BeetleB

Wow. I had no idea this was going on. Wonder how/if Roku will change under them.

There are plenty of reasons to criticize Roku, but I'm still a very happy customer.

> In the US, businesses ask for it because the SAT serves (or used to serve) as a decent proxy for IQ. A business cannot ask an applicant to take an intelligence aptitude test without a lot of extra cost

Epic actually did (does?) administer a full blown "entrance exam" - generic problem solving skills, with some basic coding and math stuff. They literally arrange with the university to administer it in a classroom setting. So yeah, kind of like an aptitude test.

See https://pigment.is/blogs/blogs/epic-systems-skills-assessmen...

I actually don't mind that, as it ensures all applicants are being judged on a level field.

It's quite rare for people graduating with a BS to be quizzed about SAT scores - the focus tends to be more on GPA, etc. But asking for SAT scores when you've been in grad school for so long...? Kind of ridiculous. And if you are going to ask, might as well ask for the GRE scores instead.

They also did (do?) a full personality quiz. You know, the type where they give you a scenario, and say are you more of A or B, and you often find yourself to be neither or both...

Reminds me of Epic (healthcare company). I was close to finishing grad school, and they wanted my SAT scores. When I gave it to them, they couldn't stop gushing. I wanted to wash my hands with a lot of soap at that point.

I think my point is that the response could be "This script is nonsense and should fail."

I'd still be wasting someone's time.

I'll probably put a write-up on my blog one day, though.

I never fixed the bug. I just removed the thing that triggered it.

I believe I do have some sort of a reproducer, but I likely wouldn't understand even the reproducer script. I think it won't be taken well if someone files a bug, says "Here's a script that reproduces it", but himself doesn't understand what the script is doing.

I don't get it. They do have a $5/month plan.

> Most of my querying can happen thru Gemini or Claude even if it's a bit slower but I don't have to pay $10/mo for something that is not worth $10 to me now.

This is more work up front, but I have a bot I communicate with via Telegram, and I've hooked up Kagi API Search and Extract, and now achieve something similar. I just ask it to do a web search to try to find the answer to my question.

It's pay-as-you-go. Not particularly expensive.

I think at some point I'm going to get banned from HN for repeatedly saying this, but here we go:

This thread highlights why I often say that at some point in the future, the obsession with whether something was written by AI or not will be classified as a mental disorder.

It is tiring to virtually every day see this discussion play out in some HN thread or other. It's also just noise. I don't think your comment, nor the thread it inspired, added anything of value to the discussion.

Same here.

KMyMoney stopped importing (some) OFX files for me. I asked an LLM to debug.

It was a wild journey. An obscure bug in some QT library that was triggered because of something completely unrelated that I had installed briefly in 2019 (and uninstalled years ago).

I had it fix the issue by cleaning the leftovers from 2019, but it's still a QT bug. I had it do a writeup, but I'll never submit it. It's fairly sophisticated and I don't know QT code at all.

Mildly related: I always felt this way with Youtube's recommendations. For me, they're the epitome of dysfunction. It's so rare it will recommend something I want to see.

Yeah, I didn't want to put too many details as it would obscure my point. I was actually using a modified Playwright that's been designed to better act as a human. It works, in that I got fewer captchas etc than regular Playwright, but apparently not well enough.

That modified Playwright was based on Firefox, and that's what I use for my regular browsing. So that didn't help.

I can actually launch Chrome and not deal with this - but I'm not going to. In fact, what surprises me is that I can create a new Firefox profile and not get those captchas. I don't know how my using that modified Playwright as a bot got them hooked on to my Firefox profile. I suspect they had my FF profile as a "suspicious" entity even before I made the bot (I use a number of privacy/anti-cookie extensions), and the bot pushed the score over the edge.

I'll probably start fiddling with my profile - disabling extensions, until things seem to work. Thankfully, no one else in the household is impacted.

For now, I got around all this by just paying for the Kagi extract API. It's not as good as my modified Playwright had been, though. I thought of a VPN, but I suspect that won't last long (not a residential proxy, etc), and I don't want an ongoing monthly fee. I like Kagi's pay as you go option.

But as I said, it's a weird world where suddenly Amazon is coming out the "better" site/vendor. It's funny - in the old days I was pretty anti-Walmart, but a few years ago I started preferring them over Amazon (and even several local stores) for a number of reasons (better collection than local stores, not having to deal with fakes for online orders, etc).

I've not been liking the state of the web for years prior to the advent of LLMs, but this is feeling like a final straw where I accept "the web is dead". We need a fundamentally different protocol - the model of "Set up a server anyone can reach, put content out there, and then put up a lot of sophisticated technology so your server isn't hammered" is not tenable. The protocol itself needs to manage the load.

I agree, but most people do not. A quite common complaint of Mastodon - even here on HN - is that chronological makes discovery difficult.

> The web is getting harder and harder to use due to all the anti-bot mechanisms site operators had to put up.

Indeed. I recently set up a bot on my local machine that I can interact with via Telegram. I gave it the ability to retrieve the contents of a URL via Playwright (with modifications). Basic things like getting the Readability view and getting the site as Markdown with links.

I was essentially mimicking the feature OpenAI etc offer where it can do a web search for you and get you the answer you seek. I just didn't want to pay a company for that feature.

It's not autonomous. It only acts when I tell it to. The actual search is via the Kagi API, but the URL contents is via Playwright. I also ensured it can't do lots of requests at a time. There's a mandatory (random) sleep of between 1 and 5 seconds between two requests.

In less than a week, I've been flagged. When I do a Google search (as a human), I have to prove I'm human. Many sites have simply blocked me - I can't buy stuff from various vendors[1], I cannot access several news sites, etc.

The thing is, I didn't really access that many sites with the bot! At most it's the equivalent of someone mildly addicted to the web. Yet they caught me quickly.

Obviously, I disabled the bot's capability to get site content. I wonder how long my IP will be in the blacklist.

I know some people will say "Good riddance" to the outcome and to what I did. I'd love to have a real, serious discussion on whether what I did was immoral. But whatever your thoughts on the matter, do ponder over the fact that the system has made it hard for average Joes like you and me to have this "feature", but if you pay a giant tech company a monthly fee, you can have it.

[1] Thankfully, Amazon didn't block me. In the past I'd avoid them, but now I'm in the dilemma where I don't want to buy stuff from sites that make it difficult for me to buy stuff from them!

> Apparently, this strategy wasn't invented in Australia

It's an old strategy. It's commonly been part of plots of various stories/movies in the US going back decades.

Most robbers are not "professional robbers".

And incidentally, in case you didn't know, to classify as a robber you need to either use, or threaten, with violence.

The average burglar is not a robber.

Yes, but what algorithm will it use to show videos from the channels you're subscribed to? Will you and everyone else agree with that choice of algorithm? The only one that makes sense is chronological. Anything else leads to similar problems as in the past.

> The issue is, AMD still pays significantly less than any company with an RTO mandate

I'm sure they pay more than Intel ;-)

> Robbers don't kill people for mere $50k.

Here in the US, people kill for a lot less.

I have to say - I actually like this.

Imagine if you go to Google.com to do a web search, and it is a page full of recommendations on sites to visit. Would you want that?

I didn't, but now I want it!

I've always liked Vivaldi's ability to show two tabs side by side without needing to open a new window. But being able to select just the image/portion you want and have that on the side can be quite useful.

I know HN is always negative on Firefox, but for me this is a rare example of them innovating like they used to in the Firebird/early Firefox days.

Eh. Uber and Lyft exploit people bad at math. Just as gambling operations do.

From his post, I have no idea what they're trying to teach him. Claims like:

> The amount of work involved has also tripled

are hard to evaluate if I don't know what the work was before. Nor can I compare with my education to see if the workload is reasonable.

> I am here to learn, god damn it, not barely scratch the surface of the 15 deliverables I have for a 3,000 word assignment.

What type of CS courses require a 3000 word assignment?

This thread highlights why I often say that at some point in the future, the obsession with whether something was written by AI or not will be classified as a mental disorder.

Since you are (likely) young - here's a tip when writing such articles:

Provide examples.

It's hard for readers to gauge whether you're complaints are legitimate or overreactions.

Weird comment, given that it was, not long ago, a common name for a male.

I'd wager if it weren't for Clinton, most people would still associate it with men.

I went to such a school.

> They now have different classmates they don't have a connection with, they enter the new class having as their identity "the person who failed the previous year", and they'll probably have to sit bored in the classes of other subjects they did pass.

Which is why they, and their parents, work really hard not to fail.

I'm good friends with someone who was left behind on, of all things, history. I spoke to him recently about the experience. Having to be with kids younger than him was really bad for a while. But overall, the experience forced him to work hard. He didn't become a top student, but he's doing well in life and he credits it as part of the reason.

Keep in mind - there is usually a "make-up" exam if they're at risk of being left behind. In my school, they'd know they failed in early June. And the makeup exams were in late August or early September. They had a whole summer to get their act together and pass the makeup.

They did have exceptions: Failing on the languages and some other humanities was somewhat OK.

> They don't see a representative sample.

Indeed. I forgot his name, but there was a Russian professor in the US who emigrated after the Soviet Union collapsed. His blog was full of complaints about the quality of students and education here.

But in one post, he actually said the US system serves the country better. In Russia, you needed a pretty high level of mathematical competence to get a basic engineering degree. Here you don't, and the reality is they still over-educate you in the US for what is actually needed on the job.

Having worked with East Europeans (Romanians, Polish and Russian) in math heavy domains, the answer I can give is: Culture.

Over here it's acceptable not to know basic things like how to do long division as an adult. In many countries (not just East European), that makes you a "moron". My mother, who hated academics, was never a good student, and refused to go to college, can do all the basic arithmetic on paper. Not because she liked it (she hates math). But because she didn't want to be perceived as a "moron".

Now when you get to Russia, etc - if you want to go into an engineering field, knowing arithmetic on paper is not sufficient. So the bar is raised a lot higher. Even if your career is not going to involve calculus, if you can't integrate by parts simply expressions, you are a "moron" in the tech circle.

They also have "mathematics circles". Kind of like a math club. You get a core set of people (probably less than 10), who meet regularly and work on different math problems. People at differing skill levels in one circle. They learn from one another. The focus is on improving problem solving skills (and fun).

That's why the Russians I worked with in the US were really, really concerned about their kids' education. All they saw were "morons" graduating high school. So the (physical) bulletin board at work often had math tutoring services targeting Russian kids.

I'm guessing that's why the "Russian School of Mathematics" exists in the US.

There are, of course, downsides to being perceived as a moron if you can't do long division or basic differentiation. At the same time, I think it does speak ill of American society that there's simply no bar when it comes to academic knowledge and skills. I wouldn't advocate that you should be considered a moron if you can't do long division. I do think there should be some baseline in society, though.

Right now, it's OK to:

- Not know the difference between cents and dollars. Verizon Math opened my eyes to this, and now I see it everywhere. And people around me don't see the problem - not in the sense of "Why are you making a fuss about this?" but "I don't understand what you're talking about: 0.5c is half a dollar!" I don't bring it up any more lest I be viewed as elitist (by people with advanced engineering degrees).

- Not knowing the number of days in a year or the number of days in a month.

- Not knowing if there is gravity on the moon.

The list goes on and on.

Of course they don't owe them anything. Ubuntu's reputation is built primarily on people who use it (or used to) for free. They are/were Ubuntu's advocates and what made it popular.

So just as they made it popular, they can make it unpopular. People like me will simply post on our blogs and social media that they should not install Ubuntu. A typical Ubuntu user is not that high on the tech scale, and they listen to people like me for suggestions on which distro.

Cut the pipeline that feeds into it.

I would say in the old days (2001-2002) it was more like a "minimax". It was maximal minimalist. It had really fancy visuals that worked on fairly slow hardware. I was blown away.