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soroushjp

466 karma · joined February 28, 2013

blog: soroushjp.com github: github.com/soroushjp twitter: @soroushjp
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soroushjp··on LLMs by Hallucination Rate
Jim Fan from NVIDIA explained how flawed the methodology of this benchmark is. I wouldn't put any weight on it.

https://www.linkedin.com/posts/drjimfan_please-see-update-be...

soroushjp··on Australia's overuse of antibiotics driving rate of drug-resistant infections
There's a fact in the article discussing this exact point around relative rates of antimicrobial use by country:

> Australia ranks seventh-highest in the developed world for antimicrobial community prescribing rates. Australia’s hospital antimicrobial use is estimated to be nearly three times that of the European country with the lowest use, the Netherlands.

So we are top 10 but not the single worse offender, at least by this metric.

soroushjp··on Yann LeCun: AI one-percenters seizing power forever is real doomsday scenario
I'd say that Geoffrey Hinton and Yoshua Bengio, two outspoken proponents of existential AI safety, are pretty familiar with how AI works.
soroushjp··on Show HN: Elara- A free open-source coding game built with Rust and WebAssembly
Super cool resource for middle and high school students learning to code! I wish this existed when I was in school. Will definitely be sharing it with kids and even older folks wanting to learn the basics of code :)
soroushjp··on Catching up on the weird world of LLMs
In my own experiments with OpenAI's GPT-4 API with temperature set to zero, I was still not getting deterministic outputs, with some small variations between completions. Not sure why, and I haven't had a chance to dig further or talk to their team about why and how this happens.
soroushjp··on Ask HN: Founding a remote-first startup – takeaways and tips?
Amazing concrete, thorough advice -- thank you so much for taking the time to share it with me and others in the same boat!
soroushjp··on Ask HN: Founding a remote-first startup – takeaways and tips?
Super helpful take, thanks!
soroushjp··on Statement on AI Risk
There are a lot of critiques here and elsewhere of the statement and the motivations of its signatories. I don't think they are right and I think they take away from the very serious existential risks we face. I've written up my detailed views, see specifically "Signing the statement purely for personal benefit":

https://www.soroushjp.com/2023/06/01/yes-avoiding-extinction...

soroushjp··on Statement on AI Risk
There are a lot of critiques here and elsewhere of the statement and the motivations of its signatories. I don't think they are right and I think they take away from the very serious existential risks we face. I've written up my detailed views, see specifically "Signing the statement purely for personal benefit":

https://www.soroushjp.com/2023/06/01/yes-avoiding-extinction...

soroushjp··on The AI Mirror Test, which smart people keep failing
Very little by way of arguments for why these chat bots are or aren't sentient. This article has an assumed point of view (current AI bots aren't sentient) and then describes & judges user's reactions to chat bots in light of that. I don't think it adds very much new to the societal conversation.
soroushjp··on The new factory making meat that’s illegal to eat
https://archive.ph/2022.10.03-002136/https://www.afr.com/tec...
soroushjp··on Ask HN: Who is hiring? (February 2022)
Vow | Smart problem solvers in a variety of roles | Full-time | Remote + Local (Sydney, Australia)

At Vow, we're growing meat that's better than the meat we eat today. While we deeply care about the environmental & ethical implications of transitioning from industrial animal agriculture, we also think the only way to get mass adoption of alternatives is if we can create something people will selfishly want for taste / nutrition / cost / other selfish reasons - think Tesla's approach to electric cars (record beating acceleration etc) or adoption of solar (massive adoption once cheaper than coal).

We have a long list of open roles (engineering to operations and more), but are also just looking for passionate, hard working problem solvers who don't fit a role. DM me if that describes you. If you see a role that fits, apply directly at https://www.vowfood.com/careers

We have both remote + local team members and make remote work for as many roles as we possibly can.

Come save our climate, ecosystems, and the world's animals while working on the most exciting technical challenges in the world today!

soroushjp··on Ask HN: Who is hiring? (January 2022)
Vow | Smart problem solvers in a variety of roles | Full-time | Remote + Local (Sydney, Australia)

At Vow, we're growing meat that's better than the meat we eat today. While we deeply care about the environmental & ethical implications of transitioning from industrial animal agriculture, we also think the only way to get mass adoption of alternatives is if we can create something people will selfishly want for taste / nutrition / cost / other selfish reasons - think Tesla's approach to electric cars (record beating acceleration etc) or adoption of solar (massive adoption once cheaper than coal).

We have a long list of open roles (engineering to operations and more), but are also just looking for passionate, hard working problem solvers who don't fit a role. DM me if that describes you. If you see a role that fits, apply directly at https://www.vowfood.com/careers

We have both remote + local team members and make remote work for as many roles as we possibly can.

Come save our climate, ecosystems, and the world's animals while working on the most exciting technical challenges in the world today!

soroushjp··on What can a technologist do about climate change? (2015)
If you're looking for ways to contribute positively to the fight against climate change, check out relevant job boards like https://jobs.climatebase.org/jobs (no affiliation).

I also lead engineering over at Vow (vowfood.com), where we're hoping to transition the world to cell-cultured meat as a way to dramatically cut back on global emissions, since a quarter of all GHG emissions are food related.[1][2] If you're a Software or Mechatronics Engineer who wants to learn more, shoot me a message. We're hiring in Sydney and for experienced remote software engineers as well.

* 1: https://science.sciencemag.org/content/360/6392/987 * 2: https://gfi.org/resource/cultivated-meat-lca-and-tea-policy-...

soroushjp··on Google Finds It’s Underpaying Many Men as It Addresses Wage Equity (2019)
Did you actually read the article? Direct quote refuting your point:

"Men account for about 69 percent of the company’s work force, but they received a higher percentage of the money."

soroushjp··on Baumol Effect
Highly recommend people follow up the Wikipedia article with this great piece on further implications of the Baumol Effect:

https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2019/05/th...

soroushjp··on Leaving fintech to tackle food sustainability: Why I joined VOW
Author here. This has been an incredibly educational, formative and positive journey for me, and I'd love to answer any questions that may helps others on their own journey.
soroushjp··on Workers Are Fleeing Big Cities for Small Ones, and Taking Their Jobs with Them
Hahaha my thoughts exactly when I read this.
soroushjp··on Outcry as Australian police search public broadcaster
I don't necessarily disagree with your larger point, but there are at least two important factual errors here:

* Australia does have an implied constitutional right to freedom of political communication: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Australian_constitutional_law#... * The federal election was on May 18, this search was on June 4th, well after the election. If anything, the AFP may have waited long enough to ensure this did not affect the election.

soroushjp··on Africa’s Only Hope Is Industrialization
> But will Africa and other low wage, low infrastructure economies be caught in an automation trap?

This is a good question, one that I'm wondering about myself. I'm hoping to read "How Asia Works" in the near future, to better understand what specific factors were relevant in the early economic success of East Asia.

soroushjp··on Honest summary of nutritional advice out there
Hi skilled, author here.

I'm not sure what you mean exactly. I don't think I'm advocating for a "meat and dairy" diet -- actually those were on the very lowest quantity end of my recommended food groups, and that's if you'd personally like to include it at all (plant-based whole food diet is fine too, IMO).

Regarding organic food, I left it in the bonus section with a couple of high quality references so that people can make up their own mind. I gave my personal decision but don't advocate for it for others -- there's not a strong medical consensus on the subject and I think it comes down to some personal views.

soroushjp··on Dropbox Could Have One of 2017’s Most Interesting IPOs
I went on a little adventure the other week of setting up my own NAS server, and checked out Owncloud and competitors. Even ignoring issues like feature parity and third-party app integration, I think the setup costs of something like this are still way too high for consumers. While VPS providers may make this process easier (even deploying complete Dropbox clones with no tech knowledge required), they'd still be doing it at a significant disadvantage to Dropbox's scale and expertise. It was clear to me very quickly just how much work has gone into giving Dropbox the level of polish it has. Note that this doesn't even address other competitive moats such as brand recognition and distribution partnerships.

Not saying that Dropbox doesn't face business risks -- but I think the open-source alternatives will not be the biggest risk ulttimately in the mainstream market.

I do think they will face margin pressures as long as Google/MSFT/Apple/Amazon believe this to be too important of a market to cede to Dropbox.

soroushjp··on Luna: Visual and textual functional programming language
There are a number of incredibly promising features here. Visualizing code graphs could be incredibly helpful in many contexts, especially in understanding high-level control flows by folding up subroutines as needed. Visual profiling is a dream come true. The functional language features make it seem like joy to use.

With that said, this is still just a concept until a language actually brings all these features together. Will believe it when I see it.

soroushjp··on Monads in JavaScript
Very powerful addition to JS. Definitely using this in my next project.
soroushjp··on Show HN: Calc – A fast and intuitive command-line calculator written in Go
Sorry HN doesn't have reply notifications and just saw this, just added the issue!
soroushjp··on Stand With Greece
This was a great way to see the human cost of economic stagnation and austerity in Greece, but it doesn't talk about the causes of these issues or the best way forward. Like others have said, there are many countries worldwide with poor quality of life and poor economic growth , but what caused it in Greece and what can be done to fix it? Playing into a game of picking sides in Greece versus the big bad EU powers doesn't seem credible or productive to me.
soroushjp··on Show HN: Calc – A fast and intuitive command-line calculator written in Go
Other comments are reasonable, but fantastic work alfredxing, played around with it just now and loved how simple and intuitive it was. The only feature I really miss here is being able to use the previous answer -- is this there and I just didn't find it? Thinking of an 'ans' constant that holds the previous answer
soroushjp··on Go concurrency isn't parallelism: Real world lessons with Monte Carlo sims
Fixed the issue, thanks wpeterson
soroushjp··on Go concurrency isn't parallelism: Real world lessons with Monte Carlo sims
Thanks again, very helpful and updated all relevant code in the post also.
soroushjp··on Go concurrency isn't parallelism: Real world lessons with Monte Carlo sims
Completely agree, nothing beats the docs.
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