yojo (u/yojo) - Readit News

yojo commented on Bank forced to rehire workers after lying about chatbot productivity, union says arstechnica.com/tech-poli... · Posted by u/ndsipa_pomu

rocmcd · 8 days ago

That's still how it is, at least for me in the US. I've never had to interact with a chat bot for anything, but maybe it depends on what you're returning.

yojo · 8 days ago

I’ve run into this with “personal care items” that are non-returnable. E.g. I received a “two pack” of eye drops that had obviously popped open in the warehouse and contained only one bottle.

I couldn’t do the regular return flow because hygiene, but the chat bot immediately issued a refund.

yojo commented on Electromechanical reshaping, an alternative to laser eye surgery medicalxpress.com/news/20... · Posted by u/Gaishan

jacquesm · 12 days ago

I'm between +3 and +4 now depending on how tired I am. I used to be able to read the print on the smallest SMT packages :(

And it does affect my quality of life: forget glasses? Good there goes your day until you've found a replacement. The best improvement so far has not been the glasses but a simple string to make sure I don't put them down but they stay around my neck. That has made a massive difference and it also helps when looking down (so the glasses won't fall off) and it has cut the rate at which I was losing them to zero from about one pair per month (which really was not sustainable).

yojo · 12 days ago

My in-laws all love their reading glasses with a split-bridge joined by magnets, and a built-in loop around the back. I think it’s these: https://cliceyewear.com/

If you don’t mind the aesthetics (though I personally can’t get past them), they solve the same problem as your string in an integrated way. Plus they rest more like a necklace, since it doesn’t require as long of a loop.

yojo commented on Sunny days are warm: why LinkedIn rewards mediocrity elliotcsmith.com/linkedin... · Posted by u/smitec

kevin_thibedeau · 12 days ago

Craigslist hasn't sold out ever and eBay is still useful for its original purpose if you look for genuinely used things. You're confusing them with the Etsy dumpsterfire.

yojo · 12 days ago

Craigslist never sold out, but it went through a big scammer phase (and largely lost me). Looking for an apartment in SF in 2016 was a mix of property management co spam and outright fraudulent listings trying to scam you. Not sure if they ever corrected this.

I’ve since moved to Portland, OR, where Craigslist seems to get about 10% of the listings compared to FB marketplace.

I generally love Craigslist and want it to succeed, but it hasn’t been “thriving” anywhere I’ve lived in a loooooong time.

yojo commented on OpenAI Progress progress.openai.com... · Posted by u/vinhnx

mrandish · 13 days ago

I agree. Since I'm recently retired and no longer code much, I don't have much need for LLMs but refining a complex, niche web search is the one thing where they're uniquely useful to me. It's usually when targeting the specific topic involves several keywords which have multiple plain English meanings that return a flood of erroneous results. Because LLMs abstract keywords to tokens based on underlying meaning, you can specify the domain in the prompt it'll usually select the relevant meanings of multi-meaning terms - which isn't possible in general purpose web search engines. So it helps narrow down closer to the specific needle I want in the haystack.

As other posters said, relying on LLMs for factual answers to challenging questions is error prone. I just want the LLM to give me the links and I'll then assess veracity like a normal web search. I think a web search interface allowed disambiguating multi-meaning keywords might be even better.

yojo · 13 days ago

I’ll give you another use: LLMs are really good at unearthing the “unknown unknowns.” If I’m learning a new topic (coding or not) summarizing my own knowledge to an LLM and then asking “what important things am I missing” almost always turns up something I hadn’t considered.

You’ll still want to fact check it, and there’s no guarantee it’s comprehensive, but I can’t think of another tool that provides anything close without hours of research.

yojo commented on Good system design seangoedecke.com/good-sys... · Posted by u/dondraper36

atomicnumber3 · 14 days ago

If I was your interviewer, I would: respect your answers a lot, not be able to check off anything on my rubric, try to explain this in the debrief, get told we have to stick to the rubric to counter bias, and then watch while they pass on you for someone who decided to play architecture jenga instead. I would potentially even consider emailing you to apologize later, then not do it because I'd probably get in trouble for exposing us to liability or something because apologizing can be construed as admission of guilt.

yojo · 14 days ago

If a candidate doesn’t ask clarifying questions that lead them to an understanding of QPS, storage requirements, and throughput considerations, that’s a mark against.

At that point, if you want to see them design a distributed system with all the bells and whistles, you should stop them, tell them the kind of traffic they need to handle, then let them go again.

If they persist in designing a system that cannot handle the specified load, they have probably failed the interview.

yojo commented on What's the strongest AI model you can train on a laptop in five minutes? seangoedecke.com/model-on... · Posted by u/ingve

aniijbod · 16 days ago

Let the AI efficiency olympics begin!

On a laptop, on a desktop, on a phone?

Train for 5 minutes, an hour, a day, a week?

On a boat? With a goat?

yojo · 16 days ago

> With a goat?

I think you meant Llama.

The rhymes are admittedly more limited, unless you have a Boston accent.

yojo commented on Stanford to continue legacy admissions and withdraw from Cal Grants forbes.com/sites/michaelt... · Posted by u/hhs

throwawaylaptop · 20 days ago

I was #3 in highschool out of a 550 graduating class. I thought I was bright.

Went to Cal for mechanical engineering, and while I survived the engineering classes, the physics classes wore me out and the math classes were almost impossible for me. I barely made it out of there.

I honestly wish I went somewhere easier so that it wasn't a constant struggle to keep up and survive. I think I would have actually learned more.

yojo · 20 days ago

I took a Math 1A class (intro to calc) at Cal where the prof turned his back on class at the start of the hour, then proceeded to mumble incoherently for 60 minutes while filling a chalkboard with equations. He’d turn back around at the end of the hour. Many students brought pillows. I learned literally nothing in lecture.

This professor wasn’t demanding, he was just making zero effort to actually teach.

Great researchers are not necessarily great teachers, especially for intro courses. Anecdotally, I think this is a common issue at “prestigious” schools.

yojo commented on My Lethal Trifecta talk at the Bay Area AI Security Meetup simonwillison.net/2025/Au... · Posted by u/vismit2000

simpaticoder · 21 days ago

"One of my weirder hobbies is helping coin or boost new terminology..." That is so fetch!

yojo · 20 days ago

Nice try, wagon hopper.

yojo commented on 19% of California houses are owned by investors ocregister.com/2025/07/21... · Posted by u/milleramp

hk1337 · 23 days ago

I don’t have a problem with it. I pointed it out because it seems to show Blackstone hasn’t bought up all the houses like people think.

People should rent what they can afford and need. Some people need the house with all its space, some only need an apartment.

The big thing is people shouldn’t be spending 50% of their monthly income on rent. It doesn’t help them, their family, or you. Likely, eventually, they’ll have trouble paying, you’ll have to evict them, their lives will be disrupted, their families lives will be disrupted, and you’ll have to spend time evicting them and finding a new tenant else you’re not making money.

yojo · 23 days ago

Agreed. I look for tenants that aren’t spending more than a third on rent. At $1300/month, that puts it right on median household income of $48k for the area (this is in rural northern CA).

I have no interest in ever evicting anyone, it sounds like a nightmare for everyone involved. I like my tenants, and my rents go up rarely and below market rate/inflation.

yojo commented on 19% of California houses are owned by investors ocregister.com/2025/07/21... · Posted by u/milleramp

hk1337 · 23 days ago

And from the link on the page: https://www.ocregister.com/2025/07/16/where-in-california-do...

> Most of California’s single-family house investors are “mom and pop” types, according to BatchData.

> Small-fry owners, with up to five properties nationwide, control 91% of California investment houses.

> The rest is divvied up this way: Owners of six to 10 houses control 4% of California investment houses. Investors with 11 to 50 houses own 3% of this Golden State housing group. And 51 or more? Only 2% of investment houses.

yojo · 23 days ago

I’m one of those mom and pop owners. The decent ROI on renting out my starter home financed me adding an ADU to the lot, which I also rent out.

I’ve owned the house long enough that I’ve had several tenants churn out when they buy their own houses.

This doesn’t feel like a policy failure, IMO. Renters have the option to live in a free standing home while they save for a down payment, and “investors” have an incentive to increase density/add to the housing stock.

Not everyone is at a point in their life where it makes sense to own a home. It feels weird making a judgement that these people should be required to live in apartments.