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lancebeet

1,045 karma · joined October 4, 2017

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lancebeet··on A Princeton PhD applied to 2,300 jobs and still can't get one
I find myself really disliking articles like this one, because it seems they don't present any information that can challenge people's perceptions. The image they want to paint is that this individual is extremely talented and still can't get a job, so what are the chances for those who are not? Yet this is one data point, and many of us have seen people with much less impressive resumes get jobs. There's no reason for this one data point to carry any more weight than your personal anecdotes, and we're not even seeing his resume. We only hear what he (and his parents) say. Not exactly independent observers.

So it seems to me that the article only serves to confirm your biases. After reading the article, you might feel that the job market is impossible, or you might feel that there's something important left out about the subject of the article. Or even both. Either way, I don't see anyone reading this article with their view of the world challenged.

lancebeet··on What driving across Europe costs in tolls, vignettes, bridges and fuel
That's a very strange statement to me. In my experience, France has extremely high motorway quality, one of the absolute best in Europe. Comparing with autobahn, there's no competition. And this is without even including supporting infrastructure like aires.
lancebeet··on OpenAI annualised revenues $20B less than previously signalled
Sorry, is this meant to be a confirmation or a rebuttal of GP's statement?
lancebeet··on “Math 2.0” will need to value mathematical progress more holistically
That doesn't make sense to me. Terence Tao is great at explaining things, but he could spend months explaining some of his proofs to me without me understanding it. Even if the AI had a superhuman ability to explain things it's no guarantee that it could make a human understand.
lancebeet··on Claude, change the “Add to Cart” button to blue
You were right to push back. It's not an accurate representation of claude. It's satire.
lancebeet··on The turbulent AI era is here
Today's Bill Gates' pathology isn't greed, but guilt. You can't trust him to do what's best for us, but you can trust him to (try to) do what's best for his public image as a philanthropist. These goals don't always coincide, but they often do.
lancebeet··on There's no reason for software to be slow anymore
I think that "almost everyone" has a multi region cdn, but fewer have multi region application deployment, or cdn workers handling a significant portion of the application logic. My experience here may be incorrect or not generalizable, but I've rarely seen web apps that are slow due to latency loading static resources, but I've often seen slowness from high latency of the API calls and due to large static payloads.
lancebeet··on Asana cleared 5 years of engineering work in 2 weeks with Codex
Is this the react test framework enzyme? To me, $6 million and 5 years seems like a very high estimate for this even without any automation (AI or otherwise) for even relatively large applications. How could they possibly have a test suite this large?
lancebeet··on Airbus Takes Flight from AWS
Well, yes, since long before the current administration. It's mentioned multiple times (with examples) in the European Parliament's "The Echelon Affair" report.[0] But it seems to me that this is not really what you're asking, but rather you're implying that there's no justification for this move other than European protectionism. If this is the case, I would argue that a sitting administration actively threatening with the invasion of your territories is a compelling argument for politicians and business leaders to evaluate alternatives.

[0] https://historicalarchives.europarl.europa.eu/files/live/sit...

lancebeet··on Show HN: IKEA Complexity Index
If you look at the item number and it begins with an s, it means it's a combination of multiple articles. If you click "what's included" you'll see what articles it consists of. The assembly documents will include the assembly documents for each child article. On the top pax, you can see it actually consists of 20 distinct child articles (some of which require no assembly).
lancebeet··on The CEO of Mullvad is the main financer of the Swedish Örebro party
I've never really gotten the impression that Allard or the Örebro party support ethnic cleansing. What makes you say this? I'm not sure if any of their suggested policies would even be considered that controversial outside of Sweden.
lancebeet··on Eric Schmidt speech about AI booed during graduation
I think his train of thought is "young graduates generally aren't anti-immigration, so if I insinuate they're anti-immigration if they disagree with me they will be convinced by my argument". I don't think we need to read much more than that into it.
lancebeet··on Cloudflare to cut about 20% workforce
I don't think the mistakes in themselves are damaging. What seems damaging to me is that cf has, on multiple occasions, repeated the same or similar mistakes right after they made major mistakes. This makes it seem like they're not learning from mistakes. Regarding the success of their business model, I can't make a meaningful statement about it, but is that really a convincing argument? If a business is successful, does that automatically mean their product is good?
lancebeet··on Cloudflare to cut about 20% of its workforce
I think GPs point is that this is how they're trying to spin it, but they're not explicitly saying it, and there are doubts whether it's actually true. For outside observers it's difficult to simply ignore all the embarrassing outages that cf has experienced recently and just accept that the company has suddenly solved all their issues by using AI and firing people.
lancebeet··on California to begin ticketing driverless cars that violate traffic laws
Maybe I expressed myself poorly. Generally, higher speed is associated with higher fatality rates, all else being equal. So, one would assume a highway without speed limits would cause lots of fatalities. Most people would probably be surprised to learn that this is not the case.
lancebeet··on California to begin ticketing driverless cars that violate traffic laws
Hm, it's only something like 10% of German traffic fatalities that occur on the autobahn. And according to wikipedia, Germany doesn't rank high in terms of traffic fatalities, even by European standards. France has a similar number of highway deaths. I'm personally not a fan of the autobahn and especially not the unrestricted speed. It seems obvious that it should cause lots of fatalities, but the evidence for it just doesn't seem to be there.
lancebeet··on Sal Khan's AI revolution hasn't happened yet
>In my interactions with my kids public school and their teachers, they're goal is ram content down their throat and test for retention, not foster an environment open to questions

Is that actually true though? Average American students (especially those in the public school system) are not excellent test takers, and they're even worse at rote memorization. If this is actually the goal they're not achieving that either.

lancebeet··on Make tmux pretty and usable (2024)
I would "just" do C-B PgUp and then use vi-like movement keys like hj, gg/G etc., and q to escape the pager, but I realize now that I say it that it doesn't sound very convenient or discoverable.
lancebeet··on Britain today generating 90%+ of electricity from renewables
Sorry, what are you implying here? That people burn lumber from Canada to heat their homes?
lancebeet··on Iran oil revenue soars as it's the only exporter out of Hormuz
Blocking them would further increase the global oil price which is probably contrary to the administration's wishes.
lancebeet··on What 81,000 people want from AI
This has to be intentional, right? To reassure people that front-end developers still have a job? The data is interesting but the site itself is a complete embarrassment for several reasons.
lancebeet··on The Appalling Stupidity of Spotify's AI DJ
I think what you're describing is what people working with recommender systems call serendipity. Maximizing serendipity, while maintaining relatively high relevance/recommendation success rate, is supposedly a pretty difficult problem to solve. I'm not sure if LLMs have changed that.
lancebeet··on Google to Provide Pentagon with AI Agents
This will sound snarky, so forgive me, but I honestly don't know the answer. Is this actually true? Is there a reliable source containing statistics on LLM compute usage that includes training vs inference for the whole market?
lancebeet··on How Taalas “prints” LLM onto a chip?
You obviously don't believe that AGI is coming in two release cycles, and you also don't seem to have much faith in the new models containing massive improvements over the last ones. So the answer to who is going to pay for these custom chips seems to be you.
lancebeet··on Nvidia and OpenAI abandon unfinished $100B deal in favour of $30B investment
If benchmarks are fishy, it seems their bias would be to produce better scores than expected for proprietary models, since they have more incentives to game the benchmarks.
lancebeet··on Dario Amodei – "We are near the end of the exponential" [video]
Well, he says

>To me, it is absolutely wild that you have people — within the bubble and outside the bubble — talking about the same tired, old hot-button political issues, when we are near the end of the exponential.

My interpretation is "It's pointless to discuss the old political issues, because they're not going to be relevant once AGI is achieved". So if he does believe in a plateau, it either contradicts his other prediction (that AGI will be reached in a year or two), or he believes it will plateau after AGI is already reached, which means it's kind of a pointless statement. The important thing w.r.t. all our problems being solved would the advent of AGI, not the plateau.

lancebeet··on Dario Amodei – "We are near the end of the exponential" [video]
Is "the end of the exponential" an established expression? There's no singularity in an exponential so the expression doesn't make sense to me. To me, it sounds like "the end of the exponential part", meaning it's a sigmoid, but that's obviously not what he means.
lancebeet··on Case study: Creative math – How AI fakes proofs
>Maybe what surprised me most is that the mistakes NanoBananna made are simple enough that I'm absolutely positive Karpathy could have caught them. Even if his physics is very rusty. I'm often left wondering if people really are true believers and becoming blind to the mistakes or if they don't care.

I've seen this interesting phenomenon many times. I think it's a kind of subconscious bias. I call it "GeLLMann amnesia".

lancebeet··on End of Japanese community
Given the abysmal market share of Firefox today I think a large percentage of the remaining users do actually care.
lancebeet··on AI tools I wish existed
This is really striking, isn't it? We've all certainly seen demos of things on this list or very similar things, and there are startups that have spent years and billions of dollars attempting to exploit existing LLMs to develop useful products. Yet most of the products don't seem to exist. The ones that you see in everyday life never seem to work nearly as well as the demos suggest.

So what's going on here? Do the products exist but nobody (or very few) uses them? Is it too expensive to use the models that work sufficiently well to produce a useful product? Is it much easier to create a convincing demo than it is to develop a useful product?

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