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paddw

848 karma · joined October 6, 2022

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paddw··on The Barbie-Oppenheimer Double Feature Is Happening, Data Shows
It seems plausible that this is just families going to the movies and then choosing to see different ones?
paddw··on xAI
x.ai/api/v1/answer

"returns 42"

paddw··on The English Programming Language
I have no doubt English like syntax is a terrible idea but this seems like a surprisingly readable example.
paddw··on Proof you can do hard things
There are infinitely many hard things. It is hard to learn Japanese. We don't require that every high school student attain basic proficiency in it though.

The reason we learn calculus in high school is because it is foundational for many advanced STEM fields, and we will yield better results during university for the small percentage of students who go into those fields by forcing everyone to learn it in high school. Or, moreso, that's a viable justification for learning it today. Had history taken a different shape maybe we would learn something else, or maybe not. But the point is that calculus is not an arbitrary hard thing we learn for arbitrary reasons.

paddw··on Ask HN: Stripe is holding 50% for 9 month
The regulation will never change, but you get a huge advantage by working with smaller processors in terms of them being willing to work with you in a reasonable way.

There are 3 stages:

You are small: Stripe and the like work best because they are easy to set up and your small payments are low risk

Your are medium sized: You start to hit restrictions with these services but can not get any real support. You should work with a small indie processor.

You are big: You can get support (probably) so going with the big powerful solutions starts to make more sense again.

paddw··on Peptide analyses reveal female leadership in Copper Age Iberia (C. 2900–2650 BC)
What are you expecting for any article about ~5000 years ago
paddw··on Uber, DoorDash Sue NYC to Stop Delivery Drivers from Getting a Minimum Wage
What legal loopholes? They are haggling over the government creating new laws specifically targeted at them.
paddw··on Deputy US Marshal pleads guilty to obtaining cell phone location unlawfully [pdf]
> and someone finally bothered to look at the proof and it was a blank page.

I think I agree more than not with your worldview, but it seems like in this case this was the first time the person tried to improperly use the system... and he was caught and is now being sentenced. So I would say this is an example of the system "working".

I'm sure there are civil rights abuses that happen much more frequently, which we don't here about, but this specific incident seems like something that should be cheered.

paddw··on New York City’s AI hiring law takes effect
There should be a blanket ban for all jobs which are under ~100k.
paddw··on Definition for Open Weights Licensing
Well, I am arguing basically that basically AI APIs would be much more prone to commodification. There would still be companies, of course, but probably not with value on FAANG scale etc...

Certainty it would be easier to set up an API for a given model than providing what RDS does, to borrow from your example.

paddw··on Definition for Open Weights Licensing
The timescale difference between the need for weights taking account of recent events and Google searches is huge.
paddw··on Definition for Open Weights Licensing
> a company can simply get the weights for free and sell them.

This is the flaw in your logic. If the weights are freely available, they can not be sold for much value. That will in turn mean there is no "another OpenAI", because the core product, AI, will basically be freely available.

paddw··on Threads: Why Meta’s Take on Twitter Feels Soulless
Love to see an ad for "Learn the Future of Marketing and Unleash the Power of AI" as I read a piece on how Meta has supposedly forsaken the true gritty down to earth spirit of the internet.
paddw··on I am drowning in mutes: The current Threads experience
people love twitter. they want twitter run by "normals". zuck has said threads will be twitter run by "normals". this is what they want. this is what they will use.
paddw··on Farmer ordered to pay $CAD82k after confusion over meaning of thumbs-up emoji
to a contract?
paddw··on The underground economy of Glassdoor reviews
Glassdoor's model suffers from intrinsic problems such that... it's hard to imagine a site as it could ever work well for a sustained period of time before becoming a target for abuse.

It also seems inevitable that such sites, will exist. Can you really blame Glassdoor here? Are they supposed to do a thorough investigation for every review? At least it gives some sort of weak signal about the place.

paddw··on Twitter now requires an account to view tweets
remember like 1/2 a year ago when they removed the sign in prompt entirely... lol

we've come full circle

paddw··on File for divorce from LLVM
I mean, one of the checkboxes under LLVM is literally "optimization passes", so... I don't know how close they are to the end goal in terms of progress actually
paddw··on Pornhub blocks access to entire state of Virginia
I've heard a lot of people start from whitelabel Nord
paddw··on People Hire Phone Bots to Torture Telemarketers
Well, clearly they must be selling something to someone to keep the lights on...
paddw··on Bill C-18: Google to remove news links in Canada over online news law
Many people who would otherwise be appalled at laws like this seem to want to rationalize this because its specifically targeting Google and Meta.

Sometimes taking the simple view is correct: It's a bad thing to prevent sites from linking to one another. It's a bad thing to interfere with the ability to access information on the Internet for reasons of nationalist politics.

paddw··on Microsoft, OpenAI sued for ChatGPT 'privacy violations'
They're fishing.
paddw··on Canada's new tech talent strategy
What are the large software companies in Canada, that aren't connected to something like a bank? Not many I could think of.
paddw··on Is ORM still an anti-pattern?
I think you are right, but databases are complicated enough where people can have different interpretations of what the fundamentals means.

For example, is being able to write the basic SQL query enough, or do you need to know what the difference between a hash join and nested loop is?

Without a pretty deep understanding, I think it can be hard to pick out faults with the ORM, and there is always the chance the ORM might avoid making a mistake you do yourself.

paddw··on US Supreme Court backs man who sent female musician flood of unwanted messages
I think there is a contextual difference between telling someone to "die" as a way of expressing contempt in a public forum and directly messaging them, with details about where they live etc...
paddw··on US Supreme Court backs man who sent female musician flood of unwanted messages
I guess, because he is claiming to be insane?
paddw··on Ernst Jünger’s narratives of complicity
> it's still a pretty good description of what regular exposure to shared hardship and danger will do to men grouped together in infantry units.

Forging an "ever purer, ever bolder warriorhood"?

I would have to say I agree with the author on that one, that is blather. WW1 was horrific. Different people, of course, responded to the trauma in different ways, but there was nothing "pure" or "chivalrous" about the militarism fostered during and after the war.

paddw··on Google is now testing YouTube Playables, before Stadia's corpse is cold
It's hard to make the case the this is different than Stadia even.

I could see it being interesting if it's just games you can run completely in the client you can publish, where you can collect revenue through ads like a YouTube video.

paddw··on Nvidia's shares surged almost 200% on an AI boom. But will they stay there?
no.
paddw··on Swedish parliament passes new energy target, easing way for new nuclear power
There is a big opportunity for countries which can overcome their reservations to become exporters of nuclear power, especially in Europe imo. Win-win, exporters find a new way to bolster the budget, while importers can get clean power with limited political pain. Seems like the Scandinavian countries which have traditionally been oil reliant might consider this.
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