flextheruler (u/flextheruler)

flextheruler commented on Everything around LLMs is still magical and wishful thinking dmitriid.com/everything-a... · Posted by u/troupo

abletonlive · 2 months ago

im glad I don’t have to work with you too lol.

It’s not toxic for me to expect someone to get their work done in a reasonable amount of time with the tools available to them. If you’re an accountant and you take 5X the time to do something because you have beef with excel you’re the problem. It’s not toxicity to tell you that you are a bad accountant

flextheruler · 2 months ago

You believe the cost of firing and rehiring to be cheaper than simple empirical persuasion?

My apologies but that does not sound like good leadership to me. It actually sounds like you may have deficiencies in your skills as it relates to leadership. Perhaps in a few years we will have an LLM who can provide better leadership.

flextheruler commented on Everything around LLMs is still magical and wishful thinking dmitriid.com/everything-a... · Posted by u/troupo

abletonlive · 2 months ago

im glad I don’t have to work with you too lol.

It’s not toxic for me to expect someone to get their work done in a reasonable amount of time with the tools available to them. If you’re an accountant and you take 5X the time to do something because you have beef with excel you’re the problem. It’s not toxicity to tell you that you are a bad accountant

flextheruler · 2 months ago

You believe the cost of firing and rehiring to be cheaper than simple empirical persuasion?

You don't sound like a great lead to me, but I suppose you could be working with absolutely incompetent individuals, or perhaps your soft skills need work.

My apologies but I see only two possibilities for others not to take the time to follow your example given such strong evidence. They either actively dislike you or are totally incompetent. I find the former more often true than the latter.

flextheruler commented on Hacker in Snowflake extortions may be a U.S. soldier krebsonsecurity.com/2024/... · Posted by u/todsacerdoti

brookst · 9 months ago

To turn it around: what percentage of people are capable of perfect opsec forever?

flextheruler · 9 months ago

For internet crimes? Almost none in perpetuity. I’d think you’d need to go off the grid totally for a few years and come back without any reference to a prior life. For physical crime, my gut says quite a few people have avoided identification for decades until they were essentially caught by turning themselves in. Ted Kaczynski comes to mind, but there must be a few others.

Perfect OPSEC to me, means near total isolation from socialization. Not something most people are capable of.

If you’re a professional criminal of any kind you weigh the risks knowing that perfection is impossible. The government is a business with a monopoly on violence. The goal is to keep their ROI for catching you as low as possible. Every single man hour spent finding you is costing money and there’s a man upstairs who wants to see some results that reflect the money spent.

Once you understand that premise, it’s easy to understand the why and how criminals are caught. The ones who are caught are always the ones who don’t know when to fold. Always the ones not to cash in and retire.

The ones who get away with it, they fold they retire and society forgets about them and the ROI drops precipitously on catching them. Research statistics on cold cases.

flextheruler commented on A mistake that killed Japan's software industry? (2023) disruptingjapan.com/the-f... · Posted by u/ayoisaiah

Karrot_Kream · 9 months ago

My feeling is that postwar Japan was a chaotic time and empowered a lot of crazy risk taking individuals along with the old zaibatsu who became keiretsu. As the Shouwa era progressed Japanese society became more risk averse and that most of Japanese industry now succeeds on the creative seeds of Postwar Japan and the rigidity born through the structure that came after.

flextheruler · 9 months ago

Well history isn’t a feeling.

It’s well documented how lenient the U.S. was with enforcing international law on Japans high ranking military and political leaders. The U.S. covered it up and whitewashed Hirohito’s role in WW2. It’s why Japan still has never apologized or even admitted to genociding Chinese and enslaving and raping Korea.

Open up a Japanese textbook on the early 20th century and you will find a glowing portrayal of an Imperial Japanese Empire.

flextheruler commented on Commonly used arm positions can overestimate blood pressure readings: study medicalxpress.com/news/20... · Posted by u/wglb

AStonesThrow · 10 months ago

> typically a precondition of receiving care

I've achieved exciting results by flatly refusing vitals checks at each and every medical appointment. Especially psychiatrists. The PCPs always gamely admire my self-reported histories and graphs, commenting how nicely the trend line goes down, and then completely dismiss the results in their clinical notes.

However, I did lock horns with a particular chiropractor. I filled out the "pre-existing conditions" form with candor and honesty. I permitted a BP check. (His method was 100% manual sphygmomanometer.)

Then he informed me that he wouldn't touch me until my BP was controlled and normal. Yes, a chiropractor, not a cardiac surgeon. Geez.

In the past, I've tried to avoid submitting to blood draws and labs, because those are 100% fishing expeditions, and not actually attempting to diagnose a complaint or symptoms. (They love to misdiagnose hypothyroid or diabetes so they can begin destroying your endocrines.)

Unfortunately, clinics do these orders on a schedule, so if you avoid labs for a while, the orders simply pile up until they contrive to get them all done. I couldn't win. Still putting off colonoscopy: 2.5 years late, and counting!

flextheruler · 10 months ago

Amazing it’s like you’ve figured out the optimal strategy of still spending the same amount of time going to the doctors but getting as few benefits as possible.

I’m pretty sure you can decline care and get second opinions no matter what.

I don’t know your family background, but I have quite a few older male relatives who died from cancers that if caught early have high survivability. They were all suspicious of the profit incentives of the medical system and felt they knew better or were tough enough to not care. My grandfather had a heart murmur, so he used that as an excuse to never go to the doctors. “They just want my money I already know my heart will kill me soon so why bother”. He died of colon cancer. I’m sure they all regretted it.

flextheruler commented on We accidentally burned through 200GB of proxy bandwidth in 6 hours blog.skyvern.com/how-we-a... · Posted by u/suchintan

xp84 · a year ago

> Imagine a legitimate travel agency cannot book 100 United tickets a day

That's the whole point, I never said travel agency, I was thinking a company with travelling consultants.

How TF is it "shady" to purchase and use airfare?

And again, bypassing captcha, say, to purchase tickets isn't evil either, if you are purchasing them for use and not for resale. It would just allow a person to book tickets for 50 people without wasting 6 hours to complete 25 CAPTCHAS and type in my information 25 times.

CAPTCHA is a blunt instrument deployed in an attempt to mitigate abuse, but it has a massive bad side effect that for every heavy user (not just evil users), it requires a human butt to be in a seat somewhere to do mindless busywork that could otherwise be automated. Working around that (sounds like OP agrees to do so on a case by case basis) is not inherently evil. It's as evil (or benign) as whatever you're using it for.

flextheruler · a year ago

You ever see that video of the women paying a thousand dollars to skip to the front of the release day line to buy one of the first generation iPhones?

Then when she did and the employees told her they limited customers to buying one or two iPhones per person she becomes incredibly flustered. The guy who sold his spot in the line celebrates with a free phone.

What you’re describing is analogous and there’s a reason that went viral on the internet and was reported on in the mainstream, but I won’t spell it out for you.

flextheruler commented on Voyager 1 is back online: NASA spacecraft returns data from all 4 instruments space.com/voyager-1-fully... · Posted by u/dev_tty01

flextheruler · a year ago

What are the theoretical risks to sending out these beacons… our we at all, as a species, significantly increasing the chance of another life form more advanced than us discovering us by doing this?

If we come into contact with a significantly advanced life form it would certainly lead to ineffable destruction.

Deep space probing without the ability to exert any sort of defense if discovered seems risky. I know the chances are low but what’s the ROI on sending this stuff out without being remotely prepared for contact. I think another comment was saying the data we’ve collected has mostly just been used to confirm preexisting theories. If that’s all we’re getting out of it I’m apprehensive.

I’m just a layman but I’d feel much better if we can establish control, knowledge and dominance of our solar system and its celestial bodies first.

I’m genuinely asking not a conspiracy theorist.

flextheruler commented on Nietzsche's Guide to Greatness johnathanbi.com/p/nietzsc... · Posted by u/jger15

IncreasePosts · a year ago

If Socrates was so smart, why is he dead?

flextheruler · a year ago

It’s funny you chose Socrates for this example because I believe he isn’t confirmed to have been a real person but rather a rhetorical character created by Plato.

Might be getting this wrong or new evidence has come to light, but I remember reading that theory years ago.

flextheruler commented on If English was written like Chinese (1999) zompist.com/yingzi/yingzi... · Posted by u/watercooler_guy

lolinder · a year ago

There's a saying in linguistics that "a language is a dialect with an army and a navy" [0]. Linguists recognize that where you draw boundaries between languages is essentially arbitrary, even more so than boundaries between biological species. It tends to be that a language is a language if and only if some sovereign state declares it to be so, otherwise it's a dialect.

This is also how you get Portuguese as a distinct language from Spanish even though the two are more mutually intelligible than Scots (a "dialect") and American English are. Portugal has the sovereign government to back up its claim to having its own language where Scotland does not.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_language_is_a_dialect_with_a...

flextheruler · a year ago

I could believe this is true if you’re only comparing languages that have the same root or parent language such as Latin languages, etc.

But I don’t see how anyone could describe the difference between Chinese and English as arbitrary or as two dialects even if the apocalyptic collapse of all major nations which spoke such languages occurred tomorrow.

My understanding is that theres something called lexical similarity and if it’s over a certain percentage it’s a dialect.

flextheruler commented on Tesla failing to deliver Semi-trucks on time to PepsiCo, Sysco, UPS, and Walmart reuters.com/business/auto... · Posted by u/alephnerd

TremendousJudge · a year ago

>it's just that the electric part is generated by a diesel engine

while technically correct, not a useful observation

flextheruler · a year ago

What’s the proposition to “electrify” trains? Batteries or a live wire everywhere there’s train tracks?

Both seem really inefficient to me with our current technology.