mmcdermott

8 ms·

1.
by mmcdermott 1mo ago
> Technical debt is nearly a nothingburger now. If you went in the wrong direction, just... change the code to go in the right direction. Uncharitable though it may sound, what I hear reading this is "Tell me you've never worke
2.
by mmcdermott 1mo ago
The deeper the concentration, the fewer words I want - or at least words I understand. Classical music with words I don't understand can also work quite well. There also seems to be a vague point where I have heard the lyrics so many t
3.
by mmcdermott 1mo ago
I prefer silence but generally use music to focus. My choices aren't usually music or silence in practice, but music or office background noise. Since my ordered ranking is Silence, then Music, with Office Noise last, music it is.
4.
by mmcdermott 1mo ago
Perhaps, but it is also the way in which LLM providers eat their seed corn. If everyone publishes less because the only one to consume it will be an LLM gives no credit, then LLMs will lose training material over time.
5.
by mmcdermott 2mo ago
Slavery was a controversy from the beginning that finally bubbled over into the Civil War. It was not, as this question seems to imply, a near universally approved of practice where a few just didn't happen to need slaves. That doesn&#
6.
by mmcdermott 3mo ago
Spite & Malice was always one of my favorites.
7.
by mmcdermott 4mo ago
I think what gets most people is the double standard. IP should either exist for everyone (which would cripple LLM providers) or no one, in which case the Pirate Bay and shadow libraries should be fully open.
8.
by mmcdermott 5mo ago
Even if we accept that, the millions dead and incalculable human suffering incurred by the attempts is more than reason enough to stop trying. There was no greater cause of human suffering in the 20th century than the worldwide attempts to
9.
by mmcdermott 5mo ago
> Oh, they love to do precisely that. I think it's been pretty well established that most legislators do not take the time to understand the details of bills prior to voting. Moreover, these articles refer to an attempt to question
10.
by mmcdermott 5mo ago
> something a congressional rep is deciding on. Congress does not, by and large, get down to that level. They are typically approving a line time that encompasses a form of lump sum (i.e. "$100 million to NSF across these categories
11.
by mmcdermott 5mo ago
Deep expertise is not a blank check for funding. There is only so much money to go around and at some point you have to articulate your value to those paying for it (in this case, the tax payers and their representatives). Yes, this means a
12.
by mmcdermott 9mo ago
This is the big one for me. I have no inherent problem with bigger budget stuff, but it is seldom about the things that interest me.
13.
by mmcdermott 10mo ago
If it was a digital transcript service alone, yes, it is a success. Claiming that the transcripts were generated by a nonexistant AI is fraud and should be treated as such.
14.
by mmcdermott 1y ago
Eh - if you extend this mode of thinking to all of your purchases, you would have to withdraw from nearly all economic activity.
15.
by mmcdermott 1y ago
https://archive.is/3cMYf
16.
Shopify Says No New Hires Unless AI Can't Do the Job(wsj.com)
5 points by mmcdermott 1y ago|3 comments
17.
by mmcdermott 1y ago
I didn't say anything about Inconsistency, so I will set that to the side. My entire point is that these things are seldom so black and white as put forward. The US administration has a self serving answer, but so do the French and thi
18.
by mmcdermott 1y ago
That's a false dichotomy. The severity depends on what the individual attempted to remove. Nuclear secrets might be unacceptable to allow him to leave. Something more administrative might not be worth the jurisdiction hassle to prosecu
19.
by mmcdermott 1y ago
None of the articles I found went into more detail than the NY Times one. What they all say in common is that the French researcher was denied entrance. If the US version is true (and I can't be sure either way), then the presuppositio
20.
by mmcdermott 1y ago
> the critical difference between secular ideology and religious ideology is that (in a properly functioning society) you can challenge/question/probe secular ideology. This feels like an odd statement, given how many of the mo
21.
by mmcdermott 2y ago
I see one key difference. Teaching code should be stripped down to only what is required for what is being taught. Everything else must go. You can see this dichotomy in Scheme. Versions <= 5 were teaching first, everything else second.
22.
by mmcdermott 2y ago
You can also print flyers, pamphlets, books, posters, and all such things without submitting them to a human censor (c.f. https://internetshakespeare.uvic.ca/Library/SLT/literature/p... for this usage).
23.
by mmcdermott 2y ago
> Require human moderation. That naturally limits scale. Does it? Does a human need to examine everything posted? You can certainly send letters without them going through a human moderator. Only what is flagged by a scanner? What if not
24.
by mmcdermott 2y ago
One major failing of WebDAV for these use cases is that the spec requires you to `PUT` the whole resource/file in order to save changes. This isn't too bad when the individual files are small, but as your single file apps grow, th
25.
by mmcdermott 2y ago
> One of my own pet peeves in Forged In Fire was that every contestant would submit Damascus (-style) blades for their final showdowns. It just wasn’t necessary and often just looked trashy. Agreed. There was a much smaller emphasis on D
26.
by mmcdermott 2y ago
I didn't read the actual filing, but the linked article days that Android is excluded, but implies it could be included later: > While the government isn’t going as far as to demand Google spin out its Android business, it’s leaving
27.
by mmcdermott 2y ago
> A friend suggests doubling the number and increasing to the next unit — hours become days, days become weeks, etc. I don't know. Going from 8 hours => 16 days seems like quite the markup.
28.
by mmcdermott 2y ago
To add to this, it is revealed in Hitchhikers that dolphins are super intelligent extraterrestrials. "So long and thanks for all the fish" is the superintelligent dolphins farewell to the last of earth/hummanity.
29.
by mmcdermott 2y ago
> Professional Engineer licensure to be able to actually charge for software (this carves out exception for FOSS and freeware) could raise the costs enough to make this kind of software engineering viable. You would almost certainly see
30.
by mmcdermott 2y ago
> It’s time to find out what value our values really have. Which is exciting, as long as the net results are better for human beings. I really don't want to see us make human experience worse to ensure that AI is able to be more suc

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