lampington (u/lampington)

lampington commented on Yann LeCun: AI one-percenters seizing power forever is real doomsday scenario businessinsider.com/sam-a... · Posted by u/g42gregory

zimpenfish · 2 years ago

> He's pretty sure that human civilization will be extinct this century.

If they are, it'll almost certainly[1] be climate change or nuclear war, it won't be AI.

[1] leaving some wiggle room for pandemics, asteroids, etc.

lampington · 2 years ago

> If they are

Am I the only one slightly disturbed by the use of "they" in that sentence? I know that the HN commentariat is broad-based, but I didn't realise we already had non-human members ;-)

lampington commented on As Digital Nomads Flock to Lisbon, Portugal's Youth Are Leaving in Droves bloomberg.com/news/featur... · Posted by u/pg_1234

quonn · 2 years ago

That was always the idea. There was a cheaper golden visa just for repairing ruins …

lampington · 2 years ago

I wonder how much good it did? You do see lots of places for sale in the countryside with XXX of land with a ruin of YYY, and it sounds like people have been using those to build summer houses, but the city centre feels like where it with be needed most. And there are still prominent ruins in central Lisbon, right by Marques de Pombal for example.

lampington commented on As Digital Nomads Flock to Lisbon, Portugal's Youth Are Leaving in Droves bloomberg.com/news/featur... · Posted by u/pg_1234

quonn · 2 years ago

> 3. Restrict foreign ownership of huge swathes of the country. This could be as simple as "new construction only".

This will make the problem worse as the Portuguese will complain that the foreigners own the beautiful modern buildings.

Additionally it‘s important to keep in mind that this is not feasible for EU countries with the four freedoms. It would be like Florida banning ownership of existing houses for Californians.

(1) would totally kill the Portuguese tourism industry.

(2) is reasonable and they are already doing it - but not sufficiently.

I have a better idea: Tax the nomads with a rate that matches typical tax rates (around 30-40% and waive the crippling social security if health insurance is covered from abroad, not the excessive Portuguese taxes of 53% + 35% social security for a total of 88% on a salary of > 80.000. Nomads are fully exempted because nobody would be willing to pay that much). It would bring more than enough money into the country for house construction.

lampington · 2 years ago

I'd go the other way with the buildings -- there are lots of unmaintained or even semi-ruined buildings, even in central Lisbon, which would benefit from foreign investment. Some of them are probably that way due to inheritance disputes, but others, I think, just need an owner that values their age. Maybe allow foreign ownership of older buildings over some particular size, or only if they do significant repairs, or something like that?

lampington commented on As Digital Nomads Flock to Lisbon, Portugal's Youth Are Leaving in Droves bloomberg.com/news/featur... · Posted by u/pg_1234

ohashi · 2 years ago

Not quite on the golden visa. Just the real estate option.

https://www.portugal.com/news/portugal-officially-ending-gol...

lampington · 2 years ago

Also worth noting that the real estate option has excluded property in Lisbon and the surroundings, Porto and Algarve for some time, and those were the places where most people from abroad would have wanted to move to.

lampington commented on Wise is deactivating Business cards in the US on Oct. 31st wise.com/help/articles/1R... · Posted by u/omneity

evadne · 2 years ago

I second the recommendation for IBKR which quotes FX rates at market compared to Wise. When the sum is higher, the differences can be drastic.

As long as you run an active trading account with them it should be fine for occasional cash movements.

lampington · 2 years ago

Agreed, if it's not your primary purpose for having the account then it should be fine. I did a bunch of FX through them not long after opening mine, and they sent me a polite email telling me that I shouldn't do that, which was fair enough. Much better than the "freeze account first, warn later" attitude that many other financial companies seem to have.

Now that I've been investing with them for a while, they don't seem to mind.

lampington commented on Why do cats love boxes so much? discovermagazine.com/plan... · Posted by u/helsinkiandrew

kstenerud · 2 years ago

I've been in an MRI scanner. It's not a calming experience by any measure. The shape of the thing is all wrong, the parts that move are unnerving, and it emits a stress-inducing sound. This is one device that REALLY needs a UX person to take a look at its outer design.

lampington · 2 years ago

Really? I rather like the German industrial techno they play while you're in it.

lampington commented on Workers AI: Serverless GPU-powered inference blog.cloudflare.com/worke... · Posted by u/jgrahamc

celso · 2 years ago

The models in our catalog are all pre-loaded before requests come in.

lampington · 2 years ago

Makes sense. A bring-your-own-model feature would be awesome, but would make it impossible to do that for rarely-used models without using valuable GPU RAM.

lampington commented on Are any words the same in all languages? blog.duolingo.com/words-s... · Posted by u/spansoa

airza · 2 years ago

Japanese uses “nyaa” for meow. I’m sure there are other counterexamples.

lampington · 2 years ago

Thanks! TIL that nyancat is something like "meowcat"

lampington commented on Now it's PostgreSQL's turn to have a bogus CVE opensourcewatch.beehiiv.c... · Posted by u/elorant

yashap · 2 years ago

There are legit security researchers out there, doing good work and finding real issues, but the vast, vast majority are … not that. If you open a security bug bounty program, for example, you’ll mostly get either auto-generated garbage like this, or just super generic non-issues like exposing numeric ids to clients, using anything less than the strictest CSP headers, etc.

I’m actually surprised there aren’t MORE bogus CVEs out there, based on my experience with bug bounty programs.

lampington · 2 years ago

I picked up the term "beg bounty" from somewhere a while back. It's a very useful phrase to describe the low-effort run-some-crappy-scan-and-spam-security-at-domain junk that comes through.

lampington commented on Do we really need a specialized vector database? modelz.ai/blog/pgvector... · Posted by u/gaocegege

lampington · 2 years ago

Great article, but I'm saddened by their view that C is too hard to work with, so the 2-year-old extension must be rewritten in Rust.

C certainly has its faults, and while I have no real experience with Rust, I'm willing to believe that it's significantly better as a language.

But pgvector, at least from a quick scan, looks like a well-written, easily comprehensible C codebase with decent tests. There are undoubtedly lots of hard problems that the developers have solved in implementing it. Putting time and effort into reimplementing all of that in another language because of an aversion to C feels like a waste of effort that could be put into enhancing the existing extension.

Maybe there's something I'm missing? Is the C implementation not as solid as it looks at first glance?