jamincan (u/jamincan)

jamincan commented on Chomsky on what ChatGPT is good for (2023) chomsky.info/20230503-2/... · Posted by u/mef

namaria · 3 months ago

> E.g it can be argued that the latest LLMs like Gemini 2.5 and Claude 4 in fact do complex reasoning.

They most definitely don't. We attach symbolic meaning to their output because we can map it semantically to the input we gave it. Which is why people are often caught by surprise when these mappings break down.

LLMs can emulate reasoning, but the failure modes show that they don't. We can get them to be coincidentally emulating reasoning well enough long enough to fools us, investors and the media. But doubling down on it hoping that this problem goes away with scale or fine tuning is proving more and more reckless.

jamincan · 3 months ago

Humans aren't infallible and make mistakes in reasoning as well. What is fundamentally different about the mistakes we make versus the mistakes that Claude or Gemini make? Haven't LLM's even been shown to make the same posthoc rationalizations of mistakes that we as humans do all the time?

jamincan commented on Whistleblower: DOGE Siphoned NLRB Case Data krebsonsecurity.com/2025/... · Posted by u/whalesalad

tomhow · 4 months ago

I mean not to be difficult: just to try and understand exactly what your claim is.

If you have an example of a moderation action that you disagreed with (E.g., a particular story about DOGE or the administration that wasn't adequately discussed on HN), please share a link or something else concrete and we'll explain it or investigate it. You can post it here or email us (we have had email threads going back years with users who want to share feedback and learn about how we think about these things [1]).

There are plenty of ways of examining the data:

- https://github.com/HackerNews/API

- https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40644563

- https://hn.algolia.com/

- https://news.ycombinator.com/front

If you have concerns about any future stories being hidden, you could set up your own API listener, monitor for new stories and then see which ones are flagged or killed.

For the record, I routinely undertake practices for evaluating and improving my own judgement, and am happy to do so regarding any specific case. But you haven't provided me with any specific feedback to respond to.

[1] https://www.newyorker.com/news/letter-from-silicon-valley/th...

jamincan · 4 months ago

At the peak period of DOGE activity when it was the biggest political news story, I never once saw stories about it on the front page here. Someone relying on HN as their primary news aggregator would be entirely clueless to what was going on in Washington. I actually tried searching for them at last, because it seemed implausible to me that nothing was being posted and gaining traction and it was only then that I realized that there were tonnes of stories, but they were being flagged and buried.

I don't necessarily know that it's moderator malfeascence so much as people abusing HN tools to bury stories that they don't like, but I do think that there should be some consideration about how those tools are being abused and how that abuse can be effectively countered.

I get the impression that an effort is being made to correct the situation, but I've given up on the front page and only visit /active now, so I might be completely wrong.

jamincan commented on Trump temporarily drops tariffs to 10% for most countries cnbc.com/2025/04/09/trump... · Posted by u/bhouston

mrandish · 5 months ago

> Genuinely wondering why so many people are still giving the Trump administration this much benefit of the doubt that their moves are strategically sound?

Since I'm one of 'those people' who's been willing to grant Trump some benefit of the doubt in the past, I'll respond with my take. tl;dr Trump's handling of the tariffs have been such disaster, there's simply no possibility it was based on a strategically sound plan. So, in answer to your question, this episode has caused me to substantially foreclose my prior willingness to grant Trump some benefit of the doubt.

To be clear, while I've tried to remain open-minded re: Trump I've never felt that he's especially smart and certainly not someone I'd ever personally like or hang out with but I'm also one of those contrarians who doesn't think every politician or public figure needs to be someone I personally like or approve of in a moral sense. I've also been willing to concede that some things done by the executive branch during his first term were generally positive (whether because of or in spite of Trump isn't clear). I also think his policies and statements have been subject to an unprecedented degree of negative spin in the media - sometimes well-deserved but always hyped overwhelmingly to the negative. So I made an effort to look past the constant headlines of, essentially, "orange man bad in all possible ways." I also decided to ignore Trump's own bizarrely extreme pronouncements and focus only on what he really put into practice and, most importantly, the tangible real-world impact of those actions on the broad population and economy over time (not the extrapolated predictions in the media).

However, even to me, how he's handled this tariff thing has been a complete shit show. I've spent a fair bit of time trying to understand the various explanations, contextualizations and even 'hidden grand plan' theories proposed by some and they simply aren't plausible. It's not a 'master negotiator strategy' because he asked for concessions but never made any concrete proposals of quid pro quo. There was no attempt at serious negotiation with most major trading partners (according to the WSJ) and thus no possibility of meaningful deals.

Now suddenly (somewhat) reversing course like this a few days after going so extreme and then publicly doubling down on his long-term commitment to the 'grand strategy' is unbelievably damaging to any remaining shred of credibility his administration may have had. It nukes any possibility that he was doing a 'crazy guy on the subway' strategy of punching his adversaries in the face and making them believe he was so nuts he'd saw off his own arm just to keep beating them over the head with it - all to cleverly convince them to make meaningful concessions they'd never make any other way. Yeah, well now that he blinked in less than a week, nothing he can do will ever make them believe that. I mean, if that was the plan, it was a terrible plan and poorly executed to boot, but flipping like this is even worse.

All I can figure is that it was a 'crazy guy' plan but that he intended to keep it going for several months and then, when his opponents were bloodied enough he'd open negotiations and "win" in a master stroke. Except he completely miscalculated the degree of economic destruction he'd cause in U.S. markets and has now had to not only fold but reveal he was playing a weak bluff all along. I'm struggling to come up with any way this could have been worse for the U.S. and Trump's interests. After this, it's hard to imagine any trading partner negotiating in good faith, or perhaps, at all with Trump over tariffs in the next 90 days. The only rational strategy for them is to play along and gather info while conceding nothing meaningful and simply wait and see what Trump's ultimately going to do long term.

As far as I'm concerned, I bent over backward to grant Trump some benefit of the doubt and give him a chance to prove himself but the tariffs have been so bungled they're impossible to put it in any positive light. So far, it appears to be an epic disaster of hubris and naive miscalculation.

jamincan · 5 months ago

Is it possible that Trump is just a stupid person? That he genuinely believes the tariffs will be good, that he's being influenced by stupid people (Navarro) that believe this, and that the reaction of bond markets that didn't follow his overly simplistic model made him hit the brakes?

jamincan commented on "Final Usonian Home" by Frank Lloyd Wright Completed in Ohio dezeen.com/2025/03/20/fin... · Posted by u/rmason

jamincan · 5 months ago

@dang Surely this is mistakenly flagged? This is interesting and hardly seems controversial or inflammatory.

jamincan commented on CDC's top laboratory on STDs is shut by Trump administration statnews.com/2025/04/05/c... · Posted by u/pmags

patates · 5 months ago

I think Herpes Zoster (shingles) vaccine already did a great positive impact on that front.

Though I agree, any advance against simplex would have been a big victory.

jamincan · 5 months ago

It was in the news in the past week that the shingles vaccine may reduce dementia risk by 20%. The results also point to it being a causative effect rather than simply correlative, which, if true, is huge.

https://www.business-standard.com/health/shingles-vaccine-ma...

jamincan commented on Self-Driving Teslas Are Fatally Rear-Ending Motorcyclists More Than Any Other fuelarc.com/news-and-feat... · Posted by u/NotInOurNames

senkora · 5 months ago

I see a lot of people saying that this isn't statistically significant. I think that that is probably true, but I also think that it is important to do the statistical test to make sure:

    tesla.mult = c(1/(5:2),1:5)
    data.frame(tesla.mult = tesla.mult, p.value = sapply(tesla.mult, (function(tesla.mult) { poisson.test(c(5, 0), c(tesla.mult, 1))$p.value })))

      tesla.mult      p.value
    1  0.2000000 0.0001286008
    2  0.2500000 0.0003200000
    3  0.3333333 0.0009765625
    4  0.5000000 0.0041152263
    5  1.0000000 0.0625000000
    6  2.0000000 0.1769547325
    7  3.0000000 0.3408203125
    8  4.0000000 0.5904000000
    9  5.0000000 1.0000000000

tesla.mult is how many times more total miles Teslas have driven with level-2 ADAS engaged compared to all other makers. We don't have data for what that number should be because automakers are not required to report it. I think that it is probably somewhere between 1/5 and 5. If you believe that the number is more than 1, then the result is not statistically significant.

jamincan · 5 months ago

Even though other manufacturers may not be reporting these numbers, Level 2 ADAS systems are pretty common as far as I can tell. Wouldn't any vehicle with adaptive cruise control and lane-keep assist be considered Level 2 ADAS?

jamincan commented on Self-Driving Teslas Are Fatally Rear-Ending Motorcyclists More Than Any Other fuelarc.com/news-and-feat... · Posted by u/NotInOurNames

plun9 · 5 months ago

This isn't true. You can try using adaptive cruise control with lane-keeping on a radar-equipped car on an undivided highway. Radar is good at detecting distance and velocity, but can't see lane lines. In order to prevent collisions, you would need to know precisely the road geometry and lane positions, which may come from camera data, and combine that information with the vehicle information.

jamincan · 5 months ago

I do this all the time with no problem at all. I drive a 2023 VW Taos, for what that is worth.

jamincan commented on Circuit breaker triggered in Japan for stock futures trading wsj.com/livecoverage/stoc... · Posted by u/perihelions

timr · 5 months ago

> Indeed. That's especially true on the NATO side. This is a historical event on the scale of the breakup of the USSR.

Exaggeration isn't helpful. Whatever "this" is, you can't possibly make an assessment of that kind until years after the fact.

In March 2020, people were convincing themselves that the global economy was flying straight into the ground, but people who didn't lose their minds made a lot of money, quickly.

IMO, there was a better case for that panic, given the context (they were partly right! the lockdown stuff was incredibly costly!), than there is that this particular spasm is meaningful. Only time will tell.

jamincan · 5 months ago

The first man on the moon, the breakup of the Soviet Union, September 11 - these were all things that people predicted would be monumental world-changing events at that point in history, and also proved to be after the fact. Maybe history will prove us wrong, but this feels like one of those moments to me.

jamincan commented on An 'administrative error' sent a Maryland man to an El Salvador prison apnews.com/article/el-sal... · Posted by u/geox

infecto · 5 months ago

Just asking a question like proves the point. Bluntly yes those discussions are fine. With the huge polarization in politics, regardless of side it devolves into an endless low-signal comments that add nothing new of value. There is no added value in any comments that would crop up from a post like this. It is also why anything related to Israel vs Gaza get auto flagged. People like to project it’s because of secret operations to remove all negative publicity but generally it’s more mundane, folks don’t want to rehash the same arguments over and over.

jamincan · 5 months ago

Should we also then be flagging posts about Rust due to the low-effort drive-by comments sniping at the language and Rust community?

jamincan commented on Tesla sales drop 35% in San Diego County fox5sandiego.com/news/bus... · Posted by u/doener

jacktheturtle · 5 months ago

i don’t understand how so many people are doing such illogical actions and justifying it because of “Elon”. Elon != Tesla..

get off social media and read something, come to your own conclusions. don’t just blindly follow others.

jamincan · 5 months ago

Why do you think Tesla stock prices doubled after Trump's election? Obviously Tesla is more than just Elon, but it is pretty clear that a huge portion of its market cap can be attributed to Musk and hype that he generates.