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stuxnet79

1,893 karma · joined June 1, 2015

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stuxnet79··on Tell the speakers that you liked their talks
Question, where do you live? In America, and especially on the Pacific Coast 'Have a great day' is a phatic expression [1]. It is a common parting phrase and has lost any special significance that it might have once had within a conversation.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phatic_expression

stuxnet79··on Dario, Please
Amodei is just another SV grifter trying to use ethics / morals to hide his monopolistic tendencies. Instead of writing essays he should put his money where his mouth is and open source all the models Anthropic has, the harnesses and donate some much needed compute to science.
stuxnet79··on Steam Frame starts at $1059
Quest 3 is cheap for the same reason that 80 inch TVs are sold at or below cost. If you value your privacy at zero and want to strap a surveilling, billboard on your face for pennies on the dollar be my guest.

This is for people who want control over their devices. Despite the poor timing and somewhat high price tag I am glad there's competition in this space. Meta's stance on software and hardware openness is not great & it's suffocating the whole space.

stuxnet79··on Ask HN: Do you run A/B Tests?
What does "ridiculously simplified" mean here? Is it that the test infrastructure in Big Tech is very mature and easy to use?
stuxnet79··on Terence Tao explains 6 essential mathematical concepts [video]
For those not in the know, Terrence Howard's dreams of a career in Astrophysics were eviscerated after Neil Degrasse Tyson reviewed his "Theory of Everything" paper [1]

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1uLi1I3G2N4

stuxnet79··on Autonomous Mathematical Discovery in an Open-World Multi-Agent Environment
Great book. I first read it 10 years ago, I think it would benefit from a re-read.
stuxnet79··on Nvidia agrees to acquire Hugging Face for $13B
It was either they (literally) sell out or enshittify. Choose your poison. Hosting and running LLMs is an expensive business to be in. There wasn't ever going to be a good ending to this story. The original investors need to be made whole.
stuxnet79··on I'm a CTO. We took PE money 6 months ago. AMA
Well, it's not that PE money is bad, it's that PE participating in a round is a sign that the startup has maxed out its potential and has weak prospects. PE goes for semi-sure bets that can be goosed for short term profits. Layoffs and other cost-cutting measures are the name of the game up until your husk of a startup has good enough financials to dump on the next sucker downstream.
stuxnet79··on I'm a CTO. We took PE money 6 months ago. AMA
Is the ownership structure of the company a mix of PE, VC and bootstrap? How does that work? Speaking for myself, "taking" any kind of money or getting outright acquired by PE is a huge red flag for a startup and I wouldn't work at such a place unless I was completely out of options.
stuxnet79··on Coding expertise is going to collapse from AI reliance
> post agentic LLM as programs are going to be mostly bloated ad-hoc, poorly thought-out and patched in a way that does not concern it's self with the correctness of the algorithms or data structures chosen.

This is an accurate description of 90% of corporate software pre-LLM.

LLMs are introducing a unique kind of bloat and dysfunction but it's not like they are replacing pristine code. Most software that is subject to market pressures and is generating a profit is painful to look at and difficult to work in.

stuxnet79··on Do teams still use scrum and sprints?
I've never worked at a place that doesn't do some variation of scrum. It is terrible. How do things work at bigger firms?
stuxnet79··on Memory prices climb 500% in 12 months, up to 10x the lowest ever tracked prices
> If there were no 'new' server market whatsoever then you could redirect 100% of memory production to consumer chips without enormous upheaval.

> By the way I personally think this scenario is very unlikely to happen.

Can you explain why? I imagine pivoting to a much less lucrative consumer market when the time comes would lead to financial ruin?

stuxnet79··on Memory prices climb 500% in 12 months
While I share your optimism, I still don't fully understand why a crash will necessarily lead to an oversupply and lower prices for regular consumers. The components / RAM you are referencing are for enterprise use / data centers which in my limited understanding is not a 1:1 swap for the kind of components that your smartphone / car / fridge / gaming rig use. I would love for someone more informed than me to spell out the rationale here.

It seems the chokehold started from the very beginning of the supply chain (wafers), so if a crash were to occur I don't see how we wouldn't be doubly screwed. Lots of worthless enterprise gear being shopped on eBay + a scarcity of consumer grade components leading to sustained high prices.

stuxnet79··on We Tracked a Shipment of Rare Books. It Ended at an Amazon AI Training Facility
> The number of books ingested by these AI companies is a drop in the bucket compared to old books destroyed every year through normal means.

Citations? Also what exactly are these 'normal means'? As a bibliophile who loves scouring used book stores for out-of-print titles this is a topic I'm very interested in.

stuxnet79··on Mars Bar from 1991 found – and it's 20g bigger than today's
You think you are buying a TV but you are actually buying a billboard. With how scarce our attention is in the current era, advertisers are paying a pretty penny to shove an ad in your face via your TV's 'smart' features with the hope of getting a guaranteed conversion. If this strategy becomes even more lucrative I wouldn't be surprised if in the near future you can get a 4K top of the line "TV" for free.
stuxnet79··on Ask HN: What E-Reader to Buy?
Kobo is the only answer here. Get any of the older non-color versions. Very hacker friendly. The stock OS is serviceable, it's not ad riddled or enshittified like Kindle or any of the other popular alternatives. If the stock OS does not work for you, you can install KOreader and you will be set.
stuxnet79··on A walk through of the DeltaNet family of linear attention variants
> It seems pretty easy but the hardware is expensive.

Huh?

If your aim is to truly 'get started' with ML then hardware is absolutely not a bottleneck (either local or cloud).

Remember that ML is much more than LLMs. Even modern day LLMs can be quantized to a point where they can run on local hardware although their capabilities won't be as impressive.

I would recommend looking into some of Andrej Karpathy's videos if you want a grasp of the basics.

stuxnet79··on China's open-weights AI strategy is winning
> Like what am I supposed to do if AI is going to take my job?

(1) You call your local representatives to start working on AI legislation.

(2) Legislators seek advisors from frontier labs (specifically Anthropic) because there is a lack of in-house expertise in government.

(3) Advisors set up a regulatory body that scrutinizes new innovations in the AI space. Causes a chilling effect in the industry effectively knee-capping OAI and Chinese model providers who don't have a direct line into Washington.

(4) Profit (for Anthropic)

stuxnet79··on Photos of items from families in different countries with different incomes
Note that some of the entries here are clearly outdated. I've cycled through some "global south" countries that I'm familiar with and what's shown may have been true maybe 15-20 years ago. GDP has 4x since then and at the same salary level the lifestyle is either equivalent or better than the richer countries.
stuxnet79··on The social physics of conversation: Communication patterns matter
> But no matter how much I think about it, I don't believe productivity is a solid, tangible thing, the way people talk about it as if it were

It's rooted in Taylorism / Management Science which is good at attaching metrics to the "factors of production" and correlating those to outputs.

But it doesn't have any easy numbers to attach to morale, motivation, loyalty or conscientiousness. These are all human factors that will have a real impact on your business.

Despite paying lip service to all these qualities corporations in the modern era either conveniently hide them under the rug or game them with lazy metrics that ultimately suffer a devastating collapse under Goodharts law.

Picking up a religious text will teach you more about dealing with people than these articles written by MBAs.

stuxnet79··on The console wars have been lost
Everytime this topic comes up I always replay this clip of Gabe Newell ranting about having to write multi-threaded code for the PS3 and chuckle [1]

Was writing code for the PS3 genuinely difficult or was it also a skill issue? The counter-argument I've heard is that multi threaded programming just wasn't as common at the time due to minimal number of cores available on most consumer hardware.

Perhaps the PS3 would have fared better with a different generation of developers.

[1] https://youtu.be/dKYT6NzsUZQ?si=wzf5e5iBP3MEEJEn

stuxnet79··on The console wars have been lost
> Sony even admitted to this being their strategy, so that later games look better and better as even brilliant devs only over time figured out how to squeeze full performance out of HW.

I think the real strategy was to make it harder for natively developed PS3 games to be ported to other platforms.

It was a sensible strategy except they effectively lost the console wars right out the gate by delaying their release a year. This alienated developers who didn't want to go through the effort of doing development the PS3 way when it was hard to program for AND had little traction among consumers.

If the PS3 had come out a year before the 360 things might have played out differently.

Sony's hubris around the PS3 was very risky. They caught up in sales by the end of that generation but early PS3 adopters unfortunately had to deal with fundamentally broken, unoptimized ports despite having superior (if over-engineered) hardware.

Also the PS3 disaster ultimately set the stage for the PS4 which had a drastically simpler architecture. PS4 was a lot easier to program for but if compared to a PC with equivalent specs it was overpriced and much more locked down.

stuxnet79··on Cyberpunk Comics, Manga and Graphic Novels
Batman Beyond is also technically cyberpunk although it has more of a Y2K vibe rather than the retro 80s / early 90s aesthetic.
stuxnet79··on Cyberpunk Comics, Manga and Graphic Novels
It might be skirting the edges of what is considered cyberpunk since it has Mecha elements but Patlabor is a fantastic manga/series that should have been included in this list [1]

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Patlabor:_The_Movie

stuxnet79··on Cyberpunk Comics, Manga and Graphic Novels
Personally I think I'm done with GitS at this point. How many times has it been rebooted, like a dozen times?

The last one I enjoyed watching was Arise but I lost track after that. I think the series has been done to death and I would love to see some completely new IP from Masamune that is more reflective of the AI and economic upheavals we are experiencing in the 20s.

stuxnet79··on Ask HN: How do you use LLMs for private discussions?
Can you elaborate on the first step? Which cloud and which service? What's the cost outlay if you are just having a convo and not doing anything 'agentic'?
stuxnet79··on Physical disc production ending in Jan 2028 for new games on PlayStation
This is the reason the PS2 is having a resurgence in popularity. With FreeMcBoot and TB of storage you can backup your entire collection and play it at your convenience. There are a non-trivial number of PS3 games that are basically unplayable unless they get patched. With digital storefronts getting shut down left and right there is no guarantee that the disc will yield anything valuable, it's basically a paperweight.
stuxnet79··on Rocketlab acquires Iridium
On the positive side, clearing out all this space junk could end up being a meaningful contributor to global GDP. See also Planetes [1]

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Planetes

stuxnet79··on GTA 6 Physical Copies Won't Include a Disc, Will Just Be a Code in a Box
How much of that 100GB is actually optimized usage? I suspect that a hard cap on the size of the game would lead to a better quality product. The size inflation of games has literally gone insane. I was looking at my Steam library and Tekken 7 was taking up close to 100GB of space which makes absolutely no sense, because it has the same fundamental gameplay as Tekken Tag 1 which was released on a 700MB CD ROM for the PS2's launch.
stuxnet79··on GTA 6 Physical Copies Won't Include a Disc, Will Just Be a Code in a Box
This is bad for many reasons:

- Externalizes the costs of distribution to consumers. DVDs and Blu Rays cost a pittance compared to the $100 MSRP that GTA 6 is rumoured to retail under. GTA 6 will likely break records for the highest single day gross of a media release of all time. They can't allocate some of that top line to providing a physical token that gamers can collect?

- Sets a bad precedent for future AAA releases in terms of acceptable size. Forces gamers to have to buy more storage at a time when storage costs are astronomical. At 200GB I don't know how anybody can justify valuable space in their SSD for a single game.

- Genuinely leads to worse quality product. Without physical media there's no deadline and effectively no incentive to provide a polished product on release day. Have fun playing a broken game for the next 3 to 5 years.

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