yfontana (u/yfontana)

yfontana commented on Prism openai.com/index/introduc... · Posted by u/meetpateltech

This seems like a very basic overleaf alternative with few of its features, plus a shallow ChatGPT wrapper. Certainly can’t compete with using VS Code or TeXstudio locally, collaborating through GitHub, and getting AI assistance from Claude Code or Codex.

yfontana · 14 days ago

> Certainly can’t compete with using VS Code or TeXstudio locally, collaborating through GitHub, and getting AI assistance from Claude Code or Codex.

I have a phd in economics. Most researchers in that field have never even heard of any of those tools. Maybe LaTeX, but few actually use it. I was one of very few people in my department using Zotero to manage my bibliography, most did that manually.

yfontana commented on Calling All Hackers: How money works (2024) phrack.org/issues/71/17... · Posted by u/krrishd

cryptica · a month ago

I think overall, the idea of money is messed up on many levels. What we call 'money' today doesn't even have an identity. It's the most important thing in the world, it's also the most heavily utilized thing in the world but almost nobody knows what it means.

- It's backed by nothing.

- It's not a fair medium of exchange because it physically cannot circulate very far from 'money printers' (not many hops) before it's taxed down to nothing. This means that it's unevenly scarce based on social proximity; unfair by design. Cantillon effects on steroids.

- It doesn't even exist as a single cohesive concept; the US dollar in your bank account is not the same as the US dollar in your friend's bank account and it's not the same as the US dollar which European traders use to buy derivatives (e.g. Eurodollars)... There are literally thousands of different ledgers (banks, institutions, in different countries), each presenting its own interface supposedly showing their holdings of this mythical unit called 'The US dollar' which is actually thousands of different currencies, which happen to share the same name, scattered around the world and held together only by regulators whose only shared interest is to print more units for themselves than the next guy does. Slow and fallible human regulators represent the only layer of 'consensus' which exists for the entire fiat monetary system; they move at snails' pace in a world of high frequency trading.

yfontana · a month ago

> - It's backed by nothing.

Money is never backed by nothing, or it's worthless. It may not be backed by anything physical, but it's always backed by some form of trust. National currencies are backed by trust in the corresponding government and institutions.

yfontana commented on Calling All Hackers: How money works (2024) phrack.org/issues/71/17... · Posted by u/krrishd

dghlsakjg · a month ago

Extremely simplified:

When I deposit a dollar, the bank records a $1 deposit liability. If the bank makes a $1 loan, it creates a new $1 deposit for the borrower.

If that dollar is spent and redeposited, deposits increase even though the amount of base money has not. It looks like multiplication, but what’s really happening is that loans and deposits are expanding together on the balance sheet.

The bank is not creating wealth out of nothing. It now has matching assets (loans owed to it) and liabilities (deposits owed to customers), backed by capital that absorbs risk.

With reserve ratios effectively zero, lending is constrained by capital requirements and risk management, not by reserves. Banks cannot recirculate a single dollar endlessly without sufficient capital.

yfontana · a month ago

Reserves matter even if reserve ratios are zero. If Bank A lends too much money, then when its customers spend that money, a lot of it will end up deposited at other banks. These banks will then ask Bank A for reserves (as in, central bank money) to clear the inter-bank transfers, which Bank A will need to borrow from the central bank, at a cost.

yfontana commented on Calling All Hackers: How money works (2024) phrack.org/issues/71/17... · Posted by u/krrishd

deejaaymac · a month ago

Unpopular opinion, but I don't think banks should be able to loan out money that's not theirs, and printing money is bad.

Gold good, paper bad. But also, gold bad, because clipping.

If only there was a solution.

yfontana · a month ago

This probably won't make you feel any better, but banks don't really loan out money that's not theirs. When they lend money, they literally create it out of thin air. Creating that money has a cost, which is what ultimately limits how much they can lend, and having more deposits can lower that cost somewhat, but there's no direct connection between the money you deposit in your account and the money that the bank lends to someone else.

yfontana commented on I failed to recreate the 1996 Space Jam website with Claude j0nah.com/i-failed-to-rec... · Posted by u/thecr0w

thecr0w · 2 months ago

Hm, I didn't try exactly this, but I probably should!

Wrt unit test script, let's take Claude out of the equation, how would you design the unit test? I kept running into either Claude or some library not being capable of consistently identifying planet vs non planet which was hindering Claude's ability to make decisions based on fine detail or "pixel coordinates" if that makes sense.

yfontana · 2 months ago

If I were to do this (and I might give it a try, this is quite an interesting case), I would try to run a detection model on the image, to find bounding boxes for the planets and their associated text. Even a small model running on CPU should be able to do this relatively quickly.

yfontana commented on The fuck off contact page nicchan.me/blog/the-f-off... · Posted by u/OuterVale

dotancohen · 2 months ago

You're going to laugh, but this is why I stick with AWS. They've twice helped me with billing issues on my personal account - as in an actual human helping me. They have no idea I manage large (not huge) AWS deployments at my day job. They just demonstrate great customer service to me as a small client.

So they have me as a loyal customer. And advocate, it seems.

yfontana · 2 months ago

On the professional side, they also often let you interact with their experts and architects directly, as part of your support contract. With most other companies, you either have to go through front-office support exclusively, or pay extra for Professional Services.

yfontana commented on Bag of words, have mercy on us experimental-history.com/... · Posted by u/ntnbr

bamboozled · 2 months ago

I take a offence in the idea I’m “religiously downplaying LLMs”. I pay top dollar for access to the best models because I want the capabilities to be good / better. Just because I’m documenting my experience it doesn’t mean I have an Anti-ai agenda ? I pay because I find LLMs to be useful. Just not in the way suggested by the marketing teams.

I’m downplaying because I have honestly been burned by these tools when I’ve put trust in their ability to understand anything, provide a novel suggestion or even solve some basic bugs without causing other issues.?

I use all of the things you talk about extremely frequently and again, there is no “thinking” or consideration on display that suggests these things work like us, else why would we be having this conversation if they were ?

yfontana · 2 months ago

> I’m downplaying because I have honestly been burned by these tools when I’ve put trust in their ability to understand anything, provide a novel suggestion or even solve some basic bugs without causing other issues.?

I've had that experience plenty of times with actual people... LLMs don't "think" like people do, that much is pretty obvious. But I'm not at all sure whether what they do can be called "thinking" or not.

yfontana commented on Super fast aggregations in PostgreSQL 19 cybertec-postgresql.com/e... · Posted by u/jnord

aidos · 2 months ago

The key idea here seems to be that if you’re grouping on a column on a related table you can do your main aggregation by grouping on the foreign key id on the primary table and use that as a proxy for the data on the related table that you’re actually grouping by.

In the examples given, it’s much faster, but is that mostly due to the missing indexes? I’d have thought that an optimal approach in the colour example would be to look at the product.color_id index, get the counts directly from there and you’re pretty much done.

I have a feeling that Postgres doesn’t make that optimisation (I’ve looked before, but it was older Postgres). And I guess depending on the aggregation maybe it’s not useful in the general case. Maybe in this new world it _can_ make that optimisation?

Anyway, as ever, pg just getting faster is always good.

yfontana · 2 months ago

> In the examples given, it’s much faster, but is that mostly due to the missing indexes? I’d have thought that an optimal approach in the colour example would be to look at the product.color_id index, get the counts directly from there and you’re pretty much done.

So I tried to test this (my intuition being that indexes wouldn't change much, at best you could just do an index scan instead of a seq scan), and I couldn't understand the plans I was getting, until I realized that the query in the blog post has a small error:

> AND c1.category_id = c1.category_id

should really be

> AND p.category_id = c1.category_id

otherwise we're doing a cross-product on the category. Probably doesn't really change much, but still a bit of an oopsie. Anyway, even with the right join condition an index only reduces execution time by about 20% in my tests, through an index scan.

yfontana commented on Super fast aggregations in PostgreSQL 19 cybertec-postgresql.com/e... · Posted by u/jnord

yfontana · 2 months ago

Interestingly, "aggregate first, join later" has been the standard way of joining fact tables in BI tools for a long time. Since fact tables are typically big and also share common dimensions, multi-fact joins for drill-across are best done by first aggregating on those common dimensions, then joining on them.

Makes you wonder how many cases there are out there of optimizations that feel almost second nature in one domain, but have never been applied to other domains because no one thought of it.

yfontana commented on I’m worried that they put co-pilot in Excel simonwillison.net/2025/No... · Posted by u/isaacfrond

ryandrake · 3 months ago

I've been trying to open my mind and "give AI a chance" lately. I spent all day yesterday struggling with Claude Code's utter incompetence. It behaves worse than any junior engineer I've ever worked with:

- It says it's done when its code does not even work, sometimes when it does not even compile.

- When asked to fix a bug, it confidently declares victory without actually having fixed the bug.

- It gets into this mode where, when it doesn't know what to do, it just tries random things over and over, each time confidently telling me "Perfect! I found the error!" and then waiting for the inevitable response from me: "No, you didn't. Revert that change".

- Only when you give it explicit, detailed commands, "modify fade_output to be -90," will it actually produce decent results, but by the time I get to that level of detail, I might as well be writing the code myself.

To top it off, unlike the junior engineer, Claude never learns from its mistakes. It makes the same ones over and over and over, even if you include "don't make XYZ mistake" in the prompt. If I were an eng manager, Claude would be on a PIP.

yfontana · 3 months ago

> - It says it's done when its code does not even work, sometimes when it does not even compile.

> - When asked to fix a bug, it confidently declares victory without actually having fixed the bug.

You need to give it ways to validate its work. A junior dev will also give you code that doesn't compile or should have fixed a bug but doesn't if they don't actually compile the code and test that the bug is truly fixed.