waffletower

Born on December 31, 2018•1008 Karma

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waffletower•

14 hours ago

•on: Apple to skip high-end M6 Mac chips in favor of AI...

They'll sell more $20-25k Macs when Goldman green lights Apple Card credit limits that will fit one of them.

zerohp•

14 hours ago

Apple Card already offers credit limits high enough for it

waffletower•

3 days ago

•on: AI has already killed academia as we know it?

"Yes, going back to paper and pencil strains our current resources, but is a likely necessity" -- When I reached this sad, arthritic point in the article it was clear that the author has no constructive idea about what happens next in education. There is no critical dialogue regarding assessment and its necessity. There is no critical understanding and projection for what intelligence as a service represents for society. Just a simple monastic shrug and a familiar scent of old world pencil lead.

FloorEgg•

3 days ago

It frustrates me that your comment is being down voted, because I agree with your sentiment.

Too many educators don't actually know how to educate, and only focus on what to educate.

LLMs are offering some ways to dramatically improve how people learn (and therefore how well they learn, what they learn,etc - to rapidly accelerate and improve outcomes). However most educators, who are ignorant to the principles of how people learn, have no idea how to harness that potential. The result is in most cases students are just using AI to sabotage their own learning, because no better alternative is being offered.

It's a hard problem... But it's a shame that so few people are working constructively and pragmatically on it.

waffletower•

3 days ago

I hope some have already thought of this addition to the AI-inundated academic's bag of tricks -- in college and graduate school I was fortunate to have some important one-on-one conversations with professors, guests and peers where I had dialogues which meaningfully stimulated and advanced my thinking in a variety of subjects. It is clear that frontier models can provide similar opportunities on demand in nearly any subject. One assessment could be student sharing of raw chat logs on a course relevant topic where particular questions were engaged and discussed. The focus is not on the prose product, but the development, the grappling and the questions. There is intellectual value here in the depths of the nested questions, corrections, and unique additions made by the student during the exchange. If not a substitute for an essay, it could be required pre-planning for it.

root_axis•

3 days ago

> LLMs are offering some ways to dramatically improve how people learn

But in practice, they are overwhelmingly having the opposite effect, and if we're realistic about the structural incentives that have no practical path to being changed in higher ed, this will continue to be the case indefinitely.

FloorEgg•

3 days ago

Yes, it's tragic.

It's as if electricity had the potential to save lives but everyone was just frantically electrocuting themselves.

waffletower•

3 days ago

•on: California AB 2047 makes 3D printers off-limits to...

Describing California as "the Europe of the United States" ignores its essential narcissism -- defining California in terms of Europe would be met with contemptuous pashaws, even if the balkanized ethnic enclaves found there, at a scale larger than anywhere in the U.S. -- not even New York, resemble Europe. The Asian communities will also wonder if you can find Vietnam on a map -- would guess you think it is in the Mediterranean.

waffletower•

3 days ago

•on: Solving Wordle using information theory

I made a Wordle solver in Clojure a while back which is backed by an English word frequency database. My family believes it is cheating to use it. Much more fun to write that code than to play the game though :D

waffletower•

3 days ago

•on: Anthropic updates their terms to verify age or ide...

If attractive, cloud providers could develop open models with their own investment, and sell hosted access as a business model. While Google checks these boxes, I haven't seen a Google much marketing focus upon their open models (Gemma) coupled with hosting. groq could conceivably train its own models, but groq's business model hosts open models (GPT OSS, Qwen 3, Llama 4 are currently their prominently advertised models on their site... which seems out of date to me) trained by other organizations.

waffletower•

4 days ago

•on: Mexican government unveils a prototype for a new h...

Even a used Nissan Leaf with degraded batteries is a viable vehicle in many U.S. cities. I would not call these markets "niche", there are many mid-large metropolitan population centers where they are practical. To use "niche", is either a political denial or ignorance of the population distribution of the United States. They are popular where I live, I drove one as a primary vehicle for 8.5 years, and I have purchased another used Leaf for my teenager. The empty pickup truck is also a "niche" vehicle with this usage -- it clearly isn't an appropriate choice for every driving need and locale.

waffletower•

4 days ago

•on: Pledging another $400k to the Zig software foundat...

I applaud this, particularly as I view Zig as a viable alternative to rust for many applications. Do I think rust is a positive addition to the Linux kernel. Absolutely. Would I reach for rust or Zig first when I was implementing a real-time audio synthesizer if I had to choose between the two? Unless Rusteze, a Clojure dialect hosted on rust existed, I would choose Zig. I sense a hegemonic power growing behind rust, and I think we need to support a breadth of alternatives in how we invoke computation.

sufficientsoup•

4 days ago

> I sense a hegemonic power growing behind rust

Can you elaborate on this?

waffletower•

4 days ago

•on: Apertus – Open Foundation Model for Sovereign AI

I don't think Dario is completely evil, but he can't see his obvious naiveté that the rest of us see clearly (vis a vis the Trump administration), and his paternal hubris, only Anthropic should win and control AI, should be perceived as far worse than Bill Gate's desire to control the internet in the 90s. The fact that Microsoft invested so heavily in OpenAI blinded me to Anthropic's potential villainy for years.

waffletower•

11 days ago

•on: Anthropic's Safety Superpower

A democratic process, of sorts, elected the current government of the United States. The president even won the popular vote this round. There is no guarantee that AI guidance by democratic process will be an effective counter to corporate autocracy; and more realistically, AI guidance by an autocratic executive branch is the more likely alternative before 2029.

waffletower•

13 days ago

•on: Ask HN: Did we witness the "Trinity moment" for AI...

I only downvoted the "Humanity has yet to create an AI" part. I agree that we have witnessed the actions of an old man with a case of dementia lashing out.