akavi (u/akavi) - Readit News

akavi commented on Ask HN: Should "I asked $AI, and it said" replies be forbidden in HN guidelines? · Posted by u/embedding-shape

parliament32 · 14 days ago

> I'm not sure what the solution here

The solution is to use a translator rather than a hallucinatory text generator. Google Translate is exceptionally good at maintaining naturalness when you put a multi-sentence/multi-paragraph block through it -- if you're fluent in another language, try it out!

akavi · 14 days ago

You are aware that insofar as AI chat apps are "hallucinatory text generator(s)", then so is Google Translate, right?

(while AFAICT Google hasn't explicitly said so, it's almost certainly also powered by an autoregressive transformer model, just like ChatGPT)

akavi commented on Three Years from GPT-3 to Gemini 3 oneusefulthing.org/p/thre... · Posted by u/JumpCrisscross

wing-_-nuts · a month ago

The top 10% of households already account for more than half of consumer spending in the US

akavi · a month ago

Hmmm, that doesn't seem right. I'm having a hard time finding an actual consumption number, but I am confident it's well below 50%.

The top 10% of households by wage income do receive ~50% of pre-tax wage income, but:

1) our tax system is progressive, so actual net income share is less

2) there's significant post-wage redistribution (social security/medicaid)

3) that high income households consume a smaller percent of their net income is a well established fact.

akavi commented on Europeans recognize Zohran Mamdani's policies as 'normal' theguardian.com/us-news/2... · Posted by u/mykowebhn

afavour · 2 months ago

I think you can nitpick the detail but the broader point is still true. Yes, you still pay for the bus, but it’s heavily subsidised. Yes, you still pay for childcare but government subsidies make it wildly more affordable than it is today for New Yorkers.

The general pitch is “raise taxes to make life more affordable for all”. That’s an idea Europeans can identify with.

akavi · 2 months ago

The bus (and the subway) in NYC are also already heavily subsidized. There is also already heavily subsidized childcare in NYC (3k, preK).

The article in general takes the approach of listing a small handful of (usually very small) polities that have one of Mamdani's proposed policies, and then claim that the full suite is therefore "normal" across Europe.

akavi commented on AWS multiple services outage in us-east-1 health.aws.amazon.com/hea... · Posted by u/kondro

rwky · 2 months ago

Hah good point, pagerduty is working at least.

akavi · 2 months ago

PD's been tolerant to total AZ failures for years (was an early eng there)

akavi commented on Jane Goodall has died latimes.com/obituaries/st... · Posted by u/jaredwiener

nntwozz · 3 months ago

Yeah I've seen this before, we could all drive V12s and eat only beef but it's not a very meaningful insight. We're going to stabilize around 10 billion by 2080 according to projections and then decline, hopefully reaching some kind of Star Trek utopia at some point.

We came from the caves, we didn't know any better we just multiplied like a cancer. More population also brings more benefits, more geniuses more inventions etc.

The trick is doing it without wars and inequality, good luck with that.

akavi · 3 months ago

> We're going to stabilize around 10 billion by 2080 according to projections and then decline, hopefully reaching some kind of Star Trek utopia at some point.

10 billion is gonna be the high end by the looks of things, and that decline is going to be hardly conducive to utopia. The math of dependency ratios is inescapably painful.

akavi commented on Deaths are projected to exceed births in 2031 cbo.gov/publication/61390... · Posted by u/johntfella

arcticbull · 3 months ago

> In a world that you have both developed and developing countries, the stable equilibrium seems to be world suffering.

I think that's the wrong read.

All sorts of animal population follow a sigmoidal growth pattern where there's exponential growth, some degree of overshoot and then a return to a steady level somewhat below that peak.

I think it's more likely, drawing from biology, that we end up at a stable global population level without having to worry about moving backwards along the metrics of education, income or contraceptive access.

Remember it was just a few years ago everyone was absolutely terrified that we would grow to the point where the world simply couldn't hold us all and we'd die off -- and now we're terrified the population will zero out. In reality, neither is very likely. We're probably just going to chill around 8 billion or so until/if we go multi-planetary.

akavi · 3 months ago

> I think it's more likely, drawing from biology, that we end up at a stable global population level without having to worry about moving backwards along the metrics of education, income or contraceptive access.

There's absolutely no inherent equilibrating force that will stabilize global fertility rates at replacement. Many countries have blown by replacement (the USA included) and continue on a downward trend year over year.

akavi commented on Protobuffers Are Wrong (2018) reasonablypolymorphic.com... · Posted by u/b-man

dano · 4 months ago

It is a 7 year old article without specifying alternatives to an "already solved problem."

So HN, what are the best alternatives available today and why?

akavi · 4 months ago

Mentioned above: https://github.com/stepchowfun/typical

akavi commented on Making LLMs Cheaper and Better via Performance-Efficiency Optimized Routing arxiv.org/abs/2508.12631... · Posted by u/omarsar

bachittle · 4 months ago

I’m fascinated by this new paradigm. We’ve more or less perfected Mixture-of-Experts inside a single model, where routing happens between subnetworks. What GPT-5 auto (and this paper) are doing is a step further: “LLM routing” across multiple distinct models. It’s still rough right now, but it feels inevitable that this will get much better over time.

akavi · 4 months ago

I'd actually bet against this. The "bitter lesson" suggests doing things end-to-end in-model will (eventually, with sufficient data) outcompete building things outside of models.

My understanding is that GPT5 already does this by varying the quantity of CoT done (in addition to the kind of super-model-level routing described in the post), and I strongly suspect it's only going to get more sophisticated

akavi commented on Vendors that treat single sign-on as a luxury feature sso.tax/... · Posted by u/vinnyglennon

medlazik · 4 months ago

Small orgs don't need to be SOC2 to have client contracts that require SSO. This is absolute fucking evil behavior and this page shouldn't exist anymore in 2025.

akavi · 4 months ago

It's evil to sell a product for a price higher than you, personally, want to pay?

akavi commented on California unemployment rises to 5.5%, worst in the U.S. as tech falters sfchronicle.com/californi... · Posted by u/littlexsparkee

akavi · 4 months ago

A zero-sum mindset on a website dedicated to programming of all places? Where we literally create wealth out of nothing but coffee and the strength of our minds?

My love for my country means I want it to be the greatest in the world. Waterloo grads make America better. Period.