yellowapple

Joined 13 years ago

Karma
12,115
Submissions
8,650
Member since
Jun 12
Polyglot programmer and sysadmin with experience in healthcare IT and e-commerce fulfillment/logistics/operations. Maintainer of a couple FOSS projects.

Website: https://yellowapple.us

Email: northrup @ the above domain

Keybase: [ my public key: https://keybase.io/yellowapple; my proof: https://keybase.io/yellowapple/sigs/JfN02l9FJTFqFnACyDFYbK7yNYFSlzTvPktWnPQiTZg ]

meet.hn/city/us-Reno

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Recent submissions

Comment · 6 days ago
Is there an option to split property tax into separate land value tax + improvement tax?
Comment · 6 days ago
Highly-structured outputs (like what you'd need for tool calls) seems like it'd be easier to put out than arbitrary text, no? At the very least, even something like BERT could make the decision of “Would any of my available tools be useful here?” and delegate to some deeper-thinking model to structure that tool call.
Comment · 6 days ago
> Given that it lacks both broad world knowledge and tool calling integration in any way, that seems kind of like a dead-end.

In its current form probably. I think the key to taking this further would be to split the listening model from the speaking model, and have some model(s) in between that can do those database/knowledgebase queries and tool calls and such and influence how the speaking model response to what the hearing model perceives. That's probably pretty similar to how ChatGPT Live and similar are operating (STT→LLM→TTS), but Dessa demonstrates that it doesn't have to necessarily be text/language, specifically, as the intermediary — and therefore it doesn't have to necessarily be an LLM, specifically, as that intermediate model.

Comment · 8 days ago
Pretty sure in most/all the cases mentioned, they were available as extensions long before Zen had them. In particular, both Zen's and Firefox's built-in vertical tabs feel like a bit of a downgrade from Tree Style Tabs (which I continue to use on Firefox, and also used on Zen last time I tried it).
Comment · 8 days ago
> If that's not how you interpreted it

That's indeed not how I interpreted it.

Being a good person, being a good citizen, and making the world better are all really sides of the same (somehow-three-sided) coin: do what you can for yourself, for your community, for your society. They apply even in the complete absence of hierarchies and higher authorities (and are indeed the very core of anarchism: making societal decisions bottom-up from individuals and the communities thereof, not top-down from some supreme executive authority).

Comment · 8 days ago
“the communist perspective that a street cleaner or security guard should be paid the same amount as a doctor”

Nobody in this thread (AFAICT) is arguing for that. By all means, people who contribute more to society should be rewarded for it. The only thing being argued is that everyone deserves to enjoy a baseline standard of living, on top of which they might receive additional benefits in exchange for the work they do. As automation continues to expand, providing everyone with that baseline standard of living unconditionally becomes more and more practical to achieve, in which case it becomes more and more unethical for society to refuse to do so.

Comment · 8 days ago
The first step is to quantify “everything you need”, and go individually from there.
Comment · 10 days ago
The adult world doesn't have to be far more complicated than that.
Comment · 10 days ago
> Making money is going to be everyone’s primary goal

I disagree. Making money is a means to an end, that end being one's ability to live a comfortable life as a member of society. If other means are able to achieve that end, then that reduces the need (or even desire) for money.

While I'd cynically agree that modern society as structured today will fight tooth and nail to keep those other means from being viable (because the current powers-that-be are such specifically because they were able to accumulate the most money), that doesn't have to be the case. We can and should demand better.

Comment · 10 days ago
> I once tried to come up with a single-word purpose for education, and I landed upon the word “resourceful”, because I reasoned that if you “were able to use arbitrary resources to uncover and solve problems”, you had no more need for schooling. In the age of Google, email, and the internet, a person was educated when they could wield them. But now I see my vision of resourcefulness perfected in the AI agent and its tool loop. Maybe resourcefulness will go the way of the Dewey Decimal System which in turn supplanted memorization and an oral tradition.

I disagree here that agentic AI somehow replaces the need for humans to be resourceful. LLMs and their harnesses are just more resources for humans to use to uncover and solve problems, and resourcefulness is more important than ever for navigating a world increasingly riddled with slop (of the AI-generated variety or otherwise) and enshittification. A properly-functioning education system should absolutely emphasize resourcefulness as the primary skill to teach students, even (especially!) in the post-AI world.

Comment · 16 days ago
Comment · 18 days ago
Especially in the western half of the US. Exactly four, half of them here in Nevada, none of them in California despite Google itself being headquartered there.
Comment · 18 days ago
Microsoft almost certainly ain't the one hiring construction workers. That work gets contracted out.
Comment · 22 days ago
As someone who uses a USB equivalent to this piece of hardware (in my case, a Behringer UMC1820): having MIDI and audio inputs on the same interface is a nice convenience feature. Avoids needing to use up multiple ports on the host machine, and avoids a lot of the time synchronization issues that arise with trying to use multiple interfaces at once.
Comment · 1 month ago
Did OpenAI acquire OpenClaw, or just the guy who created it? Last I checked it's still under the OpenClaw Foundation's stewardship.

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