florbnit (u/florbnit)

florbnit commented on Gearbox CEO Randy Pitchford tells Borderlands 4 critics: "code your own engine" techspot.com/news/109487-... · Posted by u/speckx

etblg · 3 months ago

> The exec also said "less than one percent of one percent" of players are filing customer service tickets about performance issues, and asked people to "code your own engine and show us how it's done, please."

???

Why wouldn't we just use your competitors engines instead.

florbnit · 3 months ago

They aren’t even using an engine they built themselves. It’s built on top of Unreal Engine 5 which performs great for a ton of other games. They had to put effort into making it as badly performing as it is. It’s crazy.

florbnit commented on Anthropic agrees to pay $1.5B to settle lawsuit with book authors nytimes.com/2025/09/05/te... · Posted by u/acomjean

aeon_ai · 4 months ago

To be very clear on this point - this is not related to model training.

It’s important in the fair use assessment to understand that the training itself is fair use, but the pirating of the books is the issue at hand here, and is what Anthropic “whoopsied” into in acquiring the training data.

Buying used copies of books, scanning them, and training on it is fine.

Rainbows End was prescient in many ways.

florbnit · 4 months ago

> Buying used copies of books, scanning them, and training on it is fine.

Buying used copies of books, scanning them, and printing them and selling them: not fair use

Buying used copies of books, scanning them, and making merchandise and selling it: not fair use

The idea that training models is considered fair use just because you bought the work is naive. Fair use is not a law to leave open usage as long as it doesn’t fit a given description. It’s a law that specifically allows certain usages like criticism, comment, news reporting, teaching, scholarship, or research. Training AI models for purposes other than purely academic fits into none of these.

florbnit commented on You are a good person if geohot.github.io//blog/je... · Posted by u/galfarragem

galfarragem · 4 months ago

> I will be kind to people.

If you look at it as "producing goodwill" (an intangible asset) it still fits his axiom.

florbnit · 4 months ago

Yes, and we should factor in a $ amount per child you’ve had, also subtract a $ amount per time you yell at said child. Also how much should a compliment given to a stranger be worth? Should the value be different if it’s in sincere?

The important point is that it’s the net sum at the end that qualifies if you are a good person! If you help out 1000 people and have 12 kids, but also you contribute to a racially motivated genocide, you’re still a good person as long as the net $ sum at the end is positive. /s

Absolutely everything about the idea seems wrong. Both the idea that it’s all about accounting and the idea that you can ascribe a definite value to actions that should sum to some moral statement.

florbnit commented on Why teach calculus in the age of AI mappingignorance.org/2025... · Posted by u/Gedxx

softwaredoug · 4 months ago

The most important skill with using AI is critical thinking. And that's really only honed by learning and questioning a lot of subjects.

I don't use Calculus in my day job, but it was still valuable for me to learn to hone my ability to think

florbnit · 4 months ago

> And that's really only honed by learning and questioning a lot of subjects.

Sounds like a job for AI.

florbnit commented on The sisters “paradox” – counter-intuitive probability blog.engora.com/2025/08/t... · Posted by u/Vermin2000

rml · 4 months ago

For something this small we can enumerate all the cases (this is a Scheme version of the Mathematica `Tuples` function)

    > (list-tuples '(B G) 2)
    ((B B) (B G) (G B) (G G))

3 cases have at least one girl

of those 3 cases, 1/3 are both girls

florbnit · 4 months ago

A coworker approached you and goes “hi, I have two children and one is a boy…” and is promptly vaporized because he doesn’t fit the selection criteria of the problem statement, another approaches and goes “err hi, I have two children and one is a girl…” looks nervously at the vaporizer but is left standing. What is the chance their other child is a girl, who has not been vaporized?

If you phrase the question as “someone with two children tell you the gender of a random one, what is the chance the other is the same gender?” Chance is 50/50 because 50% will have BB or GG and the vaporizer isn’t active.

florbnit commented on The sisters “paradox” – counter-intuitive probability blog.engora.com/2025/08/t... · Posted by u/Vermin2000

the_gipsy · 4 months ago

Why can you not frame it as: "a random family has been sampled, the sample family has two childs, one of them is a girl"?

I.e. without "discarding", just giving some additional, but not complete, information on the random sample. Is adding information about the picked sample the same as discarding all contrarian samples? Why is this relevant?

florbnit · 4 months ago

> a random family has been sampled, the sample family has two childs, one of them is a girl"

It’s not a random family if it must have at least one girl. If you want to talk about a random family you can only make statements of the kind “one of the children is <gender>” where the gender depend on the specific family or “the family has between 0 and 2 girls”

florbnit commented on Uncle Sam shouldn't own Intel stock wsj.com/opinion/uncle-sam... · Posted by u/aspenmayer

Night_Thastus · 4 months ago

There are a lot of times where I'd say a business should be allowed to fail - but this is a poor choice to do so.

* You can't just spin up leading edge semiconductor manufacturing on a dime. It takes decades and hundreds of billions to reach where companies like Intel and TSMC are now. It's so hard that it's essentially impossible for new entrants to catch up.

* The US has a strong interest in having local manufacturing, that no other power could take away in a time where it's needed.

>a lot of those companies are currently fabless, but how many would change that with equipment bought at a fraction of the cost?

Zero. Dumping the fabs on them would not help them. They're expensive and complicated to run. They don't have the knowledge to run the fab side of design (it's a joint effort on both sides to design a chip), nor the money or knowledge to improve those fabs and keep them up with the leading edge.

florbnit · 4 months ago

> You can't just spin up leading edge semiconductor manufacturing on a dime. It takes decades and hundreds of billions to reach where companies like Intel and TSMC are now. It's so hard that it's essentially impossible for new entrants to catch up.

You can if intel goes bankrupt. Why do people act like a bankruptcy consists of taking all the employees out back and putting them down then setting all the buildings on fire.

florbnit commented on Review of Anti-Aging Drugs scienceblog.com/joshmitte... · Posted by u/XzetaU8

IceHegel · 4 months ago

There's a fascinating tension with anti-aging drugs, which is that your preference would obviously be to take them as early as possible, so you spend more time at a younger age as opposed to just prolonging the last years of your life, where you'll be stuck in a nursing home anyway.

But taking experimental drugs while you're young is also much higher risk, and you might see people sacrificing their 20s for the sake of their 70s in a way they end up regretting, even if there aren't any side effects.

florbnit · 4 months ago

There's also a fascinating tension with physical exercise, which is that your preference would obviously be do it as early as possible, so you spend more time at a younger age as opposed to just prolonging the last years of your life, where you'll be stuck in a nursing home anyway.

But doing exercise while you're young is also much higher risk, and you might see people sacrificing their 20s for the sake of their 70s in a way they end up regretting, even if there aren't any injuries.

That said, even with risk of injuries it feels like a no brainer to be active and to be active from an early age.

Also I don’t think people should wait until their late 50ies to make sure they get enough vitamin c to “avoid sacrificing their 20ies”

florbnit commented on Hyundai wants loniq 5 customers to pay for cybersecurity patch in baffling move neowin.net/news/hyundai-w... · Posted by u/duxup

king_geedorah · 4 months ago

If the ignition and door locks in your vehicle were mistakenly designed in such a way that they are trivially shimmed or could be operated by any key it seems absurd to suggest the customer should pay you to replace these mechanisms with ones that are properly secured. This seems roughly analogous to that situation at least to my understanding.

florbnit · 4 months ago

The story has a bad spin yes. But it’s just as much of a controversy if they had require people themselves pay the cost if they found out the cars where shipped with defective breaks. It’s a product error not wear and tear or user error, they should eat the costs, but the cybersecurity framing of it is being used to attempt to push the cost to the consumer.

florbnit commented on Hyundai wants loniq 5 customers to pay for cybersecurity patch in baffling move neowin.net/news/hyundai-w... · Posted by u/duxup

agilob · 4 months ago

Swapping software, pentesting, testing, QA, CI/CD pipelines, image caches aren't free either. Can we then start making more money as software developers to patch CVEs? We clearly should consider holding ourselves to a lower standard. Your requests are getting 5xx errors? Pay me more to fix it, not my problem that your requests is failing.

florbnit · 4 months ago

> Pay me more to fix it, not my problem that your requests is failing.

If you are employed in a position where there is a defect in the product then you are already being paid. Imagine going to a restaurant and you get an uncooked frozen steak, and when you tell the waiter they tell you that since the cook will need to spend more time on it you now have to pay extra.