SignalsFromBob

Joined 10 years ago

Karma
189
Submissions
44
Member since
Jun 8
View on Hacker News

Recent submissions

Comment · 9 days ago
The video looks like it's making this whole thing out to be a joke. Everything about it conveys a lack of seriousness. The dancing cartoon character, the ascii art, the music, the whiz-bang visual effects that obscure anything interesting or useful.
Comment · 1 year ago
Yes, although resources might be a better word than tools in that case. If I'm at the library and I'm asking the librarian to help me locate some information, they are definitely an educated resource that I'm using. The same for interacting with any other person who is an expert whose opinion or advice I'm seeking.
Comment · 1 year ago
The author is making the same mistake that they're claiming other news outlets have made. They're placing too much responsibility on the AI chatbot rather than the end-user.

The problem that needs correcting is educating the end-user. That's where the fix needs to happen. Yet again people are using a new technology and assuming that everything it provides is correct. Just because it's in a book, or on TV or the radio, doesn't mean that it's true or accurate. Just because you read something on the Internet doesn't mean it's true. Likewise, just because an AI chatbot said something doesn't mean it's true.

It's unfortunate that the young man mentioned in the article found a way to reinforce his delusions with AI. He just as easily could've found that reinforement in a book, a youtube video, or a song whose lyrics he thought were speaking directly to him and commanding him to do something.

These tools aren't perfect. Should AI provide more accurate output? Of course. We're in the early days of AI and over time these tools will converge towards correctness. There should also be more prominent warnings that the AI output may not be accurate. Like another poster said, the AI mathematically assembles sentences. It's up to the end-user to figure out if the result makes sense, integrate it with other information and assess it for accuracy.

Sentences such as "Tech companies have every incentive to encourage this confusion" only serve to reinforce the idea that end-users shouldn't need to think and everything should be handed to us perfect and without fault. I've never seen anyone involved with AI make that claim, yet people write article after article bashing on AI companies as if we were promised a tool without fault. It's getting tiresome.

Comment · 1 year ago
This is why I dislike the word "hallucination" when AI outputs something strange. It anthropomorphizes the program. It's not a hallucination. It's an error.
Comment · 5 years ago
Use pkill.
Comment · 6 years ago
I hope you cut that client lose. If they'll do something like that on the POC they'll do it on the big contract and in numerous other ways. You'll have to double-check everything with a client like that and not be able to trust them. Life's too short to put up with that.
Comment · 6 years ago
Comment · 6 years ago
Comment · 6 years ago
> The ZFS on Linux project gets around this restriction by running ZFS in user space

ZFS on Linux is a kernel module. You may be thinking of ZFS-FUSE which runs in user space using FUSE, but I'm not sure if it's being maintained any more.

Comment · 6 years ago
Comment · 6 years ago
I appreciate all you do as a moderator to fend off obvious trolls and griefers. I'm sure it must be a thankless job. However, I feel that your comment is not helpful or constructive. People have legitimate reasons for not wanting to create too long of an online trail so they can remain anonymous. That's okay. If their comments are "actually pretty good" then that's good enough; The user name that's attached is irrelevant. They are contributing value to the site.

Guidelines such as "throwaway accounts are ok for sensitive information, but please don't create accounts routinely" are naive. Non-sensitive information can reveal sensitive things when aggregated. We've all read articles about how anonymized data sets can still contain enough data to identify, or come close to identifying, individuals. I'm sure a number of those articles have been linked to from this web site. Practicing user account rotation is a useful tool for mitigating such risks.

Maybe it's time to rethink this particular site guideline. Let's not throw out the baby with the bathwater when it comes to users making contributions to the site.

Comment · 6 years ago
Please forgive the off topic question, but why is your user name on hacker news shown in color? I've never seen that before.
Comment · 6 years ago
Sure it is. Quiesce your application, take a snapshot, then resume application. Then you can back up the snapshot. The alternative can be a lengthy downtime for your application.

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