DamnInteresting

I wrote a short piece about this bit of infrastructure a few days shy of 20 years ago: https://www.damninteresting.com/curio/the-falkirk-wheel/

> With something more descriptive like, "Escape from Shawshank" or just "Prison Break" people would have been more interested to see it

That does spoil the ending a little bit though. It's like changing a certain film title to The Psychologist's Ghost.

> What’s so hard to make 2-3 pins and each to access different logged in apps and files.

I've been advocating for this under-duress-PIN feature for years, as evidenced by this HN comment I made about 9 years ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13631653

Maybe someday.

See also: "Err on the side of caution."

Minor thing: The game list in the sidebar seems like it wants to be alphabetized, but AtlasChess and llmholdem.com are out of order.

I've made a few games over the years[1], but so far I only Show HN'd one of them[2]. When my next one is done (it's already in progress), I plan to post it here again, because the feedback on Omiword was great, and I implemented a lot of requested features.

[1] https://alanbellows.com/websites/

[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43654350

See also: "Don't blame me, I voted for Kodos"

> I think about this episode so much

Same.

"Well, I believe I'll vote for a third-party candidate."

"Go ahead, throw your vote away! Hahahahahaha!"

(Ross Perot punches his hat)

Tabs or spaces?

On MacOS I use multiple desktops, and I have Finder assigned to "All Desktops" since it is useful to interact with so many other apps. For several major OS releases now, this setup causes any open Finder windows to render on top of all other windows for ~1 second when switching desktops. It creates an annoying lag, and pollutes what would otherwise be a smooth, pleasant experience.

I thought Musk was pretty cool when he was just the guy making EVs and reusable rockets happen. I didn't even mind his over-optimistic projections, it's hard to be mad at optimism. But then he started becoming more of a public figure. He called that rescue worker a 'pedo guy' just for turning down a bad idea. He started broadcasting his philosophies, and they were mostly gross. He bought Twitter and made it so everyone had to see his dumb tweets. He revealed himself as a big, moist wad of lies and insecurities.

I have a hypothesis that the Hedonic Treadmill[1] can cause actual harm to the human brain; I suspect that over time, in certain brains, extreme wealth erodes the reward centers such that some rich people can't help but be miserable, flailing for ever-elusive life satisfaction. It seems like a fairly serious bug in human software.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hedonic_treadmill

> For me this was evident when they suddenly changed the UI. The new UI is more annoying.

In case you are unaware, if you're logged in, you can go into the user preferences and change the Appearance to one of the older themes, such as Vector Legacy (2010).

I have been a fan of Wikipedia since I first learned about it, about six months after it launched. What a concept! Anyone can edit, citations are required, revisions are kept indefinitely. That's a recipe for building a clearinghouse of human knowledge with the power of iteration.

But I am also a non-fiction researcher/writer, and I experience some problems caused by Wikipedia:

1) I like to dig deep into historical stories--newspapers, archives, court records, FOIA requests--and I try to produce high quality, well-sourced articles about historic events. Inevitably, someone updates the Wikipedia article(s) to include new information I have surfaced, which exiles my article to the digital dustbin in favor of Wikipedia. Occasionally the Wikipedia editors cite my article in their updates, but much more often they just cite the sources that I cited, and skip over my contribution. It can be painful for my hard work to become irrelevant so rapidly.

2) Multiple of my writings have been plagiarized on Wikipedia by careless editors over the years, and I have been subsequently accused of plagiarizing from Wikipedia. That is unpleasant.

For a recent example, in 2006 I wrote an article about Doble Steam Cars[1]. A few months ago I had reason to visit the Doble steam car Wikipedia entry[2], and as I was reading, I realized that a large portion of the text was an uncanny, nearly verbatim copy of my article. I looked at the revision history, and found that a wiki editor had copied my text to revamp the article just a few months after I wrote mine in 2006. I visited /r/wikipedia and asked how to best handle this, and the Wikipedia editors there determined that it was indeed a violation, and they decided to revdelete almost 20 years of edits to purge the violation. It was quite something to behold.

To be clear, I am not happy that the huge revdelete resulted in so many lost subsequent good faith edits. But it's impressive that it was possible to roll it back so quickly and cleanly.

[1] https://www.damninteresting.com/the-last-great-steam-car/

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doble_steam_car

> To be honest for 95% of stuff it would be enough to connect my smartphone via USB-C to a dock for mouse/keyboard/displays etc.

I was blogging about this basic idea back in 2005, just over 20 years ago:

https://www.damninteresting.com/retired/mobile-phone-as-comp...

I still think it's a good idea, but it sure is being slow to materialize in a practical form factor.

> It won’t work to put the genie back in the bottle

It's not about putting the genie back in the bottle, it's about helping folks realize that the vague smell of farts in the air IS the genie--and this particular genie only grants costly monkey paw wishes that ultimately do more harm to the world than good.

Scott Adams did me a considerable and unsolicited kindness almost 20 years ago, back in 2007. One day my site traffic logs showed an unexpected uptick in traffic, and recent referrals overwhelmingly pointed to his blog. Of course I recognized him from Dilbert fame, both the comic strip and The Dilbert Principle.

I sent him a thank you email for the link, and he replied graciously. This began a conversation where he referred me to his literary agent, and this ultimately led to a real-world, dead-tree-and-ink book publishing deal[1]. He even provided a nice blurb for the book cover.

I can't say that I agreed a lot with the person Scott Adams later became--I only knew him vaguely, from a distance. But he brought humor into many people's lives for a lot of years, and he was generous to me when he didn't have to be. Today I'll just think about the good times.

[1] https://www.damninteresting.com/the-damn-interesting-book/

Edit: I found the relevant Dilbert Blog link via the Wayback Machine: https://web.archive.org/web/20071011024008/http://dilbertblo...

> Nothing I've seen from the AI labs appears to indicate that they are worried about model collapse in the slightest.

AI labs are insufferable hype machines, they are unlikely to sow doubt about their own business models.

> they can detect that and take steps to fix it.

Each model will need an endless diet of new content to remain relevant, and over time, avoiding ingestion of LLM output (and the accompanying inbreeding depression) will likely be a tricky proposition. Not impossible, but expensive and error-prone.

This has been my suspicion since LLMs began eating the Internet. Whether it's code or writing, now that LLMs are consuming their own output, the Habsburg Jaw[1] is going to quickly become evident. It is very difficult--sometimes impossible--to know whether a given chunk of input is wholly or partially generated by an LLM. Nevertheless, filtering input may become a critical task. That expense will be passed to the consumer, and LLM prices will necessarily rise as their quality diminishes. It could become a death spiral.

If so, I, for one, will be relieved. I'm tired of LLMs trying to take over the enjoyable parts of writing and coding, and leaving the menial tasks to us humans.

[1] https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/distinctive-habsbu...

> I hope everyone realizes that the current LLMs are subsidized, like your Seamless and Uber was in the early days.

A.I. == Artificially Inexpensive

I personally enjoy changes of scenery, but my parents struggle to relearn how to use their computer every time there is a major OS update that revamps the UI. It's seldom better, it's just change for change's sake, resulting in a lot of time lost to relearning. Sticking to the old OS is only viable as long as security updates continue.

I wish that OS developers would provide the option to retain the bulk of the old UI when a new one comes out, implementing the UI like a swappable "theme." People who prefer consistency could keep most of their old UI, and those who prefer the newer UI can have it.

I made a similar effect a few years back using layered transparent PNGs[1]. It's not quite as dynamic, but it's probably a lot more efficient.

[1] https://www.damninteresting.com/ghoulish-acts-dastardly-deed...

When it's more than one company working together in a monopoly-like fashion, the term is "oligopoly".

https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/oligopoly

He makes a pretty good case that partnering with Electrify has not damaged the quality of the channel's videos so far. They've made multiple videos now under this arrangement, and they've maintained a high standard. I am not confident that it will remain that way indefinitely--capitalism will come for its pound of flesh--but for now it is holding on.

Among my circle of friends, many have a tradition of playing multiplayer games after the kiddos are asleep and the presents are prepared. It makes me wonder whether this has increasingly become a common tradition, and as a consequence the hug this year is more than even Steam could bear. This is pure speculation, of course.

Since I'm indulging in luxurious speculation: maybe Valve has taken Steam down to prepare to announce Half Life 3 tomorrow.

Oh, you can't reach the items on the higher grocery shelves no matter how hard you stretch? That's just a deficit of tall-power. I also experience items on high shelves. No, you shouldn't use a stepping stool to grab those items; just stretch more, and grow taller, like me! Look how good I am at being a bit taller than you! Your failure to be slightly taller is a character flaw, feel bad.

Some of us actually enjoy writing code, and wish to preserve the skill, so we have no motivation to offload the task to an LLM. Do LLM coding evangelists also badger illustrators, asking why they don't just embrace machine learning image generation? Do they tell people they shouldn't have human friends because chatbots exist? Do they insist that musicians slough off their creativity like a molting snake, and just let a computer generate their songs?

There is also a big, uncomfortable truth regarding "AI" coding tools: They are trained on open-source code, yet they ignore the licenses attached to that code. If it's unethical for me to copy-and-paste MIT licensed code without including the license text, then it's unethical to let an LLM do it on my behalf.

LLMs are paving the way to a dystopia where there's no motivation for humans to create, and that world sounds miserable.

Thanks! We do indeed have a sort of e-book monetization; donating above certain thresholds gives one access to download an e-book version of our entire catalog.

And true enough that RSS traffic is largely uncounted, but there are many other indications of reduced visitor count--server-side logs, comment count on original content, number of email subscribers, and that sort of thing.

Thanks! We had our 20th birthday earlier this year, so we've certainly been around for some vintage devices. Over the years our primary audience moved from desktop web browsers to mostly mobile readers, and now our largest audience is podcast listeners.

Site traffic is indeed down in recent years. The largest decline was when Facebook introduced "boosting," and stopped showing our posts to 90%+ of our Facebook followers overnight. I despise advertising, so I was unwilling to cave to their demand to "boost" our posts into ads. I'd have been happy to pay a reasonable monthly fee to reach our audience there, but that option was never available.

That big dip in traffic came with a big dip in donations, and as a consequence I eventually had to move from a part-time day job to full-time. The sharp reduction in free my time led to a sharp reduction in original content on Damn Interesting, which further shrunk the pool of people willing to donate.

This is a spiral that some would classify as "death," if I were willing to let it die. But it settled into an equilibrium where it pays for itself, makes a modest profit, and remains rewarding. Frankly I'd probably still do it even if donations dried up entirely, the research and writing give me a sense of purpose that would be difficult to replace.

I used to hope that a wealthy benefactor would discover us, and decide to fully fund our project for a few years, giving us space to realize more of the project's potential. But such offers come with strings attached, and I don't have the stomach for most of those. Perhaps I am broken.

My long-running website damninteresting.com and its affiliated projects (e.g., omiword.com) earn me a combined ~$700/month profit on average. Donations have been declining, however, so I don't know if I'll be piping up in next year's thread.

> Dumb question: who’s Firefox target user?

These days, it seems to be people who:

* Don't want to be using a browser owned by an ethically dubious corporation

* Want a fully functional ad blocker

* Prefer vertical tabs