g_sch (u/g_sch) - Readit News

g_sch commented on alpr.watch alpr.watch/... · Posted by u/theamk

tptacek · 3 months ago

That's true if you define modern policing as a form of mass surveillance, but doing so stretches the dilutes the usefulness of the term. People see a difference between automatically flagging cars on a stolen car hotlist, and monitoring the comings and goings of every resident in their town. And they're right to see that difference, and to roll their eyes at people who don't.

That doesn't mean the cameras are good; I think they aren't, or rather, at least in my metro, I know they aren't.

g_sch · 3 months ago

These cameras may have been originally sold to municipalities as a way to find stolen cars, but from one year to the next, federal agencies have (1) decided that their main goal is finding arbitrary noncitizens to deport, and (2) that they're entitled to the ALPR data collected by municipalities in order to accomplish this goal. The technology isn't any different, but as a result of the way it was deployed (on Flock's centralized platform), it was trivial to flip a switch and turn it into a mass surveillance network.

g_sch commented on AI-generated “workslop” is destroying productivity? hbr.org/2025/09/ai-genera... · Posted by u/McScrooge

fzeroracer · 6 months ago

Sadly, I've seen multiple well-known developers here on HN argue that reading code in fact isn't hard and that it's easy to review AI-generated code. I think fundamentally what AI-generated code is doing is exposing the cracks in many, many engineers across the board that either don't care about code quality or are completely unable to step back and evaluate their own process to see if what they're doing is good or not. If it works it works and there's no need to understand why or how.

g_sch · 6 months ago

I think this is equally true of writing. Once you see something written one way, it's very hard to imagine other ways of writing the same thing. The influence of anchoring bias is quite strong.

A strong editor is able to overcome this anchoring bias, imagine alternative approaches to the same problem, and evaluate them against each other. This is not easy and requires experience and practice. I am starting to think that a lot of people who "co-write" with ChatGPT are seriously overestimating their own editing skills.

g_sch commented on AI-generated “workslop” is destroying productivity? hbr.org/2025/09/ai-genera... · Posted by u/McScrooge

legostormtroopr · 6 months ago

I’m going to defend your dad here.

AI slop at work is an absolute waste of time and effort.

But your dad is trying to write his story, probably because he wants to leave something behind so he’s not forgotten. It might be cliche-riddled but AI is helping him write his experiences in a form he’s happy with and it’s still his story even if he got help.

He’s also probably only writing it for an audience of one - you. So don’t shit on it, read it. Or you might regret it.

g_sch · 6 months ago

I sympathize with people who find writing difficult. But, putting myself in GP's shoes, I can't imagine trying to read my father's LLM-generated memoir. How could I possibly understand it as _his_ work? I would be sure that he gave the LLM some amount of information that would render it technically unique, but there's no way I could hear his voice in words that he didn't choose.

If you're writing something for an audience of one, literally nothing matters more than the connection between you and the reader. As someone with a father who's getting on in years, even imagining this scenario is pretty depressing.

g_sch commented on Job-seekers are dodging AI interviewers fortune.com/2025/08/03/ai... · Posted by u/robtherobber

g_sch · 7 months ago

What I'd really like to know is:

- how many people that currently work at your company had to go through an AI interviewer to get the job? - do referrals have to go through an AI interviewer too?

To me, this just smacks of a tool that increases the cost of cold-submitting your resume so companies can optimize for "preferred" hiring paths likeinternal referrals.

g_sch commented on I Miss My Fan Regulator rishikeshs.com/fan-regula... · Posted by u/surprisetalk

g_sch · 9 months ago

Fan/AC remotes have some of the worst, most unexpected UX I've ever seen. I still remember an AC remote at an Airbnb I stayed at a few years ago that, instead of having temperature control buttons that said "up"/"down" or "hotter"/"colder", it had two buttons that said "too hot" and "too cold". The "too hot" button decreased the temperature setting on the thermostat and the "too cold" button increased it.

This labeling makes some sense if you stop to think about it, but I can't shake the thought that this was the first time I encountered an interface that asked me to describe how I was currently feeling, rather than me telling it what I wanted it to do.

g_sch commented on The Gang Has a Mid-Life Crisis chris-martin.org/2025/the... · Posted by u/dralley

jglamine · 10 months ago

This essay is weird. The author lumps James Damore, rank-and-file software engineer, in with Marc Andreessen and Mark Zuckerberg. Damore hasn't updated his LinedIn since 2018 - he might not even work in tech anymore?

It closes saying they need to stop reliving their glory days and be good fathers and not the town drunk. Those are serious accusations - being a bad father and a drunk. The author doesn't give any evidence for either.

g_sch · 10 months ago

The author is pretty upfront that the conclusion was meant as a reference to a character in the movie "Hoosiers", not that any of the personalities named were literally drunks or bad fathers.

g_sch commented on Ask HN: Share your AI prompt that stumps every model · Posted by u/owendarko

LeonardoTolstoy · a year ago

Something about an obscure movie.

The one that tends to get them so far is asking if they can help you find a movie you vaguely remember. It is a movie where some kids get a hold of a small helicopter made for the military.

The movie I'm concerned with is called Defense Play from 1988. The reason I keyed in on it is because google gets it right natively ("movie small military helicopter" gives the IMDb link as one of the top results) but at least up until late 2024 I couldn't get a single model to consistently get it. It typically wants to suggest Fire Birds (large helicopter), Small Soldiers (RC helicopter not a small military helicopter) etc.

Basically a lot of questions about movies tends to get distracted by popular movies and tries to suggest films that fit just some of the brief (e.g. this one has a helicopter could that be it?)

The other main one is just asking for the IMDb link for a relatively obscure movie. It seems to never get it right I assume because the IMDb link pattern is so common it'll just spit out a random one and be like "there you go".

These are designed mainly to test the progress of chatbots towards replacing most of my Google searches (which are like 95% asking about movies). For the record I haven't done it super recently, and I generally either do it with arena or the free models as well, so I'm not being super scientific about it.

g_sch · a year ago

I also recently had this experience! I remembered a recurring bit from an older comedy film (a customer in a shop keeps saying "Kumquats!") and tried to prompt ChatGPT 4o into getting it. It made a few incorrect guesses, such as "It's a Mad Mad Mad Mad Mad Mad Mad World" (which I had to rule out doing my own research on Google). I found the answer myself (W.C. Fields' "It's a Gift") with a minute or so of Googling.

Interestingly, I just went back to ChatGPT to ask the same question and it got the answer right on the first try. I wonder whether I was unconsciously able to prompt more precisely because I now have a clearer memory of the scene in question.

g_sch commented on Greenpeace must pay over $660M in case over Dakota Access protest activities apnews.com/article/greenp... · Posted by u/pseudolus

stickfigure · a year ago

On the other hand a jury of nine people, vetted with voir dire, found them guilty. There's probably something there. I'm waiting to form opinions until the appeals are over.

g_sch · a year ago

Notably the jury pool was from North Dakota, a state where many people have direct or indirect ties to oil and gas industries. In fact,

> During jury selection, potential jurors appeared to largely dislike the protests, and many had ties to the fossil fuel industry. In the end, more than half the jurors selected to hear the case had ties to the fossil fuel industry, and most had negative views of anti-pipeline protests or groups that oppose the use of fossil fuels.

Source: https://archive.ph/OMEYP#selection-1559.0-1563.204

g_sch commented on Musk-led group makes $97B bid for control of OpenAI reuters.com/markets/deals... · Posted by u/jdoliner

Locutus_ · a year ago

....Atreides Management?

The financing arm of a aristocratic line running a personality cult and who have a nepo baby on the cards contemplating a little bit of jyhad as his ticket out?

....I Do sometimes wonder who comes up with these names.

g_sch · a year ago

The same type of people who name their companies Palantir and Anduril

g_sch commented on Reflections on Palantir nabeelqu.substack.com/p/r... · Posted by u/freditup

JumpCrisscross · a year ago

> they have 80% margin, according to the article

I have a pet theory about private equity: they're in the business of laundering boring jobs for college graduates. Few kids dream of graduating college to work at a chemicals plant in Baton Rouge. But working for Accenture in New York or Atlanta, now that's sexy. Even if you spend your entire work week *checks notes* working at a chemicals plant in Baton Rouge. (Investment banking is similar, though the transaction orientation makes the division of labour a little more sensible.)

Palantir pays less for its consultants (sorry, FDEs) than Bain et al. Few in their generation dreamed of graduating college to work at a soulless corporate consultancy. But a tech company, now that's sexy.

More pointedly: It's remarkable how an ostensibly 80% GM business only barely became profitable last year. Palantir's Q2 '24 cash flows from operations at 40% of revenues looks closer to the mark [1]. (Palantir's cost of revenue "primarily includes salaries, stock-based compensation expense, and benefits for personnel involved in performing [operations & maintenance] and professional services, as well as field service representatives, third-party cloud hosting services, travel costs, allocated overhead, and other direct costs" [2].)

[1] https://www.sec.gov/ix?doc=/Archives/edgar/data/0001321655/0...

[2] https://www.sec.gov/ix?doc=/Archives/edgar/data/0001321655/0...

g_sch · a year ago

Matt Levine had a funny similar take recently:

"You could have a model of Harvard Business School that is like:

    1. Harvard Business School teaches you skills that would make you good at running a company.
    2. There are lots of companies that could use those skills.
    3. But you don’t want to run those companies, because they make, like, ball bearings.
    4. You want to run a fancy company; you want to run a hedge fund or a tech startup or something.
    5. Meanwhile, the people currently running the ball bearings company would not be all that excited about you, a fresh-faced business school graduate who has never run anything, coming in to run their company, even if you did learn a lot of useful skills at Harvard.
    6. Therefore various industries exist whose principal business is laundering ball bearings companies into opportunities that appeal to Harvard Business School graduates. You wrap the ball bearings company in a name like “private equity” and suddenly it is legible to the Harvard students, so they flock to it.
    7. Those industries are also in the business of getting the ball bearings companies to accept the Harvard Business School graduates, which in practice means not so much “make the ball bearings company excited about its new Harvard CEO” but rather “buy the ball bearings company and install new management.”

Source: https://archive.is/8IUCA#selection-1795.0-1869.303