panarky (u/panarky) - Readit News

panarky commented on VPN location claims don't match real traffic exits ipinfo.io/blog/vpn-locati... · Posted by u/mmaia

otar · 21 hours ago

While using mullvad reddit doesn’t block access if you’re signed in.

So, login without mullvad, turn it on after that and it should work.

panarky · 21 hours ago

The question is not "how do you make reddit work over mullvad".

The question is "if reddit can block mullvad why can't China".

panarky commented on Oracle made a $300B bet on OpenAI. It's paying the price finance.yahoo.com/news/or... · Posted by u/pera

jiggawatts · 2 days ago

You’re going to have to elaborate on that last bit! SAP HANA is used by enormous organisations as the core database for their entire operations, so pervasive data corruption bugs would be rather… concerning.

panarky · 2 days ago

This was in the early days of HANA, I'm sure they've fixed the defects by now, but it was shocking to pay nose-bleed prices for every 64gb shard, and then have basic SQL return provably incorrect results. It was a catastrophe, and after spending heavily on consultants to work around the defects, the organization eventually switched to SQL Server.

panarky commented on Oracle made a $300B bet on OpenAI. It's paying the price finance.yahoo.com/news/or... · Posted by u/pera

thedougd · 2 days ago

In my organization we've worked hard for several years to insulate ourselves from Oracle.

We've implemented aggressive desktop monitoring and blocked downloads from Oracle to avoid the Java subscription. Where it's needed, an OpenJDK distribution is used.

Where we must still use Oracle database, in some small, bespoke legacy use cases (heavy PL/SQL), we've moved to RDS with license included to avoid the direct relationship with Oracle. I get it, a big RAC customer will have a harder time, but they'll also likely have alternatives (e.g. SAP implementation to HANA).

I know of at least one vendor (Hyland) who's dropping Oracle support and providing a migration path to MS SQL. Shame not a FOSS database, but still a trend away from Oracle.

panarky · 2 days ago

I watched from the sidelines with grim interest as my organization tried to decide between Oracle and SAP.

The team defined requirements, ran an RFP and demo process and did site visits to clients of each company. The SAP reference clients weren't exactly thrilled with SAP, the product was too complex and too expensive, but it was rock solid and SAP was a reliable partner. The Oracle reference clients had the usual complaints about features and flexibility, but their real beefs were that Oracle was a predatory and untrustworthy partner.

Oracle made claims in their RFP response that were proven false in the demos and site visits, confirming the claims from reference clients about the company's ethics. In contrast, SAP's RFP responses were validated by the team's due diligence.

So management decided to go with SAP. In response, a senior Oracle person tracked down all of the company's board members and made outrageous claims of incompetence against the company's executives, and alluded ominously about bad faith and conflicts of interest.

Oracle was completely hostile and off the rails when they figured out they lost the deal. I will never, ever do business with Oracle.

Unfortunately, while the SAP application seemed solid, the organization went with their HANA database which was astronomically expensive, and had a bad habit of returning different and provably incorrect results to the same deterministic SQL query every time it ran, and then the entire database would crash for all users.

panarky commented on Auto-grading decade-old Hacker News discussions with hindsight karpathy.bearblog.dev/aut... · Posted by u/__rito__

cootsnuck · 4 days ago

To be clear...prior to this recent explosive interest in LLMs, this was already true. Snowden was over 10 years ago.

We can't start clutching our pearls now as if programmatic mass surveillance hasn't been running on all cylinders for over 20 years.

Don't get me wrong, we should absolutely care about this, everyone should. I'm just saying any vague gestures at imminent privacy-doom thanks to LLMs is liable to be doing some big favors of inadvertently sanitizing the history of prior (and still) egregious privacy offenders.

I'm just suggesting more "Yes and" and less "pearl clutching" is all.

panarky · 4 days ago

Who, exactly, is the "we" who you see "pearl clutching" instead of "yes and-ing"?

panarky commented on Bag of words, have mercy on us experimental-history.com/... · Posted by u/ntnbr

meheleventyone · 7 days ago

Human brains aren’t magic in the literal sense but do have a lot of mechanisms we don’t understand.

They’re certainly special both within the individual but also as a species on this planet. There are many similar to human brains but none we know of with similar capabilities.

They’re also most obviously certainly different to LLMs both in how they work foundationally and in capability.

I definitely agree with the materialist view that we will ultimately be able to emulate the brain using computation but we’re nowhere near that yet nor should we undersell the complexity involved.

panarky · 7 days ago

When someone says "AIs aren't really thinking" because AIs don't think like people do, what I hear is "Airplanes aren't really flying" because airplanes don't fly like birds do.

panarky commented on Everyone in Seattle hates AI jonready.com/blog/posts/e... · Posted by u/mips_avatar

josephg · 11 days ago

Well yeah. And because when an expert looks at the code chatgpt produces, the flaws are more obvious. It programs with the skill of the median programmer on GitHub. For beginners and people who do cookie cutter work, this can be incredible because it writes the same or better code they could write, fast and for free. But for experts, the code it produces is consistently worse than what we can do. At best my pride demands I fix all its flaws before shipping. More commonly, it’s a waste of time to ask it to help, and I need to code the solution from scratch myself anyway.

I use it for throwaway prototypes and demos. And whenever I’m thrust into a language I don’t know that well, or to help me debug weird issues outside my area of expertise. But when I go deep on a problem, it’s often worse than useless.

panarky · 11 days ago

> It programs with the skill of the median programmer on GitHub

This is a common intuition but it's provably false.

The fact that LLMs are trained on a corpus does not mean their output represents the median skill level of the corpus.

Eighteen months ago GPT-4 was outperforming 85% of human participants in coding contests. And people who participate in coding contests are already well above the median skill level on Github.

And capability has gone way up in the last 18 months.

panarky commented on Nano Banana Pro blog.google/technology/ai... · Posted by u/meetpateltech

losvedir · 24 days ago

I'm sure Apple will roll something out in the coming years. Now that just anyone can easily AI themselves into a picture in front of the Eiffel tower, they'll want a feature that will let their users prove that they _really_ took that photo in front of the Eiffel tower (since to a lot of people sharing that you're on a Paris vacation is the point, more than the particular photo).

I bet it will be called "Real Photos" or something like that, and the pictures will be signed by the camera hardware. Then iMessage will put a special border around it or something, so that when people share the photos with other Apple users they can prove that it was a real photo taken with their phone's camera.

panarky · 24 days ago

> a real photo taken with their phone's camera

How "real" are iPhone photos? They're also computationally generated, not just the light that came through the lens.

Even without any other post-processing, iPhones generate gibberish text when attempting to sharpen blurry images, they delete actual textures and replace them with smooth, smeared surfaces that look like a watercolor or oil paintings, and combine data from multiple frames to give dogs five legs.

panarky commented on Demis Hassabis on Gemini 3, world models, and the AI bubble sources.news/p/demis-hass... · Posted by u/gmays

panarky · a month ago

A paywall warning would be appreciated.