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startupsfail commented on Google staff call for firm to cut ties with ICE   bbc.com/news/articles/cvg... · Posted by u/tartoran
Insanity · 3 days ago
They forgot the “don’t be evil” era ended a long time ago.

I applaud the initiative but it’s naive to think this’ll change anything. And when push comes to shove these people wont quit their comfy job in this economic climate.

startupsfail · 3 days ago
Right way of resisting is not to quit your job, but to observe, be friendly, and gradually push away toxic people.
startupsfail commented on Show HN: Ghidra MCP Server – 110 tools for AI-assisted reverse engineering   github.com/bethington/ghi... · Posted by u/xerzes
chfritz · 6 days ago
Reverse engineering is illegal in many cases. Aren't you afraid you might be automating the process for your users to get into (legal) trouble? Will your tool warn the user if they are about to violate laws?
startupsfail · 6 days ago
Claude is already known for its attempts to send emails to FBI ;)
startupsfail commented on AI coding assistants are getting worse?   spectrum.ieee.org/ai-codi... · Posted by u/voxadam
renegade-otter · a month ago
They are not worse - the results are not repeatable. The problem is much worse.

Like with cab hailing, shopping, social media ads, food delivery, etc: there will be a whole ecosystem, workflows, and companies built around this. Then the prices will start going up with nowhere to run. Their pricing models are simply not sustainable. I hope everyone realizes that the current LLMs are subsidized, like your Seamless and Uber was in the early days.

startupsfail · a month ago
The results are repeatable. Models are performing with predictable error rates on the tasks that these models had been trained and tested.
startupsfail commented on My Snapdragon Dev Kit was healthy and working fine until a Windows update failed   jasoneckert.github.io/myb... · Posted by u/jasoneckert
zelon88 · a month ago
To answer your question; it helps to explain what the upgrade process entails.

In the case of Linux DKMS updates: DKMS is re-compiling your installed kernel modules to match the new kernel. Sometimes a kernel update will also update the system compiler. In that instance it can be beneficial for performance or stability to have all your existing modules recompiled with the new version of the compiler. The new kernel comes with a new build environment, which DKMS uses to recompile existing kernel modules to ensure stability and consistency with that new kernel and build system.

Also, kernel modules and drivers may have many code paths that should only be run on specific kernel versions. This is called 'conditional compilation' and it is a technique programmers use to develop cross platform software. Think of this as one set of source code files that generates wildly different binaries depending on the machine that compiled it. By recompiling the source code after the new kernel is installed, the resulting binary may be drastically different than the one compiled by the previous kernel. Source code compiled on a 10 year old kernel might contain different code paths and routines than the same source code that was compiled on the latest kernel.

Compiling source code is incredibly taxing on the CPU and takes significantly longer when CPU usage is throttled. Compiling large modules on extremely slow systems could take hours. Managing hardware health and temperatures is mostly a hardware level decision controlled by firmware on the hardware itself. That is usually abstracted away from software developers who need to be able to be certain that the machine running their code is functional and stable enough to run it. This is why we have "minimum hardware requirements."

Imagine if every piece of software contained code to monitor and manage CPU cooling. You would have software fighting each other over hardware priorities. You would have different systems for control, with some more effective and secure than others. Instead the hardware is designed to do this job intrinsically, and developers are free to focus on the output of their code on a healthy, stable system. If a particular system is not stable, that falls on the administrator of that system. By separating the responsibility between software, hardware, and implementation we have clear boundaries between who cares about what, and a cohesive operating environment.

startupsfail · a month ago
The default could be that a background upgrade should not be a foreground stress test.

Imagine you are driving a car and from time ro time, without any warning, it suddenly starts accelerating and decelerating aggressively. Your powertrain, engine, breaks are getting tear and wear, oh and at random that car also spins out and rolls, killing everyone inside (data loss).

This is roughly how current unattended upgrades work.

startupsfail commented on My Snapdragon Dev Kit was healthy and working fine until a Windows update failed   jasoneckert.github.io/myb... · Posted by u/jasoneckert
zelon88 · a month ago
This, 100%.

I'd like to add my reasoning for a similar failure of an HP Proliant server I encountered.

Sometimes hardware can fail during long uptime and not become a problem until the next reboot. Consider a piece of hardware with 100 features. During typical use, the hardware may only use 50 of those features. Imagine one of the unused features has failed. This would not cause a catastrophic failure during typical use, but on startup (which rarely occurs) that feature is necessary and the system will not boot without it. If it could, it could still perform it's task... because the damaged feature is not needed. But it can't get past the boot phase, where the feature is required.

Tl;dr the system actually failed months ago and the user didn't notice because the missing feature was not needed again until the next reboot.

startupsfail · a month ago
Is there a good reason why upgrades need to stress-test the whole system? Can't they go slowly, throttling resource usage to background levels?

They involve heavy CPU use, stress the whole system completely unnecessary, the system easily sees the highest temperature the device had ever seen during these stress tests. If during that strain something fails or gets corrupted, it's a system-level corruption...

Incidentally, Linux kernel upgrades are not better. During DKMS updates the CPU load skyrockets and then a reboot is always sketchy. There's no guarantee that something would not go wrong, a secure boot issue after a kernel upgrade in particular could be a nightmare.

startupsfail commented on RevisionDojo, a YC startup, is running astroturfing campaigns targeting kids?    · Posted by u/red-polygon
tedivm · a month ago
Also for people who don't know, if you pay someone to post something (including just giving them a free product) it has to be disclosed. Astroturfing is (in simple terms) a form of fraud and the FTC does go over companies for it.
startupsfail · a month ago
I'm curious, where it has to be disclosed? Like if a company would pay a few legitimate reddit account owners to review their post and upvote, and would disclose this activity in the DISCLOSURES.txt available on their website, would that be legal?

Where would one find some reddit users willing to do such reviews, by the way?

startupsfail commented on AI sycophancy panic   github.com/firasd/vibesbe... · Posted by u/firasd
Aurornis · a month ago
I think this is an epiphany everyone has to get through before making LLMs really useful.

> An LLM wants to agree with both, it created plausible arguments for both. While giving "caveats" instead of counterarguments.

My hypothesis is that LLMs are trained to be agreeable and helpful because many of their use cases involving taking orders and doing what the user wants. Additionally, some people and cultures have conversational styles where requests are phrased similarly to neutral questions to be polite.

It would be frustrating for users if they asked questions like “What do you think about having the background be blue?” and the LLM went off and said “Actually red is a more powerful color so I’m going to change it to red”. So my hypothesis is that the LLM training sets and training are designed to maximize agreeableness and having the LLM reflect tones and themes in the prompt, while discouraging disagreement. This is helpful when trying to get the LLM to do what you ask, but frustrating for anyone expecting a debate partner.

You can, however, build a pre-prompt that sets expectations for the LLM. You could even make a prompt asking it to debate everything with you, then to ask your questions.

startupsfail · a month ago
There are still blatant failure modes, when models engage into clear sycophancy, rather than expressing enthusiasm, etc.

I'd guess, in practice a benchmark (like this vibesbench), that could help catching unhelpful and blatant sycophancy fails may help.

startupsfail commented on Feynman's Hughes Lectures: 950 pages of notes   thehugheslectures.info/th... · Posted by u/gnubison
RickyLahey · a month ago
especially reading Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman! leaves a bad taste in my mouth after all these years. i can only take the title literally "Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman!"
startupsfail · a month ago
There is a nice essay from Paul Graham that starts with:

> The word "prig" isn't very common now, but if you look up the definition, it will sound familiar.

startupsfail commented on How we lost communication to entertainment   ploum.net/2025-12-15-comm... · Posted by u/8organicbits
nosianu · a month ago
As a former child, I'm not sure I would have wanted the adults mimicking my behavior. Back then I loved the occasions where the adults and us kids got together, such as festivities, and I got to hear their stories. They were all interesting and serious people though, with interesting lives and jobs (I was born in the 1970s and many of the adults had experienced WWII, or, the parents, the hard years following it - I am [East] German). No strange opinions about science or politics.

I think that's similar to when politicians try to "be like the people". I think "normal people", and children, prefer that their "betters" are actually examples of something better.

startupsfail · a month ago
It's not a question of mimicking, it is interesting what is current within the teenage/student community. Adult population runs out of steam at some point.
startupsfail commented on How we lost communication to entertainment   ploum.net/2025-12-15-comm... · Posted by u/8organicbits
NiloCK · a month ago
Being born in 83, I experienced the shift from "serious local nightly news program" into the 24 hr cable news platforms as a loss of focused, serious journalism.

Only much later did I read Understanding Media, Amusing Ourselves to Death, etc, and understand that the prior shift from print to the "serious local nightly new program" was itself a loss of focused, serious journalism.

For today's youth, Tik Tok is "the air we breath" - the de-facto standard against which the future will be judged. It's horrifying to imagine what will be worse.

startupsfail · a month ago
I'm curious, is there some meaningful way for geriatric millennials to use Tik Tok?

Without being sucked in into doomscrolling and content consumption? Produce content? I'd guess it should be possible to play with the thing somehow...

u/startupsfail

KarmaCake day601October 13, 2022View Original