What is Hackers' Pub?

Hackers' Pub is a place for software engineers to share their knowledge and experience with each other. It's also an ActivityPub-enabled social network, so you can follow your favorite hackers in the fediverse and get their latest posts in your feed.

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I think this needs to be repeated, since I tend to be quite negative about all of the 'AI' hype:

I am not opposed to machine learning. I used machine learning in my PhD and it was great. I built a system for predicting the next elements you'd want to fetch from disk or a remote server that didn't require knowledge of the algorithm that you were using for traversal and would learn patterns. This performed as well as a prefetcher that did have detailed knowledge of the algorithm that defined the access path. Modern branch predictors use neural networks. Machine learning is amazing if:

  • The problem is too hard to write a rule-based system for or the requirements change sufficiently quickly that it isn't worth writing such a thing and,
  • The value of a correct answer is much higher than the cost of an incorrect answer.

The second of these is really important. Most machine-learning systems will have errors (the exceptions are those where ML is really used for compression[1]). For prefetching, branch prediction, and so on, the cost of a wrong answer is very low, you just do a small amount of wasted work, but the benefit of a correct answer is huge: you don't sit idle for a long period. These are basically perfect use cases.

Similarly, face detection in a camera is great. If you can find faces and adjust the focal depth automatically to keep them in focus, you improve photos, and if you do it wrong then the person can tap on the bit of the photo they want to be in focus to adjust it, so even if you're right only 50% of the time, you're better than the baseline of right 0% of the time.

In some cases, you can bias the results. Maybe a false positive is very bad, but a false negative is fine. Spam filters (which have used machine learning for decades) fit here. Marking a real message as spam can be problematic because the recipient may miss something important, letting the occasional spam message through wastes a few seconds. Blocking a hundred spam messages a day is a huge productivity win. You can tune the probabilities to hit this kind of threshold. And you can't easily write a rule-based algorithm for spotting spam because spammers will adapt their behaviour.

Translating a menu is probably fine, the worst that can happen is that you get to eat something unexpected. Unless you have a specific food allergy, in which case you might die from a translation error.

And that's where I start to get really annoyed by a lot of the LLM hype. It's pushing machine-learning approaches into places where there are significant harms for sometimes giving the wrong answer. And it's doing so while trying to outsource the liability to the customers who are using these machines in ways in which they are advertised as working. It's great for translation! Unless a mistranslated word could kill a business deal or start a war. It's great for summarisation! Unless missing a key point could cost you a load of money. It's great for writing code! Unless a security vulnerability would cost you lost revenue or a copyright infringement lawsuit from having accidentally put something from the training set directly in your codebase in contravention of its license would kill your business. And so on. Lots of risks that are outsourced and liabilities that are passed directly to the user.

And that's ignoring all of the societal harms.

[1] My favourite of these is actually very old. The hyphenation algorithm in TeX trains short Markov chains on a corpus of words with ground truth for correct hyphenation. The result is a Markov chain that is correct on most words in the corpus and is much smaller than the corpus. The next step uses it to predict the correct breaking points in all of the words in the corpus and records the outliers. This gives you a generic algorithm that works across a load of languages and is guaranteed to be correct for all words in the training corpus and is mostly correct for others. English and American have completely different hyphenation rules for mostly the same set of words, and both end up with around 70 outliers that need to be in the special-case list in this approach. Writing a rule-based system for American is moderately easy, but for English is very hard. American breaks on syllable boundaries, which are fairly well defined, but English breaks on root words and some of those depend on which language we stole the word from.

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모니터 TV는 모니터 크기의 TV라서 KBS 수신료 지불 의무가 있습니다.

디지털 튜너 TV가 없어도 아날로그 튜너 TV를 가지고 있다면 놀랍게도 KBS 수신료 지불 의무가 있습니다.
:spaceblobcat:

집에 TV가 없는데 TV 수신 카드가 있다면 의외로 KBS 수신료 지불 의무가 없습니다.
:blobcatgooglythumbsup:

집에 TV가 없는데 지상파 DMB 디바이스를 가지고 있다면 KBS 수신로 지불 의무가 없습니다.

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단호박, 두부, 미소, 페페론치노랑 드라이 허브가 들어간 마늘콩피를 갈아서 크림 없는 크림파스타를 만들었다. 적당히 머릿속에서 이 조합이면 괜찮겠다 싶어서 만들었는데 진짜 너무 맛있다.

두부랑 올리브유, 마늘을 갈아버리는게 약간 허머스 같은 느낌도 나서 빵같은데 찍어먹기도 좋아보인다.

레시피

  1. 용기에 마늘 왕창이랑 간 후추, 페페론치노, 드라이 로즈마리와 바질을 넣고 에어프라이어 180도 20분 돌려 마늘콩피를 만든다.
  2. 단호박은 적당히 잘라서 전자레인지 10분 돌려준다.
  3. 두부랑 1, 2를 합치고 핸드블렌더로 곱게 오랫동안 갈아준다.
  4. 여기에 짠맛과 감칠맛을 위해 미소된장을 조금씩 넣어주고 다시 섞는다. (뒤에 면수가 들어갈걸 계산하고 간을 잘 봐야한다.)
  5. 파스타 잘 삶아서 알덴테일 때 물기 싹 털고 약불에 면수 좀 넣고 소스랑 버무린다.
저녁 (파스타, 닭가슴살 머스타드샐러드, 바삭하게 구운 통밀빵)
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모니터 TV는 모니터 크기의 TV라서 KBS 수신료 지불 의무가 있습니다.

디지털 튜너 TV가 없어도 아날로그 튜너 TV를 가지고 있다면 놀랍게도 KBS 수신료 지불 의무가 있습니다.
:spaceblobcat:

집에 TV가 없는데 TV 수신 카드가 있다면 의외로 KBS 수신료 지불 의무가 없습니다.
:blobcatgooglythumbsup:

집에 TV가 없는데 지상파 DMB 디바이스를 가지고 있다면 KBS 수신로 지불 의무가 없습니다.

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UK Petition against introducing Digital ID cards.

petition.parliament.uk/petitio

EDIT : 7:10am it's at 526K votes, lets get it to at least 1M.

8:27am it's now 600K 👏👏👏

2:53pm 1M achieved! Lets go!!! 👏👏👏 Lets aim for 2M now.

Sat 27th 8:45am and we're at over 1.6M. (1,621,180). 2M might be achievable today! 😀 Well done folks. 👏👏👏🤗Here's hoping we find more folk who haven't signed yet, and support this.

Sat 10pm 2M achieved! 👏👏 Now Let's get 3M, you legends. 👏🤗

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