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thebiss

139 karma · joined November 27, 2017

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thebiss··on Concerning behavior from a popular open-weight AI model
Except where does the accountability land?

If an individual employee does something unethical or illegal, the employee is accountable and may lose their license or face penalties, and if the company performed the right due diligence and training first then responded "correctly" when they learned of the employee's behavior, their liability might even be zero. There is case law on this topic.

But if a MODEL mis-advises or acts in an unethical or illegal way, who is accountable? The business team that spec'd and tested the solution/product? The architects and the developers? I've never met an architect or consultant with professional liability insurance.

There isn't enough tested law in this area yet.

thebiss··on Ask HN: Anyone else getting token limited at work now?
Yes, but we have tiered limits, and when we reach the limits of our current tier we can quickly get for more. Each tier’s limit is roughly double the last.

HOWEVER, the higher one goes the more scrutiny your use gets.

thebiss··on US Consumer Price Index up 4.2%
It's mentioned in the lede paragraph...

> The index for energy rose 3.9 percent in May, after rising 3.8 percent in April and 10.9 percent in March. The energy index accounted for over sixty percent of the monthly all items increase.

thebiss··on Vitamin D and Omega-3 have a larger effect on depression than antidepressants
That chemical may be alpha-pinene https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%CE%91-Pinene#Properties_and_u...
thebiss··on OpenBSD-current now runs as guest under Apple Hypervisor
It's well supported by the architecture. You may be interested in:

- Lima - wsl2-like access to a virtual machine https://github.com/lima-vm/lima/blob/master/README.md

- vfkit - CLI creation and management of applehv VMs https://github.com/crc-org/vfkit

- podman machine - easily run x86 containers in CoreOs, via the podman CLI https://docs.podman.io/en/latest/markdown/podman-machine.1.h...

thebiss··on Unpowered SSDs slowly lose data
zfs can run with a single disk stripe. pfsense gladly runs this way. See https://docs.netgate.com/pfsense/en/latest/install/install-z...
thebiss··on Spending too much time at airports
I have worked for similar consulting companies, though not AWS. We had to always book an initial ticket that was policy compliant (economy, or higher only if it was similarly priced), and then optionally upgrade the seat. That causes the upgrade to come through as a separate charge.

Later, when submitting expenses, the upgrade had to be marked as a personal expense, to be netted against per diem or paid back directly.

Early in my career managers did a very poor job of explaining that this was allowed.

thebiss··on Building my own solar power system
What is your recovery plan in the event of a hurricane?

I'm not fond of high electric rates, but in addition to generation those rates amortize and distribute the cost of storm recovery. A home or business with grid-tied solar pays interconnect fees for the option to get paid back a little for excess generation, and the option to decide to switch back to 100% grid power if a storm damages the on-site panels.

thebiss··on In the US, a rotating detonation rocket engine takes flight
Watch the Integza video (linked above): The lab interviewed starts the process using a very small pulse detonation engine, which injects a new explosion into the ring.
thebiss··on Finland Bans Smartphones in Schools
> [...] how we can restructure our approach to education so that students would actually feel encouraged to participate and ignore their smartphones.

Is there any precedent for this that we can model / reproduce? Any country or region where students are considered academically successful, while having unrestricted access to the internet in their pocket?

If it exists, it would be very worthwhile to understand what gives those students such strong self control. Do they do it on their own? Are they somehow admonished/shunned publicly for that behavior?

thebiss··on Stargate Project: SoftBank, OpenAI, Oracle, MGX to build data centers
See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Censorship_of_Winnie-the-Pooh_...
thebiss··on Nearly half of teenagers globally cannot read with comprehension
Do teachers and parents now actively encourage students to read aloud? I'd love to see a study showing this helps.

When I did this in middle school I was repeated told to stop, and that doing so or talking myself through math problems were "signs of mental illness," and I needed to keep it in my head.

I hated that it made it easier.

thebiss··on Eating less can lead to a longer life: study in mice shows why
There have been recent studies on the impact of fasting during pregnancy. Here's two:

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8377932/ > A total of 215 women were included in the study, 123 women fasted, and 92 women did not fast. Only 2.8% of women knew that fasting is forbidden in pregnancy. Sixty five percent of women reported weakness as the main reason for not fasting. The rate of gestational diabetes, pregnancy induced hypertension and preterm delivery was higher among women who fasted (17% vs 14%, 7% vs 2%, 9% vs 9%) respectively, compared to non-fasting women, but were not found statistically significant. There was no difference in anthropometric measurements of newborn, among both groups.

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC9931121/ > Fasting during pregnancy was associated with reduced birthweight, in particular for fasting during the first trimester (-352ˑ92g, 95% CI: -537ˑ38; -168ˑ46). Neither dietary composition nor altered sleep were directly associated with birthweight. However, dietary composition during Ramadan outside of fasting hours seems to moderate the fasting-birthweight association, which disappeared for women switching to high-fat diets.

thebiss··on End of the road for Google Drive in Transmit
rclone strongly recommends users create their own individual API key:

> It is strongly recommended to use your own client ID as the default rclone ID is heavily used. If you have multiple services running, it is recommended to use an API key for each service. The default Google quota is 10 transactions per second so it is recommended to stay under that number as if you use more than that, it will cause rclone to rate limit and make things slower.

https://rclone.org/drive/#making-your-own-client-id

thebiss··on Liquid Foundation Models: Our First Series of Generative AI Models
You may be interested in this tread regarding whisper.cpp on an Rpi4:

https://github.com/ggerganov/whisper.cpp/discussions/166

thebiss··on Forget ChatGPT: why researchers now run small AIs on their laptops
lmstudio prohibits commercial use [1]:

> Subject to the Agreement, Company grants you a limited license to reproduce portions of Company Properties for the sole purpose of using the Services for your personal, non-commercial purposes.

[1] https://lmstudio.ai/terms

thebiss··on Can solar costs keep shrinking?
Just look at the r/solar for similar quotes.

Here’s a $51k quote for 12kW with 5kW battery: https://www.reddit.com/r/solar/s/Fema45FkDx

thebiss··on Dynamic Pricing at Major Grocery Chain Can Vary Prices Depending on Your Income
So many questions...

- What happens when shopping is done by a delivery service? Does everything bought by a door-dasher get priced higher (because they might spend $5000/week at a store doing grocery runs) or lower (because their W-2 is lower?)

- What happens if I'm buy groceries for my grandmother? She's aged, has poor mobility, and on a fixed income. Are you going to charge me, and therefore her, more?

thebiss··on Empathy for the user having sex with your software
There's a difference between being stable (robust once connected), and connecting aggressively.

We have two cars from the same manufacturer, each paired with two iPhones. Start either car or drive by, and the car will take over an existing Bluetooth connection from one of the iPhones. And by take over, I mean: disconnect an active connection streaming to Airpods/Beats/Airplay soundbars, and grab that stream of music/video/conference call into the car.

The driver in the car then has to pause playback or hang up on someone else's call, because there's no way to pass it back.

thebiss··on Glance: A self-hosted dashboard that puts all your feeds in one place
Those interested in this might also like MagicMirror https://magicmirror.builders/ . It has many plugins, an active community, and renders in an Electron UI or in your browser.
thebiss··on Thread: Tech we can’t use or teach?
Would the license allow a hobby group to raise funds then create and sell a raspberry pi "hat" that supports thread in a licensed way?
thebiss··on Ask HN: How should organize and back up 23 TiB of personal files?
Interesting. Does the rclone versioning not work as described? I fortunately have never had a reason to test it.

> When rclone uploads a new version of a file it creates a new version of it. Likewise when you delete a file, the old version will be marked hidden and still be available. Conversely, you may opt in to a "hard delete" of files with the --b2-hard-delete flag which would permanently remove the file instead of hiding it.

https://rclone.org/b2/#versions

thebiss··on Ask HN: How should organize and back up 23 TiB of personal files?
I've had great luck using rclone to encrypt and send to backblaze b2 for our offsite backups.

See: - https://rclone.org/crypt/ - https://rclone.org/b2/

thebiss··on Nanofont3x4: Smallest readable 3x4 font with lowercase (2015)
Possibly. The author mentions a few other uses under "Practicality":

> Once the novelty wears off a "practical" example would be rendering "in-game book pages" that don't look like complete gibberish, or an "accurate print preview" with real text instead of blurry placeholder pixels that don't even look close to being the glyphs scaled down.

thebiss··on Why are most sofas so bad?
Umm, freight is $500?
thebiss··on SymPy: Symbolic Mathematics in Python
For those of us that have never touched lisp - can you explain why?
thebiss··on How to do things if you're not that smart and don't have any talent
I have a hard time with this advice. Is it for teens?

My daughter has severe ADHD and is a disaster without medication. One of her current doctors asked which parent has similar traits, and my wife says it is me. My daughter's academic and behavioral track record is shamefully like mine.

So I've been to two psychologists and my GP, and all three say that ADHD doesn't exist in adults, it's something kids grow out of.

thebiss··on Password may not contain: select, insert, update, delete, drop
The infamous Scunthorpe problem.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scunthorpe_problem

thebiss··on Outlook is Microsoft's new data collection service
Can you give one of those examples?

A large enterprise may have the resources (time and money for corporate counsel) AND leverage (# licenses needed across many products) to negotiate privacy terms that align with their needs, or even pick another product.

A smaller firm is effectively stuck: they don’t have the resources or leverage, and sometimes must use the same products as large enterprises to do business with them.

In the case of Outlook specifically, if you do business with enterprises that use it, your meeting calendaring needs to work flawlessly with theirs. A missed or broken reschedule or repeating event can mean your teams sometimes don’t show up when expected. This really happens.

thebiss··on United finds loose bolts on plug doors during 737 Max 9 inspections
Correct: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_Airlines_Flight_811
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