generalizations (u/generalizations)

generalizations commented on Notepad++ hijacked by state-sponsored actors notepad-plus-plus.org/new... · Posted by u/mysterydip

Barrin92 · 10 days ago

what I took a bit of offense with is the term "software maccarythism". That's a movement now remembered for an over-reaction to often imaginary enemies. Ukraine is right now fighting for its life in a hot war on our continent here in Europe. Taiwan is at the very real risk of being invaded.

American and European infrastructure is subject to cyber attacks that that are effectively hostile military acts already. I don't think a vocal stance on Ukraine and an exclusion of Russian developers deserves the rhetoric of McCarthyism or being 'too political' as is these days a fashionable accusation. This is no red scare, this is speaking up for people bombed on a daily basis.

generalizations · 10 days ago

> a movement now remembered for an over-reaction to often imaginary enemies

I'm sure it felt very real at the time.

generalizations commented on How AI assistance impacts the formation of coding skills anthropic.com/research/AI... · Posted by u/vismit2000

generalizations · 13 days ago

From Plato's Phaedrus, on the invention of writing:

Theuth: "This invention, O king, will make the Egyptians wiser and will improve their memories; for it is an elixir of memory and wisdom that I have discovered."

Thamus replied: "Most ingenious Theuth, one man has the ability to beget arts, but the ability to judge of their usefulness or harmfulness to their users belongs to another; and now you, who are the father of letters, have been led by your affection to ascribe to them a power the opposite of that which they really possess. For this invention will produce forgetfulness in the minds of those who learn to use it, because they will not practice their memory. Their trust in writing, produced by external characters which are no part of themselves, will discourage the use of their own memory within them.

You have discovered an elixir not of memory but of reminding; and you offer your pupils the appearance of wisdom, not true wisdom, for they will read many things without instruction and will therefore seem to know many things, when they are for the most part ignorant and hard to get along with, since they are not wise, but only appear wise."

Which is to say: "All this has happened before, and will happen again."

generalizations commented on Dell admits consumers don't care about AI PCs pcgamer.com/hardware/dell... · Posted by u/mossTechnician

aleph_minus_one · a month ago

> NPUs were pushed by Microsoft, who saw the writing on the wall: AI like chatgpt will dominate the user's experience, edge computing is a huge advantage in that regard

Then where is a demo application from Microsoft of a model that I can run locally where my user experience is so much better (faster?) if my computer has an NPU?

generalizations · a month ago

I didn't say they succeeded, I said they had no option but to try.

generalizations commented on Dell admits consumers don't care about AI PCs pcgamer.com/hardware/dell... · Posted by u/mossTechnician

pseudosavant · a month ago

I don't know how many others here have a CoPilot+ PC but the NPU on it is basically useless. There isn't any meaningful feature I get by having that NPU. They are far too limited to ever do any meaningful local LLM inference, image processing or generation. It handles stuff like video chat background blurring, but users' PC's have been doing that for years now without an NPU.

generalizations · a month ago

NPUs were pushed by Microsoft, who saw the writing on the wall: AI like chatgpt will dominate the user's experience, edge computing is a huge advantage in that regard, and Apple's hardware can do it. NPUs are basically Microsoft trying to fudge their way to a llamacpp-on-Apple-Silicon experience. Obviously it failed, but they couldn't not try.

generalizations commented on Show HN: I made a spreadsheet where formulas also update backwards victorpoughon.github.io/b... · Posted by u/fouronnes3

throw310822 · 2 months ago

Hm? I don't get it.

What's the point of calculating backwards non-invertible operations such as addition? Isn't the result just arbitrary?

generalizations · 2 months ago

They said this:

> Even a normal spreadsheet is fairly complex beast. But the novel thing about bidicalc is the backwards solver. Mathematically, updating a spreadsheet "backward" is a (potentially underdetermined) root finding problem, because we are trying to find a vector of unknowns such that , where F is the function computed by the cells formulas, and G is the objective value entered in the cell. Note that F is not necessarily a single formula, but the result of composing an upstream graph of cells into a single function.

> The actual root-finding solver is a custom algorithm that I made. It a general purpose algorithm that will find one root of any continuous-almost-everywhere function for which a complete syntactic expression is known. It uses a mix of continuous constraint propagation on interval union arithmetic , directional Newton's method and dichotomic search. It is of course limited by floating point precision and available computation time.

But that really doesn't answer your question. I see no reason why the solver wouldn't decide every time it had a two-variable summation that ADD(X+Y) doesn't reverse to X=-90 and Y=100.

generalizations commented on Stopping bad guys from using my open source project (feedback wanted) evanhahn.com/stopping-bad... · Posted by u/emschwartz

navane · 2 months ago

Whoops you're right. I read it twice and completely overlooked that part. Also one of the seven bullet points points in that direction.

I read it as a more "big corps exploiting open source devs" take (as were six out of seven bullet points), but they did indeed slip that in, and concluded with it even.

generalizations · 2 months ago

Upvoted but felt bad for not replying. Yeah, I initially read it as a generic "big corps exploiting open source devs" take as well. Not often someone actually says "whoops you're right" so kudos - not sure I would've done the same.

The article is an interesting philosophical situation where you know the intent is good. But maybe, they took it too far without any of the necessary caveats.

generalizations commented on Stopping bad guys from using my open source project (feedback wanted) evanhahn.com/stopping-bad... · Posted by u/emschwartz

navane · 2 months ago

No, what is deemed evil by this blog, is what exploites open source. For open source software, that's very relevant.

Just like anti democratic values are relevant for democracies.

Don't straw man this.

generalizations · 2 months ago

No, I did not. From the article. This is, unfortunately, a straightforward case of poorly-considered moralizing with extremely bad consequences.

> Overall, these ideas lead me to believe that the open source movement needs to see itself as in a larger social context. Can we shift the balance of power away from massive companies and their massive harms? Can we prevent Nazis from using our software? Should we even try?

> I know my goal: shift the default in open source from “it’s free for anyone to use” to “please don’t use this if you’re evil”. I don’t just want to do this for my little project; I want to slowly change the discourse. I’m not sure how to do that effectively, if it’s even possible.

generalizations commented on Stopping bad guys from using my open source project (feedback wanted) evanhahn.com/stopping-bad... · Posted by u/emschwartz

generalizations · 2 months ago

Sounds good, but what happens when everyone else uses ideological purity filters too?

Because if what this guy is saying is reasonable, then it immediately follows that it's also reasonable for every ideology and religion to exclude the ones they don't like. For example: how does an antisimetic software license strike you? Because that would be a perfectly reasonable license for some people to enact, and fully justified by this article's logic.

Do unto others, and all that.