twoodfin

5 ms·

1.
by twoodfin 4d ago
Then why the need for new taxes? You’re right that California tax revenue is way up, too.
2.
by twoodfin 4d ago
CA’s spending, including Federal funds, was $183B 20 years ago, before the GFC. Today it’s $539B. Total inflation has been about 64%, California’s population has grown by only about 10%. California has a spending and state capacity problem,
3.
by twoodfin 4d ago
You believe essential infrastructure is air-gapped from the public internet today?
4.
by twoodfin 4d ago
I dunno, do you really want to bet that if you took a deliberately unaligned frontier model and asked it to permanently disable the US power grid, it would do a poor job of it? What odds would you take on this bet? I’m disturbingly close to
5.
by twoodfin 4d ago
There will be a big confab at the White House by the end of the month, announcing a voluntary pacing regime roughly along these lines, codified by executive order to avoid antitrust issues.
6.
by twoodfin 4d ago
The LLMs are going to turn us into stochastic parrots.
7.
by twoodfin 4d ago
I suspect it’s more like Claude etc. optimizing for a tone that gets the green checkmark from RLHF reviewers, probably over and over in many contexts where style is otherwise an incidental concern.
8.
by twoodfin 5d ago
hn comment threads on most articles have rapidly taken on the character of Reddit threads ca. 2009. This argument in particular was a classic back then. I’ve started downvoting inanity and flagging one-liner, content-less snark, but unless
9.
by twoodfin 5d ago
Only about 2500 Americans died at Pearl Harbor. I don’t know what automobile safety was like in 1941, but I’m sure it wasn’t great, then, either. I’m therefore not sure what weight this argument is supposed to carry.
10.
by twoodfin 7d ago
“Everyone knew” that in-band signaling was an awful, horribly insecure idea… until we found magic math that couldn’t “think” any other way. I don’t think it’s reasonable to blame the Unicode authors for not anticipating this turn of events.
11.
Terence Tao – Reflections on the Foundations of Interpretability Workshop(youtube.com)
1 points by twoodfin 9d ago|0 comments
12.
by twoodfin 9d ago
“All the post-9/11 security measures other than… are worthless theater.” My point is that many of those security measures are largely invisible to passengers, but for the introduction of things like “Trusted Traveler #”’s
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by twoodfin 9d ago
One of the best examples of this: Streaming video. Literally a dream for decades, with billions of dollars spent on technology, marketing, infrastructure by huge incumbent players and startups alike. Netflix didn’t innovate much on any of t
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by twoodfin 10d ago
Under-explored in this article is the degree to which pre-NT/95 Microsoft (particularly BillG) was obsessed with NeXT, at least if you believe Steven Sinofsky: https://hardcoresoftware.learningbyshipping.com/p/009-
15.
by twoodfin 10d ago
An awful lot of money was spent on systems to track and profile fliers. It’s the reason TSA Precheck is a thing at all.
16.
by twoodfin 11d ago
No selective HUMINT is worthwhile?
17.
by twoodfin 11d ago
Also not “highly processed” in ways that weren’t common 80 years ago or more, which cuts against the correlation->causation connection here.
18.
by twoodfin 14d ago
Indeed: “Our hosts began to pass the Turing test within the first year.” Required sci-fi suspension-of-disbelief in 2017, and then at some point in the last few years we just blew by that one. Later seasons of the show were much less dramat
19.
by twoodfin 15d ago
That statement, the associated signatories, and their commentary are unsettling in the extreme! If this is all just hype for equity valuation, it’d be the most impressive coordinated disinformation campaign of all time.
20.
by twoodfin 15d ago
Taking as given this model meets the “Critical cybersecurity threshold” as defined by OpenAI: Could the Federal government use the Defense Production Act or other legal tools to compel OpenAI to deliver the un-guarded model weights for nati
21.
by twoodfin 15d ago
Given how frequently this kind of punchy-but-vacuous slop gets voted onto the hn front page, the hacking seems to be working.
22.
by twoodfin 20d ago
We are far too casual about addiction, and suits that endorse language like this are doing more harm to society’s rational appraisal of risks than good. If your kid is addicted to crack cocaine, they have a problem that is light-years furth
23.
by twoodfin 20d ago
European citizens should have obstacles put into their path to access one of the great life-enhancing technologies of the last century … so they will vote for the “right” policies as implemented by the politicians setting up those obstacles
24.
by twoodfin 22d ago
Also like sugary drinks, which our brains perceive as satisfying but are actually the opposite, LLM’s have been well-trained to produce text our brains (and up-voting fingers) perceive as lucid, logical, and authoritative despite the freque
25.
by twoodfin 22d ago
So why don’t the Visa and Mastercard banks up fees across their entire card lineup? If they’re truly too big to give up no matter the fees they charge, they’re leaving money on the table. Of course, they can’t. If Chase started handing coll
26.
by twoodfin 22d ago
Why do you think it’s a negative sum game? I don’t have any data, but my intuition is that overall high-fee, high-reward cards increase propensity for consumer spending by at least a few % beyond the fees/rewards. The merchants think s
27.
by twoodfin 25d ago
I’m not really sure what you’re asking. CEO’s of S&P 500 companies are absolutely expected to perform. Those that perform well ultimately end up at the top of the compensation list. Some who perform poorly are still compensated based on
28.
by twoodfin 25d ago
If you ranked the top 500 US professional athletes by salary and looked at the median (#250, so as here, you’re only looking at the “S&P 250”), I’d be surprised if the result were radically different. USA Today[1] helpfully has a ranked
29.
by twoodfin 25d ago
The problem isn’t JavaScript: To competitively run web app code written in any language, modern CPUs depend heavily on speculative execution, caching, and other complex, stateful implementation techniques that are inherently susceptible to
30.
by twoodfin 27d ago
Nobody was doing ads exactly like that decades ago, but celebrity endorsements in some form have been a staple of advertising for at least a century.

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