veunes (u/veunes) - Readit News

veunes commented on The time I didn't meet Jeffrey Epstein scottaaronson.blog/?p=953... · Posted by u/pfdietz

> If only Bill Gates and Larry Summers had had my mom to go to for advice, they could’ve saved themselves a lot of grief.

The actual lesson is not "listen to your mom", but "character matters". It doesn't matter how much someone agrees with you, how smart they are, how rich they are, how many great ideas they have etc etc. A rotten character will eventually rot everything around it. Techines/nerds/geeks get so enamoured with ideas they tend to not even see the kind of people ideas come from.

veunes · 3 days ago

Character matters but so does having people around you who are willing to call it early, before you've rationalized yourself into ignoring it

veunes commented on The time I didn't meet Jeffrey Epstein scottaaronson.blog/?p=953... · Posted by u/pfdietz

stein1946 · 3 days ago

While I understand that once one attains those short of connections, certain intelligence agencies will reach out offering lucrative opportunities for your co-operation.

Disgusting nature aside, I can't help but be amazed as to how someone can be so well connected. What sort of skills did Epstein have that managed to have so many people on speed dial?

How do you get in a position to correspond with presidents, royals, celebrities and getting them all hooked on you?

Amazing indeed.

veunes · 3 days ago

But less about personal brilliance and more about how social power actually works when money, status, and weak accountability intersect

veunes commented on The time I didn't meet Jeffrey Epstein scottaaronson.blog/?p=953... · Posted by u/pfdietz

soperj · 4 days ago

> If only Bill Gates and Larry Summers had had my mom to go to for advice, they could’ve saved themselves a lot of grief.

Doubt it would have changed anything for Bill. There's a pattern there and this is just a piece of that pattern.

veunes · 3 days ago

But it might've changed one decision, one meeting, one normalization step

veunes commented on The time I didn't meet Jeffrey Epstein scottaaronson.blog/?p=953... · Posted by u/pfdietz

whatever1 · 3 days ago

Power corrupts, end of story.

Democracy (limited terms), taxation and anti-monopoly regulation are examples that show a path to cure the disease.

Nobody should be trusted with too much power for too long.

veunes · 3 days ago

I'd rephrase it as: nobody should be trusted with unchecked power, especially when it's exercised quietly and indirectly

veunes commented on The time I didn't meet Jeffrey Epstein scottaaronson.blog/?p=953... · Posted by u/pfdietz

veunes · 3 days ago

Sometimes (sometimes) it just implies that someone sent an email, got ignored, and left a paper trail behind

veunes commented on Two kinds of AI users are emerging martinalderson.com/posts/... · Posted by u/martinald

danpalmer · 7 days ago

I've noticed a huge gap between AI use on greenfield projects and brownfield projects. The first day of working on a greenfield project I can accomplish a week of work. But the second day I can accomplish a few days of work. By the end of the first week I'm getting a 20% productivity gain.

I think AI is just allowing everyone to speed-run the innovator's dilemma. Anyone can create a small version of anything, while big orgs will struggle to move quickly as before.

The interesting bit is going to be whether we see AI being used in maturing those small systems into big complex ones that account for the edge cases, meet all the requirements, scale as needed, etc. That's hard for humans to do, and particularly while still moving. I've not see any of this from AI yet outside of either a) very directed small changes to large complex systems, or b) plugins/extensions/etc along a well define set of rails.

veunes · 7 days ago

All of this speedrun hits a wall at the context window. As long as the project fits into 200k tokens, you’re flying. The moment it outgrows that, productivity doesn’t drop by 20% - it drops to zero. You start spending hours explaining to the agent what you changed in another file that it has already forgotten. Large organizations win in the long run precisely because they rely on processes that don’t depend on the memory of a single brain - even an electronic one

veunes commented on Two kinds of AI users are emerging martinalderson.com/posts/... · Posted by u/martinald

veunes · 7 days ago

This is the birth of Shadow AI, and it’s going to be bigger than Shadow IT ever was in the 2000s

Back then, employees were secretly installing Excel macros and Dropbox just to get work done faster. Now they’re quietly running Claude Code in the terminal because the official Copilot can’t even forma a CSV properly.

CISOs are terrified right now and that’s understandable. Non-technical people with root access and agents that write code are a security nightmare. But trying to ban this outright will only push your most effective employees to places where they’re allowed to "fly"

veunes commented on Show HN: Nono – Kernel-enforced sandboxing for AI agents nono.sh... · Posted by u/decodebytes

veunes · 7 days ago

The zeroize after exec feature sounds good, but what is the threat model in an agent context? If the agent can run printenv in the first millisecond and exfiltrate it (if net is allowed), zeroizing won't help

It seems egress filtering (allowlists) is more critical for agents than memory protection. If I allow an agent to run npm install, I'm opening a network Pandora's box, and Landlock (until ABI v4) offers pretty limited control there

veunes commented on A lot of population numbers are fake davidoks.blog/p/a-lot-of-... · Posted by u/bookofjoe

vladms · 11 days ago

Quoting from the article "But here’s a question about Papua New Guinea: how many people live there? The answer should be pretty simple."

That sounds a very strange expectation. Most of my life post university I realized most of questions have complex answers, it is never as simple as you expect.

If the author would check how things biology and medicine work currently, I think he will have even more surprises than the fact that counting populations is an approximate endeavor.

veunes · 10 days ago

Not simple in the sense of easy, but simple in the sense of foundational: if a government can't even roughly say how many people it governs, everything built on top of that gets shaky

veunes commented on A lot of population numbers are fake davidoks.blog/p/a-lot-of-... · Posted by u/bookofjoe

hybrid_study · 11 days ago

The post leans too hard on “we have no idea.” Population numbers are estimates with error bars, especially in places with weak census infrastructure, but that’s not the same as ignorance. Most countries run censuses (sometimes badly) and use births/deaths/migration accounting to update totals. Calling them “fake” is misleading — it’s uneven data quality, not numerology. “Large uncertainty” ≠ “no idea.”

veunes · 10 days ago

I think you're right in principle, but the article is pointing at a slightly different failure mode than just "wide error bars"