skybrian's recent activity
-
Comment on I sell onions on the Internet (2019) in ~food
-
Comment on exe.dev, a service for creating Linux virtual machines and vibe-coding in them in ~comp
skybrian Link ParentI'm not sure it is any better, but here's what I figured out: They're still in alpha and not charging money yet, but on their pricing page, they say they will let you have up to 25 VM's for...I'm not sure it is any better, but here's what I figured out:
They're still in alpha and not charging money yet, but on their pricing page, they say they will let you have up to 25 VM's for $20/month, that all share the same quota on RAM and disk.
Looks like Digital Ocean droplets start at $4 / month, which is more than I'd want to pay for a barely used app that I nontheless still want to leave running. That seems appealing to me since I've been dabbling with free tiers for various services (like Deno Deploy), but it doesn't give me a Linux VM.
So I guess it's for developers who want a lot of tiny VM's.
Other than that, they hope to offer a better developer experience. For example, when you create a personal website, authentication is already set up so only you can access it.
-
Comment on I sell onions on the Internet (2019) in ~food
skybrian LinkFrom the article: I checked Twitter and his blog and he's still doing it. He has a few other domain names.From the article:
Back in 2014, the domain name VidaliaOnions.com expired, and went up for auction. For some reason the original owner abandoned it, and being a Georgia native, I recognized it ’cause I was familiar with the industry. I’ve been buying expired or abandoned domain names for a while, and enjoy developing them into niche businesses. This one was different though – I backordered the domain as a spectator, but for kicks & giggles, I dropped in a bid around $2,200 ’cause I was confident I’d be outbid.
5 minutes later, I was the proud owner of VidaliaOnions.com. I had no idea what to do with it. Ready, fire, aim.
I checked Twitter and his blog and he's still doing it. He has a few other domain names.
-
I sell onions on the Internet (2019)
30 votes -
Comment on When crisis hits, emergency cash could arrive in days, not months in ~society
skybrian LinkFrom the article: ... ...From the article:
We’ve responded to one-off crises since 2017, building tools to send emergency cash that have improved all our programs. That track record – combined with growing mobile phone coverage and new tech capabilities – convinced us there’s a big opportunity to improve crisis responses for people in need.
So this year, we went for it, starting on a moonshot bet that could radically improve the systems meant to support people in crises.
...
Families have used GiveDirectly’s emergency cash to buy food, relocate to safety, repair homes, & restock shops – all before any other aid has even reached them. The UN’s own humanitarian leaders have said there’s no reason more humanitarian shouldn’t look like this, asking donors to fund cash “‘not incrementally, but ambitiously.”
Our moonshot: build a five-day global emergency cash system
...
Our plan: testing, scaling, and influencing over 5 years
We’re not going to flip a switch overnight; we’re building this system in stages.
-
When crisis hits, emergency cash could arrive in days, not months
12 votes -
Comment on exe.dev, a service for creating Linux virtual machines and vibe-coding in them in ~comp
skybrian (edited )LinkThis is a new service (in "alpha" status) for creating Linux virtual machines, which can do whatever you like. here's their announcement post. It's free for now, but they plan to charge $20 a...This is a new service (in "alpha" status) for creating Linux virtual machines, which can do whatever you like. here's their announcement post.
It's free for now, but they plan to charge $20 a month. The interesting bit is that they automatically install a coding agent for you in the VM. I'm not sure there's anything all that groundbreaking here, but it seems nicely done and I was curious enough to actually try vibe-coding something.
The UI is rather minimal. Signing up is easy; it just requires an email. You can create a passkey or continue to sign in using email.
Once you're signed in, you can create a VM. There is a "description" field where you can optionally describe what you want your VM to do. The coding agent automatically starts up and starts building whatever you asked for.
So I asked it this:
Make a minimal website where I can share links, listed in reverse chronological order. Each link has a URL, title, and one-line summary. When I paste in a link, automatically download the page. Automatically choose the title and summary using an LLM.
And so it wrote me a little website in Go, using sqlite for the database. I can talk to the coding agent in a web browser by connecting to port 9999.
It didn't get it right the first time. I had to ask for some corrections. Also, the part where it calls out to an LLM to choose a description didn't work, so I told it to take that out and put in an edit button. But a few minutes later, I had a dumb little link-sharing website at https://skybrian-links.exe.xyz/.
There are no tests and it's just editing the live site. The initial website was committed to git (locally, in the VM), but any changes you ask for won't be committed unless you ask. I haven't bothered to upload it to github.
To make it public for everyone else to see, I had to ssh to exe.dev and run 'share set-public skybrian-links'. The coding agent can't do this, but it can tell you what to do.
Here's a post by one of the developers about how they asked it to create a shopping list app while in the grocery store.
-
exe.dev, a service for creating Linux virtual machines and vibe-coding in them
17 votes -
Comment on Do we really need all these long-duration energy storage (LDES) technologies to hit the net-zero target? in ~enviro
skybrian Link ParentI'm not sure I follow. It sounds like you're saying that the Netherlands doesn't need any more rooftop solar, but installing it should still be subsidized? But why would that make sense?I'm not sure I follow. It sounds like you're saying that the Netherlands doesn't need any more rooftop solar, but installing it should still be subsidized? But why would that make sense?
-
Comment on YouTube is awful. Please use YouTube, though. in ~tech
skybrian LinkI'm of two minds about this. On the one hand, I'm not going to blame anyone for trying to make a living. When people call for boycotts I'm often skeptical. Google is an enormous company that does...I'm of two minds about this. On the one hand, I'm not going to blame anyone for trying to make a living. When people call for boycotts I'm often skeptical. Google is an enormous company that does many good things and many bad things, but overall I think they do more good than bad. (But I'm biased. I still own a lot of Google stock, so I have a conflict of interest on that.)
On the other hand, I have personal reasons to limit how I use YouTube. I only watch music videos or the occasional movie. I've decided to never watch talking-head videos because already have an Internet addiction and I don't want to make it worse. When Sarah Taber complains that people comment on BlueSky without watching her videos, I'm like, sorry but I am never going to watch your videos.
So, this article comes across like a complaint from the owner of a BBQ restaurant that some people are vegetarians. Some people just aren't into what you sell, and that's okay. I don't blame you for trying, but there's no moral obligation to buy your product.
On the other hand, I think this guy is doing it right by having a blog as a way to communicate with people who don't watch videos. Since this article is a blog entry instead of a video, I can read it and comment on it. He also has a subscribe button for his blog, which seems like a good idea; people can pay him outside of YouTube. (Although, he missed a chance to get people interested in his videos by linking to a page that explains what they're about.)
-
Comment on US Federal Communications Commission bans new DJI Chinese drones, citing national security in ~society
skybrian LinkFrom the article:From the article:
The Federal Communications Commission has banned the sale of new models of foreign drones, including widely used Chinese DJI aircraft, citing concerns they pose a national security threat and could undermine U.S. drone production.
The ban adds DJI to the FCC’s “Covered List” — a designation that blocks authorization of new equipment — effectively preventing U.S. consumers from buying new models of the Chinese company’s drones. Existing models already approved for sale, as well as those currently in use, are not affected by the ban.
The designation deals a major blow to the world’s leading consumer drone maker, as well as other top brands including Shenzhen-based Autel Robotics. It comes after years of pressure from lawmakers and FCC officials, who have argued that DJI’s dominance of the consumer drone market exposes the United States to surveillance risks and gives Chinese firms control over a technology with potential future military applications.
-
US Federal Communications Commission bans new DJI Chinese drones, citing national security
11 votes -
Comment on Waymo: lessons from the PG&E outage in San Francisco in ~transport
skybrian LinkFrom the article: I think what they’re saying is that due to the widespread outage, Waymo vehicles overwhelmed their human operators with requests to manually verify that going through dark...From the article:
While the Waymo Driver is designed to handle dark traffic signals as four-way stops, it may occasionally request a confirmation check to ensure it makes the safest choice. While we successfully traversed more than 7,000 dark signals on Saturday, the outage created a concentrated spike in these requests. This created a backlog that, in some cases, led to response delays contributing to congestion on already-overwhelmed streets.
I think what they’re saying is that due to the widespread outage, Waymo vehicles overwhelmed their human operators with requests to manually verify that going through dark traffic signals was okay.
We established these confirmation protocols out of an abundance of caution during our early deployment, and we are now refining them to match our current scale. While this strategy was effective during smaller outages, we are now implementing fleet-wide updates that provide the Driver with specific power outage context, allowing it to navigate more decisively.
Apparently asking for help so often isn’t necessary and they’ll fix it so it doesn’t do that. (At least, when they know it’s due to a power outage and not something weirder.)
-
Waymo: lessons from the PG&E outage in San Francisco
19 votes -
Comment on A, B, C or D – grades might not say all that much about what students are actually learning in ~humanities
skybrian LinkA more gamified system would be to have a list of challenges that you have to beat and to grade each one pass/fail. Though, they would have to be re-tested after a while to make sure you don’t...A more gamified system would be to have a list of challenges that you have to beat and to grade each one pass/fail. Though, they would have to be re-tested after a while to make sure you don’t forget them. I’m not sure how practical this is without a computer, though.
It seems Alpha School is doing something like this. Though, they’re not shy about relying on external motivation, rewarding kids with “Alpha Bucks” that they can spend in a store.
-
Comment on Goodhart’s law is misunderstood in ~science
skybrian LinkFrom the blog post: … … …From the blog post:
Goodhart wasn’t talking in general about it being a bad idea to have targets. He really couldn’t have been, given the job he was in. In my view, it’s really not possible or serious to be completely opposed to the concept of setting targets in general; it’s too close to the idea that there should be no feedback from output to input.
…
But targets are always misleading, that’s what Goodhart told us! As pointed out above, no he didn’t. Even allowing for the very interesting slip from “statistical regularity” to “measure”, he was talking in the context of monetary base targeting in the UK. The specific problem that Goodhart’s Law was meant to dramatize was that before the policy regime changed, the M0 money supply seemed to bear a reasonably stable relationship to the actual quantities of interest – the level of activity and prices in the economy. When it was used as a target with the hope of manipulating those quantities, it broke down.
…
After all, a thermostat both measures and targets the ambient temperature, but that doesn’t mean that the temperature ceases to be a good measure of what the thermostat is trying to control. If you want to eliminate smallpox, then however complicated the overall ecological and social context, the number of smallpox infections is a very good measure of whether you’re winning or not. Central banks these days have more or less given up on intermediate targets and simply target the actual inflation rate – this has a number of its own problems, but they’re not problems of the sort that Goodhart experienced.
So the message of Goodhart’s Law is that if you’re setting targets, they ought to target the thing that you care about, not something which you believe to be related to it, no matter how much easier that intermediate thing is to measure. That doesn’t guarantee success; the phenomenon of “gaming the system” or the tendency of control systems to be undermined by adversarial activity is much more general and complicated than this single problem.
…
On the other hand, I think there is one major and empirically important case which is pure Goodhart’s Law and where people really could help themselves out a bit by respecting it. As far as I can see, “teaching to the test” is a one hundred and eighty degrees inverted description of a phenomenon that ought to be called “not testing for the outcomes you want”.
-
Goodhart’s law is misunderstood
14 votes -
Comment on Science, large language models, and goal displacement in ~science
skybrian LinkFrom the article: … (An example of goal displacement would be when increasing citation counts becomes an end in itself, instead of an imperfect measurement of influence.) That is, scientists are...From the article:
[…] Derek de Solla Price, a physicist turned historian of science at Yale, published studies demonstrating that scientific literature had been growing exponentially since the seventeenth century—a finding that raised urgent questions about how anyone could keep up, and how institutions could identify what mattered. Thomas Kuhn’s Structure of Scientific Revolutions reframed the history of science around paradigms and the communities that held them, making the social organization of science central to its epistemology. And Fritz Machlup, an economist at Princeton, began quantifying what he called “the knowledge industry,” treating the production and distribution of knowledge as an economic sector susceptible to the same analysis as manufacturing or agriculture. Together, these works made science legible as a system—and legibility, as James Scott has argued, is the precondition for management.
This new legibility of science created a problem: how do you manage a system that produces more literature than anyone can read. One answer, developed through the 1960s and institutionalized in the 1970s, was citation metrics. Eugene Garfield’s Institute for Scientific Information built tools to track who cited whom, which journals mattered, which papers had influence. The intention was to solve an information overload problem—to help researchers find the important work in a flood of publication. This was a reasonable response to a real problem. But solutions curdle. The tools built to navigate the literature became tools to evaluate the people who produced it. Citation counts migrated from library science into hiring and promotion decisions. What had been an instrument for managing information became an instrument for managing careers.
…
Robert Merton saw this coming, though he couldn’t stop it. In 1940, long before citation indices existed, Merton had theorized the phenomenon he called “goal displacement”—the process by which instrumental values become terminal values, means transmuted into ends.
(An example of goal displacement would be when increasing citation counts becomes an end in itself, instead of an imperfect measurement of influence.)
Into this context—a scientific system already optimized for measurable output, already decades into goal displacement, already reshaping research priorities around metrics rather than problems—arrive large language models.
They did not arrive as disruptors. They arrived as intensifiers. LLMs function as an accelerant for the existing optimization machine, making the logic run faster rather than challenging its foundations. The technology can help write more papers, synthesize more literature reviews, produce more of the shapes that hiring committees evaluate in their twelve minutes with a file. It needn’t have been this way, or at least one can imagine it being otherwise. In a different institutional context, LLMs might be enrolled as tools for synthesis, for identifying gaps in literatures, for connecting disparate fields. Some of this happens, in local pockets, where researchers use them as tools for exploration and connection rather than production. But the dominant pattern is intensification. The technology is shaped by the logic already in place, and it makes that logic run faster.
That is, scientists are using LLM’s to churn out papers faster.
The logic didn’t stay contained in the academy. When Larry Page and Sergey Brin developed PageRank in the late 1990s, they drew explicitly on citation analysis. Their foundational paper cites Garfield alongside Pinski and Narin, whose influence-weighting method provided the recursive structure for the algorithm. Garfield’s solution to the problem of scientific information overload became Google’s solution to the problem of internet information overload, and it was gamed in the same ways. Search engine optimization is goal displacement with tighter feedback loops: the tools built to identify what mattered became tools to manufacture the appearance of mattering, and the manufacturing reshaped what got produced. The pattern Merton had diagnosed in bureaucracies, and worried about in science, became the organizing logic of the web.
And from there to social media where influencers ask people to “like and subscribe” to increase their metrics. People like to blame “the algorithm.” Apparently citation counts are an early form of that?
LLMs didn’t create the dysfunction in scientific publishing; they inherited it, intensified it, made it run faster. Like a normally benign pathogen wreaking havoc in an immunocompromised patient, they point to the problem, but imagining them as the totality of the problem would be a deadly mistake.
They do the same for the web […]
They do the same for the web, which had been restructured by the same logic once PageRank exported Garfield’s citation analysis to organize the internet—and they generate paper-mill product and SEO content with equal facility because both are downstream of the same optimization, and their users are targeting isomorphic systems. One might hope that this acceleration heightens the contradictions, that the systems produce so much slop so quickly that the problem finally becomes undeniable. But, as we should all know by now, systems can persist in dysfunction indefinitely, and absurdity is not self-correcting. Whether the acceleration produces collapse or adaptation or simply more of the same is not a question about the technology, and it won’t be answered by debates about capabilities. It will be answered by the institutions that have been running this program for sixty years. Not, probably, by those who presently hold power within them—but by those who can build countervailing power, and who decide to change what gets measured, or finally wrench the institution of science itself from the false promise of measurement.
That is, the dysfunction will continue as long as people are rewarded for making numbers go up.
-
Science, large language models, and goal displacement
7 votes -
Comment on Weekly US politics news and updates thread - week of December 22 in ~society
skybrian LinkSupreme Court blocks National Guard deployment to Chicago in defeat for TrumpSupreme Court blocks National Guard deployment to Chicago in defeat for Trump
The Supreme Court said Tuesday it would not allow President Donald Trump to deploy the National Guard in the Chicago area for now, a significant setback for his campaign to push troops into cities across the country over the objections of local and state leaders.
The president’s ability to federalize the National Guard likely only applies in “exceptional” circumstances, the court’s unsigned order said.
Justices Samuel Alito, Clarence Thomas and Neil M. Gorsuch dissented from the court’s unsigned order. Justice Brett M. Kavanaugh filed a separate concurrence.
The Chicago case is the first time the Supreme Court has weighed in on one of Trump’s attempted deployments of National Guard forces. While temporary, the order could have far-reaching effects by repudiating Trump’s claim of virtually unchecked authority to mobilize and deploy troops he says are necessary to fight crime and protect immigration enforcement officers.
Yeah, that jumped out at me too. Maybe he was more prepared to start a new business than he lets on?
But if nothing else, he could probably have sold it and gotten most of his money back.