on Unreal Agent
Maybe if UnrealLabs were a banana company. But they are a software company. The trademark they have on "Unreal" is for computer software and lists a bunch of domains related to the software development of video games/3d models.
j_w··on I Remain a Skeptic
Yes I didn't say this. I'm using it to show how absurd the original claim was.
j_w··on I Remain a Skeptic
If that claim were even reasonable in the first place you would have to accept that they were idiots long before by allowing bugs to be introduced in the first place.
j_w··on We charge $10k a week to delete AI-generated code
How do you "throw away" the bloat when it becomes embedded through the code base? Is GitHub just going to rollback to some commit from 3 years ago?
j_w··on Microsoft fire idTech team at Id software
Commenting just so I can check later what he comes back with.
j_w··on Captcha proves you're human. HATCHA proves you're not
Simply use a browser plugin (or any other mechanism) that invokes the agent when the "HATCHA" appears.
j_w··on Oracle shed about 20k roles globally in the last year
Number 2 is the thing, right?

Why bother asking? Is a recruiter going to fly out to my high school and see if they can get records? Interview a teacher that still works there?

You also are likely selecting not for high school calculus geniuses, but for people willing to lie. Presumably they ask because there is a more desired answer, so if you want to get a job you should provide the more desirable answer.

j_w··on Becoming a dad changes men's brains
+1 to this method. Prior to having a reserved ~6 hour slot of sleep the lack of sleep was getting BAD.
j_w··on Pre-2022 Books
Well they aren't people churning out 40k words :)

I've spent very little time on ao3, but I imagine it's slightly better than RR where seemingly a mark of value is "huge length (word count and chapters)" with weekly updates.

j_w··on The AirPods Effect
The metro is a much less stressful experience for me with noise cancellation on. Without them the noise in tunnels just makes me anxious. The outside tracks are all fine without them though.

And for walking around - it's the traffic noise that bothers me, not people. Traffic noise can just be so loud along some roads (and at certain times of day) that it makes me not want to walk at all.

j_w··on Lore – Open source version control system designed for scalability
> I was also confused why commit and push are different steps

I think most people think about file access in the word processor terms, like you mentioned. You "edit," "save," "upload," and "download." Actions like that.

Then they have to use git for the first time and the terms/actions are really foreign. It's likely made worse if they have experience with auto-syncing file software, since that software does the whole remote management process for them.

j_w··on Lore – Open source version control system designed for scalability
These criticisms of git always seems so shallow to me.

'add' tells git to start tracking some file(s)

'commit' tells git to save the currently tracked files

'push' says "upload my changes to some other location." Git isn't dropbox magically 'rsync'ing the directory to some server.

'pull' says "download any changes from some other location." Same deal as push.

That should satisfy the majority of git casuals that get frustrated with it. You should learn the tools of your trade, and version control (specifically git) is one of the tools of the software trade. If you work adjacent to software why is it so hard to learn a little about git?

j_w··on Leaked OpenAI financials show $38.5B loss and compute burn
> converting all subscription customers to api customers would yield 10x boost in revenue immediately so the demand is there

If OpenAI started charging all subscription users API pricing they would lose the majority of users.

If they increase the price demand will plummet. They have no moat and there are competitors.

j_w··on U.S. science is in chaos
Because the same reasoning behind that statements implies that certain races are innately inferior to others. You chose to write "Asians" and "whites" here - why not make the same statement with "whites" and "blacks?"

Saying "Asians" are intellectually superior to "whites" is a thinly veiled way to say "and whites are superior to all other non-Asian/white races."

And the claim that "Asians" are intellectually superior to "whites" isn't even correct "because of race." I'm not aware of any real study that attributed racial identity to measure intelligence. Cultural differences? Socioeconomic differences? Country of origin? Sure. Race? Used as a proxy for the former.

j_w··on Correlated randomness in Slay the Spire 2
Well the .NET random is bad.

It seems really the problem is twofold: the reference is from 1992 and cites a 1981 publication's reference to an unpublished 1958 generator. Not to say that being old makes the algorithm bad, but it's a bad implementation of an algorithm that already is questionable given more recent research.

I'll go section by section: > //Apparently the range [1..55] is special (Knuth) and so we're wasting the 0'th position.

This is a silly comment. Knuth explicitly states that "24 and 55 in this definition were not chosen at random; they are special values that happen to define a sequence whose least significant bits, {Xn mod 2), will have a period of length 2^55 - 1. Therefore the sequence (Xn) must have a period at least this long."

Then you have the initial seeding of the LCG with with a = 21 and m = 55, which is interesting. Numerical Recipes uses those values, but Knuth whom they got the algorithm from does not suggest them. The closest Knuth suggests is 24 and 55. This suggestion is from 1981, so the viability is questionable (and Knuth clearly states that this is an unpublished algorithm from 1958 - Numerical Recipes itself questions the quality).

Then they use 21 for inextp - this is wrong. Numerical Recipes uses 31, and that is significant per the period length quote above. The use of 21 should measurable lower the period.

Instead if it were a simple LCG using values found in L'Ecuyer's 1999 publication on the topic (https://www.ams.org/journals/mcom/1999-68-225/S0025-5718-99-...) I assume it would have a better distribution.

So the implementation is a questionable algorithm from 1958, and it's done incorrectly. Numerical Recipes opens the chapter on randomness almost immediately with: "Now our first ... lesson in this chapter is: be very, very suspicious of a system-supplied rand()," and then the authors of the .NET random package show exactly why that is.

j_w··on "Don't You Just Upload It to ChatGPT?"
It definitely takes a lot of work. I've read that it takes a good writer themselves to translate well, since it's such an artistic endeavor.
j_w··on "Don't You Just Upload It to ChatGPT?"
As somebody who regularly reads translated works, including the occasional machine translation (MTL), they (MTL) suck. You got a hugely biased result, which you recognize.

Translation is hard. If you're familiar with reading translations from specific languages MTL works have a very specific smell to them, it's a bit hard to describe but it's there. A good translation is miles (kilometers, for those outside of the US) above MTL.

That's not to say that perhaps the latest LLMs will have better translation abilities, but that they are generally crap currently. Maybe they are fine for something very short, but absolutely not for longer content.

j_w··on A dumpster arrived behind my university's library
So if you want them just dumpster dive for them.
j_w··on Core PPI up 9.6% annualized (0.8% MoM) in May
And this doesn't even include tariffs...
j_w··on A €0.01 bank transfer could compromise a banking AI agent
That's when you bust out the third LLM. Nobody expects the fourth LLM to be the REAL LLM in the chain.
j_w··on Dopamine Fracking
Just live on /active and that stuff doesn't show up.
j_w··on Why isn't the U.S. better at soccer?
I don't know why any reply disagrees with this.

Look at basketball in the US. The best players will tell you all they did as a kid was play basketball. You can go to anywhere somewhat populated and the outdoor courts are in use almost all the time school is not in session for pickup play. Outside of structured practice (if they are on a team), many kids are still playing pickup games or shooting casually.

Soccer fields rarely get use outside of structured play. Kids that play soccer in the US just don't play as much, so their skills are (on average) much worse.

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