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carlesfe

4,526 karma · joined March 5, 2012

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carlesfe··on EU Parliament greenlights Chat Control 1.0
EU politicians are exempt from this measure. They thought it all the way through.

(Edit: seems that the statement above applies to ChatControl 2.0, not the approved text. Apologies.)

carlesfe··on VitruvianOS – Desktop Linux Inspired by the BeOS
I ran BeOS as a daily driver for a few months in the early 2000s. I had a winmodem and Linux couldn't connect to the internet for me, but for some reason, BeOS had drivers, so I used it. It was faster and the desktop environment felt more polished than KDE/Gnome.

Of course, at that time, it was impossible to know which OS would win the wars, so BeOS became my favorite. However, Linux developed very quickly during those years, I got into college and started using UNIX there, winmodem drivers appeared, and that's what I ended up using.

But BeOS still holds a very dear place in my heart. It really was superior to anything else during that era.

carlesfe··on Apple Business
Ctrl-F MDM

"Apple Business offers built-in mobile device management (MDM) [...]"

carlesfe··on I love email (2023)
I did write to him some weeks ago after reading GEB! Didn't get a reply, but also, I don't expect to. I just hope he reads the praise :)
carlesfe··on Tinnitus Is Connected to Sleep
I do hear my heartbeat from my left ear. The ear doctor said that the ear can be sensitive to the blood flowing from nearby arteries, and that there's nothing to do. Stress affects the heartbeat volume. I just got used to it, but it can be annoying sometimes, especially when you're trying to enjoy the silence.

The doctor also told me that it's not an ear problem, but rather a brain problem. The brain is supposed to filter out this noise, in the same sense that it filters out the sounds from a (normal) digestion, our breathing, etc. I do have some (undiagnosed) hypersensitivity, so that sounds consistent to me.

nozzlegear: it gets better with time, the less you think about it. I know it's not a great consolation, but trust me, train yourself not to think about it, and it will go away for extended periods of time (and will come back from time to time)

carlesfe··on Jolla phone – a full-stack European alternative
And it was Europe who, every time, fought back and won.

It works both ways.

carlesfe··on Ask HN: Abandoned/dead projects you think died before their time and why?
I built a chatbot startup in 2015. It integrated with Whatsapp (which was possible at the time with some hacks), and had:

- Multimodality: Text/audio/images input and output. Integrated OCR.

- Connection with an asterisk server, it could send and receive voice phone calls! I used it to call for pizzas to a local place via whatsapp. This was prior to Google's famous demo calling a hairdresser to book a haircut.

- It understood humor and message sentiment, told jokes and sometimes even chimed in with a "haha" if somebody said something funny in a group chat or sent an appropriate gif reaction

- Memory (facts database)

- Useful features such as scheduling, polling, translations, image search, etc.

Regarding the tech, I used external models (Watson was pretty good at the time), plus classical NLP processing and symbolic reasoning that I learned in college.

Nobody understood the point of it (where's the GUI? how do I know what to ask it? customers asked) and I didn't make a single dime out of the project. I closed it a couple years later. Sometimes I wonder what could've been of it.

carlesfe··on WinBoat: Windows apps on Linux with seamless integration
An actual explanation of what the software does, from their Github repo

> WinBoat is an Electron app which allows you to run Windows apps on Linux using a containerized approach. Windows runs as a VM inside a Docker container, we communicate with it using the WinBoat Guest Server to retrieve data we need from Windows. For compositing applications as native OS-level windows, we use FreeRDP together with Windows's RemoteApp protocol.

carlesfe··on Slow social media
Banning them is a bit harsh and unrealistic, as they allow the platform to be monetized.

Here's my random idea: all commercial accounts must be labeled as such, and people should be able to opt-out from seeing any post by such accounts - except ads because, as I said, not allowing a platform to monetize is unrealistic.

carlesfe··on Writing an operating system kernel from scratch
Yes, that is exactly what is happening
carlesfe··on Writing is thinking
Not war and peace, which was episodic, but smaller novels were thought out in Tolstoy’s mind before being written wholly. He mentions this in his diaries. Zweig mentions the same, too, but of course his novels are generally much shorter than the two Tolstoy’s masterpieces.
carlesfe··on Writing is thinking
I’ve read Tolstoy’s diaries and he mentions the thought process he uses to write small novels. First he thinks about what should happen, then he writes (or dictates) the text. Thinking takes a few weeks, sometimes a month, then writing is pretty quick. There is some editing, but nothing like we do nowadays.

Bigger novels such as war and peace were written episodically.

carlesfe··on Writing is thinking
Novels were dictated, that is absolutely correct, but on top of it, the whole plot was developed with a high level of detail before dictation started. There was some editing, of course, but nothing like we do today, where writing books is basically an iterative process. We lean on the written word too much for our thinking (not being critical, just that’s how we are taught)
carlesfe··on Writing is thinking
I think you are right and I understood it the other way around

Kind of ironic, though - I wrote, but my thinking process wasn't so great :)

Thanks for the correction!

carlesfe··on Writing is thinking
While I agree with the underlying message, "writing is thinking" is only circumstantially correct. It wasn’t always like this.

We learned to think by writing only after writing became cheap. Yes, we’ve trained our brains to develop ideas by editing raw thoughts on paper, but it is just one of the possible methods.

I have read a lot of late 18th, 19th and early 20th century books and diaries, and it is plainly clear that writers such as Tolstói, Zweig, Goethe and others developed full books in their mind first, then wrote them from cover to cover in 20-30 days.

Thinking used to be detached from writing. That is a fact. We just lost that ability in the modern era thanks to cheap writing technology: pen and paper, then computers. I'm not saying the current approach is wrong, but don't assume that the only way to think is to write.

Socrates argued that writing would destroy people's memory. He wasn't 100% wrong, yet here we are. The criticism towards the use of LLMs is so deliciously ironic. The analogy with writing... writes itself. Kids that grow up with LLMs will just think differently.

carlesfe··on Hacker Laws
In case somebody comes looking for the working link: https://github.com/dwmkerr/hacker-laws/releases/download/v0....
carlesfe··on Twitter is the worst global social network except for all the others
Ah, I understand. I don't think it breaks any rule, so it must be off-topic.

A bit harsh maybe, but gotta agree to the rules to play the game :)

carlesfe··on Twitter is the worst global social network except for all the others
Hey HN, what does [flagged] mean? Did I do something wrong when posting this? It's the first time I see it here.
carlesfe··on ChatGPT Search
I think this is just the first step for a full-featured agent that not only does searches for you, but also executes whatever was your goal (e.g. a restaurant reservation, etc)
carlesfe··on TextSnatcher: Copy text from images, for the Linux Desktop
Preview is one of the most underrated apps in macOS, and the one I miss the most when I use Linux or Windows. It's a great little toolbox for quick editing and convenience features.
carlesfe··on New 13- and 15‑inch MacBook Air with M3 chip
I have an Air and I felt like its speakers were pretty decent, but my wife bought a Pro and they're just incredible.

Sometimes I hear her watching some movie or show a few rooms away, and I can never know if she's watching it on the TV or on the Pro just by the audio alone. Those speakers do fill the room, and them some.

carlesfe··on Ask HN: What 1980s/90s-era shareware did you purchase?
VGA Planets. Such a great game, advanced to its time!

It was a Civilization-like game, but in space, with lots of pop culture references, complex like Dwarf Fortress, and turn-based. Each turn was uploaded to a BBS or Usenet, and a host put all the players' turns together every few days, then sent the turn files back. So fun.

carlesfe··on We need a more sophisticated debate about AI
FT: "We need a much more sophisticated debate about AI"

Me: "We're having it, just not in the traditional media"

Follow scientists on Twitter and listen to podcasts from experts instead of journalists. You'll find that debate.

carlesfe··on I quit my programmer job to become a chicken
Reminds me of the paper "Chicken Chicken Chicken" which made us chuckle at the lab some years ago

https://isotropic.org/papers/chicken.pdf

carlesfe··on AirPods Pro (2nd Generation)
Check if you have rust in the case contacts. Happened to me and I had to clean them with vinegar.

Weird, because I don't use my airpods for sport and I have no idea why the contacts would be rusted.

carlesfe··on After self-hosting my email for twenty-three years I have thrown in the towel
I understood that sentence as something that can happen to you even if you believe it won't.

> Please believe me. My current email server IP has been managed by me and used exclusively for personal email with zero spam, zero, for the last ten years.

carlesfe··on Dell XPS 13 Plus developer edition: Now available with Ubuntu 22.04 LTS
Shift-Capslock
carlesfe··on DaedalOS: Desktop Environment in the Browser
This was done in 2005 by eyeOS: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EyeOS

Sadly, too advanced to its time, it was acquired but dismantled some time later.

carlesfe··on Ask HN: Why doesn't anyone create a search engine comparable to 2005 Google?
Great job, I didn't know aboug Gigablast and it looks very interesting. Can I give you a small piece of feedback? I just tried searching for myself on Gigablast, and the first results are profile pages which haven't been updated since like 2005. Meanwhile, my own personal page appears on the very bottom of the results.

So my suggestion would be to lower the weight of the ranking of the domain, and promote sites which have a more recent update date.

Send me an email (contact in profile) if you want to follow up on this feedback!

carlesfe··on Fed up with the Mac, I spent six months with a Linux laptop
I used dwm as my main desktop for many years when I was a developer :)
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