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wamatt

2,899 karma · joined February 21, 2012

username at Buchheit’s beta bunker
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wamatt··on Gemini 3.8 text-to-speech
>they are better thought of as a "loose federation of warring tribes".

Googly way to put it! Nice. Might steal that :)

wamatt··on The session you cannot take with you
For some reason, my early morning waking brain, expected the blog title to be a segue into existentialism
wamatt··on Show HN: Kage – Shadow any website to a single binary for offline viewing
Love love love SingleFile too. The FF extension works pretty well for a clean save.

That said, Kage looks promising if OP can combine SingleFile reproduction quality with the HTTPTrack spidering approach. SPA's are kinda tricky with archiving and do wonder how well Kage would handle that

wamatt··on Not everyone is using AI for everything
One thing I'd personally like to see a little more discussion of (at least within my social circles) is.. what exactly does "using AI" mean?

How does this connect to everyone's high level ideas/thoughts about "tech", "AI" and "morals and feels" etc. These lines can start to seem a little blurry, at least for me.

For example, would we say my partner is "using AI" (for all intents and purposes), if she's frequently using Google.com throughout the day, and then ends up picking and believing the AI generated answer overview at the top of the SERPs almost every time?

Or do we feel "uses AI", is more along the lines of the vampire kids running 1000 sub-agents on a mattress floor in SF?

I kind of find the whole spectrum really interesting because even basic phone use is now stuffed with AI, whether we choose to label it or not.

wamatt··on Superintelligence: The Idea That Eats Smart People (2016)
> In particular, the concept of the Roko's Basilisk is some rehash of the Pascal's Wager.

Oh boy couldn't agree more. The whole Basilisk drama really caused me to rethink the idea that a group of Rationalists were in practice, were in fact particularly rational. CF The Atheists vs someone that happens to be atheist. To their credit, they also acknowledged this somewhat and hence the CFAR crowd.

The word "rehash" also resonates. Like Google has a tendency to use PHD's to reinvent everything over and make up new words and terms for the same concepts.

Having spent a little too much time in the early 2010's at Bay Area LW meetups, the more fantastical LARP of fanfic, and religious mythology often felt a bit at odds. There was the aspect of a charismatic, autodidact leader obsessed with a certain J.K. Rowling IP and the kinky stuff..Don't get me wrong, I still have fond memories of this time overall :)

From my perspective, a core issue seemed to be no-one seemed to particularly motivated in defining what it meant to be rational, aside from some loose segmentation around instrumental vs epistemic rationality. (ie practice vs theory). And because of this it almost had a faith vibe to the scene. Like "trust me bro" this is "super high brow nerd stuff" and on your third helping of "The Sequences" all these formulas and shiny new words will all make sense what and it will be clear why we’re doing these meetups. (It totally wasn't anything to do with mental masturbation and high-iq crowd bonding and feeling good ;)

When I was into Christian apologetics (C.S. Lewis etc) as in my first year of CS & philosophy of science in college, there was a similar thing.. after a year of seeking out the scientific, and logical explanations for all the religious dogma I was indoctrinated into growing up. In the end, it pretty much reduced to "just have faith". This was after exhausting the "well you're not an expert on Christian theology, so you cant have a solid argument around the nature and existence of God because you need to study more" counter. This despite reading and studying the Bible at length.

For example, right now. Is it rational to be typing this up on HN, when I have other more important goals to do? OTOH reminiscing on the past and connecting with a single serving online friend OP, gives a bit of a dopamine hit. And maybe sharing resonates with others and increases happiness in the world? (or not if anyone still LW reads this and maybe feels a different type of way)

So that’s community right and good (in the sense it's aligning with goals)? But then its driven by emotions, so that kinda is not supposed to be rational. Is it rational to observe one's own mental states and take action? Turtles all the way down!

wamatt··on Grok 4.3
Thanks from where I'm looking Grok 4.3 and Claude 4.7 do a better job on the informal close friend/coworker vibe.

ChatGPT sounds fake / formal phrasing (for the specific close friend context) and has em-dashes and uses capitalization. Hence, ChatGPT does not, imo grok the assignment ;)

wamatt··on Show HN: boringBar – a taskbar-style dock replacement for macOS
> Consumer purchase behavior is highly impulsive and irrational.

This is correct. It’s quite possible to both satisfy more customers and work within your constraints.

Eg $30 bucks lifetime would be nice. You could put it in small print below the main pricing to avoid decision fatigue and keep things streamlined for subs.

Often those early adopters appreciate and become advocates. Subs fatigue is a real thing

wamatt··on Show HN: Anos – a hand-written ~100KiB microkernel for x86-64 and RISC-V
Oh boy.. this is a perfect Show HN to wake up to :)

With the wild pace of everything going on right now. I can’t be alone feeling it truly captures the hacker spirit. Echoes to early Lisp days, or maybe my high school side quest to learn Minix? Ie building from scratch and seeing what’s possible.

Sadly most of us will never have the staying power (well definitely not myself) and yet you gave us a little window into your passion.

Thank you for the inspiration. Especially the focus on compounding small wins and including us in your orbit. Long live Anos

wamatt··on Show HN: Sub-millisecond VM sandboxes using CoW memory forking
Off the top of my head trading or realtime voice come to mind. Probably plenty other domains could benefit
wamatt··on Arm's Cortex X925: Reaching Desktop Performance
>I can't be the only person who reads "reaching desktop performance" and wonders "you mean comparable to the M1, or to the M3 Ultra?"

You're not. IMHO it's a fairly obvious, narrow and uncontroversial observation (and hence why its the top comment). That said, I personally still enjoyed the back and forth as many others one could imagine. There can be value in the counterarguments from multiple other usernames, as this facilitates sharpening reasoning for the conclusion from readers. (even when the original premise stays in tact)

The lack of others agreeing could be the result of many reasons. IMHO, a not insignificant one could be the incentive structure skews heavily towards lurking as HN rightfully disincentives "me too" type replies and not everyone always has something interesting to add

2c not an epistemologist ymmv

wamatt··on I miss thinking hard
Attention is squandered these days like free samples at a Costco run by raccoons. It's not hard to think hard. It's hard to have discipline.
wamatt··on Testing Ads in ChatGPT
Fair and share same concerns

The track record of the really big CEOs has been less than super good nervous sweating

Maybe I’m being naive, but there a few good ones (smaller and mid tier size) out there imo

wamatt··on Why is the sky blue?
Thoroughly enjoyed reading this too! Kudos and shout out to the author Erik Kennedy. One can definitely see the care and love. We hope to see more of this style the future

Kind of reminds me of worrydream (Brett Victor), better explained and neil.fun vibes (and many others I can’t recall right now)

wamatt··on Testing Ads in ChatGPT
Annnd I’m old enough to remember last weeks Superbowl ad controversy :)

It’s not like “OpenAI == AI”

One could possibly make the case that currently that is the public perception (outside the SV bubble). But is it really true?

Last time I checked Dario staked Anthropic’s future and reputation, on paid subscription.

wamatt··on Fedora Asahi Remix is now working on Apple M3
That’s a reasonable take. The never part seems strong though.

If I may offer a slight consideration? “arbitrary code vs arbitrary signed code”.

What’s realistically stopping Apple from requiring all code and processes be signed? Including on device dev code with a trust chain going back to Apple and TPU / Secure Enclave enforcement

wamatt··on Reflecting on the founding, growth and maturing of Overleaf
> that allows us to provide a solid free plan that works well for most users

The fact that you offer a real (i.e. full-featured) free plan is really nice. Congrats on your success and finding a business model that works. :)

wamatt··on ECMAScript 2017 Language Specification
Sort of related: JS is officially written as "JavaScript" (yeah, ikr) and surprisingly the trademark is owned by Oracle.
wamatt··on Former Mt. Gox CEO Heads to Trial in Japan Over Missing Bitcoins
I see what you're saying, though I think it misses the mark somewhat.

By analogy, the 'the web' does not only mean HTTP or even the exclusively just the various protocols involved. (to name a few on the client side: ip, tcp, dns, http, http/2, tls, ws/wss etc.)

The term also refers to the use of browsers, hosted websites and the culture surrounding how society interacts online with these sites. In short, 'the web' is an ecosystem just like bitcoin.

With that said, it's widely accepted that the proof of work system has not yet been compromised, nor has the network itself. However, let's not gloss over the fact that there's a rather established hacking problem in the space affecting a broad audience.

ransomeware, hacked exchanges, personal wallet attacks, online wallet attacks, 2fa attacks. Even a few of the most paranoid and technically savvy early adopters, have fallen victim to such schemes.

wamatt··on Show HN: Add a play button next to IPA on Wikipedia
Yes, that's exactly right. Sorry for the confusion lambdadmitry!
wamatt··on Show HN: Add a play button next to IPA on Wikipedia
Kudos on a useful concept. Some feedback: Alternate pronunciations seems to go a bit wonky. For example it pronounces Ribosome [1] (/ˈraɪbəˌsoʊm, -boʊ-/) as ri-bo-some-bo :). Overall quite a nifty tool as many wikipedia pages do not have native pronunciation recordings. Could also see it helping casual learners of IPA.

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

wamatt··on Colorado doesn’t need to replicate Silicon Valley
Exactly. Just like Detroit will always be the global epicenter of the automotive industry /s. A lot can change in 50 years.
wamatt··on iPad Pro
In the past I've been adamant on buying the LTE+Wifi iPads (because more options right?). In hindsight however, the cellular feature was barely used.

Have you considered an LTE mobile hotspot? It can be left charged (but off) in your laptop bag for days/weeks and only used for travel or as needed. I found it to be super useful and not much hassle at all. Also multiple devices can connect rather simply.

Lastly, a benefit of this sort of decoupling, is it allows for using a different network carrier to the mobile phone, thus effectively increasing one's LTE coverage.

wamatt··on Uncensorable Wikipedia on IPFS
The OP and GP provide an example of the age-old dichotomy between deontological (kyledrake) and consequentialist (cjbprime) viewpoints. Which is more correct, has been debated for centuries and unlikely to be resolved anytime soon, as it's highly subjective.

Should Youtube, have refrained from using copyrighted material that contributed to their popularity, given it greatly increased their chances of success compared to the other nascent video sharing sites at the time?

Was reddit.com, wrong for using sock-puppets accounts to kickstart content when they were starting out?

Some will say it's always wrong to use 'x' in a strategy no matter what. Others would argue that while 'x' might be a bit evil, it's necessary to ensure survival, and will result in a greater good (ie the service being useful to millions vs extinction) in the long run.

wamatt··on Introducing Surface Laptop
Nice aesthetics and form factor, which makes the choice to use fabric right under the palms, more than odd.

Perhaps it will have strong sales given potential buyers rarely consider these long term issues. However, that fabric is almost certainly going to turn nasty over time and be a pain to manage.

It's like innovating by installing living potted plants inside a Ferrari to improve air quality. Cleaner air is a desirable goal, although the implementation could use another iteration.

wamatt··on The Myth of a Superhuman AI
>They are incredibly slow and energy inefficient;

Human brains are energy inefficient? Well, thats a first ;)

"In 1990, the legendary Caltech engineer Carver Mead correctly predicted that our present-day computers would use ten million times more energy for a single instruction than the brain uses for a synaptic activation."

"Last March, AlphaGo, a program created by Google DeepMind, was able to beat a world-champion human player of Go, but only after it had trained on a database of thirty million moves, running on approximately a million watts. (Its opponent’s brain, by contrast, would have been about fifty thousand times more energy-thrifty, consuming twenty watts.)"

[1] http://www.newyorker.com/tech/elements/a-computer-to-rival-t...

wamatt··on Imitating people’s speech patterns precisely could bring trouble
What evidence is there to suggest this will always be the case, in light of continual improvements?
wamatt··on Facebook and the Cost of Monopoly
>Does Thiel not realize

Of course he does. While not stated directly, the implied message from Thiel seems to be: monopolies are fantastic, for founders and early investors. Given his own history, is it that surprising he is a proponent? Perhaps in this case, being contrarian might be less about intellectual enlightenment and more of a rationalization for self-serving decisions.

wamatt··on San Jose and Oakland area job markets tumble
> And Sandro Skansi says

No one knows who that is.

Namedropping in an authoritative tone about a random person, seems kind of odd.

wamatt··on Chekhov: “Cultured people must, in my opinion, satisfy the following conditions”
> I have trouble understanding how we can want something, but some other part of us can seem to not want that thing

Humans typically associate themselves (ie 'you'), as a distinct thing in reality, rather than a group of competing agents.

wamatt··on We will no longer use the phrase “zero knowledge” to describe our software
Have you tried connecting through a VPN? That could potentially rule out ISP throttling.
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