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nitwit005

9,484 karma · joined December 9, 2014

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nitwit005··on Meta censored the No Kings Instagram account during a nationwide campaign
The call to protest at some specific location and time might be "artificial", but people have to want to protest. Trump has simply managed to inspire millions to do so.
nitwit005··on Hunger beats tenure: Advice for junior engineers
> I have seen small groups and solo engineers fly past the usual process of writing product requirements documents (PRDs), getting buy-in, and lobbying for time with designers or product managers by building a working prototype.

Getting time with someone isn't success. A lot of companies have some hackathon week or similar. People are going to see hundreds of demos or prototypes every time that happens.

The problem is, projects generally need staff, and getting that assigned requires influence these people are apparently lacking:

> engineers without social capital, status, or power.

nitwit005··on Discord will soon let anyone find public server messages through Google
That it is used for other things is not in dispute by anyone.
nitwit005··on Discord will soon let anyone find public server messages through Google
Sure, but there are listings of the most popular Discords. Just scroll through them: https://top.gg/discord/servers/list/largest

The themes are pretty clear, and having a political discussion does not appear prominent.

nitwit005··on Amazon Is Gutting Its AI Division After Sustained Failure
> Amazon’s standout AI model — organized under the name “Nova” — is about the farthest thing from a household name.

I have tried asking people if they've ever used an AI product from certain companies, and you only seem to get "no", or surprise that they have any AI products, for some.

nitwit005··on Discord will soon let anyone find public server messages through Google
I'd say the evidence rather strongly suggests people are mostly going to discord to talk about video games and share anime art.

The most popular servers are for AI companies, and video games.

Which is not too surprising for a platform heavily designed around supporting video gaming.

nitwit005··on Skydance offers buyouts, orders return to office
The people working remotely are often still in a city, just a different city. Now they're back to commuting and simply adding to transit maintenance and congestion.
nitwit005··on ChatGPT Keeps Telling People 404 Media Can Solve Their Tech Support Problems
We're discussing essentially a failure case here. They wasted their time unsuccessfully trying to get media attention.

Meta does have an AI support assistant, which presumably also failed them.

nitwit005··on New AI Is More Than Twice as Good at Diagnosing Diseases as Doctors
> The system achieved its strongest results using OpenAI’s GPT-5, with additional testing showing improvements using GPT-5.5.

If it's basically dumping details into ChatGPT, I'd wonder why the hospital would bother paying Microsoft. They can ask it to simulate a panel of physicians too.

nitwit005··on Ask HN: If the models are so good, why doesn't OpenAI just start 100 companies?
Companies have expanded vertically though. Usually it's not all that challenging. Manufacturers often have to build a small version of the real thing, such as a mining tools company needing a test mine.

The barrier is often that the investors aren't fond of the heavy investment and risks involved. Using AI to generate some app would presumably not have the same level of concern.

nitwit005··on Can we replace a $150k Looker with a bucket of HTML files?
It seems like this is a relatively simpler case, where everyone sees the same content. Oftentimes, people want dashboards to query as the current user, some user group, or the people below the current user in the org chart. That means that you need to run queries dynamically, and generate the chart at runtime, rather than just hosting HTML.
nitwit005··on UUIDv7: Timestamps aren’t time-ordered and other oddities
The Python version simply forces the timestamp forward if needed to preserve ordering:

  if timestamp_ms < _last_timestamp_v7:
    timestamp_ms = _last_timestamp_v7 + 1
https://github.com/python/cpython/blob/8d119208074fef0f652f1...

But if you did want "monotonically increasing IDs", as the article suggests, that is what you want.

nitwit005··on Why do we have so many meetings?
In this second case, some people live life only bothering to deal with crises, and delay anything else. It's likely not the direct threat of a meeting, but that you've made it clear it's a crisis.
nitwit005··on Publish fake stats, get cited in LLMs
> How can this be fixed?

You can find people complaining that Google search results decayed to being unusable prior to LLMs being a big thing. The marketers and spammers effectively won that fight. They'll presumably win this one too.

nitwit005··on Constructors Shouldn't Throw
> Okay I’m not in the business of writing Date libraries, but still, if you need to parse a string, write a parser. And then write a factory method Date.parse(string) that uses that parser and calls a private constructor.

That's just a constructor you've given another name.

nitwit005··on Dogs seem to agree with humans that 'bouba' is round and 'kiki' is spiky
Suddenly doesn't mean instantly.

We have examples of people trying to invent languages in modern times, and it does not appear to be a fast process. The first people doing it would have the additional struggles of having no prior examples, no ability to take notes (writing having not yet been invented), and having to teach others to talk for the first time.

nitwit005··on Meta employees said Lula's accounts were hindered during Brazil election
> Bolsonaro's coup never actually took place, and even if it had, it'd only be a reaction to the concrete actions of the supreme court.

The classic "It didn't happen, and it did..." from The Narcissist's Prayer.

nitwit005··on Bringing the magic: Google breaks open a bottleneck in quantum computing
I was thinking more along these lines: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantum_mysticism
nitwit005··on Why is every rationalist blog post way too long?
> In any case, what is missing from this endlessly verbose rationalist writing style is wisdom. Wisdom involves discretion: an intuition for what ideas are and are not worth seriously pursuing, and the ability to determine what does and does not need to be said. This community, broadly speaking, does not seem to value wisdom as a trait at all; the idea that something may be true, valuable, or good merely because it is common sense or inherited tradition is anathema to them.

I haven't heard the term "rationalist blogger" before, but surely, not assuming tradition is correct is sort of key to the "rationalist" part?

nitwit005··on Container ship sinks in Strait of Hormuz as Iran steps up attacks
There's no obvious reason to expect that continuing on will result in some sort of resolution in the US's favor.
nitwit005··on Why claims that Ukraine drone attack halted Russian bot traffic don't hold up
The claims in this are a bit vague, and doesn't examine people's more specific claims of drops in activity tied to particular social media accounts.
nitwit005··on Epic Games' new vibe-coded launcher is 46% faster than Steam
> The results reported that Epic's client is 46% faster than Valve's client during cold starts, clocking in at 5.47 seconds compared to Steam taking 10.07 seconds. When you restore both apps from system tray background states, the new client takes 0.36 seconds while Steam takes 0.42 seconds, according to the report.

> There are still missing features that the legacy client currently has, like comprehensive social panels and advanced account management options, with its developers "working toward feature parity."

Seems fairly likely it'll get slower as they add all the missing features. I'm not sure a couple of seconds startup time will be relevant to users.

nitwit005··on The gap in shared understanding of LLM capability is widening
> And yet they don't - why?

These companies have all spent billions on marketing. I get constant ads from Google on YouTube suggesting I should "upgrade" to Gemini Pro.

nitwit005··on AI is a tool and using it well takes skill
A lot of the reason for hiring a photographer is the raw number of shots you need to take at some events. If someone needs to be dedicated to the task all day, you may as well have someone with experience.
nitwit005··on Why were Victorian elites so effective?
Your post script is not correct from the point of view of the Catholic church. God essentially penned the texts with human help.

The rest doesn't quite seem like a response to what I said.

nitwit005··on Ask HN: What if no AIpocalypse, no AI bubble, what if it just keeps advancing?
You can ask Google for similar discussions to your post, given a link to the post, and that works.
nitwit005··on Ask HN: What if no AIpocalypse, no AI bubble, what if it just keeps advancing?
You are perhaps not getting the hint that I'm suggesting you should put in a bit of effort.
nitwit005··on Ask HN: What if no AIpocalypse, no AI bubble, what if it just keeps advancing?
Perhaps look at the past dozens of discussions on this general idea.
nitwit005··on Show HN: Quake ported to safe Rust, playable in browser
Using pixel data might be unusual, but anyone porting a game with a replay feature is going to realize it's an easy way to compare implementations.
nitwit005··on What should we tell our students?
No one succeeds in making accurate predictions of the future over a 40 year time scale. Look back at the 20th century, and see the range of range of events, and the kind of technological change, that could occur in a span that long.

Go into things expecting you might have to change careers.

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