Hacker News Reader

sterlindon Intel stock collapse worsens as $3.5T chip rout spreads

I hear you about the heresy, but are you sure you aren't being too hard on yourself? mismanagement can turn brilliant, passionate people into aimless zombies through demotivation and throwing you at problems that don't fit you.

also, my old boss thought Larabee was cool as hell when he got to play with it at MSR.

sterlindon Intel stock collapse worsens as $3.5T chip rout spreads

me and a quarter of my company are looking up the barrel of a voluntary separation package. but I just moved to a team full of brilliant people working on a project that's a zen garden of algorithm design, so I won't go gently into that dark night.

sterlindon Intel stock collapse worsens as $3.5T chip rout spreads

I'm still salty at them for fumbling Optane, Gaudi, Altera and the Xeon Phi. the company seems like it's full of talented engineers working under terrible leadership.

sterlindon Anthropic reveals $900B AI spending commitments ahead of IPO

I think that's more or less where we'll end up, sadly.

sterlindon OpenAI raises less than half of $30B target

could be stone soup. a bunch of companies pitch in to train an open-weight model, a consortium or something. I think we need a return to something like the GPL for it to work, though. otherwise companies will take a good model and post-train it without contributing.

sterlindon Microsoft offers mass buyouts for roughly a quarter of its workforce

if you get hit by a car or a tree falls on you or you have some random medical emergency (which can and does happen to healthy people all the time) then you're in for a world of hurt.

please reconsider.

sterlindon Microsoft offers mass buyouts for roughly a quarter of its workforce

right, but this voluntary severance offer seems absurdly untargeted. like afaict it's offered to everyone under L70 within participating orgs. it doesn't appear to be tied to performance.

personally, I was somewhat poorly utilized in my last team, I've just switched to a dream team where I am again tremendously effective, and I'm concerned that the axe will fall on me at random or before I have an opportunity to get 140% in my next Connect.

sterlindon Microsoft offers voluntary buyouts to a quarter of its workforce

I very much hope such layoffs are not inevitable. I just started on a really good team and I've been as excited about the tech as ever and I love my coworkers and I'm starting to kick ass. I'm gonna be real bummed if I get laid off in 6 months.

sterlindon Microsoft offers mass buyouts for roughly a quarter of its workforce

?s/economy/tech job market/g

sterlindon I refuse to accept a censored Internet. Join Me at FOSDEM 27

or the sysadmin from Stormfront, I presume.

I tolerate the freedom of speech of neo-Nazis and cyberbullies because it's the same freedom of speech I use. but they're awful people. FOSDEM is free not to associate with them.

sterlindon I refuse to accept a censored Internet. Join Me at FOSDEM 27

even in countries where it's blocked there are ways in. Chinese users are given unlisted bridges which camouflage their traffic signal.

sterlindon That AI Temptation

because powerful AI requires tons of compute for training, so training a frontier model requires billions of dollars.

if it weren't for China, half a dozen US billionaires would own the frontier, gatekeeping any model more powerful than Llama from the public. fortunately China is open-sourcing powerful models, but how long will they keep it up?

sterlindon Danish Government silently drops plan to dump MS Office

then perhaps they can contribute to it?

sterlindon Danish Government silently drops plan to dump MS Office

presumably Office source code isn't in the LLM's training data. so it would be a clean room implementation of Office.

sterlindon A robot I didn't expect to build

if AI eventually surpasses humans at intellectual labor, and general-purpose robots outpace humans at physical labor, then whether we live in serfdom or in paradise becomes a purely political problem - we will have all the resources for every human on earth to live a charmed existence.

I think the political problems are much harder than the technical problems, fwiw. I can readily imagine ending up in a neo-feudalist dystopia.

sterlindon A robot I didn't expect to build

> I wouldn't call a laptop a digital slave - a digital slave would be a human robot that you could program to use your computer for you while you were away from your desktop workstation. That would be a really dumb invention.

have you seen Astra's computer use harness? it's literally that.

sterlindon eMudhra to Exit Global SSL/TLS Certificate Business;

nah, it's still be 2 factor, because 2 is a factor of 4!

sterlindon Someone Opened a CashApp in Her Name. She Faces Years in Prison

they should, and they do. that's what the prosecution will attempt to prove to the jury at trial.

the burden of proof is on the prosecutor, but the defendant stands a better chance by presenting evidence that it wasn't her.

sterlindon Wine ported to OpenBSD

honestly LLMs could probably write drivers in CompCert C or some other formally verified dialect. having AI discharge proof obligations seems like a terrific use for all this newly-developed mathematical process.

you could have the driver code prove it implements a spec, that there's no UB, that hardware invariants are maintained, that routines take a fixed time to execute.

the formal driver spec must still be written by sober, well-caffeinated humans of course.

sterlindon Tesla Roadster

but how well will the people in the other car fare if you crash into them? with the Cybertruck especially, its sharp edges make it seem like a set of knives on four wheels. the pommel is just facing the driver rather than the pedestrian or other vehicle.

sterlindon Claude reveals ECDSA curve origins

the null hypothesis for Voynich is that it was generated by some random process, like asemic writing, assembling bits from tables and copy/paste/edit. there are some reasons this is plausible (the entropy of Voynich words is low for language, there aren't scribal corrections etc), but fundamentally the "ancient hoax" hypothesis can't be proven, only disproven (since there's so much freedom of choice in generating garbage that it's not a compact explanation.)

so frustratingly, if it is an ancient hoax we can't ever prove it. all we would observe is that we haven't deciphered it, but failing to decipher isn't proof that there's nothing to decipher.

sterlindon Grace Hopper Celebration Cancelled

Grace Hopper invented COBOL (or its direct predecessor anyway), did a lot of foundational work with compiler design, and generally (if you'll pardon the pun) led the deep integration of computer systems and programs into the military in the very early days. but yes, we should be focusing on what they've done, not just who they are.

sterlindon Germany: Ex-spy chief arrested for espionage

allies spy on each other all the time. statecraft is weird like that.

sterlindon Surely you have ultra-wideband radios on your bins too?

agreed it's Orwellian. fortunately, open-weight VLMs you can run on a Mac mini or a strix Halo are more than adequate for this task.

sterlindon Cops Can Bypass iPhone's Automatic Reboot to Get into Locked Phones

I'm not sure the police can compel you to open a safe. they can get a warrant to have someone weld it open with a blowtorch, but I don't think they can get a warrant to compel you to open your own safe for them.

sterlindon Does Reddit have an astroturfing problem? What the data suggests

expansion?

sterlindon Does Reddit have an astroturfing problem? What the data suggests

I've noticed this too. it's always towns and sports teams. but I thought I was being paranoid..

at least Eternal September was a human invasion.

sterlindon Jensen Huang says AI distillation is 'competition.'

many, many websites have terms of service that forbid scraping. how many of those ended up in the training set, I wonder?

sterlindon How we learned to stop worrying and love campus surveillance

> No. The security cameras do not record audio. Massachusetts law prohibits recording audio without the knowledge of those being recorded. Additionally, we do not use facial recognition technology with our security cameras.

could you read lips with AI?