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billyp-rva

627 karma · joined November 26, 2024

Building Ilograph: https://www.ilograph.com
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billyp-rva··on Claude Whiteboards, Claude Sheets, and Claude Data
> When you’re done brainstorming ... where you can continue working on it with your team.

Yeah, if we're done working on it, why are we continuing to work on it? That makes no sense.

billyp-rva··on Anthropic's IPO Filing Warns It May Be 'Imminently' Close to RSI
Did the definition of "warn" change recently?
billyp-rva··on US boy names that became girl names and vice versa
> Of the 42 names that moved toward girls, 34 were driven mainly by an increase among girls, rather than a decline among boys.

> Surprisingly, the same pattern held in the opposite direction. Of the 12 names that moved toward boys, 9 shifted mainly because fewer girls were receiving them, rather than because more boys were. In other words, whichever way a name moved, the biggest change usually came from girls.

This is consistent with the observation that girl's names are more dynamic.

billyp-rva··on The importance of communities around software
I guess it's way too late to lodge this complaint, but using the word "community" to refer to things that aren't rooted in geographical areas has always struck me as odd.
billyp-rva··on Facebook Pages require paid subscription to post more than two links per month
Have any of them seriously considered going back to print-only?
billyp-rva··on Facebook now charging to post more than 2 links a month
Probably. Their aim has always been to colonize the entire web.
billyp-rva··on Facebook Pages require paid subscription to post more than two links per month
For a long time. Essentially all social media will heavily downrank any post that includes a link. They don't want you leaving.
billyp-rva··on Facebook Pages require paid subscription to post more than two links per month
Fun historical note: one of the first applications of the internet was the "world wide web" (WWW). The idea was people that people would host HTML files on the internet that would be connect to each other using "links" to form a web of "sites" (called, of course, "websites"). You can still find these websites on the internet if you leave the walled gardens and paywalls, but it takes some effort.
billyp-rva··on Redesigning source control at Anthropic
It's a fair question to ask. If literally all the economic growth (and then some?) is going to AI companies, then nothing else is improving, in the aggregate.
billyp-rva··on Immich Sequence Diagrams
Thank you. The goal of these is to be be accurate, detailed, and useful. Since this got killed almost immediately, it kind of feels like many people's prior assumption is `detail == slop` and they reject it.
billyp-rva··on Immich Sequence Diagrams
Try tapping on the colored boxes to zoom in.
billyp-rva··on Anecdotally, programmers dislike "reduce"
Well yeah, it's the lowest-level array function. All of the others can be written with reduce, but not vice-versa. Of course it's going to be less friendly.
billyp-rva··on There's a new "Google Jail" for independent wikis
> That's ignoring how video game wikis are used. People will google "<game> <place where I'm stuck>" and completely miss the wiki. Or "<game> <mechanic>". Etc. So reachability and proper indexing by search engines is a must.

Well, it's a "must" because over the years people have been trained to do this, instead of going directly to a quality website they trust. However, this has also trained website owners to neglect their brand and focus only on SEO, leading to the ad-infested wiki sites we have today.

Google went through all of this many (many) years ago with the "content farm" problem, so this is nothing new, really.

billyp-rva··on ChatGPT ad targeting is garbage
> ChatGPT recommends bidding somewhere around by £2 per click, but I bid between £0.15 and £0.07 and was still able to get traffic. However 0.46% is a shockingly low conversion rate.

I'm not an ad guru by any means, but isn't it expected that you will get junk clicks with a bid like that? Seems like a you-get-what-you-pay-for scenario.

billyp-rva··on The Sloppification of Peptides
The battle between black-hat SEO and search engines has been going on for a long time. They may or may not "got this," exactly, but they definitely know a lot about it. I'd wager if a blogger can sniff this out, the search engines at least stand a chance.
billyp-rva··on Guess which of these LLM outputs is watermarked
If its paraphrased to any significant degree I'd expect the original to not survive. The second model's watermark would of course be there regardless.
billyp-rva··on The Amazon Tax
Of course not. A terrible product may not sell well even if it has great ads, for instance.
billyp-rva··on The Amazon Tax
I have to agree with OP, this phrase specifically reveals it isn't a good take:

> sales [the best product] were entitled to in the first place

Unfortunately, this is not, and has never been, how it works. The best product is never entitled to sales. Marketing, which very much includes advertising, is a massive, massive factor in sales.

billyp-rva··on Karpathy’s Pelican
> "design me a sneaker and all the equipment to manufacture it autonomously"

We already have sneaker designs and the equipment to manufacture them. Whatever it spits out is going to be, at best, a mediocre clone of something that already exists. What exactly is the point?

billyp-rva··on Substack writers, you need a website
> Substack gives you a way to push content to your subscribers without an intermediary deciding what they get to read.

How do we know they won't start limiting your reach in the future? That's the path basically every other platform has gone down.

billyp-rva··on Google's Beyond Zero: Enterprise Security for the AI Era
The engineer could be fixing an emergency issue while on vacation. For financial data, that would hopefully be an auto-deny anyway until someone on-site whitelists their IP. And this is if they aren't using VPNs. Adding AI to this party feels like it wouldn't really help.
billyp-rva··on Show HN: Bento - An entire PowerPoint in one HTML file (edit+view+data+collab)
Ilograph diagrams can be exported to standalone HTML files (like this example: [0]). Coincidentally, they also have slides (kind of) and clock in at around 560KB.

[0] https://www.ilograph.com/demo/intelligentDocumentProcessing....

billyp-rva··on Frozen 2 should be Rated R
Some might quibble with using AI for research, but this at least feels directionally correct. I'm not sure if ratings/MPAA is the right avenue to fix it, but the sheer laziness of manufacturing stakes by catastrophe instead of through characters definitely feels like its gotten worse.
billyp-rva··on DSLs Enable Reliable Use of LLMs
> and i would say json/yaml is not a dsl

But you can have DSLs that are json/yaml, is my point.

> PlantUML is a real dsl.

PlantUML is a DSL that isn't json/yaml. That doesn't make it better, and you can make the argument that it is worse because the tooling around it won't be as good.

billyp-rva··on DSLs Enable Reliable Use of LLMs
> the premise is that because of these few existing dsls (like PlantUML mentioned) my "new dsl" will be equally effective. PlantUML has millions of examples in the training data, my new dsls are not (*specially if its not json/yaml* or just function chain based)

I can confirm that having a DSL that is json/yaml helps a ton. Kind of like static type checking, it eliminates entire swaths of syntactical errors, allowing the LLM to focus on the semantics.

> because if then you are going to ask the llm to "compile the dsl to implementation" we are back to square 1.

I think this is an edge case; 99% of the time you (and/or the LLM) would have access to the implementor so it wouldn't need to do this.

billyp-rva··on Your 'app' could have been a webpage (so I fixed it for you)
> I can’t understand how we got to this place with “app culture”!

The short version: ad blockers work on browsers but not apps[0].

[0] https://pluralistic.net/2024/01/30/go-nuts-meine-kerle

billyp-rva··on Yt-Dlp Sequence Diagrams
Thanks for the heads up; that shouldn't have been happening. Please try again.
billyp-rva··on Yt-Dlp Sequence Diagrams
Hi, author here. The app itself (Ilograph[0]) is fairly old; its first ShowHN was in 2019.

These particular yt-dlp diagrams were an experiment in getting meaningful sequence diagrams from a code repo using Claude. If you open the black tab on the left, you can see the source of the diagrams. Claude was able to generate most of this, albeit with a good amount of back-and-forth to get the details right, plus some manual tweaking in the end.

[0] https://www.ilograph.com

billyp-rva··on GPT-5.6, Grok 4.5, Claude, and Muse Spark build the same 4 apps
Calculator / Rubik's cube / game of life apps should be very close to 100% identical, right? I don't see the point of asking an AI for one of these when there are dozens (hundreds?) of repos that all have exactly what you want.
billyp-rva··on Show HN: Arcaide – Explore code with multi-level call graphs
It's a bit like a (simplified) version of Ilograph[0]. Are these editable, or strictly LLM-generated?

[0] https://www.ilograph.com

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