ruffrey (u/ruffrey) - Readit News

ruffrey commented on The United States withdraws from UNESCO state.gov/releases/office... · Posted by u/layer8

lvl155 · 7 months ago

And it’s wild to think that more than 1/3 of the devs I’ve met in my life support this admin. These are seemingly smart people. The past 10 years or so made me realize I don’t know anything about human nature or intellect.

Edit: I am in no way saying conservatism is bad and liberalism is good. I have my values in both.

ruffrey · 7 months ago

I've been toying with the following attempt to explain all this:

- Information bubbles (this is the top issue, and it's really incredibly persuasive)

- Geographic location and social environment

- Lack of time to deeply evaluate truth vs noise and consider multiple sides of an issue

- Conviction of values - how much does a person believe their values are tied to the political view (leads to subtly drawing emotional conclusions and implicitly trusting a political party)

- Belief that due to one's own intelligence, one is not subject to propaganda (a clearly false belief that many smart people fall into)

Deep emotional awareness is not as strongly related to intelligence as people think.

ruffrey commented on Anthropic cut up millions of used books, and downloaded 7M pirated ones – judge businessinsider.com/anthr... · Posted by u/pyman

ruffrey · 7 months ago

Two of the top AI companies flouted ethics with regard to training data. In OpenAI's case, the whistleblower probably got whacked for exposing it.

Can anyone make a compelling argument that any of these AI companies have the public's best interest in mind (alignment/superalignment)?

ruffrey commented on Gemini CLI blog.google/technology/de... · Posted by u/sync

ruffrey · 8 months ago

Thanks, Google. A bit of feedback - integration with `gcloud` CLI auth would have been appreciated.

ruffrey commented on Ground control to Major Trial virtualize.sh/blog/ground... · Posted by u/plam503711

ruffrey · 9 months ago

I have a theory this happens because for individual contributors, the effort to buy SaaS software in the era of "vendor risk assessment" is a nightmare. So you end up with grassroots avoidance of that process, at all costs, inside the company.

ruffrey commented on Ground control to Major Trial virtualize.sh/blog/ground... · Posted by u/plam503711

ruffrey · 9 months ago

As a solo-founder I have experienced this on a massive scale over nearly 15 years. It's really strange how happy people are with unethical behavior, yet on my end it just doesn't feel right to cut off peoples systems. After multiple attempts to contact them, we will often disable their accounts. It is against the social contract. It is stealing. In many cases companies may have 15+ free trial accounts, the company itself absolutely dwarfs our 3-person company. The cost is beans for them. But they just don't care.

ruffrey commented on AI Avatars Escape the Uncanny Valley a16z.com/ai-avatars/... · Posted by u/asparagui

torginus · 10 months ago

This is just a personal preference thing - but I dislike any attempts at injecting artificial personhood - if they make an agentic personal assistant or whatever, I don't want to think of it as a person but a rather sophisticated tool. My phone uses AI to retouch the pictures it takes with its camera, but I don't have to exchange pleasantries with iPhone Clippy for it to do its thing - it just pretty much does.

I don't want artificial buddies, or servants or whatever except maybe in video games.

ruffrey · 10 months ago

As exciting as the last couple years have been in the AI space, I totally agree.

There was an advertisement on Twitter a few years ago for Google Home. It was a video where a parent was putting their child to bed, and they said, "Ok Google, read Goodnight Moon."

It felt like a window into a viscerally dystopian future where we outsource human interaction to an AI.

ruffrey commented on Isaac Asimov describes how AI will liberate humans and their creativity (1992) openculture.com/2025/04/i... · Posted by u/bookofjoe

vannevar · 10 months ago

I don't think Asimov envisioned a world where AI would be controlled by a clique of ultra-wealthy oligarchs.

ruffrey · 10 months ago

As I recall, many of his early stories involved "U.S. Robot & Mechanical Men" which was a huge conglomerate owning a lot of the market on AI (called "robots" by Asimov, it included "Multivac" and other interfaces besides humanoid robots).

ruffrey commented on Show HN: I made a C program to create a vanity SHA-1 hash for a text file gist.github.com/o0101/77e... · Posted by u/keepamovin

actinium226 · 10 months ago

I don't get the last one?

ruffrey · 10 months ago

"scalable"

ruffrey commented on After 30 years, FDA overhauls guideline for the claim "healthy" on food packages wsj.com/health/wellness/h... · Posted by u/Jimmc414

ruffrey · a year ago

If you look at the table and do the math to convert obfuscated units, a 3/4 ounce serving of “whole grains” may have 5g of added sugar, which is 5/21.26 g or 23.5% added sugar.

This seems like an obvious problem to me. Despite some progress with adding nuts and salmon.