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CivBase

5,675 karma · joined August 27, 2017

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CivBase··on Nashville uses eminent domain to block data center near zoo
I don't understand the water usage fears. I'm much more concerned with electricity usage.
CivBase··on AI is a bubble, just like dot-com
> Or was it just some companies were overvalued?

That's what a bubble is.

Calling AI a "bubble" is not calling it useless or a fad. It's just pointing out that companies in the sector are overvalued. And it's important to recognize and correct bubbles quickly because the bigger the pop, the worse the overall economic damage to everyone.

CivBase··on If coding has been solved, why does software keep getting worse?
Coding litterally is cheap. We outsource it for wages that you'd expect of a bottom-level fast food employee. We've been doing that for many years.

It doesn't take a 4 year education to learn how to use loops, functions, and basic data structures. Most of you could probably code by the end of your fresan year of college. Many probably learned at least some coding before college.

I've learned plenty since those days. I can code much faster now than I used to - in the same way an accountant is probably faster at mental math than they once were. But an accountant's value isn't in how fast they can crunch numbers. In the same way, a software engineer's value isn't in how fast they can code.

CivBase··on If coding has been solved, why does software keep getting worse?
I'd say "coding" has been solved, but that was never the bottleneck.

Coding is cheap. It has been for a long time. Ten years ago my company was outsorcing all its coding to the cheapest people they could find in India. But most of these people can't solve problems. They can't even identify problems, much less design solutions.

Code is a liability. You want as little as you can to solve the problems you actually have. That takes an engineer. Maybe AI will get there someday, but it certainly isn't today.

Engineers can certainly use AI to generate code when they need it... but in my experience I don't need much code to do my job, so AI coding doesn't help me much. My personal experience is that by the time I've reviewed the output and corrected the mistakes, I may as well have written it myself.

CivBase··on Chrome's Breaking and Entering
Whenever I see posts like this I'm always surprised to see these people are still using Chrome. I agree it's another user hostile move by Chrome, but if this is a big deal to you then how have you tolerated Chrome up until now?

Maybe it's a work requirement.

CivBase··on LG to ban residential proxies from smart TV apps
Stop buying LG TVs.
CivBase··on Jack Dorsey launches Buzz to combine team chat, AI agents and Git hosting
I'm left wondering why I should bother adopting - much less paying for - these kinds of projects. If it's that trivial to throw together, what value are you even delivering for me? Why wouldn't I just use the same tricks to spin my own solution that does exactly what I need and not whatever you think I might need?
CivBase··on A graph that should be front-page news
Graphs tell stories and the only story this one actually tells is "29-year high".

It doesn't do a good job of establishing trends and its sample size is too low to discern how significant of an outlier this is.

Actually there is a similar outlier on the bottom of the graph, which suggests the current outlier might not actually be that significant. And that's definitely not the story intended by the author.

CivBase··on Show HN: Fortress – a stealth Chromium so your agents stop getting blocked
Unconscionable.
CivBase··on CoMaps – FOSS Offline Maps
OSM is great as a map, but the biggest thing keeping me from switching from Google Maps to any OSM solution is the "white pages". My most common use case for a maps app is location-based search.

Having a complete and updated registry of businesses with operating hours is the bare minimum, and OSM apps already struggle with that. I also want pictures of the establishment, pictures of the menu for restaurants, and price estimates for fuel and hotels.

I understand the cost of hosting and moderating that stuff is enormous, but that's what it will take for me to finally convert.

CivBase··on Resetting Xbox
It surprises me that there isn't simply an option to postpone the update for up to 12 hours until shutdown. I'd much rather let my system take 10 minutes to shutdown when I'm done than have to wait 10 minutes on startup before I can use it.

How often could they realistically have updates that seriously need to be installed ASAP? Especially if you're not even doing anything that requires going online.

CivBase··on "Software Engineering" Is Not Engineering (2005)
Fine, but then what am I? I'm certainly not a scientist. And calling me a "programmer" is like calling an accountant a "calculator".

I design solutions to computational problems. I also happen to implement them a lot of the time, because code was trivial to implement even before LLMs. What does that make me if not an engineer? I'm open to suggestions.

CivBase··on Studio Canal Movies purchased on PlayStation Store removed without refund
"I buying isn't owning, piracy isn't stealing."
CivBase··on Steam Machine launches today
Idk why anyone thought this would be a "PC console killer" type of product. Consoles are subsidized because they act as the entry point to closed hardware/software ecosystems. You can't do that with a general purpose PC because it's an open ecosystem by definition.

But there are economic benefits to an open ecosystem. The Steam Machine has a gigantic back catalog of games that can be had for cheap. You also probably already have all the peripherals you'll need for it. And of course they don't charge for online play.

That last part alone makes up for the cost after just 2-3 years.

CivBase··on Cocktail Optimization, an Integer Programming Problem
A hundred bottles in my cabinet and I'm still always missing one to make the drink I want. And so the collection keeps growing...
CivBase··on AMD will reinstate memory encryption on Ryzen 9000 CPUs via BIOS update in July
You'd need physical access while it is running as the target is using it.
CivBase··on GrapheneOS has been ported to Android 17
I refuse to ever use a banking app on my phone, so I don't even know if my bank's app would work. But every other app I've tried to use works just fine on GraphineOS.

If you've confirmed your banking app won't work on GOS, have you considered accessing your bank's website through your phone's browser instead?

CivBase··on Windows 11 users are tired of MS account requirements creeping into everything
Funny enough, I just switched to Linux for a game I play because it was a hassle on Windows.

My friends and I play Halo Infinite sometimes and I've had some performance issues with it on Linux so I've always booted into my Windows 11 partition to play it. It's about as vanilla Windows 11 install as it gets.

But over the last few months it has been crashing all the time. It started happening very frequently - like once every ~30 min. It was a vanilla install. Basically just the game and graphics drivers. And everything was up to date.

I started playing it on Linux and now it just works. There's still a weird performance problem, but I can live with that because it's at least stable.

CivBase··on A Farmer Donated Land to Turn into a Park. The City Is Building a Data Center
> Though that donation itself is a bit weird because literally on the just the other side of the neighborhood is. a park!

To be fair, parks don't just mean playground equipment. It could be a forested area with trails. It could be a drainage pond you can fish in. It could be a garden or prairie. It could even just be a big grass lot where people can play games and do whatever.

CivBase··on Age verification tech could put children at greater risk, says think tank
Payphones were mostly extinct even when I was a kid. I didn't have a cellphone either and smartphones didn't exist yet, except for the extremely rare Blackberry. But it wsn't a problem because basically every establishment around me had a landline phone I could use in an emergency. Now even landlines are extinct because just about everyone has their own phone on them at all times. Phones are easier to come by now more than ever. Kids have never been safer, even without their own phones.
CivBase··on The gamers taking on the industry to stop it switching off games
This is a good step, but it's not enough on its own. The core issue with game licenses is that they can be terminated at any time for any reason. There needs to at least be a well-defined timespan for the license. But of course that'd be seen as an "expiration date" and no publisher wants to put that on their game.
CivBase··on Meta confirms 1000s of Instagram accounts were hacked by abusing its AI chatbot
Meta's brand is already toxic. Idk if there's much to lose there.
CivBase··on Failing grades soar with AI usage, dwindling math skills in Berkeley CS classes
> You go to a university because you are deeply interested in understanding the subject that you study.

You must come from a wealthy background because what you described is far beyond the vast majority of people's means - at least here in the US.

Most of us go to college because it's the only reliable way to get a tollerable job that pays well. Only a few of my college courses aligned with my interests. The rest were just the price paid for the degree.

CivBase··on Please Use AI
> thanks to an algorithm (that's another name for AI, by the way) suggests it to me on HN.

It's a pretty big stretch to liken a ranking algorithm based entirely on direct, intentional human inputs to what most people understand to be "AI".

CivBase··on YouTube to automatically label AI-generated videos
> something that mostly works most of the time

Problem is that at YouTube's scale the remaining "some of the time" ends up being a collossal figure. On top of that, YouTube's effective monopoly position magnifies the damage done by false positives.

CivBase··on I'm Tired of Talking to AI
I agree this is probably true, but IMO the solution to this problem is unpalletable.
CivBase··on Uv is fantastic, but its package management UX is a mess
I heard a lot of great things about uv before finally having a chance to dive into it over the last month and... honestly I'm not sold. It's fast, but the UX feels like it's mostly just a wrapper around older tools.

I ran into a frustrating issue today with uv lock. AFAICT there's no way to "unlock" an individual dependency. I either lock everything down or forgo locks entirely. In my case I'm working with two tightly coupled packages - both developed internally to my organization - where package A is dependent on package B and I always want the latest version of package B. But I still want all my other packages to be locked to specific versions.

My thought was to stop using a uv lock file and just go back to pip with all my dependencies pinned with hashes in pyproject.toml. But after some digging I realized there was no way to put dependency hashes in pyproject.toml. So my only solution is to go back to using requirements.txt, at which point I lose out on the primary value-add of uv.

This experience left me feeling like the "new and improved" tools are still half-baked and that I should stick with the old stuff. It's a little slow and clunky sometimes, but I'm familiar with it and once it's setup it just does what I want.

CivBase··on You can no longer Google the word 'disregard'
The "AI Overview" is broken but it still shows the correct search results. My first result is this exact TechCrunch article, followed by the M-W dictionary definition.

It's a funny bug, but hardly worthy of the headline.

CivBase··on The Companies Cutting Headcount for AI Will Lose to the Ones Who Didn't
I still think AI is just a cover story for these job cuts. Tech companies are still "rightsizing" after unsustainable growth during the pandemic. At the same time we're clearly headed into a recession.

Investors like growth, not shrinkage. Claiming AI is replacing those jobs helps avoid the appearence of shrinkage, while also feeding the AI hype machine that many of these companies have invested heavily into.

CivBase··on The IBM-ification of Google?
I hate it, but I still use it. The platform sucks, but most of the content isn't available anywhere else. Between the infrastructure cost, the difficulty of monetization, and the immense user/create base already invested in the platform, I don't think it's possible for anyone to compete with YouTube without government intervention.
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