flat-pluto | 2 years ago | on: Blunt/Direct Communicators, Online Communication and How to Overcome Challenges
flat-pluto's comments
flat-pluto | 2 years ago | on: How to Succeed: Lessons from Sam Altman
Another example of this is how homeowners are treated vs renters. Specifically, in terms of tax breaks for mortgage interest payments, expenses incurred during major home improvements, etc. Also you can withdraw a decent chunk of money from your IRA early without the hefty penalty if the withdrawal goes toward buying a home. On the other hand, renters are not eligible for any such benefits.
flat-pluto | 2 years ago | on: Students can’t get off their phones. Schools have had enough
Teachers have a difficult job as it is, not to mention that they are already mistreated - they have almost no authority over students since they never have backing from parents or school administrators.
I recently came across a post on Reddit[1] where a student pepper sprayed her teacher because he confiscated her phone during an exam. One of the commenters claimed that the same teacher was previously punched in the face by a different student for taking their phone away after catching them cheating on a test. It is disconcerting to say the least.
[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/facepalm/comments/1397n4l/teacher_t...
flat-pluto | 3 years ago | on: Talking to AI might be the most important skill of this century
Anyway, this[1] is a really good introduction to Prompt Engineering and how one can tailor prompts for their use-case.
Interesting podcast episode that touches on this stuff - "In an age that favors the formulaic and generic to the ambiguous, complex, and unexpected, it's no wonder that computers can sound eerily lifelike. Leslie tells EconTalk host Russ Roberts that we should worry less about the lifelike nature of AI and worry more that human beings are being more robotic and predictable."[2]
[1] - https://www.nocode.ai/introduction-to-prompt-engineering/
[2] - https://www.econtalk.org/ian-leslie-on-being-human-in-the-ag...
flat-pluto | 3 years ago | on: Ask HN: What do you use for basic data analysis, visualization, and graphing?
Earlier today there was a Show HN post[1] which showed how to visualize a Pandas dataframe (can come from CSV, JSON whatever). I tried it for basic tasks and it is pretty good. It's minimal code (<5 lines) - just reading the json and calling pygwalker in a Google Colab environment[2] or something. Something like this:
import pandas as pd
import pygwalker as pyg
df = pd.read_json('{filename}.json')
gwalker = pyg.walk(df)
Should be decent for most basic use-cases.flat-pluto | 3 years ago | on: “Latinx is used only by the people educated at America’s most elite schools”
Groupthink, herd mentality, conformity > Meritocracy
This should be a fun couple of years, sigh!
flat-pluto | 3 years ago | on: The costs and problems of using public and government data
As outlined in the article, common sense solutions do exist so the problem isn't technical per se. Is it just that not enough people are using these datasets for it to be an important enough problem to solve? Or is it more of a bureaucratic/political issue where its difficult to come to a consensus among these departments?
flat-pluto | 3 years ago | on: Patio11 (Patrick McKenzie) has left Stripe
[1] - https://www.kalzumeus.com/2010/03/20/running-a-software-busi... [2] - https://www.kalzumeus.com/2012/01/23/salary-negotiation/
flat-pluto | 3 years ago | on: Ask HN: I Need to Talk to Someone
Email is in my bio.
flat-pluto | 3 years ago | on: Creation happens in silence
Sidenote - if you can find the time, you should write more often. I just went through your articles and there is a lot of useful advice to be found. The projects are pretty interesting too. Cheers!
flat-pluto | 3 years ago | on: Creation happens in silence
I'd say this is just the first stage of creating something, an MVP of sorts. After that you do need to get some feedback, iterate and improve it step-by-step to get the finished product.
flat-pluto | 3 years ago | on: Ask HN: Where are laid off employees gathering?
flat-pluto | 3 years ago | on: Elon Musk on OpenAI Microsoft deal and OpenAI seeking profits
1. Government - it'll prolly be hidden from the public under the garb of national security, and used for god knows what
2. For-profit companies - Google, Meta, MS, etc who have shown themselves to be untrustworthy and purely motivated by profits
3. Non-profit companies - OpenAI (and others?) who have explicitly made the commitment to optimize for long-term benefit, safety, and cooperation [1]
I'm not saying there is a right answer, but the non-profit route seems like the least worst option.
> Non-profit or not, AGIs shouldn’t be controlled by anyone.
I don't see that ever playing out in the real world. It is much too powerful a tool to be made accessible to everyone.
flat-pluto | 3 years ago | on: Elon Musk on OpenAI Microsoft deal and OpenAI seeking profits
flat-pluto | 3 years ago | on: Musks texts: Twitter employees do at least 100 LOC a month
The creator states - "They were interpreted by AI. We've aimed to be as accurate as possible, but we can't guarantee accuracy or validity."
flat-pluto | 3 years ago | on: Ask HN: Why isn't light/dark mode triggered based on ambient light sensor?
I know of several Android phones that have this feature (it is off by default though).
flat-pluto | 3 years ago | on: My iPhone 14 Fell Off My Motorcycle and Told My Family I Crashed
Just want to stress that training an ML model is going to be really difficult for this scenario, and false positives are to be expected. It isn't like this was unexpected either given that "the phone flew off its handlebar mount".
flat-pluto | 3 years ago | on: What China Can Teach Us About the Future of TikTok and Video Search
Sidenote - Only a few years ago, I thought it'd be damn near impossible to compete with FB + IG in the social media space OR with Google + FB in the digital ads industry. On both counts though, I've had to rethink my position given the rise of TikTok, Amazon[1] and Apple[2].
[1] - https://www.statista.com/statistics/1305698/amazon-advertisi... [2] - https://www.statista.com/statistics/1330127/apple-ad-revenue...
flat-pluto | 3 years ago | on: Ask HN: Does anyone actually Use GCP?
4) I've also received discounts which helped us save on query and storage costs (20% off above a certain threshold).
As a hobbyist, I have used Google Colab which has been pretty good as well. (Don't know if it officially comes under GCP).
This is known but is worth repeating - GCP is under-pricing its products as a way to gain market share, and once they have a larger piece of the pie, they are likely to increase prices.
flat-pluto | 3 years ago | on: James Earl Jones Signs Off on Using Recordings to Recreate Voice with AI
In the near future, I imagine it'd be easy enough to take a snippet of audio and transfer a celebrity's voice to it, similar to what we can already do to images using StyleGAN or something similar.
Exciting times ahead!
I found this[1] to be a good resource. Another thing that has helped me is adding a prefix to my review. Classifying it as: suggestion, nitpick, props, etc. More about this here[2].
[1] - https://stackoverflow.blog/2019/09/30/how-to-make-good-code-...
[2] - https://emmer.dev/blog/code-review-comment-prefixes/