Readit News logoReadit News
mediaman commented on Web Bot Auth   developers.cloudflare.com... · Posted by u/ananddtyagi
nerdsniper · 4 hours ago
Why use a "web bot" instead of an API? Either can be driven by an AI "agent"...but this just seems like an "API key for a visual api interface", and rather wasteful in cost and resources. If a company could afford to pay a partner for an API key they wouldn't need this. If they can't afford to pay the partner for access -- they'd still be blocked with or without "Web Bot Auth". I don't understand what this is for.

I suspect I'm missing something, what am I missing?

mediaman · an hour ago
The website the human sees is the new API.

That's needed because many APIs are either nonexistent or extremely marginal in design and content coverage.

mediaman commented on Rendering a game in real time with AI   blog.jeffschomay.com/rend... · Posted by u/jschomay
doawoo · 9 hours ago
[flagged]
mediaman · 8 hours ago
It's interesting to see software engineers realize that AI can be useful in the hands of competent engineers, but that LLMs tend to produce a mess in the hands of those with little software engineering knowledge. Then they're confused why generative AI asset creation doesn't look that good in the hands of people who have no art training.

I know someone creating a game, and she is using AI in asset creation. But she's also a highly skilled environment technical artist from the industry, and so the use of AI looks totally different than all these demos from non-artists: different types of narrow AI get injected into different little parts of the asset creation pipeline, and the result is a mix of traditional tools (Substance Designer + Painter, Blender, Maya) with AI support in moodboarding, geometry creation and some parts of texture creation. The result is a 2-5x speedup, but instead of looking like slop it looks like a stylistically distinctive, cohesive world with consistent art direction.

The common pattern is that people think AI will automate "other people," because they see its shortcomings in their own field. But because they don't understand the technical skill required in other fields, they assume AI will just "do it." Instead, it seems like AI can be a force multiplier for technically skilled people, but that it begins showing its weakness when asked to take over entire pipelines normally produced by technically skilled people, whether they be engineers or artists.

mediaman commented on The Folk Economics of Housing   aeaweb.org/articles?id=10... · Posted by u/kareemm
seanmcdirmid · 13 days ago
I never argued that new supply is bad. My only observation is that new supply does not always lead to price decreases since demand isn't fixed (e.g. Seattle isn't a closed system). I think another comment that mentioned equilibrium is probably a better way of putting it. It can take a lot of supply before the price point changes as new supply is added because a lot of people are waiting on the sideline to pay X that is already being paid for existing supply (but they are unable to pay X+1 to force someone out and take their place).
mediaman · 13 days ago
New supply obviously increases demand because shifting the supply curve to the right (more quantity) reduces the clearing price, which increases demand. That's econ 101. In this classic case, increasing supply both decreases price and increases demand.

But what you're arguing is different: that increasing supply has no effect at all on the clearing price. That would require an unusual demand "curve" that is perfectly flat, i.e., perfectly elastic, where there is infinite demand at a given price and zero demand at just a dollar above that price (or else that infinite demand would have already pushed prices up higher than the pre-existing price).

This clearly doesn't make any sense for the housing market; home buyers are sensitive to price, there is not infinite demand, some people have more or less desire to pay for a house. In fact, perfectly elastic markets essentially don't exist, and very low slope demand curves only exist in some unusual edge cases in markets (such as commodities that are near-perfect substitutes).

mediaman commented on The Folk Economics of Housing   aeaweb.org/articles?id=10... · Posted by u/kareemm
seanmcdirmid · 13 days ago
> The entire question can be contained by the assumption that "there is someone new coming to Seattle" and whether it would be better to have a new condo unit to sell to them or have them compete for existing fixed stock. The whole bit about the Chicago housing market is a distractor, because it stays the same under either policy.

Are you denying that induced demand is a thing for housing? That everyone who wants to move to Seattle will move there regardless of housing prices, and no one will leave because they get squeezed out of the housing market by new arrivals? Or is there a more nuanced argument that I'm missing?

That new condo allows one more family to live in Seattle regardless, whereas if they were competing with existing stock, some family would probably have to leave. We could play a few rounds of musical chairs to prove that fact.

mediaman · 13 days ago
Yes, people are going to get squeezed out of the housing market by new arrivals if new housing stock isn't built.

"Squeezing out" is done by a price mechanism: a family that would prefer to stay in Seattle decides to sell, because that new buyer (unable to buy the condo, because it hasn't been built) decides to offer a high enough price to induce the existing family to leave.

That's only done by reducing housing affordability (increasing prices) which is the public policy outcome we're trying to avoid.

It sounds like you agree that new supply is good, I think, because you believe new entrants would otherwise "squeeze out" existing residents and I assume you would agree that this is done by price, and so therefore you would also agree that new housing stock (which decreases the "squeezing") also suppresses price level relative to the alternative fixed stock scenario.

mediaman commented on The Folk Economics of Housing   aeaweb.org/articles?id=10... · Posted by u/kareemm
starkparker · 13 days ago
> It's not new affordable housing, but the people moving in to the new expensive houses are leaving their old houses, and the people who buy those are leaving their old houses, so eventually the price drops happen on the older, smaller homes at the bottom end of the market.

I keep seeing this, but if the housing being vacated is in a different, less-desirable market, it's a bit tree-falling-in-the-woods for locals.

If a $450,000 house in a Chicago suburb is freed up by its owners moving to a $700,000 condo in Seattle, the people who can't afford a house in Seattle don't see the benefit of the condo building and aren't going to buy the house in Chicago, and the people who can't afford a house in Chicago don't recognize the Seattle development as the cause of the house hitting the market.

mediaman · 13 days ago
This analogy seems confused.

If someone in Chicago moves to Seattle, then our policy options are (1) no new condo in Seattle or (2) new condo in Seattle.

Under policy 1, the new buyer from Chicago must outbid locals for the fixed housing supply; they will wind up buying older housing stock, which otherwise would have gone to existing local residents. Prices go up.

With policy 2, the new entrant buys the new condo and does not compete for pre-existing housing stock.

In this scenario, whatever house is freed up in Chicago is irrelevant to the housing stock in Seattle. I'm not sure why you included it.

The entire question can be contained by the assumption that "there is someone new coming to Seattle" and whether it would be better to have a new condo unit to sell to them or have them compete for existing fixed stock. The whole bit about the Chicago housing market is a distractor, because it stays the same under either policy.

mediaman commented on Rerank-2.5 and rerank-2.5-lite: instruction-following rerankers   blog.voyageai.com/2025/08... · Posted by u/fzliu
jpctan · 15 days ago
Hi fzliu,

Have you considered to add keyword search and other factors into the re-ranker?

Other factors are formatted texts like bold, heading, bullet points, as well as bunch of factors typically seen in web search techniques?

mediaman · 15 days ago
Keyword search (or something similar in concept, like bm25) would typically be first stage, rather than second, since it can be done with an inverted index.
mediaman commented on GPT-5 for Developers   openai.com/index/introduc... · Posted by u/6thbit
skepticATX · 21 days ago
This was really a bad release for OpenAI, if benchmarks are even somewhat indicative of how the model will perform in practice.
mediaman · 21 days ago
I actually don't agree. Tool use is the key to successful enterprise product integration and they have done some very good work here. This is much more important to commercialization than, for example, creative writing quality (which it reportedly is not good at).
mediaman commented on GPT-5 for Developers   openai.com/index/introduc... · Posted by u/6thbit
jodosha · 21 days ago
Still no CLI like Claude Code?
mediaman · 21 days ago
It works on Codex CLI, install it with npm.

That's been out for a while and used their 'codex' model, but they updated it today to default to gpt-5 instead.

mediaman commented on Study mode   openai.com/index/chatgpt-... · Posted by u/meetpateltech
breve · a month ago
> Adding in a mode that doesn't just dump an answer but works to take you through the material step-by-step is magical

Except these systems will still confidently lie to you.

The other day I noticed that DuckDuckGo has an Easter egg where it will change its logo based on what you've searched for. If you search for James Bond or Indiana Jones or Darth Vader or Shrek or Jack Sparrow, the logo will change to a version based on that character.

If I ask Copilot if DuckDuckGo changes its logo based on what you've searched for, Copilot tells me that no it doesn't. If I contradict Copilot and say that DuckDuckGo does indeed change its logo, Copilot tells me I'm absolutely right and that if I search for "cat" the DuckDuckGo logo will change to look like a cat. It doesn't.

Copilot clearly doesn't know the answer to this quite straightforward question. Instead of lying to me, it should simply say it doesn't know.

mediaman · a month ago
This is endlessly brought up as if the human operating the tool is an idiot.

I agree that if the user is incompetent, cannot learn, and cannot learn to use a tool, then they're going to make a lot of mistakes from using GPTs.

Yes, there are limitations to using GPTs. They are pre-trained, so of course they're not going to know about some easter egg in DDG. They are not an oracle. There is indeed skill to using them.

They are not magic, so if that is the bar we expect them to hit, we will be disappointed.

But neither are they useless, and it seems we constantly talk past one another because one side insists they're magic silicon gods, while the other says they're worthless because they are far short of that bar.

mediaman commented on Section 174 is reversed, mostly   newsletter.pragmaticengin... · Posted by u/jawns
jszymborski · a month ago
> (if salaries are equal)

That's rarely the case, right?

mediaman · a month ago
He's not saying it's only true when salaries are equal. It makes a significant difference at the margin: if you're an employer debating whether to employ US talent or offshore talent, weighing time zones, skill and other factors against cost, then introducing a tax advantage for domestic hiring will cause those employers who were otherwise indifferent between the two options to now prefer US labor.

u/mediaman

KarmaCake day5374April 20, 2009View Original