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lamontcg commented on UK drops demand for backdoor into Apple encryption   theverge.com/news/761240/... · Posted by u/iamdamian
hermannj314 · 6 days ago
As a believer in equal protection under the law, it is never a win when a powerful company or government lobbies for a specific carve out for only it's customers or its country. Human rights like privacy don't belong to those who bought the right phone or were born on the right piece of soil.

This isn't a win, this is solidifying and reinforcing the idea that different laws should exist for different classes of people - those who can afford to make the government look the other way and those that can't.

Congratulations to Apple on lobbying for its own money. Very noble.

lamontcg · 6 days ago
Weird way to manage to do enough contortions to make this all Apple's fault.
lamontcg commented on GPT-5   openai.com/gpt-5/... · Posted by u/rd
markasoftware · 17 days ago
this is what i don't get. How can GPT-5 ace obscure AIME problems while simultaneously falling into the trap of the most common fallacy about airfoils (despite there being copious training data calling it out as a fallacy)? And I believe you that in some context it failed to understand this simple rearrangement of terms; there's sometimes basic stuff I ask it that it fails at too.
lamontcg · 17 days ago
It still can't actually reason, LLMs are still fundamentally madlib generators that produce output that statistically looks like reasoning.

And if it is trained on both sides of the airfoil fallacy it doesn't "know" that it is a fallacy or not, it'll just regurgitate one or the other side of the argument based on if the output better fits your prompt in its training set.

lamontcg commented on HHS Winds Down mRNA Vaccine Development Under BARDA   hhs.gov/press-room/hhs-wi... · Posted by u/coloneltcb
OCASMv2 · 18 days ago
> Everyone got exposed eventually. Republicans who didn't vaccinate died at a higher rate when they got exposed.

Again, due to differences in risk behavior not limited to anti-covid measures.

> Which was Omicron, and it turned out to be just as deadly. Which completely falsifies your argument that mutation led to less deadly strains.

Not really since there's no mention of the treatment or lack thereof used there. You assume the outcome is due to lack of previous exposure when it can just be poor management.

But hey, at least is nice to see people who admit natural infection confers protection. That wasn't the case during the pandemic.

lamontcg · 18 days ago
> But hey, at least is nice to see people who admit natural infection confers protection. That wasn't the case during the pandemic.

That is incorrect. Nobody with a passing familiarity of the human immune system would claim that natural infection didn't confer immunity. It just also carries a substantially higher risk of death and disability compared to vaccination.

lamontcg commented on GPT-5   openai.com/gpt-5/... · Posted by u/rd
highfrequency · 18 days ago
It is frequently suggested that once one of the AI companies reaches an AGI threshold, they will take off ahead of the rest. It's interesting to note that at least so far, the trend has been the opposite: as time goes on and the models get better, the performance of the different company's gets clustered closer together. Right now GPT-5, Claude Opus, Grok 4, Gemini 2.5 Pro all seem quite good across the board (ie they can all basically solve moderately challenging math and coding problems).

As a user, it feels like the race has never been as close as it is now. Perhaps dumb to extrapolate, but it makes me lean more skeptical about the hard take-off / winner-take-all mental model that has been pushed.

Would be curious to hear the take of a researcher at one of these firms - do you expect the AI offerings across competitors to become more competitive and clustered over the next few years, or less so?

lamontcg · 18 days ago
> they can all basically solve moderately challenging math and coding problems

Yesterday, Claude Opus 4.1 failed in trying to figure out that `-(1-alpha)` or `-1+alpha` is the same as `alpha-1`.

We are still a little bit away from AGI.

lamontcg commented on HHS Winds Down mRNA Vaccine Development Under BARDA   hhs.gov/press-room/hhs-wi... · Posted by u/coloneltcb
OCASMv2 · 19 days ago
> Which is borne out through the higher death rate in Republicans who didn't get vaccinated, compared to Democrats who did.

Or because republicans never took the threat seriously and didn't took effective preventive measures like reducing social contact, increasing their exposure risk.

> And we had situations like Hong Kong which got absolutely hammered by Omicron, even though that strain was supposedly "less severe", because of the low levels of prior infection and vaccination when Omicron hit there.

Hong Kong focused all its efforts in preventing the virus to even get there. Once it broke through they were unprepared to deal with it, hence the bad outcome.

lamontcg · 18 days ago
> Or because republicans never took the threat seriously and didn't took effective preventive measures like reducing social contact, increasing their exposure risk.

Everyone got exposed eventually. Republicans who didn't vaccinate died at a higher rate when they got exposed.

> Hong Kong focused all its efforts in preventing the virus to even get there.

Yes, that's why it produced a good example of an immunologically naive population, late in the pandemic.

> Once it broke through they were unprepared to deal with it, hence the bad outcome.

Which was Omicron, and it turned out to be just as deadly. Which completely falsifies your argument that mutation led to less deadly strains.

We can see in Hong Kong that it was just as deadly.

In the United States it wasn't, and the difference is due to immunity from vaccination and natural infection.

lamontcg commented on HHS Winds Down mRNA Vaccine Development Under BARDA   hhs.gov/press-room/hhs-wi... · Posted by u/coloneltcb
OCASMv2 · 19 days ago
> 2021 - saved millions of lives

Not really, the virus mutating into less aggressive strains did. Reducing counter-productive treatments (like ventilators) helped greatly too.

lamontcg · 19 days ago
The virus didn't mutate into less aggressive strains, everyone got T-cells through vaccination or infection, which made subsequent infection less severe.

Which is borne out through the higher death rate in Republicans who didn't get vaccinated, compared to Democrats who did.

And we had situations like Hong Kong which got absolutely hammered by Omicron, even though that strain was supposedly "less severe", because of the low levels of prior infection and vaccination when Omicron hit there.

lamontcg commented on AWS deleted my 10-year account and all data without warning   seuros.com/blog/aws-delet... · Posted by u/seuros
spiralcoaster · 22 days ago
The amount of self-aggrandizing and lack of self awareness tells me this author is doing to do all of this again. This post could be summed up with "I should have had backups. Lesson learned", but instead they deflect to whining about how their local desktop is a mess and they NEED to store everything remotely to stay organized.

They're going to dazzle you with all of their hardened bunker this, and multiple escape route that, not realizing all of their complex machinery is metaphorically running off of a machine with no battery backup. One power outage and POOF!

lamontcg · 22 days ago
> Me: “You’re answering like I’m Piers Morgan asking ‘Do you condemn October 7th?’ and you reply with historical complexity dating to 1948.”

Yeah...

If I'm working tickets at AWS that kind of dickishness is going to ensure that I don't do more than the least amount of effort for you.

Maybe I could burn my entire weekend trying to see if I can rescue your data... or maybe I'm going to do nothing more than strictly follow procedure and let my boss know that I tried...

Deleted Comment

lamontcg commented on U.S. bombs Iranian nuclear sites   bbc.co.uk/news/live/ckg3r... · Posted by u/mattcollins
dragontamer · 2 months ago
Weapons grade Uranium is over 90% purity.

60% is just a stepping stone towards 90%.

lamontcg · 2 months ago
That's like saying driving from NYC to Sacramento is just a "Stepping Stone" to driving to SF. You've done most of the drive.

To get 1kg of U-235 requires 1.11kg at 90% purity, 1.67kg at 60% purity, and 140.6kg at natural 0.711% purity.

lamontcg commented on Tesla blows past stopped school bus and hits kid-sized dummies in FSD tests   engadget.com/transportati... · Posted by u/ndsipa_pomu
BobaFloutist · 2 months ago
At 25 mph, which I would hope would be the speed limit on roads next to schools, slamming on the brakes even seconds before colliding with children can make an enormous difference in how fast the car is going when it hits the kid.

Speed is the factor in collisions (other than weight), and modern brakes are incredibly good.

Not to mention that the car, with it's 360 degree sensors, could safely and efficiently swerve around the children even faster than it can brake, as long as there's not a car right next to you in another lane -- and even if there is, hitting another car is far less dangerous to their life than hitting the children is to yours.

These things should be so much better than we are, since they're not limited by unidirectional binocular vision, but somehow they're largely just worse. Waymo is, at best, a bit better. On average.

lamontcg · 2 months ago
> At 25 mph, which I would hope would be the speed limit on roads next to schools

I regularly drive on a two lane 55mph highway that school buses stop on and let kids out.

It runs through a reservation and has no sidewalks at all.

> modern brakes are incredibly good.

They're probably not worth that much of a superlative, and they're fundamentally limited by the tires.

This is just a pet peeve of mine, since it is used by people to argue that modern vehicles are so much vastly better than cars in the 1980s that we should be able to drive at 90mph like it is nothing.

But reaction times and kinetic energy are a bitch, and once traction control / stability assist hits its limits and can't bail you out, you might find out the hard way that you're not as good of a driver as you think you are, and your brakes won't stop you in time.

> Speed is the factor in collisions

This I will definitely agree with. Say it louder for everyone in the back.

u/lamontcg

KarmaCake day12149April 4, 2013View Original