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benjijay

263 karma · joined July 17, 2023

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benjijay··on Show HN: Brutalist Concrete Laptop Stand (2024)
If you find yourself in West London, also check out Brunel University, all of the older buildings are pure brutalism
benjijay··on The "Crown of Nobles" Noble Gas Tube Display (2024)
Wearing this as an actual crown might leave one feeling light headed

I'll get my coat

benjijay··on Oxide raises $200M Series C
Very cryptic; what are you actually saying here?
benjijay··on Two kinds of AI users are emerging
I don't recall the bot he was using, it was a rushed portion of the presentation to make the point that "yes these tools exist, but be mindful of the output - they're not a magic wand"
benjijay··on Two kinds of AI users are emerging
> If a data science team modeled something incorrectly in their simulation, who's gonna catch it? Usually nobody. At least not until it's too late. Will you say "this doesn't look plausible" about the output?

I recently watched a demo from a data science guy about the impending proliferation of AI in just about all related fields, his position was highly sceptical but with a "let's make the most of it while we can"

The part that stood out to me which I have repeated to colleagues since, was a demo where the guy fed his tame robot a .csv of price trends for apples and bananas, and asked it to visualise this. Sure enough, out comes a nice looking graph with two jagged lines. Pack it ship it move on..

But then he reveals that, as he wrote the data himself, he knows that both lines should just be an upward trend. Expands the axis labels - the LLM has alphabetized the months but said nothing of it in any of the outputs.

benjijay··on Douglas Adams on the English–American cultural divide over "heroes"
While we're on an Olivia Colman thread, I can't leave 'Green Wing' unmentioned
benjijay··on Nova Launcher added Facebook and Google Ads tracking
How disappointing. Been using premium for a decade now (got it in a 10p sale back in 2015! Those were the days)

Time to start scoping out replacements, this thread is a great start

benjijay··on TurboTax’s 20-year fight to stop Americans from filing taxes for free (2019)
Land of the f(r)ee
benjijay··on How Silica Gel Took Over the World
I'm scrolling before coffee and initially took your acronym as India Pale Ale, which would certainly be a different cleaning experience...
benjijay··on Extend Extra Extreme: keyboard extend layer mappings
That's a throwback! I remember being excited about the Optimus Maximus back around '06! Never heard of any actually making it out into the wild...
benjijay··on The Floppotron 3.0 (2022)
Managed to see them in London a few months back, can definitely echo the recommendation! (The warm up act could have done with a sound check but I was very impressed with his playing an OG GameBoy as a MIDI controller)
benjijay··on Nobody cares
Volkswagen already had this idea...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Volkswagen_emissions_scandal

benjijay··on Making an intersection unsafe for pedestrians to save seconds for drivers
I am more familiar with (and more partial to) a California Roll consisting of 'crab' sticks, avocado, and cucumber, wrapped in seaweed and then rice.
benjijay··on Olympians turn to OnlyFans to fund dreams due to 'broken' finance system (2024)
This always gets the pearl-clutchers out of the woodwork - you're gathering a few hundred of the world's fittest people in peak performance mode in the same place for a few weeks, giving most of them a huge amount of downtime, what do you THINK is going to happen? (This is the general 'you', not YOU)

Providing free access to make sure things are happening safely is not what's 'encouraging the behaviour' here :D

benjijay··on VLC tops 6B downloads, previews AI-generated subtitles
Totally personally skewed perspective, but thinking about the number of systems I've installed VLC on, some multiple times through rebuilds etc, 6 billion feels like a huge underestimate!
benjijay··on A middle schooler found a new compound in a piece of goose poop
It's that old adage once again... throw enough goose shit at the wall and eventually you'll treat cancer.
benjijay··on Astronomy Photographer of the Year 2024 winners
I went to this exhibit at the weekend! Some truly awesome pictures (and a handful of runners up that left me wondering how easy it is to do, really)

One of the most interesting comparisons was how some pictures were a single shot, maybe 10-15 second exposure, and others were stacks of 700 or more images with exposures ranging from 60-400 seconds, taken over the course of a month.

benjijay··on Everyone is capable of, and can benefit from, mathematical thinking
Most people have an above-average number of legs.
benjijay··on Show HN: I built the most over-engineered Deal With It emoji generator
Unless the comment above has been edited, I make that 100 days?
benjijay··on Gamma radiation is produced in large tropical thunderstorms
Well, now I have a goal!
benjijay··on Salt Water Dimmers
> bubbled (as another mentioned, yeah, probably chlorine gas)

Suddenly I am reminded of my A-level Physics project, where I tested the relationship between salinity and conductivity with some graphite rods in a beaker of water - has to move to a chemistry lab and use their fume hoods after the first day of testing :D

benjijay··on FakeTraveler: Fake where your phone is located (Mock location for Android)
If someone wanted to track me when I was a teenager they would have needed to access the mobile network and triangulate the signal from my 3310
benjijay··on The Typeset of Wall·E (2018)
Tangentially reminds me of how, in an early build of Win11, the localisation team at M$ changed 'zip' to 'postcode' for the GB language pack

People then had a lot of fun being unable to extract their .postcode archive files which suddenly came into existence...

benjijay··on Count Binface
A highly necessary change, to be sure
benjijay··on Research on the visual rabbit illusion takes a leap forward
Either the gif's not loaded right or I'm more broken than I thought, but I'm only seeing two distinct flashes - one left and one right...
benjijay··on Why today's phones are so boooooring?
My last was a g8x ThinQ, dual screen by virtue of a case like the v50, but both screens were the same size - I believe with the v50 the secondary was slightly smaller?

What ultimately forced me to upgrade, however, was the main screen fell off - the glue holding it to the body seemingly failed, and as it fell the ribbon cable tore. I mulled getting another one (or a Wing) on ebay, but the P7Pro seemed a wiser investment

benjijay··on Why today's phones are so boooooring?
I miss my LGs for exactly this reason. They were just about the only ones doing anything 'new' beyond "hey our camera is 12% better than last year!"

My Pixel 7 Pro is great and all, but it doesn't do anything _interesting_

benjijay··on WinDirStat – Windows Directory Statistics
I used to have similar views, but last year found out about WizTree and was instantly converted. Way faster, just as functional.
benjijay··on Cold brew coffee in 3 minutes using acoustic cavitation
I was recently discussing this with a colleague and we settled on calling it quality creep - as you become used to better things, the stuff that was previously acceptable becomes unbearable.

e.g. I used to drink any old instand coffee, then I found Douwe Egberts and strongly preferred that for a few years, then I started making pour-overs with pre ground coffee in a v60, then I found a better grind/roast/etc of the beans which is my go-to - now I drink 'real' coffee black and can only tolerate instant if it's adulterated with milk and a little sugar.

I'm trying to avoid making the jump to pulling my own espressos, it looks like way more fuss than the pour-over...

benjijay··on World Food Atlas: Discover local dishes and ingredients
Slightly upsetting that at maximum zoom, the bubble over London claims 218 more dishes lay hidden behind Fish and Chips, but on clicking that only about 36 load...

Great idea, needs better scaling for larger data sets

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