sonofaragorn (u/sonofaragorn)

sonofaragorn commented on 12ft.io Taken Down newsmediaalliance.org/tak... · Posted by u/afeuerstein

commandar · 2 months ago

A decade ago, I was really interested in the idea of using a crypto like what Doge was at the time for this specific use case. Back then, a dogecoin was a fraction of a cent so it was a better fit than its current valuations.

Any individual page impression is only worth a few cents to the publisher anyway. I still think there's a lot of potential value in something similar as infrastructure for facilitating ultra-microtransactions on that scale that don't get completely consumed by credit card processors, etc.

I'm not going to maintain subscriptions to every news source out there, but I'd be more than happy to toss something in the tip jar from a fund I could top-up on a regular basis.

sonofaragorn · 2 months ago

That's what the Basic Attention Token (BAT) from the Brave team tried (is still trying?) to do: https://brave.com/brave-rewards/

sonofaragorn commented on CERN releases report on the feasibility of a possible Future Circular Collider home.cern/news/news/accel... · Posted by u/gmays

sigmar · 5 months ago

My view- she, like many, has been conditioned by social media to optimize for clicks by having contrarian and anti-establishment views. She's not positioned to have a particularly well-researched opinion on 95%+ of the topics she covers (which is understandable considering how many hundreds of videos she has made). I watched her for a bit, but stopped when I researched a topic deeper and found her analysis very superficial. Physics is a huge field. Think it is always better to find experts in a particular subfield and hear their views, rather than follow the feed of someone who repeatedly expresses the "everyone else is wrong" schtick

sonofaragorn · 5 months ago

I'm not sure that is fair. I've been reading her blog for over a decade, and she has always taken a contrarian view.

sonofaragorn commented on Show HN: If YouTube had actual channels ytch.xyz... · Posted by u/hadisafa

sonofaragorn · a year ago

Loved this. Would it be possible to add subtitles?

sonofaragorn commented on How Meta trains large language models at scale engineering.fb.com/2024/0... · Posted by u/mfiguiere

OsrsNeedsf2P · a year ago

> How do they sanitize PII?

I can't comment on how things like faces get used, but in my experience, PII at Meta is inaccessible by default.

Unless you're impersonating a user on the platform (to access what PII they can see), you have to request special access for logs or database columns that contain so much as user IDs, otherwise the data simply won't show up when you query for it. This is baked into the infrastructure layer, so I doubt the GenAI teams are using something else.

sonofaragorn · a year ago

What about a post or comment that includes proper names?

sonofaragorn commented on Ilya Sutskever to leave OpenAI twitter.com/ilyasut/statu... · Posted by u/wavelander

izend · a year ago

And none of them build AI companies in Toronto.

I’m Canadian and disappointed at how ineffective we are at building successful companies.

sonofaragorn · a year ago

Aidan Gomez, Nick Frost, and Ivan Zhang, all of whom were Hinton's students at UofT started Cohere (https://cohere.com/about)

sonofaragorn commented on Ilya Sutskever to leave OpenAI twitter.com/ilyasut/statu... · Posted by u/wavelander

loopdoend · a year ago

The amount of paperwork involved makes it unworkable

sonofaragorn · a year ago

Not true. I've done SRED every year for the past ~7 years. It is work, but there are specialized consultants that do most of it. If the work is truly R&D (which would be the case for a cutting-edge AI company) and you track your work in JIRA or something like that, then it's mostly just writing a few pages describing the efforts.

sonofaragorn commented on Peter Higgs, physicist who discovered Higgs boson, has died theguardian.com/science/2... · Posted by u/angrygoat

dotnet00 · a year ago

My parents had a hard time explaining my dad's job to me, so they just told me he was a scientist because he had a masters in physics (he was a diplomat). Like any little kid, my parents were my heroes, so of course this led me to becoming obsessed with scientists and reading up on science stuff, eg trying to read my sister's university textbooks.

I developed a hobby of reading up on and sharing factoids I found online, and found one about the 'god particle'. At first I thought it was cool because it seemed to basically talk about a particle that causes mass (of course, this was actually wrong, but that didn't really matter to a 10 year old), but reading about how it was predicted 40-50 years ago and the largest single machine humanity had built was being used to try to find it made it my favorite factoid and I'd excitedly start talking all about it the moment anyone showed even the slightest bit of interest.

In 2012 when the detection was announced, we were on a short 2-3 day vacation in Dubai and were having breakfast in the hotel. The TV was right next to us, and seeing the news I was trying (and failing) to explain to my parents how the Higgs boson had been predicted 50 years ago and it took that long for the technology to finally catch up to be able to verify it, and how this would represent one of the last remaining pieces of the standard model (although back then I didn't quite grasp that the standard model was not a full theory of everything). I was trying to explain to them the size of the LHC, how it was the biggest single machine we've built, how when they were turning it on for the first time, there were fears about it creating micro-black holes which might swallow the Earth.

I think that while we need scientists in the public eye, we don't need them as social media entertainers, a lot of well known science communicators on social media come off as attention-seeking charismatic fakes/frauds to me (eg NDT). Stuff like the interviews and documentaries Stephen Hawking had appeared in (or to a lesser extent, the ones Michio Kaku has appeared in) did much more for me in being inspired, even without having known what research they were known for.

I think we could also do with more books like Hawking's 'A Brief History of Time' and encouraging kids to read them. Also, instead of over-simplifying everything and passing off scientists as geniuses in the traditional sense, we should be more open in showing that the people who made these discoveries or predictions were not inherently born with it, the vast majority of them were completely normal people who worked very hard to build skills in the thing they enjoyed.

Another discovery I feel was somewhat similar is that of discrete time crystals, casually predicted in 2012, turned out to actually be possible in 2018 and has a similar 'cool' factor.

sonofaragorn · a year ago

I get your sentiment, but I think it's important for science communication to adapt to the times. Decades ago (and even as little as one decade ago), most scientists (maybe Hawking being the exception) who would dare appear in these 1hr documentaries would be belittled by the "hardcore" scientists with the same words you used "Science should not be over-simplified like that", "they are not real scientists, they just want to be on TV", etc.

The truth is that young people are mostly on TikTok et al, so this type of content needs to get there.

sonofaragorn commented on Better Call GPT: Comparing large language models against lawyers [pdf] arxiv.org/abs/2401.16212... · Posted by u/vinnyglennon

nprateem · 2 years ago

The only problems are it could be convincingly wrong about anything it tells you and isn't liable for its mistakes.

sonofaragorn · 2 years ago

What if they were liable? Say the company that offers the LLM lawyer is liable. Would that make this feasible? In terms of being convincingly wrong, it's not like lawyers never make mistakes...

sonofaragorn commented on Rarbg Is No More web.archive.org/web/20230... · Posted by u/0___0

sonofaragorn · 2 years ago

are these safe? being clones doesn't really inspire much confidence

rarbg was my go to for years :S

sonofaragorn commented on IPyflow: Reactive Python Notebooks in Jupyter(Lab) github.com/ipyflow/ipyflo... · Posted by u/smacke

sixhobbits · 2 years ago

Looks like it solves a common problem but the page is a bit confusing. It could make it clearer upfront what it does (I didn't know what reactive meant in this context) and how it relates to Jupyter (I thought it was official/core stuff at first, but I take it its a third party tool that integrates into jupyter).

Stuff like "Trust me? Good." in the introduction doesn't really help me answer "wtf does this do" more quickly and the first intro sentence is pretty long and convoluted.

sonofaragorn · 2 years ago

Agreed on the confusing page. I use notebooks every single day but a quick glance at the README gave me zero indication of this being something I need