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rawgabbit

5,570 karma · joined April 12, 2020

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rawgabbit··on Ask HN: What do you believe or not believe about AI?
It is more of what do the corporations believe. As far as I can tell, Open AI is positioning itself as the replacement for knowledge worker office suite software. Enter your data once and ChatGPT AI agents can walk, transform, and shepherd it through your entire business life cycle.

Microsoft is doing its usual schizo strategy. It thinks it’s a tech pioneer software company, an enterprise software company, a game development company, an online services company, ad infinity.

My take is that yes, AI agents, will be one day be the way companies run their operations. When does this happen? Probably long after I am retired.

rawgabbit··on Peter Thiel, the tech oligarch who believes in the Antichrist
Not a theologian. My understanding is that during Jesus' time on Earth, the Jews were under the heavy yoke of the Romans. At that time, there were many Jewish sects who all claimed secret knowledge and were led by a "messiah" who would deliver the Jews from the Romans and re-establish Judah as a military-political power. The Anti-Christ as mentioned in Revelations and in Catholic texts were a warning to Christians. Christians should not be led astray by demagogues who preached salvation by political or military means. Instead, for Christians, salvation lay in Christ's commandments to love God, love neighbor, and love like he loved us.
rawgabbit··on Microsoft offers mass buyouts for roughly a quarter of its workforce
A couple of times in my career, I was one of those who were not given out a buyout. I was chosen to keep the lights on while the number of employees shrank every month. It sucked. I was given responsibility for systems with no documentation or than a username/password. I was called by all sorts of people I had never spoken to who had their hair on fire because the system was breaking left and right. I wished I was given the buyout; instead I was told I should be grateful I had a paycheck. No thanks.
rawgabbit··on Why is AI generated language so hard to understand?
With ChatGPT, I notice it tends to use abstract subjects. E.g., ChatGPT wrote "Texas allows treated sewage sludge to be used as agricultural fertilizer, yet the proposed law requiring routine PFAS testing failed to advance". I would have written "Texas allows treated sewage sludge to be used as agricultural fertilizer, yet the state failed to advance the proposed law requiring routine PFAS testing".

No matter how many times, I ask it to avoid fluff; it keeps writing it. E.g., Please avoid fluff sentences like "This is where the story gets more interesting." and "Here is how the evidence compares." They are not needed and serve no purpose.

I also notice its sentences do not provide a clear sense of who did what. E.g., it wrote "According to pilgrimage organizer Christian Marquant, Bishop Schneider met with Pope Leo in December 2025 and discussed the traditional Latin Mass." I would have wrote "According to pilgrimage organizer Christian Marquant, Bishop Schneider discussed the traditional Latin Mass with Pope Leo on December 2025." The phrase "met with" was extraneous and made it seem like the meeting was by accident.

rawgabbit··on Woman charged with computer fraud due to scam CashApp account being in her name
Meanwhile, Cash App who facilitated the scam and actually cost the buyer actual money... walks away with no repercussions. There is something horribly broken when tech companies who are ruining people's lives have zero responsibility but are making money in the process.
rawgabbit··on Honey, I shrunk the TV
I have two Sony Bravias. They are older LCD with souped up panels. I have been eyeing the micro-leds but can’t justify buying it when the other two are still going strong.
rawgabbit··on Honey, I shrunk the TV
It is a new company or joint venture with TCL owning 51%.

https://www.sony.co.jp/en/news-release/202603/26-0331E/

rawgabbit··on Ask HN: What's your favorite children's books?
Max and Ruby

https://www.amazon.com/Maxs-Chocolate-Chicken-Max-Ruby/dp/01...

rawgabbit··on Modernize Every SQL Server to Azure SQL or Fabric DW
I left a few years ago for Snowflake. Thanks for the memories.
rawgabbit··on (Japanese Acrobat Lantern) Akita Kanto Festival [video]
One of the three biggest festivals in Japan. Skip to the 50 minute mark to watch them raise the lanterns.
rawgabbit··on Sites in ChatGPT
I took it for a spin. I used Claude to create a self contained HTML file with JSON data embedded to create a SVG bar chart with sort and filter buttons. I then gave the HTML file to ChatGPT Work and it created the site using the provided HTML code unadulterated.

I then asked the next question. How can I automatically update the embedded JSON data. It gave two answers which I thought was weird. First, it said I could using a plugin to an MCP server. Second, it said I could use an API and when I asked for which API... it said there was an API available in ChatGPT Sites but no details. So I assume it can be done.

What I am thinking of is to use ChatGPT sites as a replacement for SharePoint. I can create self contained HTML charts and let employees view it within our enterprise instance of ChatGPT. The piece I am working on is how to automatically update the embedded data from our database.

rawgabbit··on Why the Bronze Age Collapsed
https://claudemariottini.com/2014/06/19/ripping-open-pregnan...

Quote

     One of the most violent and brutal conducts in times of war was the Assyrian practice of ripping open pregnant women in order to expose their fetus. In his article, “‘Ripping Open Pregnant Women’ in Light of an Assyrian Analogue,” Mordechai Cogan quotes an Assyrian poem, probably dated to the reign of Tiglath-Pileser I.
rawgabbit··on Why the Bronze Age Collapsed
It could be the Bronze Age empires were based on violence and coercion. When the small polities had the means to defend themselves, the empires fell apart.
rawgabbit··on Nvidia launches new tool to keep AI agents from going rogue
The related X post: https://x.com/JensenHuang/status/2104499465055023424?s=20
rawgabbit··on Japan moves to tighten rules for foreigners
When East Germany existed, East Germans were shot dead trying to escape to West Germany.
rawgabbit··on The darker side of being a doctor
Thanks for the link. Am I reading the article correctly. There are about 24K medical school students and 50K medical school applicants so that means almost half of the applicants are accepted into medical school? That seems a bit high?
rawgabbit··on What California is learning from solar panels built over irrigation canals
You sir are a literary genius.
rawgabbit··on Beyond Ukraine: Why Europe is preparing for a wider conflict
You assume rationality when history has shown wars are often started with irrational or no apparent reason.
rawgabbit··on I hate you Microsoft
Oddly enough. I found ChatGPT to be good at making slides. I prompt it with the text I want and some "stage direction" about the aesthetics and it makes good slides. It also makes good PDF documents as well; I feed it my markdown and tell it to make a publish quality PDF and it does a good job. In short, I am defaulting to Obsidian/markdown and use ChatGPT when I need to create other formats.
rawgabbit··on Australia says it could follow Canada in forging deeper ties with EU
As an American, because of Trump's actions, I identify more with "European" culture and feel I am a stranger in my own land.
rawgabbit··on Most people prefer traditional architecture
https://www.habitat67.com/en/

I find the Habitat67 brutalist apartment complex in Montreal to be tasteful and livable?

rawgabbit··on Show HN: Neobrutalism.dev – Just added Base UI support and added new color theme
I am not a front end dev. But one question I always had is why px and not em? I thought em as a relative distance would be better than hard coding px?
rawgabbit··on Why is Google still serving dodgy ads?
Google’s cash cow is ads. I think the writing on the wall is ChatGPT and other AI search engines will dominate. It is to be seen how Google will respond. But in the end, their monopoly on web search is coming to an end.
rawgabbit··on Flock worker calls police on reporter filming public camera installation
In the United States, clergy never had formal political power. Religious movements did play major roles in the abolition of slavery and Prohibition of alcohol.

The United States had campaign-finance laws to limit the political influence money can buy. The McCain–Feingold Act restricted “dark money”. The Supreme Court struck it down in Citizens United v. FEC.

rawgabbit··on Fuck it, make it anyway
Any advice on how to use or not use AI?
rawgabbit··on iPhone Duo
My first thought is what happens when I drop a $1999 device and break it.
rawgabbit··on PISA 2025 Students' reading and mathematics performance declined across the OECD
I found this nugget on page 315. It seems to say the OECD acknowledges students are just blowing off this test.

     For most students, PISA is a low-stakes assessment: they can refuse to participate in the test with no negative consequences and do not receive any feedback on their performance. There is a risk, therefore, that students do not do their best on the test; and that they behave differently from what they would do in other circumstances.
    ...In most countries/economies, students reported making less effort on the test in 2025 than in 2022 and in 2018: on average across 35 OECD countries, the difference corresponds to -0.5 points on the 10-point scale (compared to 2018; and -0.3 points compared to 2022) (Table I.A1.1). Meanwhile, the proportion of students who indicated that they invested very little effort in the PISA test increased from 3.5% to 5.4%.

There is also this strange entry here(https://www.oecd.org/en/publications/pisa-2025-results-volum...).

     In this section, the analysis focuses on two types of incorrect responses that can be identified on most, if not all, items: skipped responses (item responses left blank, in-between non-missing responses); and hasty responses (item responses that were not scored as correct, and on which students spent less time than the fastest, yet accurate respondents). More precisely, a “minimum threshold” of time effort required for each item was defined as the 1st percentile of the (unweighted) distribution of response times among all respondents who solved the item correctly, across all participating countries and economies.2 This means that only 1% of all full-credit respondents were able to respond to the item in less time, and 99% of full-credit respondents spent longer than this threshold. The minimum threshold of time required was increased to 10 seconds in all cases where, mostly because of correct guess answers, more than 1% of full-credit respondents had provided the correct response in less than 10 seconds. Respondents who did not obtain a full-credit score on the item, but who spent less time than this threshold, are considered to have given a hasty, speeded response (as defined, a “skipped” response may also be a “hasty” response).
     Table I.A1.12 shows how the proportion of skipped and speeded responses evolved between 2018 and 2025. A clear trend emerges: on average across OECD countries, the average proportion of hasty (incorrect and fast) responses increased significantly between 2018 and 2025. The average proportion of hasty responses increased by over 4 percentage points over the period, reaching a total of about 9%. The average increase across items of hasty responses exceeded 10 percentage points in three countries/economies (Kosovo, Dominican Republic and Bulgaria, in descending order of that increase). Similar analyses for the mathematics and science test are presented in Tables I.A1.13 and I.A1.11; analyses for math, in particular, also show an increase in the proportion of hasty responses between 2022 and 2025, with the largest increases observed in Serbia, Malta and Israel.
    In the PISA test, sequences of items that are left blank at the end of the test are not considered when scoring students’ answers. Similarly, in these analyses, the corresponding students and (missing) answers are excluded from the percentages of “skipped” or “hasty” respondents. Indeed, in PISA, these items are considered as if they were not administered to students, who, most likely, did not reach them. Such non-reached items are also ignored when estimating item difficulty and student performance. However, because, over time, students became more likely to skip or to provide a fast (if incorrect) response rather than to continue working on a task that they perceived as difficult, it is interesting to note that the proportion of non-reached items declined in reading, by about 2 percentage points (Table I.A1.12), on average across OECD countries.
rawgabbit··on How Climate Resilient Are the Largest Cities?
From what I read Texas will have larger and more intense heat domes. On the plus side, this high pressure shifts tornado alley towards the east away from Texas. On minus side, Texas will be the new Arizona.
rawgabbit··on How Climate Resilient Are the Largest Cities?
I have a hard time believing this site also. When I looked at their methodology at how this list was created, it said "Please fill out our Methodology Request Form, and a member of our team will get back to you, typically within one business day.". As far am I am concerned, I can safely ignore this site.

https://docs.alphageo.ai/climate-resilience-suite/climate-ri...

rawgabbit··on PISA 2025 Students' reading and mathematics performance declined across the OECD
Quote

     PISA 2025 was the largest assessment to date, involving 760 000 students across 91 countries and economies.
What were the sample sizes in previous years and their related demographics?
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