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d136o | 2 years ago | on: Beating GPT-4 on HumanEval with a fine-tuned CodeLlama-34B

llama-2-70b-chat (courtesy of llama.cpp on m2) says:

  Pretend to be a commenter on hackernews. Respond to the comment below:

  [parent comment inlined]

  what is your response?
  "Wow, that's great to hear! It sounds like you had a really positive experience with the 34B last night. I'm also excited to see what's in store for Phind and its potential applications. Have you tried using the 34B for any specific tasks or projects yet? And do you think the text completion feature would be useful for your use case if it were improved further?"

d136o | 2 years ago | on: The median return of 2022's SPAC mergers: -82%

The suckers aren’t just investors, but also employees who work at companies that hinted/promised liquidity via one of these transactions. I didn’t work at a company that failed to ipo via spac, but I almost did and although every technical interviewer felt earnest, something felt off about their lack of detail around business and the equity part of the comp.

Too much of it felt like hot air and I went elsewhere. This was two years ago, and indeed some BS press release from a year ago says their “deal” fell apart. Seemingly reputable investors too, wtf.

Keep your BS detectors on at all times.

d136o | 2 years ago | on: How do we pay for parking?

Some people say that the common folk now have cheap mass produced gadgets that were previously only available to the wealthy, and some rant about the enshitification (great term whose origin I need to learn more about of) of our society.

I nod along to this piece and yet I don’t want to be so cynical.

d136o | 2 years ago | on: A look into the finances of SpaceX

I am not a finance professional but…

Say you make $1 of profit, does that translate into $1 your company can control for its benefit? If kept as profit part of that dollar flows out of the company, to other companies and possibly to the government as taxes (god forbid).

If the company reinvests then it fully benefits from its would be $1 as opposed to someone spending it elsewhere.

IMO Accounting is the only reason many companies don’t turn an external “profit”

d136o | 2 years ago | on: Why hundreds of decades-old yet vital drugs are nearly impossible to find

Are there any chemical precursors these drugs all have in common that could have been exhausted by something else that is more important to manufacture?

Alternatively is supply being commandeered somehow?

So much weird stuff is happening with supply chains that it feels like the US is purposefully being squeezed.

d136o | 2 years ago | on: Terrible real estate agent photographs

When I was looking for an apartment to rent in Palo Alto I found a great deal on rent because I visited a place listed on Craigslist that had awful photos.

It turns out the owner was just an older man who wasn’t good with tech, the place was pretty great in person and I ended up living there for a couple of years.

Normal untouched photos are more honest. I also dislike when photos make it ambiguous which unit in a duplex is for sale, or don’t make clear/hide that it’s only part of a lot or something like that.

d136o | 2 years ago | on: Want to buy a West Texas ghost town? Now’s your chance

At the beginning of the pandemic I obsessed over large land listings on Redfin/Zillow. I thought I’d finally found the bargain when I saw something near a Clearlake here in CA. It was something like 80 acres for less than $400k…

Well it turns out Clearlake was heavily contaminated with mercury when there was an active mine right on the lake…

Buyer beware!

d136o | 2 years ago | on: Ask HN: Most interesting tech you built for just yourself?

Love this.

Semi relatedly, the reason I chose my current smart watch is that it can go weeks without charging, I simply don’t worry about it. Yes it has a limited number of colors and I can’t browse the web on it or w.e. but that’s a feature.

Maybe I’ll seek out a phone with similar battery use profile…

d136o | 2 years ago | on: Bed Bath and Beyond files for bankruptcy

I wonder how much of it is explained by all the company retirement plans that are set to auto invest via an index fund.

They says it’s retail meme stock buyers… but what if it’s everyone who doesn’t have time to look at things and these publicly traded companies are now just selling into those reliable biweekly/monthly retirement account contributions.

d136o | 2 years ago | on: USA Cycling champion dies after being struck by car in San Francisco’s Presidio

This rider could have been you or someone you know. I feel for them, their family, and their friends.

I did a pretty regular bike commute while living in LA, Westwood to Santa Monica. Years later while driving through I noticed one of the white bikes (shown in article) memorializing a bikers death at a particular intersection I crossed every commute (Santa Monica Blvd and 405 intersection). It was utterly tragic and a reminder of how often I had been in the same danger that killed another unlucky rider. It could have been me.

d136o | 2 years ago | on: Bing Chat now has ads

I’m far from an expert (just an engineer who likes to download and try out demos) but one dark view of the alignment chatter is that it’s really about whether can you can get this new big artificial brain to push any user in the direction of BigCorp goal, while letting the users think that it’s answering their questions etc.

I’d love to think that we can have AI agents working locally (with privacy) in alignment with our personal goals, but that seems like one of those things that won’t happen. (Will apple come through in terms of enabling local+decentralized inference/training?)

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