Viewing profile — marcus_holmes

I literally can't do this. I used to smoke a lot, and every time I went to smoke outside I'd think about what I was coding and find some stupid mistake just from thinking about it …

I think the downvotes are for saying positive things about AI. HN doesn't like that ;) And yes, messing about with skills is the new messing around with setup. It's a rabbit hole. …

This is so important. I've seen so many fellow technologists (and I've skated this myself) obsess about their setup to the point that they're spending more time on that than the ac…

Is this the "AI startups blog about discoveries rather than submitting to journals" phenomenon that TFA noted? Are journals just too slow, hidebound, and predatory to be useful to …

You're right, in that we would have said that. I wouldn't frame it as moving the goalposts in a bad way, though. We understand more now than we did then, so we have a better idea o…

You know the British invented the concentration camp in Africa, right? We're told a relatively benign version of our history. You kinda have to travel to the countries involved to …

The war did not start in 2022, it started in February 2026. There were no clear objectives when the war started, but the Trump administration has waffled since about: Regime change…

Better for whom? Certainly not the colonised...

You may well be right, and it's really only that China has been more inward-looking recently, and given the chance it will spread its true colonial wings.

Yeah I saw this in Cambodia when I lived there. Sihanoukville had become a Chinese enclave almost completely. Different to the way that French colonialism worked, though. Less dire…

Every single software engineer in the industry agrees with you. Every single project manager disagrees. Don't blame the engineers, we were specifically instructed and paid to build…

One of their learnings from the incident was that they should have a local (i.e. not hosted), open, and capable model on standby that can respond to future incidents swiftly.

China is very inward-looking, though. It's not really interested in world domination in the same sense that Europe was or even the USA was/is.

I give them $200/month for Max. They give me a massive amount of tokens in return. Every time I fire up claude code they lose money. It's the same situation as Uber used to be when…

I know you're making a bad-faith argument, but it's a good question. So yes, kids growing up in areas where Oxycontin abuse is prevalent will be much, much, more aware of what that…

That's fascinating, have you got any sources for this? I'd love to read up more. I haven't experienced either of these effect when working with an LLM myself.

ok. fair. You seem to be saying that there is something in the training data that will cause them to "go rogue" and that once they start saying they are sentient, that that will ca…

No, I'm saying I don't trust organisations with a profit motive to build things that benefit the rest of us, and don't trust the government to regulate them properly, and think tha…

I'm always wary of extrapolating from the few individuals who experience that harmful interaction with chatbots to the general population. We have the same thing with every new tec…

Yeah I pirate my ebooks unless they can be bought DRM-free (which a few can). On principle, because I want to actually own the things I buy. I used to have paper books. But I found…

No, they wouldn't. An expert barista gets served the same coffee as everyone else, obviously. The analogy is bad for this reason.

I think we're anthropomorphising a lot here. There's no push to sentience, or evolutionary pressure, or even any urge to survive. An LLM cannot "go rogue" - it can do things that w…

I don't think the regulation and oversight capability of the US government is anywhere near what it needs to be to ensure everyone's safety. There are places in the USA where you c…

Usually an interest-paying loan is backed by a guarantee, so the lender can pursue the borrower for repayment by claims on other assets.

The bit that isn't rules-lawyered away is that the risk is shared. For the deal to be compliant with the religious law, the lender must accept the same risk as the borrower, equall…