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jagraff commented on YouTube Blocks Background Listening Workaround for Free Users   pcmag.com/news/youtube-bl... · Posted by u/ripe
bm3719 · 23 days ago
There is no free Google product. You pay for all of them with your data, your privacy, and your attention.

Your data is worth far more to them than a $13/month subscription fee. In fact, if you do pay it, the data becomes even more valuable, because you're now guaranteed to always be logged in. You're also likely to use it more to get more "value" out of your purchase, generating even more value (for them). Finally, you've also identified yourself as the kind of person that pays for things that should be actually free.

Worse than all of this, when you use Google (or any of these malware/spyware companies), thanks to network effects, you don't just pay for it with your freedom, you pay for it with some of everyone else's too.

jagraff · 20 days ago
Setting aside whether the payment with my data is worth it - I don't understand why youtube would be in the category of "things that should be actually free". They have server costs, and employee costs, and they pay out to creators - somebody has to pay those bills.
jagraff commented on YouTube Blocks Background Listening Workaround for Free Users   pcmag.com/news/youtube-bl... · Posted by u/ripe
bm3719 · 23 days ago
It seems crazy and impossible now, but imagine this notion: Software should serve the needs of the user.

Software that does things the user doesn't want, like try to trick money out of him, waste his bandwidth, or fill his screen with unwanted ads used to have a name: Malware. We've redefined that term to mean when a non-BigTech firm does those things, but the definition used to be functional, not attributional.

RMS warned us of this day, and now it is here. You don't control your data or the code that operates upon it. That would've sucked in 1990, but since then, we've migrated our entire lives into that code/data. The degree to which it embodies your very existence is the degree to which you have lost control over your life, which for most of us is total. You lost that control but it didn't disappear; it is now owned by someone else, commoditized and exchanged, redirected and engineered. Enjoy the ride if you can, because you're just in the passenger seat.

jagraff · 23 days ago
Would it be better if youtube removed the free, ad supported version entirely, and only allowed paid users?
jagraff commented on What the hell have you built   wthhyb.sacha.house/... · Posted by u/sachahjkl
deified · 4 months ago
There is an argument I rarely ever see in discussions like this, which is about reducing the need for working memory in humans. I'm just in the mid thirties, but my ability to keep things in working memory is vastly reduced compared to my twenties. Might just be me who's not cut out for programming or system architecturing, but in my experience what is hard for me is often what is hard for others, they just either don't think about it or ignore it and push through keeping hidden costs alive.

My argument is this; even if the system itself becomes more complex, it might be worth it to make it better partitioned for human reasoning. I tend to quickly get overwhelmed and my memory is getting worse by the minute. It's a blessing for me with smaller services that I can reason about, predict consequences from, deeply understand. I can ignore everything else. When I have to deal with the infrastructure, I can focus on that alone. We also have better and more declarative tools for handling infrastructure compared to code. It's a blessing when 18 services doesn't use the same database and it's a blessing when 17 services isn't colocated in the same repository having dependencies that most people don't even identify as dependencies. Think law of leaky abstractions.

jagraff · 4 months ago
This is a good point - having your code broken up into standalone units that can fit into working memory has real benefits to the coder. I think especially with the rise of coding agents (which, like it or not, are here to stay and are likely going to increase in use over time), sections of code that can fit in a context window cleanly will be much more amenable to manipulation by LLMs and require less human oversight to modify, which may be super useful for companies that want to move faster than the speed of human programming will allow.
jagraff commented on VOC injection into a house reveals large surface reservoir sizes   pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas... · Posted by u/PaulHoule
jagraff · 5 months ago
Interesting, it seems that the actual surface material of walls and/or furniture makes a large difference in how long VOCs stick around, due to differences in surface area at the microscopic scale.

I have a couple HEPA filters in my house that hopefully keep particulate exposure down. Does this mean that I have to run them longer? That I need more of them continuously running to keep exposure to VOCs low?

jagraff commented on America's future could hinge on whether AI slightly disappoints   noahpinion.blog/p/america... · Posted by u/jxmorris12
onlyrealcuzzo · 5 months ago
Tariffs can easily be turned off, and in December the supreme Court could rule that they majority of tariffs in place are illegal AND must be refunded.

According to Polymarket, there's a >50% chance that happens: https://polymarket.com/event/will-the-supreme-court-rule-in-...

jagraff · 5 months ago
Polymarket gives a >50% chance of the tariffs being ruled illegal, not that they would be refunded - the market only gives a ~8% chance of the tariffs being ruled illegal AND and order to refund: https://polymarket.com/event/will-the-court-force-trump-to-r...
jagraff commented on CPI for all items rises 0.4% in August, 2.9% YoY; shelter and food up   bls.gov/news.release/arch... · Posted by u/impish9208
ProjectArcturis · 6 months ago
House prices actually have nothing to do with CPI. "Shelter" is calculated using "Owners Equivalent Rent": https://www.bls.gov/cpi/factsheets/owners-equivalent-rent-an...
jagraff · 6 months ago
I think, all things being equal, higher home prices should lead to higher rents, since at the margin people on the verge of buying a home would be more likely to choose to keep renting when prices are higher, thus increasing demand for rental units.
jagraff commented on Second study finds Uber used opaque algorithm to dramatically boost profits   theguardian.com/technolog... · Posted by u/c420
jowea · 9 months ago
If I understand TFA correctly, what is going on, is that the grocer is going

* This person is wearing a suit, I'm going to charge double

* This is a regular that always buys the same thing every week, I can charge 30% more without breaking his routine

* This one is buying the ingredients for a recipe to do tonight, I can charge double more on one product because she won't want to go to another grocer just for one missing item.

Or in economic terms it is doing price discrimination to turn the consumer surplus into profit for itself. I think it's obvious why consumers wouldn't like that. Although they can also do "this one is a cheapstake with lots of free time, I have to offer a 20% discount to keep him coming"

jagraff · 9 months ago
Groceries regularly do price discrimination (and have for a long time) via coupons. People mostly seem to be fine with it.
jagraff commented on The bitter lesson is coming for tokenization   lucalp.dev/bitter-lesson-... · Posted by u/todsacerdoti
marcosdumay · 9 months ago
Yeah, make the network deeper.

When all you have is a hammer... It makes a lot of sense that a transformation layer that makes the tokens more semantically relevant will help optimize the entire network after it and increase the effective size of your context window. And one of the main immediate obstacle stopping those models from being intelligent is context window size.

On the other hand, the current models already cost something on the line of the median country GDP to train, and they are nowhere close to that in value. The saying that "if brute force didn't solve your problem, you didn't apply enough force" is intended to be listened as a joke.

jagraff · 9 months ago
I think the median country GDP is something like $100 Billion

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_GDP_(PPP)

Models are expensive, but they're not that expensive.

jagraff commented on Why top posting has won (2018)   solipsys.co.uk/new/WhyTop... · Posted by u/ColinWright
jagraff · 10 months ago
I think there is perhaps a different conclusion that I come to - email is not the right tool for long discussions with multiple points of disagreement, because it is, generally, a linear medium, which makes it difficult to maintain different threads without careful formatting by every author in the email chain.

I am not sure if there exists a good tool for threaded discussions with multiple different focus areas - something like git but for conversations?

jagraff commented on Sugar-Coated Poison: Benign Generation Unlocks LLM Jailbreaking   arxiv.org/abs/2504.05652... · Posted by u/favoboa
jagraff · 10 months ago
Very interesting. From my read, it appears that the authors claim that this attack is successful because LLMs are trained (by RLHF) to reject malicious _inputs_:

> Existing large language models (LLMs) rely on shallow safety alignment to reject malicious inputs

which allows them to defeat alignment by first providing an input with semantically opposite tokens for specific tokens that get noticed as harmful by the LLM, and then providing the actual desired input, which seems to bypass the RLHF.

What I don't understand is why _input_ is so important for RLHF - wouldn't the actual output be what you want to train against to prevent undesirable behavior?

u/jagraff

KarmaCake day374June 19, 2019View Original