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damiante

130 karma · joined February 4, 2022

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damiante··on No Man Is an Island
If you agree that LLM-produced code in this instance may have no LoCs in common with the source program, in what sense is this different to the replacement being written by humans? Humans also learn to write code by reading it and synthesising that reading to produce new code.

I agree that the motivation for such a consortium being formed is lower when LLMs can vomit out any program of which one can conceive, and I agree that the value in publishing is lower for no-one reading it/attributing it. But I think the functional replacement of a tool which is run in a way that is extortionate or exploitative is an objectively good outcome regardless of whether the replacing tool was small-batch bespoke artisanal Rust or synthetic Rust extruded from the bilgepipe.

damiante··on More assorted notes on Liquid Glass
The solution here is to build more higher-density housing options. Tokyo has very affordable real estate because dwellings are appropriately-sized for dense urban lifestyles and are nearly uniformly mixed-use buildings with retail space on ground floors and residence/office above. Combine this with lax zoning and you have a recipe for affordable housing.

Comparing this to my own city of Melbourne, Australia: high-density dwellings are generally constrained to innercity suburbs and are still seen as undesirable compared to free-standing homes or semi-detached houses. Councils restrict the development of new high-density or mixed-use buildings for what amounts to NIMBYism. Inadequate public transport in the growth areas of the Northern and Western suburbs increases dependence on roads and freeways.

There are options to support affordable living in cities that don't involve covering our farmland and wildlife reserves with uniform white plaster cubes.

damiante··on More assorted notes on Liquid Glass
I see the same sort of thing happening in housing, and I think it's because the nature of the thing has changed.

Houses used to be for families; they were often quirky or strange or emergent, with weird layouts or materials. They may have garish wallpapers or floor to ceiling wood panelling. But these touches were reflective of the personalities of the owners. They met the needs of the specific people who inhabited them.

Nowadays, as houses are more of a commodity, they must be generic. All flat white interiors, straight corners, no cornicing or archetraves or plasterwork or anything to give the home a unique character. Instead it must be a blank canvas such that any inhabitant can put his own things inside it to make it his.

Computers are the same; what was once a niche product for enthusiasts and businesses has now become an instrumental part of nearly every moment of nearly everyone's lives. Thus they also must be generic and same-y, with limited avenues for superficial customisation, so that they can be interchanged or upgraded without jarring the user against the new version or device.

Personally I prefer radical customisation and quirkiness. I find it charming. But it seems that those who are designing (or perhaps only selling) the things disagree with me.

damiante··on Fewer students are enrolling in doctoral degrees
Correlation does not imply causation (but it does stare at it from across the room and suggestively waggle its eyebrows)
damiante··on Why Skyscrapers Became Glass Boxes
Perhaps just coincidence but I found it interesting to realise that buildings and animals followed a similar structural development trend: both started off with externally structural components (exoskeletons and structural walls) that evolved to become internal structural components (endoskeletons and load-bearing columns with concrete flooring).
damiante··on Grayjay Desktop App
The Grayjay Android app (which I use regularly) has a "Recommended" tab under each video that provides anonymous recommendations based only on the video you're watching. I recall them asking me to opt-in to the creation of a database like this as well recently, but I don't think it's available yet.
damiante··on After 10 years, Yelp gave my app 4 days
I was thinking about how to solve this given that one of the primary problems is that of fast, global content distribution. I like the idea of paying people in crypto as part of a ledger transaction to host and serve content, like bittorrent with a crypto payment. Unfortunately I can't also think of a way to prevent such a system from being abused to distribute harmful media such as CP. I guess it's not like this isn't a problem with BitTorrent today though.
damiante··on Stop KOSA (Kids Online Safety Act)
It seems that the US Government introduces a new bill of this form every few years; SOPA & PIPA, COPPA, CISPA, etc. Will governments (particularly the US government) simply keep attempting this until they get one through?
damiante··on German Court Fines Security Researcher for Reporting Company's Vulnerabilities
Looking at the bits on the disk with a magnifying glass and copying them onto a piece of paper with a pen :^)
damiante··on Omg.lol: An Oasis on the Internet
I love the idea of such smaller communities and the "old web" style of interaction, but for me the issue is one of discoverability. How do I find and follow people? Does anyone still use RSS, or are we relying on Mastodon/ActivityPub? Bavk in the day this was the purpose of search engines, but it seems that now such small pages are scarcely even indexed...
damiante··on Apostrophe Protection Society
>It's free, so why not join today!

Evidently their passion for punctuation does not extend to the question mark.

damiante··on VanCubic Camper Modules Turn Your Cargo Van into a Modern House on Wheels in 1hr
Cargo van? No, car go "beep beep"
damiante··on A clock where the time is in a song title
Ones I can predict based on my music knowledge:

2112 by Rush (interpreted in this case as a timestamp rather than a year)

25 or 6 to 4 by Chicago (get 2 whole mins for this one)

2 Minutes to Midnight by Iron Maiden

damiante··on Voice Actor Turns Instagram's Terms of Service into 51-Minute Sleep Aid
I have a similar desire for laws; they say "ignoratia juris non excusat", "ignorance of the law is no excuse", but that is only a fair rule if the law can reasonably be known. No-one could possibly know all of the law, so expecting everyone to know it is an unreasonable standard (unless we can make the law very brief).
damiante··on Investigating why Steam started picking a random font
I have a similar issue with Caprine, the desktop frontend for Facebook Messenger. I have not however messed with my datetime settings, not is it such a big issue that I have taken the time to try to fix it (I don't use Messenger often and on desktop even less).
damiante··on Zoho's annual revenues surpassed $1B in 2021
I just use domain forwarding to have my inbound emails to my custom domain address land in my plain old Gmail account, and outbound ones to forward to my domain. All the benefits of Gmail at no cost.
damiante··on Meta Learning Backpropagation and Improving It (2020)
Anyone else read this headline as "Facebook parent company does a thing"?
damiante··on Ask HN: Why is Microsoft Teams still so bad?
It's also upsold as part of existing MS sales agreements which is why execs will buy it. Easier and cheaper than negotiating a new enterprise contract with an unrelated company eg Slack
damiante··on The chicken you are eating has increased 364% in size over the last 50 years
I didn't even know chickens lived for 50 years, much less how big this one got over that time!

:^)

damiante··on Convoy Crackdown – power to freeze bank accounts without trial or legal recourse
Here in Victoria, Australia, we had similar emergency powers which were only valid for a couple of months.

In practice, the government simply kept voting to extend its emergency powers until it passed a piece of legistlation that allowed it to keep the relevant powers from the emergencies act indefinitely.

damiante··on Cassowary – Run Windows Apps on Linux using a VM as if they were native apps
I've seen other posts here before with similar offerings such as Looking Glass; does this make use of GPU passthrough or does it use GPU virtualisation? I ask because my Linux machine doesn't have onboard graphics on my CPU so I can't use passthrough solutions to achieve good performance (didn't realise I needed this when I bought my parts).