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byronic

108 karma · joined February 1, 2023

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byronic··on AI-generated posters don’t have to be horrible
the ones in the article that aren't complete eyesores are just what you get out of Canva with no changes except busier (which, by the way, is worse)

this is dumb as hell. Instead of feeding it through an LLM just make it plain text comic sans and it'll be better. Word clipart looks more palatable than this

byronic··on Alan Greenspan has died
TLDR - Why make it harder for people to get help on the basis that some people might get help who don't deserve it?

means testing kills the usefulness of these kinds of stimuli. I completely disagree with your point here and the people buying Gucci/LV are a drop in the bucket compared to, say, Wal-Mart's yearly wage theft statistics.

There is no simple means of identifying who is in need and if people get the help who don't need it they can redistribute it if they are morally inclined or do hoarding or w/e; who cares?

byronic··on "Don't You Just Upload It to ChatGPT?"
she did. Did you remember to read the article?
byronic··on AI uses less water than the public thinks
what an incredible slop political cartoon around the first paragraph
byronic··on Tech employment now significantly worse than the 2008 or 2020 recessions
yes, ha ha ha... yes
byronic··on Discuss: AI Slop Bores Me
After you get some 'credits' by responding as AI, you can swap back to the human mode and throw new stuff into the pile
byronic··on Discuss: AI Slop Bores Me
doesn't matter apparently because this gets removed from the page quickly and with rapid response. It was up on the front page long enough for a few people to see it I guess
byronic··on MIT Living Wage Calculator
This depends a lot on where you live. In our area, the minimum internet-only offering from Spectrum is $125 (approximately) after taxes/fees, and the only "competitor" is AT&T, which is more expensive for (at least in our area) worse / flakier service.

I was surprised (at least for Birmingham/AL/Jefferson County) how accurately it pegged _most_ of the costs -- childcare here is closer to $12k/annum/child so that one was the only one I pegged as 'off' - they show 2 children as $16k and that's a ~$8k underestimate

byronic··on AI is killing B2B SaaS
at last, TrueAnon has arrived at hackernews
byronic··on Microsoft forced me to switch to Linux
[obviously YMMV, take me with a grain of salt etc]

I actually tried Fedora first (thinking dev-first workflows) but ended up switching to Ubuntu w/x11 for gaming. A lot of that had to do with Fedora's release schedule (rather than Ubuntu's 2-year LTS) breaking working GOG/steam/wine-based apps on a rotating basis. Since switching to a defaults lifestyle / Ubuntu with x11 I deal with NVIDIA driver compatibility issues every 6 months or so instead of once/month. The 22 -> 24 upgrade was better than I expected and I didn't lose more than a couple of hours of life to appease the shell gods.

In any case Fedora and a once/month problem would still beat the Windows update nonsense, which I am still supporting since my spouse hasn't switched yet :/

byronic··on After two years of vibecoding, I'm back to writing by hand
I was so lucky to land in a CS class where we were writing C++ by hand. I don't think that exists anymore, but it is where I would go in terms of teaching CS from first principles
byronic··on The most banned books in U.S. schools
What does "ban" mean in this context? Like schools bought the book and it was removed, or it was on a "we won't approve this PO" list?

At first glance this is a useless list

byronic··on Rob Reiner has died
In the interest of preserving anonymity, let's call him Rob R. No, er, wait, let's do R Reiner. There, that should do it
byronic··on Horses: AI progress is steady. Human equivalence is sudden
my favorite part was where the graphs are all unrelated to each other
byronic··on Why are 38 percent of Stanford students saying they're disabled?
why are 38 percent of Stanford students saying they're left-handed?
byronic··on Why are 38 percent of Stanford students saying they're disabled?
The hyperbolic "surely a child with a learning disability can't (or shouldn't) go to college!" is very funny post-1950. John Keats wrote the definitive treatise on the subject and nobody read it. The secondary "oh no, rich kids are getting unfair advantages!" argument makes the article somehow worse and less informed. I feel dumber for having read it.

My conclusion: Reason is running the world's dumbest cover for The Atlantic

byronic··on Greeting Vocalizations in Domestic Cats Are More Frequent with Male Caregivers
we asked seventy-four cats and you won't BELIEVE number eight
byronic··on Make product worse, get money
What a dumb article. My favorite part was 'people are incentivized to make unsafe cars' and comparing that to pizza
byronic··on Ask HN: How would you set up a child’s first Linux computer?
Seconding “YouTube ban.” I do it now at the network level. If at some point they alter parental controls to allow list channels I would consider adding it back, but the sheer quantity put forth onto the platform makes it impossible for any parent to moderate (or moderate effectively).

At least with streaming a TV show or movie there are defined breaks instead of an endless array of kid dopamine

byronic··on You should write an agent
The author shoulda written a REPL
byronic··on AI's Dial-Up Era
how much does the correction here hew to making an AI model just look like standardized API calls with predictable responses? If you took away all the costs (data centers, water consumption, money, etc) I still wouldn't use an LLM as a first choice because it's wrong enough of the time to make it useless -- I have to verify everything it says, which is how I would have approached a task in the first place. If we put that analogy into manufacturing, it's "I have to QA everything off of the line _without exception_ and I get frequent material waste"

If you make the context small enough, we're back at /api/create /api/read /api/update /api/delete; or, if you're old-school, a basic function

byronic··on Second Chances on YouTube
Speaking as a parent of young children, I don't see any point in going back to YouTube. It's been blocked in our household basically since our oldest was six, and I don't see any way they could ever lure us back into that ecosystem.

Save perhaps allowing access only to specific, curated (self-controlled) channels.

If anything, YT's announcement here suggests they're going to take an already terrible platform covered head to toe in schlock and say "y'know what, we can add on a few more buckets"

byronic··on Americans increasingly see legal sports betting as a bad thing for society
I don't know how we could put limits on gambling that would make sense, though. There's a huge difference in bets that I used to make (which were all black-market sports bets, usually on 'game winner' or over/under) ~ once a week during the NFL season vs. the shit going on with FanDuel and all these phone-based gamified services. And that stuff absolutely encourages you to make bets that you can't afford and can easily turn into a problem even for someone who isn't 'addicted' per se -- it's like the predatory loot box model from video games.

TLDR I don't know how you write a law that would put hard and fast limits on what can be bet on and how much an individual is allowed to bet during a week in a way that would be palatable to the companies. I'm in favor of the blanket ban at this point; the black market for betting has always existed and it was better than the current setup.

byronic··on EA Announces Agreement to be Acquired by PIF, Silver Lake, and Affinity Partners
I'll defer to people who claim to work there now (avanderveen in the other replies). If you want my perspective, your parenthetical is describing worker abuse. Severance-avoidant layoffs and crunch are shitty and _are_ worker abuse -- in my opinion.
byronic··on EA Announces Agreement to be Acquired by PIF, Silver Lake, and Affinity Partners
Jason Schreier (sp?) is probably the journalist with the best track record on covering EA and it’s generally been rotten all the way down. His recent book Play Nice focuses on just Blizzard but I wouldn’t be surprised if he does one on EA someday because they are in a league of their own when it comes to toxic workplace practices
byronic··on EA Announces Agreement to be Acquired by PIF, Silver Lake, and Affinity Partners
Not referencing the Saudi Arabia portion here specifically but LBOs as documented in the book Barbarians at the Gate (covers Nabisco/RJR tobacco) gives me basically zero hope for the future of EA. EA was already rabid cost-cutters and RIF specialists, and they won the most hated company award for however many consecutive years for a reason. Giving them crushing debt to go along with their propensity to give large executive bonuses and stomp their workforce is not a good recipe long-term
byronic··on Just let me select text
Trying to select the text on the page and it took me a few seconds to get the joke
byronic··on Stripe Launches L1 Blockchain: Tempo
This would be more exciting if the current steam/itch situation didn't rest (at least partially) on their shoulders as payment processors. Other people in the threads have brought up the lack of regulation and market capture that Stripe enjoys so I won't rehash those points here.

I can't see this as a positive because of how Stripe has behaved in terms of preventing transactions in the past. Although Tempo is behaving more like a b2b model or fintech-specific orgs in this case, the shoe-drop is when they decide a particular bank, or fintech org, or product is not allowed to perform the transaction on their network after the market capture takes place.

byronic··on I Am An AI Hater
A marvelous article that gave voice to things I can't articulate appropriately (although, I guess, now I can).
byronic··on The cost of interrupted work (2023)
I actually thought this was going to reference the (earlier) 2000 Spolsky post (point 8 from https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2000/08/09/the-joel-test-12-s...), which is itself dependent on the 15 minute per-person interruption cost (higher than 23m15s in aggregate time)
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