mr-wendel

6 ms·

1.
by mr-wendel 22d ago
And yet it reads better than quite a bit of non-fiction and invokes some interesting questions. Maybe its worth asking yourself what qualities in writing can make a “fake” story engage so many peoples interest? It’s also a bit odd to call i
2.
by mr-wendel 3mo ago
There are some good points here, but I think the take away is incorrect. Don't stop arguing with people... change your strategy away from winning. Much of the advice given still holds. A well-conducted argument serves important purpose
3.
by mr-wendel 4mo ago
Maybe a low value comment in the context of the article, but structurally I think it's a great comment that strikes a nice balance between curiosity, doubt, hope, and concern. I think a huge amount of SWE resources are tied up in the e
4.
by mr-wendel 4mo ago
“Engaging in” isn’t the same thing as doing. It was meant to imply a degree of separation from the act itself. Statements like “I will murder your family unless” are exactly that. Obviously you would never do anything remotely close to that
5.
by mr-wendel 4mo ago
Except... stating who is a better person is exactly what you just did. I've never attempted to compare myself to others. I've stated that I think negative behavior inhibits growth, even when done to nobody, and positive behavior s
6.
by mr-wendel 4mo ago
No, I don’t think it’s going to make you a meaner, more negative person. There is no tangible harm being done. I genuinely believe it’s preventing you from becoming a better person by engaging in psychopathic behavior. If I were writing the
7.
by mr-wendel 4mo ago
"Treating a machine like a human" is a two-party interaction. Of course the layers of matrix multiplication is unaffected by this, but I think that we are not. It's a great opportunity to exercise consistency and dedication t
8.
by mr-wendel 4mo ago
Gotta plug nightride.fm as an online station that is fully fueled by artist-submitted, non-AI music. It's all 80s/synth-inspired with one main channel, but there are more niche channels (e.g. chillwave is a popular one) too. The s
9.
by mr-wendel 4mo ago
This is very reminiscence of the whole LMGTFY (let me google that for you) phase of things. At a job in a while back, when front-level support reached out to senior staff for help the two golden rules were: 1. Do NOT answer right away.
10.
by mr-wendel 4mo ago
Here is my beef. I'm pro-VPN. The ability to gain more control over who can track your online communication is a net-positive to me, personally and philosophically. However, I can't justify their existence from a utilitarian persp
11.
by mr-wendel 4mo ago
Let me add more! PIPES. It's a bit more abstract and useful than "character-selectable" when viewed at the byte-level abstraction. The ability to chain together utilities with no complicated data structures is extremely flexi
12.
by mr-wendel 4mo ago
Hard disagree. Maybe there is a time for difficult outreach, but recommending someone to celebrate a person (and one of the most significant people in their life) whose primary emotion is disgust in response to unchosen personal attributes
13.
by mr-wendel 5mo ago
True that, and therein lies the difficulty in generalizing. No clue what the exact situation is here (Vietnam, perhaps?), but at the human-to-human level I'm glad for it and hope it brought her strength.
14.
by mr-wendel 5mo ago
Rather than try to score points for team X (or against team Y), I'll quote one of my favs. Please generalize as needed to suite your perspective. "I don't get all choked up about yellow ribbons and American flags. I see t
15.
by mr-wendel 5mo ago
My pet theory is that network protocols will evolve to require some kind of certificate-based signing to uniquely identify individuals and groups. Hardware and operating systems will have legal mandates to enforce this. Penalties for carryi
16.
by mr-wendel 5mo ago
Ha, I also have this happen all the time in response to mouse clicks. When playing with Apple Foundation Models + Whisper I noticed that it happens so often that I had to explicitly filter this out before acting on transcriptions.
17.
by mr-wendel 5mo ago
Only in my dreams! erm... The closest I've come since is involuntary obsessions with playing video games in my dreams. Not something I'd ever want to seed. Quite the opposite, in fact.
18.
by mr-wendel 5mo ago
I was at my first real software job and we had an in-house system to provide automated installers for common open-source applications for our end-users. After I started getting familiar with it I had a dream one night that certain input fie
19.
by mr-wendel 5mo ago
The python ecosystem will never permit this, but I sure wish this topic was better understood and appreciated within it. I hate to generalize, but the AI dev community in particular seems to favor convenience over every other consideration.
20.
by mr-wendel 5mo ago
My guess is that if the database is subject to auditing then LLM access (obviously writes in particular, but even reads come with exfiltration risks) will be a hard "no" and instant red flag. When it's a person, there is a se
21.
by mr-wendel 5mo ago
It's a game. The VPN marketplace is huge so it's wack-a-mole. Big companies don't hide their VPN ASNs. Obscure, for sure, but getting a good list isn't hard. Usually they get blocked. Smaller companies may pass under the
22.
by mr-wendel 6mo ago
I think this is a great analogy. I read quite a bit of the site and it's wildly blown out of proportion and severely lacking in context. How many phone apps do you think are trying to detect what else is installed on your phone? I was
23.
by mr-wendel 6mo ago
I've spent a fair amount of time contracting -- this issue is even more relevant here. While I wasn't spending very much on AI tools, what I did spent was worth every penny... for the company I was supporting :). Fortunately, ther
24.
by mr-wendel 6mo ago
> I'm going to play with getting Gemini to look at the photo of the receipt and categorize and add up the categories for me. FWIW, I have a pet project for a family recipe book. I normalize all recipes to a steps/instructions&#
25.
by mr-wendel 6mo ago
Much appreciated. I find is that referencing code in conversation is hard -- e.g. "underscore foo bar" vs `_fooBar`, "this dot Ls" vs `this.els`, etc happens often. Lower-powered models especially struggle with this, and
26.
by mr-wendel 6mo ago
The fact that you are engaging in this thread shows me you have considered my opinions, even if you reject them. I think thats great, even in the face of being told I advocate for the collapse of civilization and that I want others to shut
27.
by mr-wendel 6mo ago
I appreciate the feedback. I like it because I have no expectation of perfection-- out of others, myself, and especially not AI. I expect "good enough" and work upwards from there, and with (most) things, I find AI to be better th
28.
by mr-wendel 6mo ago
I disagree. I've done nothing to argue that the harm isn't real, downplayed it, nor misrepresented it. I do agree that at large, the theoretical upsides of accessibility are almost certainly completely overshadowed by obvious down
29.
by mr-wendel 6mo ago
My two cents: I've been coding practically my entire life, but a few years back I sustained a pretty significant and lasting injury to my wrists. As such, I have very little tolerance for typing. It's been quite a problem and made
30.
by mr-wendel 7mo ago
I wish I could upvote this over and over again. Without knowledge of the underlying prompts everything about the interpretation of this story is suspect. Every story I've seen where an LLM tries to do sneaky/malicious things (e.g.

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