bustadjustme | 4 months ago | on: What will enter the public domain in 2026?
bustadjustme's comments
bustadjustme | 9 months ago | on: LLMs are cheap
Sorry if I missed it, but how is a single token output from an LLM comparable to a search result from an engine? The author here compares 1k tokens (as an estimate for an average LLM single query response) to 1k web search queries. How is this not a factor of 1000 error?
> To compare a midrange pair on quality, the Bing Search vs. a Gemini 2.5 Flash comparison shows the LLM being 1/25th the price.
That is, 40x the price _per query_ on average (which is the unit of user interaction). LLMs with web-search will only multiply this value, as several queries are made behind the scenes for each user-query.
EDIT: thanks, zahlman, he does quote LLM prices in 1M tokens, or 1k user-queries, so the above concern is mistaken!
bustadjustme | 11 months ago | on: Show HN: HN Watercooler – listen to HN threads as an audio conversation
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You may have issued such a license...
Though without an explicit sublicense from Y Combinator, they may have issues with this application:
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bustadjustme | 1 year ago | on: Antiqua et Nova: Note on the relationship between AI and human intelligence
"Writers disagree on how best to define and classify atheism, contesting what supernatural entities are considered gods, whether atheism is a philosophical position or merely the absence of one, and whether it requires a conscious, explicit rejection; however, the norm is to define atheism in terms of an explicit stance against theism." (emphasis mine)
bustadjustme | 1 year ago | on: Why America's economy is soaring ahead of its rivals
But the polls weren't wrong [1]. This was a normal polling error. If we expect polls to give us pinpoint accuracy, it's our expectations that are wrong.
[1] https://www.natesilver.net/p/the-model-exactly-predicted-the...
bustadjustme | 3 years ago | on: AI-Generated Bible Art
Note that the prompt is AI-generated as well, though. From the linked blog post:
> OpenAI has another AI, GPT-3, that I used to generate many of the ideas for DALL·E prompts. I wanted to explore DALL·E using a wide variety of styles and artists, and I have limitations and biases when it comes to my knowledge of art history. GPT-3 cast a wider net of styles and artists than I would’ve come up with on my own.... The GPT-3 prompts I used evolved over time, but this one is emblematic:
> Suggest 5 unique concept ideas for a work of visual art inspired by Luke 14:7-11 (do not pick the place of honor) in the Bible. Include art direction and a specific medium and artist to emulate. Include artists from a variety of eras, styles, and media. Try for an unusual perspective. Title, year, medium. Description.
bustadjustme | 6 years ago | on: 'Oumuamua could be a shard from a dead planet
> The ʻokina has historically been represented in computer publications by the grave accent (`), the left single quotation mark (‘), or the apostrophe ('), especially when the correct typographical mark (ʻ) is not available.
bustadjustme | 6 years ago | on: Facebook reverses on paid influencers after Bloomberg memes
While this does kinda suck, note that Marianne Williamson is excluded from many (if not all) of these same examples, while having announced her candidacy well before (and even making it into the televised debates as well). Politics aside, my guess is this is more than anything else a symptom of not knowing what to do with candidates who don't already hold an elected position.
bustadjustme | 6 years ago | on: Free Audio Books: Download Great Books for Free
Looking at LibriVox specifically (linked to by many of the entries in OP), each audiobook has an RSS feed, so I'll just be listening to them in a podcast app. If you have a decent one that keeps track of which "episodes" you've listened to and allows downloading for offline listening (ideally automatically), seems like that should cover the audiobook usecase pretty well.
bustadjustme | 6 years ago | on: Bananas Are Berries, Strawberries Aren't
.... whales certainly aren't bony fish. They're in class Mammalia, which is not within the superclass Osteichthyes. I.e. they're mammals, not fish.
bustadjustme | 6 years ago | on: Ask HN: Best books you read in the past decade?
The way I read it, the Bible makes it a point to communicate that Jesus was/is a real person (and that his importance actually hinges on that fact). AFAIK, this is and has always been the Church's position.
bustadjustme | 7 years ago | on: Air-conditioners do great good, but at a high environmental cost
Wow, there's some fantastic mapping of this effect from a few years ago: https://calepa.ca.gov/2015/09/16/urbanheat/. Links to a study and lots of data produced from it.
Southern California: "urban heat archipelago".
bustadjustme | 7 years ago | on: An Interesting Pattern in the Prime Numbers: Parallax Compression
From OP:
> Interestingly, this same pattern holds for more numbers, and for different intervals.
He's not claiming it holds for _all_ n, just for _many_ n.
bustadjustme | 8 years ago | on: Oldest recorded solar eclipse helps date the Egyptian pharaohs
I don't follow their reasoning. Given their premises:
1. The solar eclipse of Oct 30, 1207 BC is recorded in the book of Joshua, describing events concerning the people of Israel in Canaan (specifically, a battle with some Canaanites).
2. A battle between Israel and Egypt (under Pharaoh Merneptah, son of Ramesses II) is recorded on the Merneptah Stele (which says it was recorded in Merneptah's 5th year).
The researchers conclude:
> So the Israelites must have been in Canaan by Merneptah's fifth year.
> ...
> The confrontation with Israel probably occurred in his year 2 to 4 (Kitchen 2006), so 1207 BC is probably year 2, 3 or 4 of Merneptah.
Huh? They must have been in Canaan by 1207, sure, but why does that imply the Israel/Egypt battle happened in 1207? It seems like 1207 is just an earliest-possible date for the battle...
From what I can tell, the Merneptah Stele has no other information indicating it should be linked to the eclipse or the account from Joshua.
Have I just missed something?
bustadjustme | 8 years ago | on: How Taser inserts itself into investigations involving its own weapons
Yeah your number's surprisingly (to me) actually not far off.
Use of Tasers varies pretty widely from department to department -- according to [1] the Richmond County SD reports about 0.053 uses per officer-month, Miami-Dade PD about 0.0074 uses per officer-month, and Seattle PD about 0.056 uses per officer-month.
Extrapolating the RCSD value across the US, with over 800k officers total [2], it comes out to about 43k uses per month. Given the ~200 months over which this data was gathered, that's 9.2M uses, which makes the 276 fatalities only 0.003% of all incidents (as a best-guess).
Obviously that in no way implies Taser's behavior was ethical; but it's actually a surprisingly low fatality rate for a weapon still considered somewhat lethal.
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I think a reasonable argument against copyright being so long is that things I experienced as a child, and especially shared experiences with others, have become a part of me: they've become shared culture, even parts of our shared language. "The Christmas Song" ("Chestnuts roasting..."; still under copyright in the US for another ~15 years) is just as much a part of Christmas to me as "Angels We Have Heard on High" (public domain). Maybe a good example of this is the "Happy Birthday" song: that song is synonymous with birthdays to me and those I associate with -- if you have a birthday that song is sung, if you hear that song sung it must be somebody's birthday. Yet for the longest time it was excluded from movies, TV, radio, establishments, because somebody was thought to own the copyright for it. It was part of our shared language and experience as much as aspirin or kleenex or thermos (genericized trademarks). Similarly, "hobbit" means the same thing as "halfling" to me, but don't use the word in a published work. Eventually copyrighted works seem to become pretty genericized, much quicker than ~100 years, yet their protection remains.
Disney's Snow White is about as old now as the Brothers Grimm version was when Disney's was made. I'm not allowed to make derivative works of Disney's version; should Disney have been disallowed from making it because elements of the story were "so recent"?
Obviously people should be able to profit from their own work, but I think the "shared culture/language" aspect is a decent argument that the public has an interest that counterbalances the interests of authors/creators.