robmccoll (u/robmccoll)

robmccoll commented on Entities enabling scientific fraud at scale (2025) doi.org/10.1073/pnas.2420... · Posted by u/peyton

pfdietz · 17 hours ago

One approach is more integration of researchers with businesses. Fraud (or simple incompetence) by researchers negatively affects businesses, as they expend effort on things that aren't real. I understand this is a constant problem in the pharmaceutical industry.

robmccoll · 16 hours ago

It's quite possible to be very successful marketing and selling things that aren't real. The market consists of humans, not perfectly rational machines.

robmccoll commented on Is legal the same as legitimate: AI reimplementation and the erosion of copyleft writings.hongminhee.org/2... · Posted by u/dahlia

palmotea · 2 days ago

> So: once it's not "hard" any more, does IP even make sense at all? Why grant monopoly rights to something that required little to no investment in the first place? Even with vestigial IP law - let's say, patents: it just becomes and input parameter that the AI needs to work around the patents like any other constraints.

I think it still does: IIRC, the current legal situation is AI-output does not qualify for IP protections (at least not without substantial later human modification). IP protections are solely reserved for human work.

And I'm fine with that: if a person put in the work, they should have protections so their stuff can't be ripped off for free by all the wealthy major corporations that find some use for it. Otherwise: who cares about the LLMs.

robmccoll · 2 days ago

I think you have a rather idealized model of IP in mind. In practice, IP law tends to be an expensive weapon the wealthy major corporations use against the little guy. Deep enough pockets and a big enough warchest of broad parents will drain the little guy every time.

robmccoll commented on Is legal the same as legitimate: AI reimplementation and the erosion of copyleft writings.hongminhee.org/2... · Posted by u/dahlia

Gigachad · 2 days ago

Someone should put this to the test. Take the recently leaked Minecraft source code and have Copilot build an exact replica in another programming language and then publish it as open source. See if Microsoft believes AI is copyright infringement or not.

robmccoll · 2 days ago

As described, this would not be the same thing. If the AI is looking at the source and effectively porting it, that is likely infringement. The idea instead should be "implement Minecraft from scratch" but with behavior, graphics, etc. identical. Note that you'll need to have an AI generate assets or something since you can't just reuse textures and models.

robmccoll commented on The beauty and terror of modding Windows windowsread.me/p/windhawk... · Posted by u/wild_pointer

robmccoll · 9 days ago

Speaking of modding desktop environments, has anyone figured out how to get back the old border radius in macOS Tahoe?

robmccoll commented on The beauty and terror of modding Windows windowsread.me/p/windhawk... · Posted by u/wild_pointer

robmccoll · 9 days ago

If you want tweaks that are a little more first party, there's always PowerToys https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/powertoys/

robmccoll commented on We do not think Anthropic should be designated as a supply chain risk twitter.com/OpenAI/status... · Posted by u/golfer

_heimdall · 11 days ago

Exactly, and its easy to hide behind things like the Patriot Act if challenged legally.

Its interesting to see the parties flip in real time. The Democrats seem to be realizing why a small federal government is so important, a fact that for quite a few years their were on the other side of.

robmccoll · 11 days ago

I think the problem is exactly the opposite. The federal government has the total combined power and scale that it does because we are a massive and complex modern nation. That's inevitable. The problem that we are seeing is that the reigns to that power can be held by too few people it turns out. The checks and balances have ceased to exist. No one is held accountable and people are allowed to be above the law.

robmccoll commented on I now assume that all ads on Apple news are scams kirkville.com/i-now-assum... · Posted by u/cdrnsf

speak_plainly · a month ago

Apple News and News+ represent everything wrong with modern Apple: a ham-fisted approach to simplicity that ignores the end user. It is their most mediocre service, jarringly jamming cheap clickbait next to serious journalism in a layout that makes no sense.

The technical execution is just as lazy. While some magazines are tailored, many are just flat, low-res PDFs that look terrible on the high-end Retina screens Apple sells. Worst of all, Apple had the leverage to revolutionize a struggling industry; instead, they settled for a half-baked aggregator.

It’s a toxic mix of Apple tropes that simply weren't thought through. The ads are the cherry on the cake.

robmccoll · a month ago

They also bought and killed texture, a fantastic cross-platform magazine subscription service, to somehow further Apple News. I subscribed to Texture on Android. I wouldn't give a dollar to Apple News even if I was in the Apple ecosystem.

robmccoll commented on After two years of vibecoding, I'm back to writing by hand atmoio.substack.com/p/aft... · Posted by u/mobitar

recursivedoubts · a month ago

AI is incredibly dangerous because it can do the simple things very well, which prevents new programmers from learning the simple things ("Oh, I'll just have AI generate it") which then prevents them from learning the middlin' and harder and meta things at a visceral level.

I'm a CS teacher, so this is where I see a huge danger right now and I'm explicit with my students about it: you HAVE to write the code. You CAN'T let the machines write the code. Yes, they can write the code: you are a student, the code isn't hard yet. But you HAVE to write the code.

robmccoll · a month ago

Yes! You are best served by learning what a tool is doing for you by doing it yourself or carefully studying what it uses and obfuscates from you before using the tool. You don't need to construct an entire functioning processor in an HDL, but understanding the basics of digital logic and computer architecture matters if you're EE/CompE. You don't have to write an OS in asm, but understanding assembly and how it gets translated into binary and understanding the basics of resource management, IPC, file systems, etc. is essential if you will ever work in something lower level. If you're a CS major, algorithms and data structures are essential. If you're just learning front end development on your own or in a boot camp, you need to learn HTML and the DOM, events, how CSS works, and some of the core concepts of JS, not just React. You'll be better for it when the tools fail you or a new tool comes along.

robmccoll commented on Anthropic's original take home assignment open sourced github.com/anthropics/ori... · Posted by u/myahio

giancarlostoro · 2 months ago

> Calling sort is far easier than understanding the algorithm for example.

This was one of my gripes in college, why am I implementing something if I just need to understand what it does? I'm going to use the built-in version anyway.

robmccoll · 2 months ago

Because that's the entire point of college. It's supposed to teach you the fundamentals - how to think, how to problem solve, how to form mental models and adapt them, how things you use actually work. Knowing how different sorting functions work and what the tradeoffs are allows you to pick the best sorting function for your data and hardware. If the tools you have aren't doing the job, you can mend them or build new tools.

robmccoll commented on Package managers keep using Git as a database, it never works out nesbitt.io/2025/12/24/pac... · Posted by u/birdculture

c-linkage · 2 months ago

This seems like a tragedy of the commons -- GitHub is free after all, and it has all of these great properties, so why not? -- but this kind of decision making occurs whenever externalities are present.

My favorite hill to die on (externality) is user time. Most software houses spend so much time focusing on how expensive engineering time is that they neglect user time. Software houses optimize for feature delivery and not user interaction time. Yet if I spent one hour making my app one second faster for my million users, I can save 277 user hour per year. But since user hours are an externality, such optimization never gets done.

Externalities lead to users downloading extra gigabytes of data (wasted time) and waiting for software, all of which is waste that the developer isn't responsible for and doesn't care about.

robmccoll · 2 months ago

I don't think most software houses spend enough time even focusing on engineering time. CI pipelines that take tens of minutes to over an hour, compile times that exceed ten seconds when nothing has changed, startup times that are much more than a few seconds. Focus and fast iteration are super important to writing software and it seems like a lot of orgs just kinda shrug when these long waits creep into the development process.