Recent submissions

Comment · 5 days ago
This is not what "AI psychosis" colloquially refers to. Few people have any firm opinions about the nature of cost accounting on LLM products.
Comment · 2 months ago
This writeup emphasizes the many, profound human failures that led to this, at the time, and continuing to the present day.
Comment · 4 months ago
And taking the labor and time of the employees is a value extracted. While there is some modest surplus I hope people get from their job (e.g. they'd do the same job for less money), that surplus of excess wages over what people would accept will be lower than consumer surplus for almost any standard business.
Comment · 4 months ago
I think this draws too strong a line between the matrix-math core and the harness that uses it. Those harnesses undoubtedly were built with purpose and the systems fail to achieve that goal. Common usage says the the DMV can make mistakes, like any systems, despite the DMV itself not being a person (and it is common to allege large organizations make mistakes even when no specific individual is making an identifiable mistake). This isn't person-language it's systems/purpose-language.
Comment · 4 months ago
The vast majority of the value provided vs extracted, for any business, is related to consumer surplus and gross margins, as opposed to payroll.
Comment · 4 months ago
There exist both type I and type II errors, yes. But it's not absurdity, the South Korean Thyroid Cancer "epidemic" is one of the classic examples of the dangers of using traditional treatments on the lower-severity cases more advanced scanning uncovers. It was a public health disaster with lifelong consequences for those impacted, and was, legitimately, people getting cancer treatment for small cancers so harmless that they would have died of something else before becoming symptomatic.
Comment · 4 months ago
Exposing asymptomatic potential issues leads to medical care that often does not meet out standards for medical tradeoffs. Chemo is nasty, even the most minor surgery has risks. We endure the risks because we are addressing either major health issues or other dire uncertainties. Using our heavy duty treatments for issues without any symptoms at all would, normally, cause the patient suffering in excess of what would be justified. Chemo is a life saver when it's saving lives -- if the alternative is no symptoms, it just ruins your life for a profoundly uncertain upside.
Comment · 4 months ago
This couldn't possibly matter, but 5 xor 3 is 6.
Comment · 4 months ago
The aggressors not being the targets of the firebombing is central to the concerns here. They weren't military targets (largely).
Comment · 4 months ago
They have developed an LLM, so they are an AI lab, but the quality of that model suggests they're not a frontier anything.
Comment · 4 months ago
Confirming that saving genuinely works. Interesting stuff. Wonder if we can get trades working too.
Comment · 5 months ago
Bananas are like transport and refrigerator maxing! It can't possibly be the literal optimum of that metric.
Comment · 5 months ago
The carbon in food is not captured or emitted in any coherent sense here. The crops are grown (capturing the carbon in the first place) for the purpose of feeding people -- in the same way that modern American forestry for paper is functionally carbon neutral (ignoring transport and processing) because the trees are in equilibrium. The counterfactual of not eating the food results in fewer crops and basically the same atmospheric carbon dioxide.

Edit: if you only mean food transportation carbon, it seems impossible bananas are literally optimal per calorie.

Comment · 5 months ago
I feel like this pastiche burned through whatever comedy potential it had before mid-2017.
Comment · 5 months ago
Isn't this a Goomba fallacy? The people trying to conserve energy and the people who are using vastly more energy than before are different individuals, no singular person is contradicting their values.

Live from the official Hacker News API

A modern reader for Hacker News · SvelteKit + Skeleton