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voxl commented on Temporary suspension of acceptance of mail to the United States   post.japanpost.jp/int/inf... · Posted by u/Kye
ericmay · a day ago
> Closing these de minimus exemptions is making it harder for discerning consumers to buy higher quality goods than are currently available in the US right now.

Everything has a trade-off.

On the other hand, it also prevents companies from dumping artificially cheap and crappy goods (TEMU) on US markets and making it nearly impossible for others to compete.

Unsuspecting consumers buy a super cheap (subsidized) crap product on Amazon or Temu or Shien or wherever - probably a knock-off of an American product, have it shipped to the US, then it disintegrates after a couple of uses or stops working, and we wind up with pollution, additional landfill, and relentless consumerism that's harmful to the country all so we can help a certain country whose name starts with a C keep the lights on and keep factories running so that they don't see unemployment numbers tick up.

Legitimate businesses selling higher quality products where they exist will be able to figure it out. Or not. It's not a big deal if your sunscreen is slightly worse than the Korean version (which I use). Maybe it just hasn't been approved because they haven't done the work to apply because they can get around working with our government and making sure their product meets our safety standards because of the de minimus loophole?

There's also safety concerns, which I think the CBP did a good job of overviewing here: https://www.cbp.gov/frontline/buyer-beware-bad-actors-exploi... . Send drugs or guns or illegal animal products to the US, get caught, who cares you live in (not the US) so you can just spin up another sham company and do it again.

voxl · 21 hours ago
Everything does not have a tradeoff. This philosophy alone is bullshit.
voxl commented on AI tooling must be disclosed for contributions   github.com/ghostty-org/gh... · Posted by u/freetonik
quotemstr · 5 days ago
As a project maintainer, you shouldn't make rules unenforceable rules that you and everyone else know people will flout. Doing so comes makes you seem impotent and diminishes the respect people have for rules in general.

You might argue that by making rules, even futile ones, you at least establish expectations and take a moral stance. Well, you can make a statement without dressing it up as a rule. But you don't get to be sanctimonious that way I guess.

voxl · 5 days ago
Except you can enforce this rule some of the time. People discover that AI was used or suspect it all the time, and people admit to it after some pressure all the time.

Not every time, but sometimes. The threat of being caught isn't meaningless. You can decide not to play in someone else's walled garden if you want but the least you can do is respect their rules, bare minimum of human decency.

voxl commented on Why is it worth spending time on type theory? (2013)   math.stackexchange.com/qu... · Posted by u/mindcrime
fellowniusmonk · 20 days ago
As a mereological nihilist I like type theory but I wish it was type and schema theory.

Treating complex types, structure, arrangement, entanglement, etc. as if it has the same realness or priority as primitive types is a mistake.

It's like acting like recursion is physically real (it's not) when it smuggles in the call stack.

voxl · 20 days ago
Yes well we all have our pet theories about the world. Thankfully the people that think the natural numbers aren't "real" or that recursion isn't "real" haven't won out and destroyed our ability to make meaningful progress.
voxl commented on I tried to replace myself with ChatGPT in my English class   lithub.com/what-happened-... · Posted by u/lapcat
atleastoptimal · 22 days ago
I literally used a graphing calculator on my algebra exams in middle school.
voxl · 22 days ago
Yeah I don't believe you, especially because you have an axe to grind about AI singularity bullshit. No one in their right mind should allow a graphing calculator to be used on an algebra exam, might as well let them bring a laptop and open Wolfram alpha.
voxl commented on I tried to replace myself with ChatGPT in my English class   lithub.com/what-happened-... · Posted by u/lapcat
brudgers · 23 days ago
Altman’s analogy didn’t hold up. Calculators were uncontroversial

Calculators are uncontroversial now. But when they first became cheap and widely available, they were not allowed in math classes. Then only four function calculators, then graphing calculators. But still today, programmable calculators are prohibited in many academic contexts.

voxl · 22 days ago
No middle schooler is using a graphing calculator on their algebra exam
voxl commented on Ongoing Lean formalization of the proof for Fermat's Last Theorem   github.com/ImperialColleg... · Posted by u/anonyonoor
amelius · 24 days ago
Since the proof already exists in human-written form, I'm wondering, can't OpenAI's IOM gold winning algorithm not translate the blueprint to lean?
voxl · 24 days ago
Proof assistant code is high reliability, there is no room to fudge it. This is perhaps the one place where you can really see how bad LLMs are when you care about reliability.
voxl commented on Helsinki records zero traffic deaths for full year   helsinkitimes.fi/finland/... · Posted by u/DaveZale
AnthonyMouse · 24 days ago
"Slippery slope is a logical fallacy" is a logical fallacy. "Doing the proposed thing makes a bad thing easier or more likely" is a valid concern.
voxl · 24 days ago
Slippery Slope is a logical fallacy. This is an undeniable fact. There is no syllogistic, propositional, predicate, or type theoretic argument you can make that uses a slippery slope to derive a theorem.

Of course, we are not doing proper logic, which is why I balk at bringing up fallacies anyway, it's bad form and idiotic. Nevertheless, the argument that we shouldn't try to improve safety on the roads because that would lead us to the conclusion that we need to ban driving altogether is so incredibly pathetic that you should feel embarrassed for defending it.

voxl commented on Helsinki records zero traffic deaths for full year   helsinkitimes.fi/finland/... · Posted by u/DaveZale
dataflow · 24 days ago
You could ban cars entirely. Why wouldn't you? Would you rather people die than drive cars at all?

I'm not agreeing or disagreeing with the parent here; I'm just saying your rebuttal is a strawman.

voxl · 24 days ago
Since we're pretending to know logical fallacies, your deflecting with a slippery slope. Lowering the speed limit by 20 mph is not an extreme change, and it if demonstrates to improve car safety then yes blood should be on your hands for not wanting to drive 20 mph slower.

Alternatively, driving is sometimes necessary to deliver goods and travel. But the funny thing is, is that I would GLADLY ban cars in all cities and heavily invest in high speed rail. Cars would still be needed in this world, but again it's the relative change.

So no, it's not a strawman. If anything it was an ad hom.

voxl commented on I know when you're vibe coding   alexkondov.com/i-know-whe... · Posted by u/thunderbong
atleastoptimal · a month ago
This is all true. The best way to treat LLM's as they are now is one step above the abstraction offered by compiled languages over assembly. You can describe something in plain english, note its explicit requirements, inputs and outputs, and an LLM can effectively write the code as a translation of the logic you are specifying. Using LLM's, you are best served minimizing the entropy they have to deal with. The transformer is essentially a translation engine, so use it as a translator, not as a generator.

That being said, every few months a new model comes out that is a little less encumbered by the typical flaws of LLM's, a little more "intuitively" smart and less needing of hand-holding, a little more reliable. I feel that this is simply a natural course of evolution, as more money is put into LLM's they get better because they're essentially a giant association machine, and those associations give rise to larger abstractions, more robust conceptions of how to wield the tools of understanding the world, etc. Over time it seems inevitable that providing an LLM any task it will be able to perform that task better than any human programmer given it, and the same will go for the rest of what humans do.

voxl · a month ago
No, LLMs are not an "abstraction" like a compiler is. This is bullshit. LLMs are stochastic token generators. I have NEVER met someone in real life that has produced something I wouldn't throw in the trash using LLMs, and I have had the displeasure of eating cookies baked from an LLM recipe.

No, LLMs will not get better. The singularity bullshit has been active since 2010s. LLMs have consumed the entire fucking Internet and are still useless. Where the fuck is the rest of the data going to come from? All these emails from people wanting high quality data from PhDs only for them to be scammy. People only want to train these things on easily stolen garbage, not quality input, because quality is expensive. Go figure!

This optimistic horeshit hype is embarrassing.

voxl commented on Helsinki records zero traffic deaths for full year   helsinkitimes.fi/finland/... · Posted by u/DaveZale
SilverElfin · a month ago
> More than half of Helsinki’s streets now have speed limits of 30 km/h. Fifty years ago, the majority were limited to 50 km/h.

So they hurt quality of life by making it more painful to get anywhere, taking time away from everyone’s lives. You can achieve no traffic deaths by slowing everyone to a crawl. That doesn’t make it useful or good. The goal should be fast travel times and easy driving while also still reducing injuries, which newer safety technologies in cars will achieve.

> Cooperation between city officials and police has increased, with more automated speed enforcement

Mass surveillance under the ever present and weak excuse of “safety”.

voxl · a month ago
Your argument is really "I'd rather people die then drive through your city slower."????

u/voxl

KarmaCake day679October 31, 2017View Original