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bentcorner

4,537 karma · joined December 4, 2012

Gmail: bentcorner.hn
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bentcorner··on YouTube as Storage
Nope, I hand wrote this.

I actually considered using an LLM but in my experience they "warp" the content too much for anything like this. The effort required to get them to retain what I would consider something to my taste would take longer than just writing the poem myself. (Although tbf it's been awhile since I've asked a LLM to do parody work, so I could be wrong)

bentcorner··on YouTube as Storage

    I met a user from an antique land
    Who said: Two squares of a clip of video
    Stand in at the end of the search. Near them,
    Lossly compressed, a profile with a pfp, whose smile,
    And vacant eyes, and shock of content baiting,
    Tell that its creator well those passions read
    Which yet survive, stamped on these unclicked things,
    The hand that mocked them and the heart that fed:
    And on the title these words appear:
    "My name is Ozymandias, Top Youtuber of All Time:
    Look on my works, ye Mighty, and like and subscribe!"
    No other video beside remains. Round the decay
    Of that empty profile, boundless and bare
    The lone and level page stretch far away.
bentcorner··on Fix the iOS keyboard before the timer hits zero or I'm switching back to Android
> Clearly tapping a letter “taps” a different letter (hot spots poorly calibrated)

FWIW I encounter this in Android every so often (using gboard). Anecdotally I don't know what causes it (I swear sometimes it's worse and sometimes it's better), but Android isn't entirely problem free.

bentcorner··on The Day the Telnet Died
A very very long time ago as an intern I was working on a perl cgi script and I would often test it with telnet. I was used to messing around with hayes commands so manually typing in HTTP commands seemed like a natural extension of that.
bentcorner··on Teaching my neighbor to keep the volume down
Honestly I could see arguments going both ways. Pairing prevents unauthorized access, but at the same time, pairing means you need to be able to pair without having a paired device on-hand.

For a passive read-only device (like most satellite/cable receivers 20 years ago), it was probably more important to allow customers to easily replace their lost remotes than it was to prevent pranksters (who could often be dissuaded by more physical means).

bentcorner··on The WiFi only works when it's raining (2024)
Good guess! I did enable some QoS algorithm in openwrt so it's certainly possible. But yeah it doesn't make sense that wifi traffic was non-impacting. But it's something I didn't try turning off.
bentcorner··on The WiFi only works when it's raining (2024)
My only unsolved networking mystery was that my computer would experience high packet loss when a Roku in the other room was streaming Netflix.

My PC and the roku device were both wired to two different ports on a router (iirc an Edgerouter X running openwrt at the time). This didn't repro when the roku streamed other services (hulu/youtube tested), only netflix. This also didn't repro if the roku was connected over wireless (connecting to an AP wired to a different port). Just opening netflix also didn't repro, the roku had to be actively streaming a netflix video.

I never ended up solving it, I just worked around it by making the roku connect over wireless.

It did take me forever to figure out the problem though. For a long time I'd be in one room getting frustrated with my computer while someone was innocently watching netflix in the other room.

bentcorner··on PlayStation 2 Recompilation Project Is Absolutely Incredible
When I was a kid I recall my cousin upgrading his computer to 1 or 2 MB so that we could get some extra features when playing Wing Commander 1. That was 1990.

35 years later, burner phones regularly come with 4 GB of RAM these days. 3 order of magnitude difference, not taking into account miniaturization and speed improvements.

In another 35 years who knows what will happen. Yeah things can't improve at the same pace forever but I would be surprised if anyone back in 1990 could predict the level of technology you can get at every corner store today.

Maybe it's not that everyone gets an RTX 5090 in our pocket, but maybe it's that LLMs now can run on rpi. Realistically it's probably something in the middle.

bentcorner··on Cloudflare claimed they implemented Matrix on Cloudflare workers. They didn't
I get vibe coding a feature or news story or whatnot but how do you go about not even checking if the thing actually works, or fact checking the blog post?
bentcorner··on Instabridge has acquired Nova Launcher
I appreciate that I can choose to decorate my house as I see fit. At least on my Pixel 10 there's way too much google this and google that. I guess if you're deep into the ecosystem it's a value add but for me a custom launcher lets me remove all that code.
bentcorner··on Dead Internet Theory
This itself could be a bot argument casting doubt on reddit. It's an endless cycle.

If bots reference real sources it's still a valid argument.

bentcorner··on Predicting OpenAI's ad strategy
> A simplified model is needed otherwise rigorous analysis becomes impossible, and people make handwavy arguments about how paying workers more means they can spend more, which means factories, and it's a perpetual growth machine!

I'm no economist but you can't live on an island that only produces coconuts, because the people on that island would quickly start producing other stuff, breaking your premise.

This is like saying cash is useless because amoeba haven't evolved a cash economy.

bentcorner··on Scott Adams has died
Love the art, not the artist.

I loved reading the Belgariad as a young teen and was shocked upon learning more about the author as an adult.

bentcorner··on Drones that recharge directly on transmission lines
My gut says there's something like an inverse-square law that governs how far away they can effectively charge.
bentcorner··on Anti-cheat evolution in Windows 11
It's a balance between allowing linux and (theoretically) opening the door for more cheaters. Saying "players can't play our game because every match has a cheater" is just as bad.

I can't say which has more weight but it's not a cut and dry situation, at least until Linux has anti-cheat.

Right now developers could make an "unattested" queue for linux and other non-TPM windows systems. Which could also serve as a black-hole for cheaters, so maybe there's some value in that.

bentcorner··on All AI Videos Are Harmful (2025)
I don't think AI reduces cost of marketing in any significant way. Everybody has access to these tools so at best it just allows marketing companies to employ fewer ad-creation teams to pump out the same amount of advertisements.

Pushed to the extreme, where a single person could create an oscar-worthy advertisement in seconds, it doesn't suddenly mean that the superbowl will charge pennies for an ad slot.

I suspect the end state will be just-in-time rich ad creation (not bidding) tailored specifically to you.

bentcorner··on Report: Microsoft kills official way to activate Windows 11/10 without internet
For casual use I use lightroom web and it's good enough for me, if you haven't tried it, I highly recommend.

I'm sure for some workflows it isn't sufficient but for basic edits and raw development it works quite well.

bentcorner··on Trump says Venezuela’s Maduro captured after strikes
> As an American, I’m glad to see an authoritarian dictator removed

Personally I'm not. This is like kidnapping the CEO of Kroger because your eggs are too expensive, and then telling everyone you did it because he wasn't listening to his employees enough.

We can't undo this and this was a very big stick we used. I highly doubt this was done with the interests of the common American in mind.

bentcorner··on Linux is good now
> I'm writing from a position of ignorance on the state of mouse/keys with current consoles

I'm far from an authority on this topic but from my understanding both Sony/MS have introduced mkb support, but so far it looks to be an opt-in kind of thing and it's still relatively new.

bentcorner··on A website to destroy all websites
Is that bad?

I black-hole plenty of sites via pihole above and beyond the typical adblock lists. On a very few rare occasions I have turned off the pihole to unblock a site because I was curious after following a link that was blocked by said pihole. Every single time I quickly learned why that site was blocked, and visiting that site gained me nothing.

bentcorner··on ManusAI Joins Meta
I'm all for dogfooding but if you work for a bicycle company it shouldn't mean you can't drive to work. The right tool for the right job.
bentcorner··on How we lost communication to entertainment
I love this paragrpah and I think it provides an interesting insight:

> They are entertainment platforms that delegate media creation to the users themselves the same way Uber replaced taxis by having people drive others in their own car.

Taking this analogy further, is today's end goal of social media to provide AI generated content that users can endlessly consume? I think Facebook is heading this direction.

bentcorner··on Unifi Travel Router
In my experience hotels throttle wifi connection per device (IP/Mac address or whatever) and so you'd be better off using something that can use the wired connection in your room (which is usually unthrottled or has higher bandwidth) and be an AP for your personal devices.

If you don't have a wired connection then this wouldn't be any better, except for any connectivity features it might offer (probably some vpn capability).

I have a gl-inet device and it does pretty much all I need whenever I travel.

bentcorner··on Claude Code's DX is too good. And that's a problem
"It's not just X, it's Y"

I find it really hard to read articles that use AI slop aphorisms. Please use your own words, it matters.

bentcorner··on Rivian Unveils Custom Silicon, R2 Lidar Roadmap, and Universal Hands Free
Far be it from me to tell automakers how to roll out software but I would expect them to have relatively slow and gradual rollouts, segmented by region and environment (e.g., Phoenix might be first while downtown London might be last).
bentcorner··on Last Week on My Mac: Losing confidence
Windows went through a pendulum swing of integrating touch (I think they ended up in a place where they expect users to use more of a multi-modal approach instead of touch-only).

I suspect Mac is going through the same thing right now as ipad is "growing up" and they're trying to reconcile all their UI. I'm a little surprised that Macs have never introduced touch.

bentcorner··on Leak confirms OpenAI is preparing ads on ChatGPT for public roll out
I think a lot of techies would be surprised with how much some users embrace their products. We see and know the man behind the curtain, other people believe in the magic.
bentcorner··on Leak confirms OpenAI is preparing ads on ChatGPT for public roll out
While that's true even today there really isn't a product that wraps that API that is as simple to use as any of the major chat applications.

I've used OpenUI and it's fine but it's incredibly fiddly to configure and web integration is almost nonexistent (this was as of a few months ago so maybe it's better today).

bentcorner··on Rebecca Heineman has died
This doesn't make any sense. If you make a thing, the price you set for selling that thing in a country has little to do with where you happen to be living when you made that thing.
bentcorner··on Older Adults Outnumber Children in 11 States
> Some people on the right blame birth control or women not knowing their place or whatever, but it seems odd that propagation of a species would rely on essentially forced participation of prospective parents.

The simple explanation is that there is no local "cost" to doubling your household's income. The only thing you "pay" is to have fewer children. As smaller households become more competitive, average costs rise and the only way to stay competitive is for other households to also stay small.

Looking at world-wide graphs and it's extremely worrying - many countries are completely upside-down and over the next 25-50 years as the elderly die, these populations will crash.

IMO governments should have started doing something about 20 years ago if they wanted to keep things on-track, I suspect the children of today are just going to have to suffer the consequences of a large population decrease.

It's certainly plausible that this is all for the best for Earth's sustainability, but I expect the coming years to be turbulent nonetheless.

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