wpietri

11 ms·

1.
by wpietri 11d ago
I don't understand why that matters. We can't act in 1970. We can act today. So we should be looking at biggest current problems and the highest-ROI fixes.
2.
by wpietri 11d ago
Exactly. It's a pretty small number of people who are this terrible. Thinking of it in evolutionary terms creates a sense of fatalism. If you look globally since the invention of agriculture, it's very clear that a) humans are ext
3.
by wpietri 11d ago
That, alas, would violate Wilhoit's law.
4.
by wpietri 11d ago
I was one of Twitter's first 500 users. Later, I worked at Twitter on anti-abuse. I was a big fan. But I quit using it after Musk's takeover because I didn't want to be supporting somebody who's awful in a half-dozen way
5.
by wpietri 11d ago
Do you measure anything about complexity or brevity? I'm currently working on importing some LLM code and it's 5-10x bigger than it should be for the actual needs. One of my open questions is how much that increases over time. It
6.
by wpietri 14d ago
I thoroughly disagree. Did Facebook take advantage of existing issues? Yes. Did they magnify those issues while creating new ones? Absolutely yes.
7.
by wpietri 15d ago
Your theory is that Facebook not only had no impact on that but could have done nothing to improve things? That seems implausible to me. I think at best you could claim that cause and effect are quite tangled here.
8.
by wpietri 17d ago
Society depends upon having generation after generation of healthy members. That has never been a time when individual parents were sufficient to solve all the problems there. And even that were possible, directing all the attention on them
9.
by wpietri 17d ago
I'm ok with generic people struggling with that. But anybody covering tech or business should be able to work effectively with the numbers at hand. Anything less is journalistic malpractice.
10.
by wpietri 21d ago
You started out saying it was simple, but now you have a definition where you need to somehow slice trades down the middle, so I think you're starting to see my point. Having worked for market makers, I find it weird to get lectured on
11.
by wpietri 21d ago
I started using DuckDB last year and I loved it. Small, focused, crackling with competence, no bullshit. I think what I liked about it had a lot to do with it being made by a small group of technical people who weren't interested in &q
12.
by wpietri 27d ago
I believe he's using it metaphorically here, and thus so am I.
13.
by wpietri 27d ago
Natural selection is demonstrably not working. It only takes one look at a newspaper to see that thoughtlessness and stupidity are doing better than ever. I think the internet is pretty great, but it's a major factor in that rise in at
14.
by wpietri 28d ago
It's a land grab. Right now none of them have a dominant position. Much better to get mind share and market share now. They can always squeeze the value chain later. And whoever wins surely will.
15.
by wpietri 28d ago
I do think it breaks down in practice for the goal of deciding which given trade/bet is gambling. I worked for market makers. Their theoretical job is to provide liquidity. They are required to always give a price. So if the theoretica
16.
by wpietri 28d ago
I think a more effective definition involves socially productive activity. If support the creation of value to others in hopes of getting paid back over time through getting a fraction of the value created, that's investing. If I put m
17.
by wpietri 28d ago
Those are all questions with a variety of answers historical and current. You could have looked them up. But I take it that you mean them rhetorically, with a point something like, "since I, a smart guy on the Internet can't think
18.
by wpietri 28d ago
That definition sounds plausible but breaks down in practice. Every Chicagoan has snowfall-related risk. And conversely, a lot of those guys legally traded where they were not exposed to risk. They were just gambling.
19.
by wpietri 28d ago
It does have to do with Amazon. Their original mission was to be the best place to buy things. And for a long time they were. But now they've parasitized themselves. They make more money by making things worse for buyer and seller.
20.
by wpietri 29d ago
It took decades to clearly define gambling enough to regulate it as we do now. Note that pinball was banned in major cities for decades because it was too similar to gambling devices. And even with those definitions things weren't very
21.
by wpietri 29d ago
What's your evidence that it will result in worse translations? I'm skeptical that such a thing as a universally optimal translation exists in cases beyond the trivial. But if it does, I see no reason to think LLMs are anywhere cl
22.
by wpietri 29d ago
Oh, I am? That's news to me. So glad some anonymous goof who recently joined HN can tell me who I really am.
23.
by wpietri 29d ago
Again, bub, I'm not uncomfortable. I am saying you are a bad HN participant, making this place worse. I am not averse to conflict, but neither am I fond of dressing up an enjoyment of conflict and pointless drama as something that&#x27
24.
by wpietri 29d ago
Plenty of books in libraries? I'd guess the incidence is relatively low. Libraries have limited funding, trained professionals doing the book selection, and a culture that fiercely loves books, authors, and readers.
25.
by wpietri 29d ago
One of the things that I took away from reading about the history of the transatlantic slave trade was that rich people always get the ideas they need circulated. I don't want to call all of those people liars, although I'm sure s
26.
by wpietri 29d ago
It's a reasonable theory for sure. From what I read, two big problems for long-running columnists are getting tire of the work and running out of things to say. I have no knowledge of Gruber, but I can certainly see why people who are
27.
by wpietri 29d ago
Again, given the limits of LLMs (stochastic, rapidly changing, everything's a hallucination, widely known prose issues) I am skeptical that you really care that much about optimal prose. I could believe it's one of the things that
28.
by wpietri 29d ago
Oh wow, that sounds horrible. Do you have a sense of what motivates that behavior?
29.
by wpietri 29d ago
I grant that sane behaviors may not always be successful at toxic companies. That seems true by definition. But I don't think general career advice should be based on what is (temporarily) safe at the bottom decile. Also, if you go bac
30.
by wpietri 29d ago
I'm not uncomfortable or upset. I'm just a long-time HN denizen pointing out some behavior I think is toxic to a healthy community. You're vigorously trying to make reasonable people look bad. I knew you wouldn't like me

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