deanCommie (u/deanCommie)

deanCommie commented on Tipping point in Gulf Stream may be reached as early as mid-century agupubs.onlinelibrary.wil... · Posted by u/tcumulus

myth_drannon · 2 days ago

Europe suffers from unprecedented heat waves, record after record. Wouldn't it be beneficial for temperatures to drop 10C? I remember the winters in Eastern Europe in the 80's unbearably cold (to a child), now barely any snow and endless forest fires in summer...

deanCommie · 2 days ago

You're probably going to get downvoted, but the reality is it's a valid question.

Just as apparently sulfur emissions from global shipping fleets helped offset some warming and eco-friendly fuel actually caused problems, the climate is complex, and there are definitely going to be the collision of interesting trade-offs.

Unfortunately, most likely, the answer is there won't be anything beneficial here. Remember, the key here isn't average global temperatures, but rather the temperature range. Life likes a temperate climate in a narrow range of degrees. Not just humans, but agriculture too.

If you lower the winter temperatures by 10 degrees, and raise the summer ones by 10, your crops still die either from the frost or from the fire. And humans likewise either freeze on the street or overheat in the sun.

This is the main thing climate change denialists can never seem to grasp. It's not the specific temperature numbers, it's the SPEED at which it's happening. Humans, in their current biological form, have been around for a million years, and survived much larger climate swings. But...the climate also changed slower. And they migrated. And they still almost didn't make it several times, barely surviving.

A world where hundreds of millions of people from the indian subcontinent are trying to escape murderous heat one season while tens of millions of people in Europe are freezing in the winter, and putting up walls to protect what they already have, is not one where humanity thrives.

In the long term we'll probably be fine. A few billion will die. Demographics and politics will shift. The human spirit will persevere, and we'll innovate our way through and adapt to a new world.

But it might take a century and our children and our children's children will not be better off than us.

deanCommie commented on Women dating safety app 'Tea' breached, users' IDs posted to 4chan 404media.co/women-dating-... · Posted by u/gloxkiqcza

1970-01-01 · a month ago

"Breached"

1st sentence: "exposed database"

We need a more nuanced headline here. They did nothing responsible. 404 should title this story with something that will blame them first and the 'hackers' 2nd.

deanCommie · a month ago

This kind of pedantry drives me crazy.

If i leave my house unlocked and someone walks in and takes my TV, they still committed a crime!

Just because it was irresponsible of me, they still BREACHED MY PRIVACY.

The correct ethical behaviour in situations like this is to report to the site that this information is exposed, not download it and archive and repost it.

EVEN IF you believe that the app is itself unethical, you cannot tell from just the drivers licenses of the users who signed up that they have themselves done anything unethical justifying reprisal.

deanCommie commented on What will become of the CIA? newyorker.com/magazine/20... · Posted by u/Michelangelo11

caseysoftware · a month ago

Is this a defense of the CIA? The first half of the article catalogs decades of failures ranging from comical to catastrophic.

"There was a time when the C.I.A.’s existential fear was of losing its adversary. In Al Qaeda, it found a new one; in Iraq, it created others. In Trump, it faces an adversary of a different kind."

Further, calling the Commander in Chief its "adversary" is terrible framing.. if they're working against the elected leadership of the US, who are they working FOR?

deanCommie · a month ago

The president is not the state. That's been established multiple times in cases like Nixon, and unfortunately recently regressed with the Trump SCOTUS decision.

But in theory all these organizations swear an oath to the constitution, not to any branch of government, and especially not their leadership.

If any of the leadership issues illegal orders or does work to undermine the constitution or the country, according to the oath sworn by CIA agents, they should be doing everything they can to work against this leadership.

Even the military expects soldiers to reject illegal orders to commit gencode.

deanCommie commented on Gemini with Deep Think achieves gold-medal standard at the IMO deepmind.google/discover/... · Posted by u/meetpateltech

deanCommie · a month ago

From Terence Tao, via mastodon [0]:

> It is tempting to view the capability of current AI technology as a singular quantity: either a given task X is within the ability of current tools, or it is not. However, there is in fact a very wide spread in capability (several orders of magnitude) depending on what resources and assistance gives the tool, and how one reports their results.

> One can illustrate this with a human metaphor. I will use the recently concluded International Mathematical Olympiad (IMO) as an example. Here, the format is that each country fields a team of six human contestants (high school students), led by a team leader (often a professional mathematician). Over the course of two days, each contestant is given four and a half hours on each day to solve three difficult mathematical problems, given only pen and paper. No communication between contestants (or with the team leader) during this period is permitted, although the contestants can ask the invigilators for clarification on the wording of the problems. The team leader advocates for the students in front of the IMO jury during the grading process, but is not involved in the IMO examination directly.

> The IMO is widely regarded as a highly selective measure of mathematical achievement for a high school student to be able to score well enough to receive a medal, particularly a gold medal or a perfect score; this year the threshold for the gold was 35/42, which corresponds to answering five of the six questions perfectly. Even answering one question perfectly merits an "honorable mention".

> But consider what happens to the difficulty level of the Olympiad if we alter the format in various ways:

* One gives the students several days to complete each question, rather than four and half hours for three questions. (To stretch the metaphor somewhat, consider a sci-fi scenario in the student is still only given four and a half hours, but the team leader places the students in some sort of expensive and energy-intensive time acceleration machine in which months or even years of time pass for the students during this period.)

* Before the exam starts, the team leader rewrites the questions in a format that the students find easier to work with.

* The team leader gives the students unlimited access to calculators, computer algebra packages, formal proof assistants, textbooks, or the ability to search the internet.

* The team leader has the six student team work on the same problem simultaneously, communicating with each other on their partial progress and reported dead ends.

* The team leader gives the students prompts in the direction of favorable approaches, and intervenes if one of the students is spending too much time on a direction that they know to be unlikely to succeed.

* Each of the six students on the team submit solutions, but the team leader selects only the "best" solution to submit to the competition, discarding the rest.

* If none of the students on the team obtains a satisfactory solution, the team leader does not submit any solution at all, and silently withdraws from the competition without their participation ever being noted.

> In each of these formats, the submitted solutions are still technically generated by the high school contestants, rather than the team leader. However, the reported success rate of the students on the competition can be dramatically affected by such changes of format; a student or team of students who might not even reach bronze medal performance if taking the competition under standard test conditions might instead reach gold medal performance under some of the modified formats indicated above.

> So, in the absence of a controlled test methodology that was not self-selected by the competing teams, one should be wary of making apples-to-apples comparisons between the performance of various AI models on competitions such as the IMO, or between such models and the human contestants.

> Related to this, I will not be commenting on any self-reported AI competition performance results for which the methodology was not disclosed in advance of the competition. EDIT: In particular, the above comments are not specific to any single result of this nature.

[0] https://mathstodon.xyz/@tao/114881418225852441

deanCommie commented on LLM Inevitabilism tomrenner.com/posts/llm-i... · Posted by u/SwoopsFromAbove

mg · a month ago

In the 90s a friend told me about the internet. And that he knows someone who is in a university and has access to it and can show us. An hour later, we were sitting in front of a computer in that university and watched his friend surfing the web. Clicking on links, receiving pages of text. Faster than one could read. In a nice layout. Even with images. And links to other pages. We were shocked. No printing, no shipping, no waiting. This was the future. It was inevitable.

Yesterday I wanted to rewrite a program to use a large library that would have required me to dive deep down into the documentation or read its code to tackle my use case. As a first try, I just copy+pasted the whole library and my whole program into GPT 4.1 and told it to rewrite it using the library. It succeeded at the first attempt. The rewrite itself was small enough that I could read all code changes in 15 minutes and make a few stylistic changes. Done. Hours of time saved. This is the future. It is inevitable.

PS: Most replies seem to compare my experience to experiences that the responders have with agentic coding, where the developer is iteratively changing the code by chatting with an LLM. I am not doing that. I use a "One prompt one file. No code edits." approach, which I describe here:

https://www.gibney.org/prompt_coding

deanCommie · a month ago

the issue isn't the capabilities of AI.

It's how it will be used maliciously and change our society irrevocably.

Not from saving developers hours of work.

But from making truth even more subjective and at the whims of the powerful.

And from devaluing and stagnating art even further.

And from sabotaging the critical thinking capabilities of our youths.

All technology comes with tradeoffs. The internet you describe also doesn't exist - it's been overtaken with ads and tracking and it's basically impossible to use without some sort of adblocking. But we can all agree it was worth it for humanity.

So will AI. Probably.

But that's what people are always concerned with - the downstream consequences like nothing we've ever encountered before.

deanCommie commented on Grok 4 simonwillison.net/2025/Ju... · Posted by u/coloneltcb

techpineapple · 2 months ago

So, to try and make a relatively substantive contribution, the doc mentions that the following were added to grok3's system prompt:

- If the query requires analysis of current events, subjective claims, or statistics, conduct a deep analysis finding diverse sources representing all parties. Assume subjective viewpoints sourced from the media are biased. No need to repeat this to the user. - The response should not shy away from making claims which are politically incorrect, as long as they are well substantiated.

I'm guessing there are quite a few algorithms and processes in modern LLM's above and beyond just predict the next token, but when you say "find diverse sources" and "be well substantiated".

Is this passing an instruction to the process that like reads from the weightset or is it now just looking in the weightset for things trained related to the tokens "find diverse sources" and "be well substantiated"

I guess what I'm asking is does. "be well substantiated" translate into "make sure lots of people on Twitter said this", rather than like "make sure you're pulling from a bunch of scientific papers" because, well technically, racism is well substantiated on Twitter.

deanCommie · 2 months ago

You can tell this was written by a technologist without a clue of the realities of social dynamics

* "finding diverse sources representing all parties"

Not all current events are subjective, not all claims/parties (climate change, holocaust etc.) require representation from all parties.

* "Assume subjective viewpoints sourced from the media are biased."

this one is sad because I would've said that up until a decade ago this would've also been ludicrous. Most media was never as biased as the rising authoritarian right tried to claim.

Unfortunately over the years, it has become true. The rise of extremely biased right-wing media sources has made things like FOX news arguably centrist given the overton window move. Which made the left-wing sources lean into bias and becoming themselves complicit (e.g. hiding Biden's cognitive decline)

So annoyingly this is probably a good guidance...but it also just makes the problem even worse by dismissing the unbiased sources with journalistic integrity just as hard

* " The response should not shy away from making claims which are politically incorrect"

The next mistake is thinking that "politically incorrect" is a term used by people focused on political correctness to describe uncomfortable ideas they don't like that have merit.

Unfortunately, that term was always one of derision. It was invented by people who were unhappy with their speech and thinking being stifled, and thinking that they're being shut down because of political correctness, not because of fundamental disagreements.

There's an idea that racist people think that everyone is racist they are just the only ones honest about it. So when they express racist ideas and get pushback they think "ah well, this person isn't ready to be honest about their opinions - they're more focused on being POLITICALLY CORRECT, than honest"

Of course there's a percentage of these ideas that can be adequately categorized in this space. Subjects like affirmative action never got the discussion they deserved in the US, in part because of "political correctness"

But by and large, if you were an LLM trained on a corpus of human knowledge, the majority of anything labelled "politically incorrect" is far FAR more likely to be bigoted and problematic than just "controversial"

deanCommie commented on Nobody has a personality anymore: we are products with labels freyaindia.co.uk/p/nobody... · Posted by u/drankl

WorkerBee28474 · 2 months ago

> it's why there's now suddenly an influx of ADHD and Autism diagnosis - because in the past anyone outside of the norm who wasn't lucky to do one of the things above was simply ignored, beaten, or died.

I think you're understating how well those people were incorporated into society. My grandfather was born in the 20s and was described as quite "high strung", was amazing with technology, would repair anything, and even used to build his own farm machinery. These days he'd definitely be called severely anxious, and probably labelled as being on the spectrum. Yet he was part of a community, farmed his whole life, and built a family. People knew his quirks and compensated for them.

deanCommie · 2 months ago

no i don't think we're saying different things.

what you're describing is survivor's bias.

1) the most talented people with cognitive differences made it out for sure. But not every person on the spectrum is "amazing with technology" in a useful way. But not all are, and the ones that weren't just didn't make it. Today they do.

2) those people still needed luck. Luck that they were able to come up in a society that didn't expect more from them than to perform a "function". Things like meeting a spouse were "easier" because there was a more rigorous social structure. Depending on which society this was in, potentially to the detriment of your grandmother who didn't have a lot of choices.

2b) and luck that the community around them accepted them. That wasn't JUST because he was a farmer, it's also because he hit the other markers of inclusion whether he wanted to or not.

People in that day and age were not cognitively free. Is cognitive freedom preferable? Well that's the question of our age. We weren't supposed to just kill god and stop. We were supposed to replace a new humanist secular philosophy to replace the theology to find purpose to humanity.

We didn't, society is now full of anxiety and malaise, and the right wing is rising promising to fix it by a RVTRN to the old ways regardless of who they harm.

deanCommie commented on Nobody has a personality anymore: we are products with labels freyaindia.co.uk/p/nobody... · Posted by u/drankl

hresvelgr · 2 months ago

The lovable aphorisms we had for people with character quirks were largely from our original support systems. What no one is talking about is the reason therapy-talk has become so pervasive is because all those support systems: family, friends, and local communities (religious or otherwise), have all degraded so severely for most that therapy is the only option for reaching out and getting help.

deanCommie · 2 months ago

except they weren't really "support systems"

i mean they were, if you got lucky.

If you were neurotypical; if you bought in to the local religious sect's particular flavour and embraced it wholeheartedly; if you followed the other local cults of sports fandoms; if you were lucky enough to either have family without their own trauma that didn't take it out on you OR decided to repress it in exactly the same way that they did and just simply passed it forward or didn't talk about it.

i don't know what the ratios are but a LOT of people fell through the cracks.

it's just that the birth rate was high enough to continue the population growth, and there were socially acceptable ways to ignore the inconvenient problems (see: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rosemary_Kennedy)

it's why there's now suddenly an influx of ADHD and Autism diagnosis - because in the past anyone outside of the norm who wasn't lucky to do one of the things above was simply ignored, beaten, or died.

now the stigma is gone and we're finding EXPLICIT paths to treatment, tolerance, and embracement of mental health, neuroatypical brains, spectrums, etc. Is there overpathologizing? Maybe? Hard to know! The stigmas still aren't gone. Go read the comments on any video providing tips on how to parent children on the spectrum and see neurotypicals freaking out about how soft the current generation is.

the western world seems to have peaked in tolerance in the 2010s, and is now backsliding into authoritarianism and fascism. that's trying to recreate a lot of those original support systems (by destroying the new ones). It's a bold plan, let's see how it happens.

deanCommie commented on Tesla sales drop for fifth month in a row in Europe abcnews.go.com/Business/w... · Posted by u/doener

deanCommie · 2 months ago

It was crazy to visit Oslo or Amsterdam in the mid-2010s and notice just what a high % of vehicles were Tesla Model S's.

Car ownership is expensive and unnecessary so people with wealth bought the environmentally positive status symbols. There was simply no equivalent.

I wonder what will replace it.

deanCommie commented on Now might be the best time to learn software development substack.com/home/post/p-... · Posted by u/nathanfig

bitpush · 2 months ago

Bravo. This is the exact sentiment I have, but you expressed in a way that I could never have.

Most people miss the fact that technical improvements increases the pie in a way that was not possible before.

When digital cameras became popular, everybody become a photographer. That only made the world better, and we got soo many more good photographers. Same with YouTube & creativity.

And same with coding & LLMs. World will have lots more of apps, and programmers.

deanCommie · 2 months ago

> That only made the world better, and we got soo many more good photographers. Same with YouTube & creativity.

I think you really missed the point of what these technologies and innovations actually did for society and how it applies to today, underneath the snark.

In the 1970's, if you got gifted a camera, and were willing to put in the work to figure out how to use it, you learned a skill that immediately put you in rare company.

With enough practice of that skill you could be a professional photographer, which would be a good , reliable, well paid job. Now, the barrier of entry is nothing, so it's extremely competitive to be a professional photographer, and even the ones that succeed just scrape by. And you have to stand out on other things than the technical ability to operate a camera.

That's...what's about to happen (if it hasn't already) with software developers.