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Have you tried SolveIt (method, tool) from Jeremy Howard yet?

I was in the first batch last year where they introduced it and going to do the second one too.

It´s a very different kind of beast to what is currently being discussed.


> going to do the second one too.

I missed the first one, when will the second one be?


"Signups are open [1], and will remain so until October 20th."

Recently on HN [2].

[1]: https://solve.it.com/

[2]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45455719


I participated in the first batch and am not a shill, look through my comment history.

The dismissive comments here pain me as Ive seen them work hard on this over the last year as they integrated many of our feature requests and built out the platform. I’ve also had time to let the ideas sink in.

You definitely cant hang back and expect some magic ai to do all the work for you.

I also cant say „you will definitely benefit“ since everybody is difft.

But i can honestly say it‘s the real deal, no ifs and buts.


As someone who participated in the first cohort but is not part of their team, i would say it’s a programming environment for AI assisted literate programming.

It’s like an intelligent notebook. That means you could use this for many different things but at least to me the high order bit is „AI assisted literate programming“


I see, thank you. Is this more of an exploratory programming tool, then? A Jupyter notebook with AI features?

Considering how the folks at answer.ai have been using (successive versions of) it to build this tool itself and judging by student projects and showcases, it definitely goes beyond exploratory. You can build big stuff with it.

Personally I’m using it to learn the whole fastai ecosystem.


I'll give it a shot, thanks!

Maybe you should look a bit more into the folks who made this before dissing their work like this.

I did do that now, and I see a string of similar consultant-like training/course packages. It's a bit like when Deloitte comes by to pitch.

What have they built that impressed you?


Let me see. Fastmail? The first LLM which actually used transfer learning for NLP? One of the most wildly useful and successful deep learning courses [available for free]? A big chunk of what is Kaggle?

I love almost everything they have done, I would highly recommend looking a little deeper.

Can you provide some links? Because I see that Eric Ries has a resume on Wikipedia that mainly highlights his book, "The Lean Startup." I see that he was adjacent to some dot-com-bubble-era startups. I see he has a handsome photo. I don't see where he actually founded a successful startup; if anything, reading his resume makes me think he stopped coding and discovered a more successful career in selling promises to young people that his methodologies would turn them into successful entrepreneurs. To me, that does sound like a grift. I mean, why bother doing the actual work of starting a startup, coding and solving lots of problems, when you can present yourself as a guru in how startups work, right? Smart. Also, shady.

Apparently he also runs a stock exchange with two companies on it. And a lot of "core principles". Lol. Speaking as someone who coded and ran the first Bitcoin casino and was around a lot of early crypto bullshit in the nascent years of BTC when lots of dudes like this had crazy plans to commoditize it all sorts of ways, this is juvenile boiler room stuff that would have been laughed out of the Bitcoin Business Association Skype chat in 2010. (And yes, dread pirate roberts was there for a sec, and the general level of dialog was a far sight more intelligent than this dreck).

I got hell-banned here for criticizing PG for running this very site basically to achieve the same grift - to form a cult of young people who'd worship him in exchange for pie in the sky promises that they would become successful startup founders. But to be fair, PG has both actual experience and a ton of investment capital to prove it, so his cult followers have at least some chance of receiving an investment (or a gift, if you think kissing his ass is the essential requirement) that will catapult them into another echelon.

These guys are just living the mantra of "fake it til you make it." This reminds me of the $500 I spent when I turned 21 to take a bartending class for two weeks. Loads of fun. End result: There was one job on their board for graduees, for a bar that had been closed for a couple years. Turned out the best way to become a bartender was to learn on the job.

Turned out that was also the best way to become a software engineer.


Totally

the next mac pro (presumably next mar/apr) is the first that comes a full 3-year product cycle after ai hype started.

therefore I expect that mac pro (and in similar vein mac studio) will be repositioned as ai/ml dev machine, with apple leaning into their lucky strike of UMA fit with modern requirements.

my bet is m5 extreme exclusive to mac pro and 1 tb possibly even 2 tb ram, and mac studio limited to m5 ultra and 1 tb ram on the high ends.

but thats not based on rumors or "news" of any sort, just from logic extrapolated if i were in apple shoes


I like how everybody thinks this applies to others and they should change.

When in fact this entire genre should be read and addressed exclusively for oneself.

It reminds me how I was passionately discussing sth like this with a (former) friend and it seemed we agreed on the principles. When suddenly through some offhand remakr or turn of phrase it turned out he was thinking of others while I was thinking of myself

Meaning, he thought how easily others were misled (naturally, he himself was perfectly immune, his worldview correct) while I was talking about how I needed to protect myself from being seduced by agreeable nonsense.

Again, this genre applies to the reader, it is not a lecture material for you.

We have no business judging others`s beliefs when we have enough trouble keeping our own sane.

What we can do is short or bet against them if we are so convinced that we are right. Place your bets and stick to yourself. If you are as right as you are convinced, you should do well over time. Physical and economic reality >> fantasy and cope.


> We have no business judging others`s beliefs when we have enough trouble keeping our own sane.

Assessing other peoples’ beliefs and ideas is, in my experience, one of the best ways to stay sane and learn. Ideas are ultimately independent of the people that hold them. I feel like it is people with unfounded ideas (religions, historically) that try mightily to stop other people from critically assessing them.


> Ideas are ultimately independent of the people that hold them

That's a nice thing to believe. I disagree.

The difference between good people and bad people literally is the things they believe. Nazis aren't born evil, they are made evil by naziism. Its not only OK, it's necessary to your survival to judge them by that metric.


> We have no business judging others`s beliefs when we have enough trouble keeping our own sane.

A kinder way to say "judging" is perhaps discrimination. As humans we must discriminate between the good and bad opinions of others, and even good and bad people, or we are doomed.

If you were to learn only from your own mistakes, or try to pretend that there is no such thing as a bad person, you would live a short and brutal life of victomhood.

We must judge kindly, but we must judge.


> We have no business judging others`s beliefs when we have enough trouble keeping our own sane.

I agree with you except for this part here, because what other people believe can, and does, materially impact you when they vote. There's an incentive to try and influence others' beliefs when they're harmful to you or your communities.


Sure but then it also pays to be clear what you are doing: It it not about "truth" or epistemology but about influence/propaganda/persuasion/pick your own euphemism.

And the literature on this is completely difft and, more to the point, vastly more effective than the one on philosophy of science or striving for truth.

Not saying one is better than the other. My point is only those are difft and Sagan is not a good guide to make masses of people vote or act how you want.


> What we can do is short or bet against them if we are so convinced that we are right. Place your bets and stick to yourself. If you are as right as you are convinced, you should do well over time. Physical and economic reality >> fantasy and cope.

In a world with bad faith & ill-informed missionaries (meme-ssionaries?) this is an inadequate political/societal perspective. We should all have the humility to be wrong but the conviction of our current beliefs and tomes that represent them


To me, there is nothing that can beat CSAPP on this topic.

[1] R. E. Bryant and D. R. O’Hallaron. Computer Systems: A Programmer’s Perspective. Prentice Hall, 3rd edition, 2015.

It´s a shame that the last edition is from ten years ago, although to be fair I actually only read the 2nd and only skimmed the 3rd one. Still, would be nice to get an update using ARM.


Swinsian


I paid for the previous version, but you do have to admit the lack of syncing to an iPhone is a huge gap in the feature set. The new paid upgrade doesn't offer a solution either.


What if you run little snitch and block any communications from obsidian to anything?


Or firejail. Or QubesOS using a dedicated VM. There are options, but it would still be nice if Obsidian had a more robust security model.


I have been using firejail for most of these kind of applications, be it Obsidian, Discord, or the browser I am using. I definitely recommend people start using it.


Sell it to us! Why do you use specifically firejail?

There are so many options, from so many different security perspectives, that analysis paralysis is a real issue.


I feel like I should keep track of all my comments on HN because I remember writing a lengthy comment on firejail more than once. I cannot keep doing this. :D

For user-space, there is usually bubblewrap vs. firejail. I have not personally used bubblewrap, so I cannot comment on that, but firejail is great at what it does.

The last comment was about restricting clipboard access to either X11 or Wayland which is possible with firejail quite easily, so if you want that, you can have that.

You can do a LOT more with firejail though.

https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Firejail

https://man.archlinux.org/man/firejail.1


> bubblewrap vs. firejail

In case anyone else is curious, I found the following comparison in bubblewrap's repo.

- https://github.com/containers/bubblewrap#related-project-com...

I'm gonna try both and see which one I like. Thanks for this info! You're sure living up to your user name there. (:


To comment on the Pulseaudio bit from the link: you will want "keep-config-pulse" and "whitelist ${HOME}/.config/pulse/*".

> You're sure living up to your user name there. (:

You are too kind, thank you!


So do you configure firejail to give each app their own separate, permanent home directories? Like "firejail --private=/home/user/firejails/discord discord", "firejail --private=/home/user/firejails/chromium chromium", and so on?


I have my own Discord.profile!

This is my ~/.config/firejail/Discord.profile[1]:

  include disable-common.inc
  include disable-devel.inc
  include disable-interpreters.inc
  include disable-shell.inc

  noblacklist /sys/fs
  noblacklist /sys/module

  keep-config-pulse
  keep-dev-shm

  name discord
  apparmor
  caps.drop all
  caps.keep sys_admin,sys_chroot
  netfilter
  nodvd
  #nogroups
  #noinput
  nonewprivs
  noroot
  notv
  #nou2f
  #novideo
  protocol unix,inet,inet6
  #shell none

  disable-mnt
  private-cache
  #private-tmp

  noexec /tmp

  dbus-user filter
  dbus-user.talk org.freedesktop.Notifications

  private-bin Discord,cut,echo,egrep,electron,electron[0-9],electron[0-9][0-9],grep,head,sed,sh,tr,xdg-mime,xdg-open,zsh,gzip,wget,curl,notify-send
  private-etc alternatives,asound.conf,ca-certificates,crypto-policies,fonts,group,ld.so.cache,ld.so.preload,localtime,login.defs,machine-id,password,pki,pulse,resolv.conf,ssl

  noblacklist /usr/lib/discord/
  whitelist ${HOME}/.config/discord
  read-write ${HOME}/.config/discord
  whitelist ${DOWNLOADS}
  whitelist ${HOME}/.config/pulse/*

  include whitelist-common.inc
  include whitelist-var-common.inc
  include whitelist-run-common.inc
  include whitelist-runuser-common.inc
I have some things commented out but you could probably uncomment most.

Some has this, too:

  disable-mnt
  private-dev
  private-cache

  env http_proxy=socks5://127.0.0.1:9050
  env https_proxy=socks5://127.0.0.1:9050
FWIW, once you start whitelisting, it will only have access to those directories and files only, so Discord has no access to anything other than its own directory and ${DOWNLOADS}, which I should probably change.

You should check out the default profiles for many programs / apps under directory "/etc/firejail".

[1] You run it via "firejail Discord" or "firejail ./Discord" if you name it "Discord.profile".


This is great. Thanks for the detailed reply!


It was not THAT detailed and it makes me feel a bit guilty, so if you have any questions let me know.


FYI you can search your comment history with hn.algolia.com:

https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...


Thank you, exactly what I have been looking for!


Little snitch can block open(2)?


I treat LS as a privacy/anti-telemetry/anti-accident tool, not as anti malware.

Obviously it can detect malware if there’s a connection to some weird site, but it’s more like a bonus than a reliable test.

If you need to block FS access, then per app containers or VMs are the way to go. The container/VM sandboxes your files, and Little Snitch can then manage externa connectivity (you might still want to allow connection to some legit domains—-but maybe not github.com as that can be use to upload your data. I meant something like updates.someapp.com)


Very, very good point

I got lazy

Time to crank the paranoidmeter up again

ty


I believe they're saying it can open, it just can't send the data anywhere.

Seems a little excessive, but here we are.


It still can encrypt everything and demand you pay some ₿₿₿₿.


If it can open and write any file on the OS, it's pretty much game over. Too many ways to exfiltrate data even without network/socket access.


Worse, what keeps this from editing the config files for Little Snitch (or similar blockers)?


I believe LS has some protections against this. Never tried them, but there are config related security options, incl. protection against synthetic events. So they definitely put some thought into that.


File system permissions?


> "shoot for the moon and you'll land among the stars"

I´ve never been able to wrap my mind around this saying.


Ha, yeah, it's a weird saying. I think it makes more sense if you imagine the sky as like a static painting you shoot yourself into with a cannon or something.


That's not a bad outcome, especially if the world ends up being one large Truman show and you escape! ;)


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