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wjnc

3,684 karma · joined February 26, 2013

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wjnc··on I resigned from Anthropic today (Jacob Coxon)
Capture a market. Become big enough to jump hurdles XYZ due to scale and amount of, say, lawyers and compliance officers you can field. Then push for more compliance. It’s effectively a moat and one of the most durable kind since lawmakers aren’t very agile. It also opens a second front (first front being: product) to go up against newcomers. Kindly point out to the regulatory agencies that they are not compliant and demand enforcement due to “equal playing field”.

To make this point concrete: KYC in banks in Europe is on a scale of 1000s FTE per bank. No newcomer can ever comply with KYC the way big banks have implemented this by pure meat. Trouble ensue for all newcomer. That’s a moat!

wjnc··on Bill Gates tries to install MovieMaker (2003)
Every single recipient on the thread was a Vice President, Corporate Vice President, or Senior/Group Vice President. Gates intentionally bypassed lower-level product managers and emailed the executive tier directly to demand accountability for platform-wide usability regressions.

If you think this is not missing the forest for the trees, please explain.

wjnc··on Bill Gates tries to install MovieMaker (2003)
Sorry, but board room or top-50 professional discussions are ment to be a lot more meta. Bill using 500-1000 words to voice his concrete experience in downloading an app, with his directors immediately chiming in for fixes misses the forest for the trees. And Bill starts the quest for the one tree in his choice of words. It was disalignment in his organizational model and the CEO is on the line for that alignment. The happy install flow for moviemaker.exe - who cares… Just look at that thread! Response 3 is already “that’s not my turf”-ing. I’m not saying it’s easy to create a shift in a company of that size, it’s that they weren’t trying when the problem was yelling in their face.

(Typing this with a hot lap thanks to Windows update. The agony. Debian solved that 20-30 years ago.)

wjnc··on Hackers have withdrawn ~4k BTC (~$320M) from the Liquid Federation wallet
This is funny. Is this analogous to finding a wallet on the street and returning it (in my locale: and getting a finders fee), or is this analogous to taking a wallet from a drunk sleeping person (morally dubious), contacting them the day after to return the wallet, or is it just stealing per se.

Where I live it's only theft if there is an intention to unlawfully take ownership of the good. As an example, forgetting to pay in a supermarket lies exactly on that boundary. Take a cart or hide a product and you won't get away. Try to pay, payment fails and you don't notice, walk away and get apprehended and you might convince the judge that you had no intention to unlawfully take ownership.

wjnc··on Mark Cuban: Why US hospitals "don't know their costs"
There is no one way of doing cost attribution. So, at scale, there is no such thing as one perfectly calculated cost per product. Hospitals are outliers compared to more regular firms in that they produce tens of thousands of procedures / products. In the Netherlands we’ve standardized products for billing and negotiation purposes but still most negotiation is on a higher level than price per product.

Tl;dr Mr Cuban is right, but I think hospital accounting nears P/NP-level complexity

wjnc··on UEFA's Champions League draw creates unfair clusters; a Cayley graph fixes it
It’s something I like (math and networks) on a subject I like (football) but the AI tone is so heavy I get turned off. It’s far beyond my load-bearing capacity.

(tldr - a subset of teams get paired dispropotionally often in UEFA Champions League when compared to random, lowering average points taken away and thus harming chances for this ingroup and increasing chances for the outgroup; it’s interesting stuff; the group differs per year)

wjnc··on GPU World
In spirit of this conversation - Terence Tao is awesome right? He was already one of the best mathematicians on the planet when he happened to start dabbling in computer assisted proofs (obviously as a giant standing on the shoulders of giants) at exactly the right time for the computer revolution to find a perfect use case (as you point out).
wjnc··on GPU World
I know! And financials and actuaries aren't either. Excel, Python, R and don't know what we can use ducktape and spit for to keep together. But as the LEAN-example quite nicely shows: with the right scaffolding I am convinced the GPU World /could/ look rosy.

An economic problem would be - how could the builder of a scaffold capture _some_ value without right away be copied. The fact that LLMs threw away every protection of intellectual property at their inception makes it a lot harder to invest in (with the goal of capturing some) value. I am at least /somewhat/ influenced by RMS on the 'seductive mirage' of IP but I have my doubts on how copyleft could bring more than breadcrumbs to those who build scaffolds.

wjnc··on GPU World
I share this sentiment, while deploring the current AI board room sentiment. I know some people that design (safe) buildings. They use software all the time for their load-bearing work (lol). Think about the creativity that could be unleashed if that (like LEAN for math) becomes a commodity.

The same thing for my job: creating insurance premiums is somewhat hard but not stellar. A combination of skills, data, tools and people. I can imagine a future where you can post a 'have good weather on holiday or money back' bond on a platform. (I can think of more serious applications...) The sheer diversity and amount of liquidity AI's can create is enormous. (Switching to a very general outlook here.) And with liquidity hopefully comes more specificity in the ROI on saving our planet. (Or the disproving of the necessity thereof, if that is your outlook.)

wjnc··on I think the military commissary's freezers were hacked
This points to either an inside job (a US gov agency that feels it needs to create urgency) or Iran (that has an urgent need to do something), since no serious adversary would use this capability in the absence of a theater.
wjnc··on METR and Redwood Offer Holy %^ Postmortem of the HuggingFace Hack
As someone who read Milton Friedman to quite disliking professional licensing, this strikes me as a real US perspective (Louisiana florists and hair braiders come to mind). Plain old US tort law should do the trick.

In the same direction of your idea though: Why don’t the token factories have risk management and compliance departments? Multibillion dollar firms that stand to lose every penny if they hack and destroy any reasonable sized firm. I think these firms are the largest firms without proper corporate governance in humanities history. Move fast and break other peoples shit.

wjnc··on Uefa pursuing criminal legal action against Infantino
For the HN curious: What was wrong with the plan to further commercialize football via creating an SPV for the World Cup?

I detest Infantino and the grotesque corruption in FIFA, like in IOC and a certain administration. But UEFA Champions League and Nations League are the model Infantino proposed?

Another note is that I see a match of my favorite club every fortnight and have gotten used to the economics of being the 1500th club financially worldwide. (You get either youths or scratched players, and any outstanding player you bring up or find, you will lose for pennies.) Money changed football, but that change was 60 years ago. No manna from heaven is going to change that. So I’ll be gentle: without graft and corruption, and with adequate distribution, more money /could/ even mean better conditions for youth worldwide (/naive dreams).

wjnc··on The Dutch are filling gas wells with cement
I agree. The Dutch government still has a pretty sinister way of using divide and conquer against parts of society (NOx, Groningen / gas, Tata, ‘Toeslagen’; further back: closing of the mines, Indonesia). Our government finds it very hard to govern in compliance with the rules it made for themselves. Perhaps the nature of a complex system and also a general democratic phenomenon. But there is something typically Dutch in just not being able to fix a problem in the way the administration works.
wjnc··on The Dutch are filling gas wells with cement
But be fair with us: are you holding back on investing in other forms of heating due to non-financial reasons? (I am. We use a bit less gas than you, but I am looking for another house and unwilling to transition even though I can afford it and it seems profitable.)
wjnc··on The Dutch are filling gas wells with cement
I agree with the ideological part of it. But the Dutch economy or governement was perhaps “dependant” on the revenues in the 80s (peak at >15% of gov exp), but in recent years it was more like 1%. The strategic concern is not primarily a financial concern.

I generally don’t believe in conspiracies, but not filling the strategic reserves for next winter (each year after the energy shock of a few years ago, they fill the gas storage less) looks like a way to scare the populace into making the electric transition via a government made supply shock.

wjnc··on Exercise intensity modulates interorgan communication and is associated with
Sorry, bit late to the party. Eat a pizza and the energy will only come into your body in (as far as I've learned) a few hours. Eating a pizza is hard on your digestion. That why we usually go to sleep a few hours after are largest meal. We give our body the time to digest the energy and wake up fresh.

(from AI overview) "The human body can absorb and process about 60 to 90 grams of carbohydrates (roughly 240 to 360 calories) per hour during exercise when using a single or mixed source of sugars" And that's for your 14? waking hours. With another conundrum looking around the corner - work out or basicly: burn more calories, and you need more sleep.

Your body is constantly calomaxxing. Eat two pizzas (hey, once in my 20s I could as well!) and your digestion is working for the next 10-15 hours.

wjnc··on Nvidia agrees to acquire Hugging Face for $13B
I'll expand on the economics somewhat. My intuition is that you can like a moat left of you in the supply chain, but dislike moats to the right of you. (I'm using left and right as I picture this horizontally drawn. It is usually called vertical integration by economists.) But free competition in your market is worst of all. Free competition right outside your moat is pretty sweet, and that's were parent is commenting on.

Nvidia probably likes that ASML is a monopolist (it's called a monopsony). The price is high and Nvidia can't scale as hard as they want to (more general: capital intensive market). This monopsony makes sure that other chip companies can't rapidly scale up and try to beat Nvidia. That there only ever was one other GPU firm (I'm prehistoric; once there were more) and they bungled it on software, is pretty sweet for Nvidia.

On the side of their customers. It would be best for Nvidia if there is free competition for the outputs generated from there GPUs. This maximizes consumer surplus and thus demand. Maximum demand for tokens, is maximal demand feeded in their monopoly. If there is a monopoly right from you, demand is curtailed, and your value is limited.

And that exactly is why you see interest from token generators for chips. Bridge that moat and gain a larger value surplus. Both NVidia and, say, China actively undercutting the token-supplier value chain is quite interesting to watch. It's like the Opium wars with us as somewhat happy customers.

In this same vein, why isn't ASML raising thousands of billions for building their own (subsidiary) chip foundries, while raising prices and starving the market (a little) for their machines.

wjnc··on Social media use on the rise among Australian under-16s after ban: data
A proper FF back to you, Sir. We are quite far out on the parental spectrum with regards to controlling their devices and I can attest to ultimately having no control at all. They will find a way. (And that’s natural in a way.) You just hope that next to controls, the talks about keeping your balance in life and being aware of dangers, even when everyone does XYZ, help in the long run.

Social media are a scourge on society and a US hegemonic instrument. Who cares about this opinion…? (Hint: nobody, it’s about parenting the three I want to help grow up in life.)

wjnc··on Being ambitious and being a dad
Because any fault of theirs feels like a fault of yours, but you learn that you cannot fix faults of theirs like you can (try to) fix faults of yours. You learn to become a parent, a teacher, a guide, a kind of friend, in the most deeply connected relationship you’ll ever have. A relationship that exposes you to every fault of yourself, while you feel the deepest love for and connection with your children. A connection that’s not even always reciprocated. Parenting is the true Aristotelian politeia.

(I’m halfway through our main parental fase.)

wjnc··on Exercise intensity modulates interorgan communication and is associated with
Why is the pointing to Relative Energy Deficiency “misinfo”? It is my understanding that that is one of the factors that are used in explaining the overtraining in say ultrarunners. Eating 5k+ calories a day is near threshold for the hours in a waking day.
wjnc··on LinkedIn CringeBot 3000
I had to unfollow a coworker who was starting a female inspiring coaching career by constantly pushing messages like created by thus CringeBot while adding photos in bikinis. On LinkedIn.
wjnc··on Can Intel finally beat ARM on performance per Watt?
I’ll just go and pick out those sentences I find not of curious good will for this forum:

“Did Jeff […] get paid to post misleading headlines”

“I can't believe this crap is getting upvoted. Hopefully this guy loses all his credibility going forward. This kind of post is seriously misleading and smells like like an undisclosed sponsor review.”

Ad hominem, cursing, opinion as fact with a barrage of replies.

That could have gone three steps up in politeness without losing any of the criticism.

wjnc··on Can Intel finally beat ARM on performance per Watt?
I think the lite tip of: “take your credibility seriously” stands, however you are getting attacked by pretty much one (ab-)user. (Those type of users are normally not even in your market.)

I think it’s pretty normal that you are incentivized by YT. Too bad the internet favors screaming and yelling. Pretty clear line you draw between writing and video.

wjnc··on Ancient Library – 1,060 Greek/Latin texts, click any word to parse it
Congrats on self learning Latin. That takes hard work. I adore reading texts on ancient texts that go into possible alternative interpretations. One of my favourite classes in university was on a work of Plato where the professor knew both the Greek, Latin and Arab versions of the text and could get carried away philologically, even philophillically, on how we could alternatively interpret sentences. Reading about deconstructing the origins of say the Bible. Those are scientific works of marvel to me.
wjnc··on When online commenters detect my art as AI
No, no, you misunderstand my intentions. Say there is art in “pop music” (I think there is, as is in classical music or rock; even in 00s or 10s pop). So there is a pinnacle of art.

But if that pinnacle lies on the average of a lot of types of (pop and non pop) music the LLM might give a sound that at first glance sounds like a specific artist.

The Backstreet Boys (and One Direction as well) were pretty good (lol) but any average of boybands will sound like them. That is not a digg on their artistry but on them being the middle of the road in pop.

AI classical will sound romantic? AI rock will sound Three Doors Down? AI art will be deviant like (but there still can be true artistry in that category). That /I/ usually like arts at least a standard deviation away of the middle, is just my snobbery, which I was trying to explain away because in my opinion artistry is in the craftsmanship (not taste of the public).

wjnc··on When online commenters detect my art as AI
I see the resemblance to what AI generates, and wow some of those works are painfully detailed. I don’t think it’s just training.

His work I is what I would describe as somewhat middle of the road Fantasy / SciFi Pop art. The deviant art of old, or even before, the art that would cover the scifi magazine. It’s an amalgam of styles and interests from the nerdy spectrum, obviously done with great care by the artist. Problem is with middle of the road is that that’s where the LLM averages out. Not flaming the artist at all, these are lovely works, but an average of lots of pop art / interests. I don’t think he will lose his livelihood - art by commission will stay a thing. For poster and promo work, that’s gone probably.

wjnc··on Leopold Aschenbrenner Built a Hot A.I. Hedge Fund. Then It Melted Down
Can be true at the same time when dealing with high leverage and a growing fund. The YTD doesn’t make you more liquid or secure.
wjnc··on Increasing the lifespan of a bulb makes it worse in every other way
In the category of private victories without any economic use (any hobby costs you something): I store boxes for LED lights with receipts. Write on the box where you put the light and chug it in the garage. I have not failed to get a new one for free at our local home depot equivalent after 3 to 4 years. It doesn’t help the store that the boxes used to state how many years they would last.

I agree that even Osram doesn’t meet the hours or years, Philips doesn’t by a long way.

wjnc··on Ask HN: My domain registrar (Hover) rug-pulled me for $3000
You're right. Those are 2999.99 according to their site. According to the Wayback Machine they've been priced that way since at least 2024 [1]

[1] https://web.archive.org/web/20240111120913/https://www.hover...

wjnc··on Ask HN: My domain registrar (Hover) rug-pulled me for $3000
Register a complaint with the creditcard company with proof of last years $38, the auto renew message with price of $38 and the amount they put on your card. Pretty clear and cut? You can’t offer X and then take Y. It’s Hovers problem what the price behind the door is.

Did you read the ToS? The ToS states they renew at prices mentioned on the website. I can find .xyz to renew at $19.99. Now get your screenshots and get your money back. (I’ll correct myself transparantly: this is not very clear from the ToS. Prices are in USD and from time to time they can limit the number of domains at that price. That says little about the price at renewal.)

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