mejutoco (u/mejutoco)

mejutoco commented on How Much Wealth an AI Stock Market Crash Could Destroy economist.com/interactive... · Posted by u/skx001

mitthrowaway2 · 5 days ago

That's very witty, but not really accurate. I think in any market where you're the seller, you will complain (or at least be grumpy) when your competitors slash prices. Especially when you're not sure the sale is temporary, and the market price is now below your cost basis on your inventory. And especially if your accountants are forced to write down your inventory value to the new, lower price.

Even when people are only buying with no intent to sell, they'll often complain if prices fall right after they've bought an item, and ask for a rebate for the difference, because they feel they deserve the new lower price. Many retailers are aware of this psychology and do offer some sort of forward-looking price match, both to help buyers overcome that hesitation, and to avoid going through the paperwork of returning and refunding a used item just to sell the same thing again anyway. But the stock market offers no such buyer protections.

mejutoco · 5 days ago

> But the stock market offers no such buyer protections.

In some situations you can deduct losses in the stock market from the taxes to pay over the next 5 years. Not the same, but not nothing.

mejutoco commented on Lie groups are crucial to some of the most fundamental theories in physics quantamagazine.org/what-a... · Posted by u/ibobev

voxleone · 12 days ago

My experience with groups and linear algebra is similar. I made real progress only after I got past the initial fear and intimidation, making a point of understanding those beautiful equations. Now I find myself agreeing with those who argue that mathematics education could profitably begin with sets and groups instead of numbers.

https://d1gesto.blogspot.com/2025/11/math-education-what-if-...

mejutoco · 11 days ago

I vividly remember first day of school after kindergarten in Spain. (3-4 years old?) Sets and Venn diagrams, how interesting and intuitive. Unfortunately it was arithmetic from then on.

mejutoco commented on AI agents find $4.6M in blockchain smart contract exploits red.anthropic.com/2025/sm... · Posted by u/bpierre

nrhrjrjrjtntbt · 13 days ago

The pure (if you like) smart contacts do transactions. You give me 100 apple tokens and I give you 50 pear tokens. The contract ensures nothing else can happen.

They get more sophisticated e.g. automatic market makers. But same idea just swapping.

Voting is also possible e.g. release funds if there is a quorom. Who to release them to could be hard coded or part of the vote.

For external info from the real world e.g. "who got elected" you need an oracle. I.e. you trust someone not to lie and not to get hacked. You can fix the "someone" to a specific address but you still need to trust them.

mejutoco · 13 days ago

Just wanted to add that the oracle can have also majority mechanisms, can stop being used if it drifts too much or is unavailable for too long. People running the oracle can be incentivized by staking some amount of money that they lose if they do not meet SLA-like conditions, etc. It requires trust but it is not just all trust or nothing.

mejutoco commented on A new AI winter is coming? taranis.ie/llms-are-a-fai... · Posted by u/voxleone

HPsquared · 14 days ago

Birds and planes are very similar other than the propulsion and landing gear, and construction materials. Maybe bird vs helicopter, or bird vs rocket.

mejutoco · 13 days ago

> other than the propulsion and landing gear, and construction materials

"Apart from the sanitation, the medicine, education, wine, public order, irrigation, roads, the fresh water system and public health, what have the Romans ever done for us?" Monty Python's Life of Brian.

P.S. It is relative, but quite a lot of differences IMHO.

mejutoco commented on Stopping bad guys from using my open source project (feedback wanted) evanhahn.com/stopping-bad... · Posted by u/emschwartz

sokoloff · 15 days ago

How do you make good or bad resolvable? Is a piece of code being used by Tyson Foods okay? A vegetarian software engineer who contributed to the package might say “no, that use contributes to the killing of animals for food, which is bad.”

If you need to evaluate all the context to know whether a license is usable, it makes it extremely hard for “good guys” to use code under that license. (It’s generally very easy for “bad guys” to just use it quietly.)

mejutoco · 15 days ago

> How do you make good or bad resolvable?

It is not a computer program, but a an ethics problem. We can solve it by thinking of the context and the ethics of it.

I realize it is the topic of this thread, but OP did not mention anything in relation to licenses, and was just talking about good and bad not existing objectively (without context).

I think, if we came with a specific situation, most people with similar values might reach the same good/bad verdict, and a small minority might reach a different one.

I believe the Tyson Foods example is overly simplistic and still too abstract, because one can be vegetarian for many reasons, and these would affect the "verdict". In the real world, if we were working on that piece of software the question would be: Does the implementation of this specific hr SAP module for Tyson foods by me, a vegetarian against animals suffering unnecessarily, etc. as opposed as the abstract idea of any piece of code and any vegetarian. If a friend called you: I have this situation at work, they are asking me to write software to do x and I feel bad about it, etc. etc. I bet it would not be difficult to know what is right and wrong. Another aspect of it is, we could agree something is wrong (bad) and you might still do it. That does not mean there is no objective reality, just that you might not have options or that your values might not be the ones you think (or say) they are, for example.

mejutoco commented on Stopping bad guys from using my open source project (feedback wanted) evanhahn.com/stopping-bad... · Posted by u/emschwartz

awesome_dude · 15 days ago

I have this thinking that, in reality, there's no such thing as objectively 'good' or objectively 'bad'

It's all context and timing.

Almost everyone that will attack this idea will present actions that are loaded with context - murder, is killing when it's bad, self defence is killing when it's good.

If you look at everything, and look at it's non-contextual action, then you can easily find contextually 'good' and contextually 'bad' instances of that thing.

Even further, the story of the man who lost his horse [0] shows us that even if we say that something that happens is contextually good, or bad, the resulting timeline could actually be the complete opposite, meaning that, ultimately, we can never really know if something is good, or bad.

[0] https://oneearthsangha.org/articles/the-old-man-who-lost-his...

mejutoco · 15 days ago

I think this is one of these cases where talking in abstract terms does not help people agree.

What I am hearing is if you remove context (and timing, lets say it is part of context) then there is no good or bad. But who said to remove context? Arent we saying then there is good and bad depending on context?

Many people, including myself, would agree in the abstract, while at the same time some situations being very clear once down to a real example.

It reminds me of people claiming pain is an illusion or facts not existing (very edgy), until someone slaps them in the face to prove "I did slap you, that is a fact". I think that is reality, and specific examples are easier.

P.S. I would add values into the context.

mejutoco commented on Leak confirms OpenAI is preparing ads on ChatGPT for public roll out bleepingcomputer.com/news... · Posted by u/fleahunter

aurareturn · 16 days ago

- ~1 billion users in just 3 years

- Extremely personal data on users

- Novel way of introducing and learning more about sponsored products

- Strong branding for non-techie people (most normal people don't know what Claude or Gemini are)

- An app that is getting more and more addictive/indispensable

I think OpenAI is going to kill it in ads eventually. This is why Meta and Google went all in on AI. Their lucrative digital ad business is in an existential threat.

I think people who kept saying there is no moat in AI is about to be shocked at how strong of a moat there actually is for ChatGPT.

All free LLM chat apps will need to support ads or they will eventually die due to worse unit economics or run out of funding.

PS. Sam just said OpenAI's revenue will finish at $20b this year. 6x growth from 2024. Zero revenue from non-sub users. What do you guys think their revenue will end up in 2026?

mejutoco · 16 days ago

I do not understand why the conversation is always about showing ads in chatgpt. Can they not track users there without ads and sell ad space on websites like google ads? Why ruin the experience there when they can highly target ads. I am guessing they prefer both.

mejutoco commented on The Math of Why You Can't Focus at Work justoffbyone.com/posts/ma... · Posted by u/0x79de

cancan · 17 days ago

Yeah this is something I want to learn more about for sure and is the weakest part of this piece. What have you found that works for you? Or is just that knowing that you’ll get interrupted will force better discipline?

mejutoco · 16 days ago

Not OP, but keeping a log of what I am doing helps me get back to it if I lose my train of thought. I use obsidian with daily pages.

mejutoco commented on Can Dutch universities do without Microsoft? dub.uu.nl/en/news/can-dut... · Posted by u/robtherobber

tester756 · 16 days ago

Visual Studio is world class IDE, C# is one of the better designed languages and ecosystems, Windows is everywhere - from home, to enterprise.

mejutoco · 16 days ago

X is great; Y is great; Z is everywhere!

Probably not intended, but had to laugh a bit at that.

mejutoco commented on Confessions of a Software Developer: No More Self-Censorship kerrick.blog/articles/202... · Posted by u/Kerrick

stuffn · 16 days ago

> Remote work eliminates a lot of problems with office work: commutes, inefficient use of real estate, and land value distortion. But software development is better when you breathe the same air as the folks you work with. Even with a camera-on policy, video calls are a low-bandwidth medium. You lose ambient awareness of coworkers’ problems, and asking for help is a bigger burden. Pair programming is less fruitful. Attempts to represent ideas spatially get mutilated by online whiteboard and sticky note software. Even conflict gets worse: it’s easy to form an enemy image of somebody at the end of video call, but difficult to keep that image when you share a room with them and sense their pain.

Every ounce of data proves this statement wrong. If you feel like you work better non-remote then do it. Don’t shill it as a panacea. I’ve been remote for 11 years now and if I wasn’t I wouldn’t have been able to take care of my family, go back to school part time, work on my health with better meals and reasonable gym hours, etc. even IF in office was better for the employer (even though all data says it’s not in terms of productivity) it is unequivocally better for the employees life to work remote as much as humanly possible.

This hot take is just simply insane. Humanity had no problem coordinating massive projects over IRC and mailing lists. It’s clear the author is a “nu-coder”.

mejutoco · 16 days ago

> Remote work eliminates a lot of problems with office work: commutes

> Every ounce of data proves this statement wrong

There is no need for hyperbole. Because one thing we can all agree on is that remote work eliminates commutes, by definition.