Totally terrible. ONe place I worked we all had sparcs and the first thing that happened whenever anyone left is there would be this mad shuffle where everyone nicked everyone else's computer with the IPX being the prize for whoever wasn't there at the time or the new joiner. So I had the IPX for a while, even just using it as an x client for a remote build server it was horrible.
We neither need, nor benefit from this precis, which is longer than the headline but contains no additional information and insight. On hn people are encouraged to read tfa for themselves.
If you have showdead on, that user's comment history is rather full of this sort of thing. Seemingly restarted half a year ago, but with similar conduct in the pre-LLM era as well.
Actually, as the article falls into that "ad begging" category and requires time-consuming disabling of tracking, I can understand why someone posts a summary.
every few months i like to ask chatgpt to do the "thinking" part of my job (scientist) and see how the responses stack up.
at the beginning 2022 it was useless because the output was garbage (hallucinations and fake data).
nowadays its still useless, but for different reasons. it just regurgitates things already known and published and is unable to come up with novel hypotheses and mechanisms and how to test them. which makes sense, for how i understand LLMs operate.
I am also a scientist and had the same conclusion. I just use it to summarize papers, occasionally write boilerplate, and sometimes do some google search primitives if its an easy question.
A better title would be: “Person who doesn’t know how to write state machines struggles to write a state machine”.
In attempt 2 the old school C way of writing the state machine would work just fine in python, avoid a bunch of the boilerplate and avoid the “state setter needs to know a bunch of stuff” problem. Basically you make the states as a table and put the methods you need in the table so in python a dictionary is convenient. Then you have
> def set_state(new_state):
> state = new_state
> events[new_state].set()
Aaand you’re done. When you add a new state, you add an event corresponding to that state into the events table. If the stuff you would put into a conditional in set_state is more complicated, you could make a state transition method and link to it in the table. Or you could make a nested dict or whatever. It’s not hard, and the fact that the author doesn’t know an idomatic way to write a fsm definitely isn’t something that’s wrong with python’s asyncio and shared state.
In general if you’re writing a state machine and you have a lot of “if curr_state == SOME_STATE” logic, chances are it would be better if you used tables.
The “attempt 2” was literally a state machine implementation which the author rejected because they didn’t know how to do it properly and so did it badly using a bunch of if then else logic.
Anyone who says that they can maintain perfect opsec over an extended period of time is seriously mistaken. A sufficiently motivated investigator with enough resources will join the dots eventually. The would-be evader has to be lucky every time whereas the investigator only has to be lucky once.
Certainly in the UK you can get the 2fa app popup in store if you tap to pay with your phone rather than a card. It’s analogous to going for a contactless payment with a card and them asking to insert the card and type the pin (which sometimes happens). It’s pretty rare (as in I have done the vast majority[1] of my payments using contactless on a phone for a couple of years now and I think it’s happened once to me).
[1] Like probably 99%+. I scarcely ever have a card on me and never use cash.
Reading the links posted in a sibling thread it only does it if you have text to speech enabled and they use an anonymizing proxy so openai can't associate sessions with any particular user ie it's not perfectly anonymous and private but I don't see how you could have totally anonymous and private until you have a fully offline on-device TTS model, which the fairphone guy said they tried and didn't feel it was up to scratch.
I don't use e/os but it doesnt' seem like a terrible compromise to me personally.
It obviously depends on where you live. In my country you certainly con choose a new electric company. I mention that because we really should use consumer choice to overcome these types of problems where we can. Ie if you can switch to a bank/electricity provider/whatever that has a less terrible app it’s really good to do so.
I agree on principle. I'm not sure if everywhere in the US is like this, but everywhere I've lived in California basically had a monopolistic electric and gas provider.
For things where we do have a choice, yes I agree.
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