Gormo · HackerTrans

il y a 24 heuresdiscuss

If keyboards did have keys for ASCII delimiters, people would start using them for a variety of purposes, and they'd start showing up in data streams, leading to the same issues we face with the typable delimiter characters we currently use. It's sort of a catch-22.

Gormo

hierdiscuss

> While I do use old.reddit and genuinely think it's better UI-wise, in the general case users tend to be resistant to any UI change because it breaks their habits and muscle memory.

It's funny how often people say "it's just habit / muscle memory / etc." in response to these kinds of discussions, as though it were somehow a counter-argument, and not something that corroborates the argument against making sudden, drastic UI changes.

It's really weird how common it is for people to say "well, Y is only true because of X" in response to "Z doesn't work because of Y", and thinking they're somehow defeating the argument against Z. If you acknowledge that X exists and causes Y, and accept that Y isn't compatible with Z, then you are conceding that Z does not hold!

Gormo

hierdiscuss

> By design there is no separation between control & data channels in LLMs.

No? MCP integrations are certainly different channels than the prompt stream input by the user. They're usually interface layers that connect to traditional REST APIs and/or CLI tools, and are exposed to the LLM by the agent software, all of which is deterministic code.

Shouldn't it be relatively simple to strip ANSI escape sequences from data originating from MCP connections? Or alert users to their presence, or have granular approval rules that trigger when ANSI sequences are detected?

Gormo

il y a 3 joursdiscuss

> After your post I reviewed the first page of your comment history and I was pretty sure I knew where you would stand on this issue.

Yes, that seems reasonable. I try to root my positions in a baseline understanding of reality and a core set of underlying principles, rather than allow them to be unduly influenced by polemic and arguments from emotion (as is unfortunately all too common these days) so there should be a certain level of consistency in my stances on various issues. Thanks for recognizing this.

> Once you get off your soapbox, reality may find you surrounded by pitchforks.

Where I live, alligators are a bit more common, but perhaps a bit more rational in their actions than the allegorical pitchfork-bearers. The alligators may act to obtain food that's actually present, but the mob is usually reacting only to imaginary stimuli.

> This is where our conversation ends, because we have a different interpretation of value creation and reality, and neither one of us will change the other's mind.

I supposed not. But where empirical propositions are concerned, reality is what it is regardless of how you choose to interpret it, and things will play out as cause and effect entail, with people acting on the motivations that they actually have, irrespective of the normative opinions of uninvolved stranger.s

> The billionaire class have different rights and opportunities.

I thought you'd ended the conversation with the last paragraph. Nevertheless, I'll respond to point out that there is no such thing as a "billionaire class", or any other kind of class, as a causal entity in the world: it's all just people pursuing motivations deriving from fundamental human nature, as parsed through their individual reason.

The taxonomy you're engaging with exists in your own mind, not the world itself, and encompasses disparate people who are often at odds with each other as you suspect they are with you.

And no one has "different rights and opportunities"; the former are normative boundaries that are definitionally the same for everyone, and the latter are states of affairs that exist in the world at large. Indeed, the specific people we're talking about here did not start out as billionaires, but acquired their wealth by pursuing opportunities that already existed.

> They have more sway in the political system, and they can greatly impact how things play out.

This is a defect of the political system, not the broader world in which the political system exists. My suspicion, though, is that you may not want to acknowledge this and join those who seek to restrain the reach of political power itself, out of a desire to use political power for your own ends and the fatal conceit that it can be used effectively for those ends without ultimately just becoming an instrument of greater abuse than the abuses you aim to rectify.

> But currently capital allocation and mechanisms see to it that the representation and opportunities are limited, which is the entire problem caused by having such wealth disparity.

Ah, an empirical claim! It sounds like you're saying that some people earning large amounts of wealth from success in businesses -- that exist on account of widespread availability of capital in the first place -- is somehow blocking other parties' access to liquid capital. Can you cite any examples of this? It doesn't seem to make sense, given how capital markets actually work, so some actual specifics would definitely help you make your argument here.

> It is thorn in the side of democracy,

Democracy is a political decision-making process that has nothing per se to do with how much wealth anyone in particular has, and if political decisions are being distorted by misuse of wealth, that again is a defect of the political system that can only be remedied by constraining politics itself.

> and antithetical to freedom.

People you don't know and have no relationship with having more stuff than you is absolutely not antithetical to your freedom; rather, organized attempts to take anyone's stuff away from them is a threat to everyone's freedom.

Gormo

il y a 3 joursdiscuss

Well, it's not so much a "rhetorical fishing expedition" as much as I just initially gave you the benefit of the doubt, and didn't assume you were aiming to divert the thread into a platform for inane propaganda. Sadly, the doubt did not resolve in your favor.

Needless to say, people who have little or nothing to do with each other having different levels of wealth as a consequence of activities entirely unrelated to one another is not a "problem" that needs to be solved. People having their rights violated or opportunities artificially limited is a problem, but attempting to attribute that sort of problem to someone else, somewhere else, not being artificially transgressed against is disingenuous and fallacious.

Gormo

il y a 3 joursdiscuss

It's not possible for any of these to be "basic human rights", regardless of what rhetoric may be employed by states seeking to assert centralized political control over their provision. Goods and services that must be actively supplied by other people cannot be rights.

Rights are norms that protect people's inherent rights unto themselves as baseline rules we use to negotiate society in the first place. They can't pertain to things that can only be obtained within society.

Gormo

il y a 3 joursdiscuss

It's not a coincidence that the three sectors you mention are the three most heavily regulated and subject to political intervention in the US, all with schizophrenic policy frameworks that simultaneously restrict supply and subsidize demand.

Gormo

il y a 3 joursdiscuss

Until what problem goes away? What are you talking about?

Gormo

il y a 3 joursdiscuss

In fact, there is no relationship whatsoever between these considerations.

Gormo

il y a 4 joursdiscuss

Apart from the fish being visible inside the pelican's mouth.

Gormo

il y a 4 joursdiscuss

Culture does not exist in a vacuum -- it's downstream of fundamental human motivations that are manifest in all times and places.

And using "culture" as a general concept to dismiss concerns about specific behavior, without actually attempting to posit any particular cultural values, or describe what mechanism actually causes those values to have a determinant effect on behavior, is equivalent to saying nothing at all.

Whatever official party line the current Chinese government espouses, it's plenty clear from even a cursory understanding of Chinese history, from the Warring States period to the warlord-era conflicts of the early 20th century, to the current behavior of the CCP, that China does not have any effective cultural guardrail against factions seeking advantage over opposing factions, which is a phenomenon that has been present in all societies that have ever existed in human history.

Gormo

il y a 4 joursdiscuss

How does releasing open weight models to FOSS communities help capture market share for subscription-based cloud services?

Gormo

le mois dernierdiscuss

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Gormo

le mois dernierdiscuss

> Chinese models first of all can be hosted on your own hardware, I'd argue they are way more transparent than US companies, by well releasing stuff.

US-based companies release open-source models too. Gemma and Granite, for example.

Gormo

le mois dernierdiscuss

What about the formatting seems indicative of AI generation? It just looks like normal long-form writing to me.

Gormo

le mois dernierdiscuss

"Welcome to our ool. Notice that there is no 'P' in it. Please keep it that way."

Gormo

le mois dernierdiscuss

Maybe the ice cream was just that good, and GAP was lucky to be able to sell their polo shirts to ice cream enthusiasts who'd otherwise have bought them at Old Navy.

Gormo

le mois dernierdiscuss

> Wrong answer. The ice cream and chocolate store was in competition with every other store in the mall. Time or money spent at the GAP can't be time or money spent here.

Was the interviewer a macroeconomics grad student working his way through school at the ice cream shop? Because I can't imagine anyone but a macroeconomics student aggregating all demand into a generic concept of "time and money" without regard for qualitative distinctions between entirely different product categories.

Did he also think the shop was in competition with United Airlines or the local dentist's office, because time and money spent on a trans-Atlantic flight or getting a root canal was time and money that couldn't be spent at the ice cream shop?

> Whether or not people are using LLMs for news specifically, any new, large eater of eyeball-time is going to hurt the business landscape for all other eyeball harvesters.

Which demonstrates that the model of treating the content users are looking for as bait so you can sell their attention to someone else was always an adversarial one in the first place.

Users themselves were never looking for time sinks, they were looking for specific information or experiences that they've had to increasingly endure time sinks to get to due to the perverse incentives in the social media landscape.

AI destroying the viability of "eyeball harvesters" as a business model is an opportunity for people actually creating interesting content, not engagement-maximizing filler, to pivot back to pitching quality directly to their users. That's exactly the point that Tim Ferriss was making in the article: he points out that he already prefers to sell his books to a niche audience of 10,000 readers who actually find value in them than try to engage with 10 million passers-by on social media.

Gormo

le mois dernierdiscuss

AUR isn't a package repo. It's a collection of user-contributed PKGBUILD scripts, to make building packages from upstream source distributions more convenient. It's not meant to be treated like an official repo of binary packages.

Gormo

le mois dernierdiscuss

Direct link to the video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qzpZQe7JT-o

It's quite interesting, and describes how the developer used COBOL to implement a raycasting algorithm and generate a stream of PPM images to to pipe into FFplay. There's zero evidence of this being written in Claude; there are multiple clips of the developer working in VSCode, where the Claude plugin doesn't even appear to be installed.

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