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diatone commented on A new chapter begins for EV batteries with the expiry of key LFP patents   shoosmiths.com/insights/a... · Posted by u/toomuchtodo
gmac · a month ago
> an ideologically driven push for renewables

Renewables (especially wind) are now just about the cheapest way to generate electricity, and new battery technologies do much to help with their intermittency, so where’s the problem?

(Plus, the ‘ideology’ in question would seem to be: it’s bad to fry the planet, and also bad to run even a small risk of radioactively contaminating one’s landmass, and IMHO neither of these positions deserves to be called an ideology).

diatone · a month ago
Chiming in as Australian with no context on European situation. AFAICT the key drivers of cost inflation are to do with reconfiguring the electric grid to transfer power efficiently and reliably from plants that produce renewable energy. However, the grid is set up to do so from non-renewable sources. And you want to do it while smoothly operating the network. This is extremely hard. Doing so quickly therefore elevates prices. That’s the rationale I could imagine being the case in EU markets.
diatone commented on NaN, the not-a-number number that isn't NaN   piccalil.li/blog/nan-the-... · Posted by u/tobr
grogers · 2 months ago
Doesn't "1 + x == 2 + x" evaluate to true for any x with large enough magnitude? In general we should expect identities that hold true in "real" math to not hold in FP
diatone · 2 months ago
That’s not real math though, that’s a quirk of floating point math.
diatone commented on Anti-aging breakthrough: Stem cells reverse signs of aging in monkeys   nad.com/news/anti-aging-b... · Posted by u/bilsbie
JumpCrisscross · 3 months ago
> people in power might apply life extending technologies, like they do many other technologies, to exercise and entrench that power

Sure. One of which would be broadly granting access to it.

Like, if a country tried to restrict such technology to its leaders, you could probably trigger regime change by simply promising to share the technology in the event of deposement. Every party member who barely missed the cut would become your revolutionary.

diatone · 3 months ago
That’s possible, I suppose. I think @btbuildem was expressing a personal distaste for other uses of power, and an avulsion to the technology because of that. For example: labor camps.
diatone commented on Anti-aging breakthrough: Stem cells reverse signs of aging in monkeys   nad.com/news/anti-aging-b... · Posted by u/bilsbie
gruez · 3 months ago
>Picture a world where a slew of today's despots (including the current American president) get to live for two, or three human lifespans.

What makes the current lifespan any more correct than 2x or 3x, or 0.5x of a century or two ago? Given that life expectancy was much shorter a century ago, should we start randomly executing people to keep "the uber-wealthy and powerful" from living too long? That would probably have kept "the current American president" from being in power.

diatone · 3 months ago
Iiuc it wasn’t a comment about what the perfect lifespan is. It’s expressing a concern about how people in power might apply life extending technologies, like they do many other technologies, to exercise and entrench that power.

Or put differently: it’s a request, given limited resources let’s expend effort on a fairer society, not one with longer lived people.

diatone commented on Ask HN: Should we stop worrying that AI will replace developer jobs?    · Posted by u/_pdp_
pesfandiar · 4 months ago
The delineation between programming and software engineering is arbitrary at best. Everybody understands the "engineering" in software engineering has nothing to do with other certified engineering practices, so the hair splitting here strikes me as mere gatekeeping of titles. Responsibility and accountability for outcomes have always been a requirement regardless of the title.
diatone · 4 months ago
Probably worth clarifying with GP what responsibility and accountability they’re referring to.

Where I live, if an engineer signs off on a bridge design and the bridge personally collapses, they are personally liable for harm done to folks on the bridge. As far as I’m aware software engineering does not have something like that.

diatone commented on The current state of LLM-driven development   blog.tolki.dev/posts/2025... · Posted by u/Signez
simonw · 4 months ago
Why would you need to take all of these additional sandboxing measures if you weren't using an LLM?
diatone · 4 months ago
For one - I’d say scoped API tokens that prevent messing with resources across logical domains (eg prod vs nonprod, distinct github repos, etc) is best practice in general. Blowing up a resource with a broadly scoped token isn’t a failure mode unique to LLMs.

edit: I don’t have personal experience around spending limits but I vaguely recall them being useful for folks who want to set up AWS resources and swing for the fences, in startups without thinking too deeply about the infra. Again this isn’t a failure mode unique to LLMs although I can appreciate it not mapping perfectly to your scenario above

edit #2: fwict the LLM specific context of your scenario above is: providing examples, setting up API access somehow (eg maybe invoking a CLI?). The rest to me seems like good old software engineering

diatone commented on GPT-5: Overdue, overhyped and underwhelming. And that's not the worst of it   garymarcus.substack.com/p... · Posted by u/kgwgk
Uehreka · 4 months ago
This is a genre of article I find particularly annoying. Instead of writing an essay on why he personally thinks GPT-5 is bad based on his own analysis, the author just gathers up a bunch of social media reactions and tells us about them, characterizing every criticism as “devastating” or a “slam”, and then hopes that the combined weight of these overtorqued summaries will convince us to see things his way.

It’s both too slanted to be journalism, but not original enough to be analysis.

diatone · 4 months ago
FTA

> That’s exactly what it means to hit a wall, and exactly the particular set of obstacles I described in my most notorious (and prescient) paper, in 2022. Real progress on some dimensions, but stuck in place on others.

The author includes their personal experience — recommend reading to the end.

diatone commented on Why are so many companies pushing for AI adoption by developers?    · Posted by u/alcasa
techniquetech · 4 months ago
diatone · 4 months ago
I’ve read some blog posts by Geoff and there’s a useful idea here but it’s surrounded by so much storytelling.

To dig up the lede: LLMs are proving useful in some instances, consider staying abreast of developments here to find ways to do a better job as time goes by. The exact nature of “better job” and the timeframe along which that reveals itself are left as exercises for the reader

u/diatone

KarmaCake day323February 14, 2021
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