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chr15m commented on Shifts in U.S. Social Media Use, 2020–2024: Decline, Fragmentation, Polarization (2025)   arxiv.org/abs/2510.25417... · Posted by u/vinnyglennon
jeffbee · 16 hours ago
I think you are right to suspect the methods and the results. If you look at the paper's github, the python notebook was clearly written by a chatbot (the comments are all in the second person). So what you have here is a monograph, unreviewed, unpublished, based on GPT-level understanding of a survey that might not even apply to this subject.
chr15m · 16 hours ago
And worse, it says something smart people wish was true.
chr15m commented on Selection rather than prediction   voratiq.com/blog/selectio... · Posted by u/languid-photic
languid-photic · a day ago
It was not, the agent id is not overt but can be found via the workspace filepath.

But that is a good point. Perhaps it should be mapped to something unidentifiable.

chr15m · a day ago
Ah ok. If you do run it again that would be a worthwhile change. I know I personally have biases about models and I have seen others commenting the same - it seems likely it would skew the results at least a little.

Nonetheless you've convinced me to try an even wider variety of models, thanks!

In fact, this makes me think I should add this as a feature to my AI dev tooling - compare responses side by side and pick the best one.

chr15m commented on Selection rather than prediction   voratiq.com/blog/selectio... · Posted by u/languid-photic
languid-photic · a day ago
This was exactly the kernel of the idea :)
chr15m · a day ago
Ah interesting. Thank you very much for sharing the illuminating results.

One question I had - was the judgement blinded? Did judges know which models produced which output?

chr15m commented on Selection rather than prediction   voratiq.com/blog/selectio... · Posted by u/languid-photic
chr15m · 2 days ago
If you view LLM driven dev as a kind of evolutionary process rather than an engineering process (at the level of a single LLM output) then this makes a lot of sense. You're widening the population from which you select for fitness.
chr15m commented on Software factories and the agentic moment   factory.strongdm.ai/... · Posted by u/mellosouls
davedx · 2 days ago
Meanwhile, me

> $20/month Claude sub

> $20/month OpenAI sub

> When Claude Code runs out, switch to Codex

> When Codex runs out, go for a walk with the dogs or read a book

I'm not an accelerationist singularity neohuman. Oh well, I still get plenty done

chr15m · 2 days ago
The openrouter/free endpoint may make your dog unfit. You're welcome. Sorry doggo.
chr15m commented on xAI joins SpaceX   spacex.com/updates#xai-jo... · Posted by u/g-mork
Rzor · 7 days ago
>In an interview with Robert Wright in 2003, Dyson referred to his paper on the search for Dyson spheres as "a little joke" and commented that "you get to be famous only for the things you don't think are serious" [...]

To be fair, he later added this:

>in a later interview with students from The University of Edinburgh in 2018, he referred to the premise of the Dyson sphere as being "correct and uncontroversial".[13] In other interviews, while lamenting the naming of the object, Dyson commented that "the idea was a good one", and referred to his contribution to a paper on disassembling planets as a means of constructing one.

Sources are in: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dyson_sphere

chr15m · 6 days ago
Thanks for pointing out those follow ups. Interesting stuff!

> correct and uncontraversial

From the original quote it is clear he was referring to the idea of aliens being detectable by infrared because they will absorb all of their sun's energy. Later in the same paragraph he says:

> Unfortunately I went on to speculate about possible ways of building a shell, for example by using the mass of Jupiter... > These remarks about building a shell were only order-of-magnitude estimates, but were misunderstood by journalists and science-fiction writers as describing real objects. The essential idea of an advanced civilization emitting infrared radiation was already published by Olaf Stapledon in his science fiction novel Star Maker in 1937.

So the Dyson Sphere is a rhetorical vehicle to make an order-of-magnitude estimate, not a description of a thing that he thought could physically exist.

Full quote from the video cited before "the idea was a good one":

> science fiction writers got hold of this phrase and imagined it then to be a spherical rigid object. And the aliens would be living on some kind of artificial shell. a rigid structure surrounding a star. which wasn't exactly what I had in mind, but then in any case, that's become then a favorite object of science fiction writers. They call it the Dyson sphere, which was a name I don't altogether approve of, but anyway, I mean that's I'm stuck with it. But the idea was a good one.

Again he explicitly says this "wasn't exactly what I had in mind." This one hedges a bit more and could be interpreted as his saying the idea of a Dyson Sphere is a good one. He may have meant that in the sense of it being a good science fiction idea though, and he subsequently goes on to talk about that.

The Dyson Sphere is good for order-of-magnitude calculations about hypothetical aliens, and also for selling vapourware to the types of people who uncritically think that vapourware is real.

chr15m commented on xAI joins SpaceX   spacex.com/updates#xai-jo... · Posted by u/g-mork
jupp0r · 7 days ago
chr15m · 7 days ago
Dyson's paper was literally written in jest.
chr15m commented on What I learned building an opinionated and minimal coding agent   mariozechner.at/posts/202... · Posted by u/SatvikBeri
mbrock · 8 days ago
That kind of blanket demand doesn't persuade anyone and doesn't solve any problem.

Even if you get people to sit and press a button every time the agent wants to do anything, you're not getting the actual alertness and rigor that would prevent disasters. You're getting a bored, inattentive person who could be doing something more valuable than micromanaging Claude.

Managing capabilities for agents is an interesting problem. Working on that seems more fun and valuable than sitting around pressing "OK" whenever the clanker wants to take actions that are harmless in a vast majority of cases.

chr15m · 7 days ago
I don't mean to sound like I'm demanding this. I'm saying you will get better outcomes if you choose to do this as a developer.

You're right it's an interesting problem that seems fun to work on. Hopefully we'll get better harnesses. For now I'm checking everything.

chr15m commented on What I learned building an opinionated and minimal coding agent   mariozechner.at/posts/202... · Posted by u/SatvikBeri
hk__2 · 8 days ago
You’ll just end up approving things blindly, because 95% of what you’ll read will seem obviously right and only 5% will look wrong. I would prefer to let the agent do whatever they want for 15 minutes and then look at the result rather than having to approve every single command it does.
chr15m · 8 days ago
> I would prefer to let the agent do whatever they want

Lol, good luck to you!

u/chr15m

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