academia_hack

4 ms·

1.
by academia_hack 4d ago
Fair. My point is not that all of Marxism is correct (or even most of it) but rather that the specific pattern he and other theorists in that school of thought observed when developing the theory of historical materialism seems to strongly
2.
by academia_hack 4d ago
I'm not terribly optimistic. I don't think humans have really figured out what to do about historical materialism. More just remarking that this is a blog post that almost literally reads "fellow elites, let us ensure only we
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by academia_hack 4d ago
I think you're reading too much into what I'm saying. We've got a whole legal system developed over the course of thousands of years which is well suited towards regulating the effects of "intelligence" by regulatin
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by academia_hack 4d ago
Dario's proposed approach is a classic example of capital attempting to control technological advancement and the means of production. For the first time in human history, any member of the working class can just about afford to have a
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by academia_hack 4d ago
The essay includes specific regulatory measures to prevent developing countries from accessing hardware and software needed to benefit from technological development. The US government is constantly applying new perversions of arms control
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by academia_hack 4d ago
I'm tired of tech billionaires lobbying the US government to make an AI patriot act that gives them unprecedented control over speech, trade, and technology. The narrative is grotesquely transparent: 1) AI is a dangerous technology tha
7.
by academia_hack 8mo ago
Reading the definitions here it looks like France is basically banning 15 year olds from using interactive websites. Platforms like Steam, Xbox Live, Minecraft, the New York Times comment section, etc all fall under the super-vague definiti
8.
by academia_hack 8mo ago
It's inordinately difficult and expensive to start an LLC or SA in some EU countries. It's even difficult and expensive to _stop_ an LLC and dissolve it. Huge amount of risk and cost on founders and a huge distraction from running
9.
by academia_hack 8mo ago
++ Anecdotally, I find you can tell if someone worked at a big AI provider or a small AI startup by proposing an AI project like this: " First we'll train a custom trillion parameter LLM for HTML generation. Then we'll use it
10.
by academia_hack 1y ago
I hear this a lot (that children learn languages faster, or the corollary from various app ads that the best way to learn a language is to do so like a baby does), but is it actually true? It takes children a very very long time to learn a
11.
by academia_hack 1y ago
Everyone remotely competent in AI in the federal government that I know has quit in disgust over the past 6 months. I know zero talented AI people who are looking to take a cut in pay, benefits, and career stability to sign up for a new job
12.
by academia_hack 1y ago
At least to me, loyalty _is_ the benefit. I can't conscience working for someone I hate or someone who I don't feel like I want to help succeed. I've definitely quit jobs before just because the senior leader in my reporting
13.
by academia_hack 2y ago
Do you think there is a role for the federal government to employ engineers for any purpose? 18F was a general purpose engineering group that built software for many agencies instead of having those agencies pay vast amounts of money to Del
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by academia_hack 2y ago
Check out: https://trafficcamarchive.com/ for an example.
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by academia_hack 2y ago
The data collection isn't even quiet. There's an entire cottage industry of companies that scrape these traffic cam feeds, store everything for x numbers of months in low-cost cloud vaults (e.g. glacier) and then offer lawyers&#x2
16.
by academia_hack 2y ago
True that! I use probably 15 days of "unlimited" leave and still manage to feel guilty about it. The frustrating thing for people in fed jobs is that if you hit your 13 days that's it (during your first 3 years in government)
17.
by academia_hack 2y ago
USDS is great! I know people who have made a huge impact there and if I personally were to go into government from tech it's where I'd look. They are situated at the White House which allows them to be hired at a higher level than
18.
by academia_hack 2y ago
In terms of benefits, here's an anecdotal comparison with a senior engineer (5-10 years experience) at a mid-level start up I worked at. * Federal Pay (GS-12): $100,000 * Startup Pay: $150 base + $25 k bonus + equity * Federal Health I
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by academia_hack 2y ago
Counterintuitively, scaling government down goes hand in hand with increasing the attractiveness of the civil service. Right now if a government agency wants to do something like make a webform where you can apply for a passport, they have
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by academia_hack 2y ago
Totally. I think comp is a necessary but not sufficient precondition for fixing government technology. The actual solutions (good authentication and least privilege systems, robust monitoring, rapid intrusion detection and response, secure
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by academia_hack 2y ago
Until the US federal government pays civilian tech talent competitively, this is always going to be an issue. Your typical hands-on-keyboard blue team engineer in federal government is a GS-12 getting paid around $68,000 per year (or $99k i
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Ask HN: What's with floating point operations and AI regulations?
1 points by academia_hack 2y ago|3 comments
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by academia_hack 3y ago
I've giving "Accept - Minor Revisions" to every paper I've peer reviewed since getting my PhD other than two that were outright plagiarism. Figure it's important to the morale of grad students to get some positive v
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by academia_hack 3y ago
Dan's fantastic. Been interviewed by him in the past and was super impressed by his interest in understanding technical nuance and communicating the story accurately to a lay audience. He's definitely not a headline chaser like a
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by academia_hack 3y ago
They don't even copy and paste the text! At least in my experience, once done with peer-review I spend a few hours wrestling with the "print ready" LaTeX template provided by the publisher to get my paper and tables to render
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by academia_hack 3y ago
Honestly they were just there in the Wikipedia text I copied. I've seen them in more modern texts to help with pronunciations and translation (if I recall correctly some words have different meanings depending on the length of the fina
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by academia_hack 3y ago
Exactly this! It gets even cooler in this example too because the meter for "Odi et amo" elided to "Od'et amo" directly parallels the scansion for "excrucior" (long syllable, short syllable, short syllable
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by academia_hack 3y ago
I'm really sad at how much Latin I've managed to lose since my school days. It's really an incredible language and this stack exchange post shows some of that versatility. Because the words in Latin contain dense grammatical
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by academia_hack 3y ago
It's a pity the state of the art here is still so dire for basic use cases. Things like managing group access to files in directories, or giving people field-level permissions to specific columns on specific database records. All of th
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by academia_hack 3y ago
As an atheist, I've been thinking a lot about this in the context of the factors that made me atheist in a way that would've been not just repugnant, but downright unimaginable, to the previous 20+ generations of my family. I thin

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