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hnaccount_rng commented on How does misalignment scale with model intelligence and task complexity?   alignment.anthropic.com/2... · Posted by u/salkahfi
gf000 · 7 days ago
I don't know, LLMs strive on human text, so I would wager that a language designed for humans would quite closely match an ideal one for LLMs. Probably the only difference is that LLMs are not "lazy", they better tolerate boilerplate, and lower complexity structures likely fit them better. (E.g. they can't really one-shot understand some imported custom operator that is not very common in its training data)

Also, they rely surprisingly closely on "good" code patterns, like comments and naming conventions.

So if anything, a managed language [1] with a decent type system and not a lot of features would be the best, especially if it has a lot of code in its training data. So I would rather vote on Java, or something close.

[1] reasoning about life times, even if aided by the compiler is a global property, and LLMs are not particularly good at that

hnaccount_rng · 6 days ago
But that is leas fundamental then you make it sound. LLMs work well with human language because that’s all they are trained on. So what else _could_ an ideal language possible look like?

On the other hand: the usefulness of LLMs will always be gated by their interface to the human world. So even if their internal communication might be superseded at some point. Their contact surface can only evolve if their partners/subjects/masters can interface

hnaccount_rng commented on When employees feel slighted, they work less   penntoday.upenn.edu/news/... · Posted by u/consumer451
randycupertino · 16 days ago
I felt like they should have just written off the error and let me keep it, as by the time they realized it, it was almost a year later, and I was a high-performer who had gotten promoted twice. I left the following year for a better opportunity, but this was sort of one thing that turned me 180* from being an all-in, kool-aid drinking culture-carrier to feeling kind of bitter and shafted by them.
hnaccount_rng · 15 days ago
Depends on the future expected value that they assign to you. But.. yes
hnaccount_rng commented on When employees feel slighted, they work less   penntoday.upenn.edu/news/... · Posted by u/consumer451
randycupertino · 16 days ago
I have an example of this that happened to me:

I received a referral bonus and where the company payroll made an error and accidentally gave me a higher bonus per the level of employee my referral reward was (they set it to the bonus level for a VP and she was a Sr. Director). So unbeknownst to me they gave me $5000 extra in my bonus that should have been only $3000, not $8k. Accounting figured this out next tax season, so then they informed me the would be clawing their error overpayment back had, which apparently is legal. Thus the $5k was taken out of my next paycheck. Their error was not my fault!

I was really annoyed and basically stopped going above and beyond for that company the rest of the year. :-/

It just seemed very petty and reactionary of them for something that was their error originally. This messed up my budget and suddenly having $5k less 9 months later that I hadn't anticipated was a bit of an unforeseen financial hardship. Also she had been my 5th referral to date that they'd hired!!

The whole thing was very demoralizing.

hnaccount_rng · 16 days ago
I love that example. It’s a basic exercise in “for how little money can you break any amount of trust”. Not sure how they could avoid that (besides being competent in the first place..)
hnaccount_rng commented on Proof of Corn   proofofcorn.com/... · Posted by u/rocauc
onion2k · 17 days ago
In this case the LLM is just acting as a super-charged search engine.

It isn't, because that implies getting everything necessary in a single action, as if there are high quality webpages that give a good answer to each prompt. There aren't. At the very least Claude must be searching, evaluating the results, and collating the data in finds from multiple results into a single cohesive response. There could be some agentic actions that cause it to perform further searches if it doesn't evaluate the data to a sufficiently high quality response.

"It's just a super-charged search engine" ignores a lot of nuance about the difference between LLMs and search engines.

hnaccount_rng · 17 days ago
I think we are pretty much past the "LLMs are useless" phase, right? But I think "super-charged search engine" is a reasonably well fitting description. Like a search engine, it provides its user with information. Yes, it is (in a crude simplified description) better at that. Both in terms of completeness (you get a more "thoughtful" follow up) as well as in finding what you are looking for when you are not yet speaking the language.

But that's not what OP was contesting. The statement "$LLM is _doing_ $STUFF in the real world" is far less correct than the characterisation as "super-charged search engine". Because - at least as far as I'm aware - every real-world interaction had required consent from humans. This story including

hnaccount_rng commented on UK offshore wind prices come in 40% cheaper than gas in record auction   electrek.co/2026/01/14/uk... · Posted by u/doener
zingar · 25 days ago
> ~ doesn’t matter whether you first sell the energy and then go to the government for reimbursement. Or whether you sell the energy to the government which then handles the follow up sale

Still missing something in relation to a point above. Does one of these scenarios involve the operator “paying” or “giving back” actual money when the market price is higher than agreed? As opposed to just operating at a loss or less profit?

hnaccount_rng · 25 days ago
If you are willing to ignore the mechanics, then the result rounds to: The operator will receive the auctioned value of x £/MWh for each MWh delivered to the grid

If you are interested in the mechanics, then _I think_ (i.e. not first hand knowledge) the operator will join each auction (once per day for each 15 min interval of the next day) and offer his energy amount there. He will then receive the integral of (auction price) times (volume) from “the grid”. If that is too little money he then goes to the government and asks for a top up to (contract price) times (volume). If that was too much he has to pay the government the difference.

But again. That is purely mechanical. The end effect of the contracts is you will always receive say 80£ per MWh delivered. Independent of the MWh was worth 500£ in that 15 min interval or -50£. It’s “just” a risk transfer

Ah I’m seeing a possible confusion. There are two different auctions in the description. The first one is for the CfD price and happens (for each project) once. The second one is the daily-price-discovery one and happens daily

hnaccount_rng commented on UK offshore wind prices come in 40% cheaper than gas in record auction   electrek.co/2026/01/14/uk... · Posted by u/doener
SoftTalker · 25 days ago
There's a big wind farm I drive by occasionally and sometimes most of the windmills are feathered. Some are turning, so there's clearly wind. I have assumed this is when the demand is low (or maybe negative).
hnaccount_rng · 25 days ago
That’s not necessarily true. In general a single windmill is more efficient at pulling energy out of the wind than two are. And the marginal costs of windmills are not zero. I.e. their maintenance cadence (also) scales with active hours. So it might be a “at this price-wind point it’s not profitable for us to run a second mill”
hnaccount_rng commented on UK offshore wind prices come in 40% cheaper than gas in record auction   electrek.co/2026/01/14/uk... · Posted by u/doener
zingar · 25 days ago
I’m missing something. Is the operator paying actual cash money if the market price goes up? It’s not just that they’re forced to produce electricity at a rate that’s possibly less than what it cost to buy fuel?

(Or in the case of renewables: producing for less profit than they would if they made their contract later)

hnaccount_rng · 25 days ago
Think of it this way: as a windfarm operator you know your costs and you know your expected amount of energy produced. But you don’t know the precise timing and therefore the market value at generation time.

From the first two you can calculate what you need in terms of £/MWh (include whatever profit you want in there). Now you can go to the government and bid that price in the auction. If you win, you have a safe profit and all risk (and upside potential) now lies with the government. As GP said, in the case of 2022 you would have lost out on revenue. But that’s the price foe guaranteed margins

The CfD part is a technical detail. It ~ doesn’t matter whether you first sell the energy and then go to the government for reimbursement. Or whether you sell the energy to the government which then handles the follow up sale.

What I’m not sufficiently familiar with is whether you _have_ to go to such an auction (i.e. whether the auction also is the mechanism of capacity planning) or whether you are free to bypass this system and just hook up your wind park and carry the risk yourself. But functionally this is an insurance scheme for profits, with a market based pricing system

hnaccount_rng commented on The Waymo Ojai Will Soon Offer Autonomous Rides Around the U.S.   caranddriver.com/news/a69... · Posted by u/Zigurd
AlotOfReading · a month ago
Vehicle regs require passenger restraints for safety reasons. That's only analogous to a very specific kind of hotel room. The bus exemption kicks in for vehicles designed to carry more than 10 people.

Also, hotel rooms tend to offer privacy. If you do that in a vehicle people get motion sickness.

To be clear, I do think there's interesting stuff in this general area. I'm just not sure it's as a sleeper bus. The big OEMs have loads of interesting concept designs buried in their basements about similar vehicles that I wish could see the light of day.

hnaccount_rng · a month ago
Why wouldn't a few-occupancy sleeper bus work? I'd agree that this is a bit beyond "normal cars are autonomous". But I don't think the driving part will be particularly special to this application. It's just the form factor that changes.

Whether it will be possible to be cheap enough operationally is an interesting question though. The price of an (autonomous) taxi is (probably?) largely lower bounded by cost to build the system divided by the number of times it's used. And that means the denominator largely scales inversely with trip length. So it might still be too expensive to offer hotel-price level fares for night-long drives

hnaccount_rng commented on ICE's Tool to Monitor Phones in Neighborhoods   404media.co/inside-ices-t... · Posted by u/cmurf
embedding-shape · a month ago
> I mean, who else is using a pager in Lebanon?

But they can impossibly actually know who physically has the pager next to them, when they're triggering them. This is the "failing to verify each target" part.

hnaccount_rng · a month ago
I mean in the case in Lebanon they knew. They sold those pagers to Hezbollah.
hnaccount_rng commented on Asahi Linux with Sway on the MacBook Air M2 (2024)   daniel.lawrence.lu/blog/2... · Posted by u/andsoitis
ffsm8 · a month ago
Not trying to discredit your idea, but I feel like you're misrepresenting the amount of optimization apple does by calling it baseline.

It's generally the most optimized system down to the fact that Apple controls everything about it's platform.

If that's considered baseline, then nothing but full vertical integration can compete

hnaccount_rng · a month ago
While you are correct, for any user this is completely irrelevant, right? I have the choice between picking up an MBA or a different laptop. One comes with a reasonable expectation of battery life. The other is a gamble

u/hnaccount_rng

KarmaCake day790January 17, 2021View Original