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dimask

370 karma · joined August 27, 2023

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dimask··on Almost no one cares if your site is not on social media
> This created tragicomic situations, such as people posting anonymous reports of toxic companies in the comments of the blog and one that threatened to sue me if I didn’t take down the spreadsheet.

In the old times, I briefly worked in some industry and was co-admin in a blog about working-related issues in that field. It was a rather small, obscure blog, that did not have any real traction outside a certain political niche, until a post where we shared one of our readers' experience working in a certain company. That post totally blew up and it received insane amount of views and comments by people talking about their experience working there and elsewhere. The comment thread below was going on years after the blog was practically abandoned. I still enter from time to time to approve comments.

I miss the blog era, because a blog post like that is not ephemeral like social media or other similar modern platforms like reddit or this very site. This creates a more protracted, sustained and imo healthy engagement profile. It still needs to be discoverable, but it was no problem back then once of community of blogs was formed linking to each other. Social media, on the other hand, are a black hole, as it is much harder to find and even more engage with posts that are more than a few days at most old. And while everything is always hosted somewhere and nobody ensures that stuff like with geocities will never happen, platforms like wordpress blogs allow at least one to backup and scrap a site more easily, and the control of the hosting providers on the content is much less than that of the social media platforms.

dimask··on Google Books Is Indexing AI-Generated Garbage
Running, protecting and supporting these shadow libraries is one of the biggest service to contemporary's humankind's written culture that can be done nowadays. Sometimes the discussion is just on "copyright" and "for knowledge to be free", but some older material is actually realistically impossible or extremely hard/time consuming to find out of these shadow libraries. Money is not the only problem that makes certain material inaccessible. Having these places shut down and their material disappear by copyright predator firms would be catastrophic in a way that has probably not happened since events like the burning of the library of Alexandria. The current state of AI just makes it even more important.
dimask··on Google Books Is Indexing AI-Generated Garbage
Current LLMs cannot "actively participate in the real world" as humans do because they cannot actively learn from their interaction with the real world. Their weights are fixed. Their further training and finetuning is mediated by external mechanisms. It has nothing to do with what "people here" want.
dimask··on Kobold letters: HTML emails are a risk
I think that, in theory, it could allow for more sophisticated and targeted attacks, like changing the intended recipient of a money transfer. That would be much harder to detect.
dimask··on Intel discloses $7B operating loss for chip-making unit
Partly yes, I mean my effort was just to search for a link about the subject to something that seems reputable enough to share.

On the other hand, I just stated a fact. If by "explanation to try and refute" you mean just the story around china and geopolitics, it is not any high effort one. It is just repeating the same official story over and over. It does not change the fact of who is paying for it, as any sort of geopolitical justification for a war (or supporting a side in a war or supporting the continuation of a war) does not change the fact of who dies for it. Or who profits.

Funny note: your comment being self-referential.

dimask··on Intel discloses $7B operating loss for chip-making unit
That is the government that decides to spend the money is a fact. Whether the "taxpayers" (and what "taxpayers" means) are the ones that will pay for it, is an interpretation up to perspectives on political economy.
dimask··on Intel discloses $7B operating loss for chip-making unit
No big deal, it is going to be essentially covered by government (taxpayers'?) money as usual

https://techcrunch.com/2024/03/20/white-house-proposes-up-to...

dimask··on The Pentagon's Silicon Valley Problem
A goal without the specific means to achieve it is as abstract as a philosophical question.
dimask··on The Pentagon's Silicon Valley Problem
It was really aimed at "allies" (soviet union), not japan.
dimask··on Amazon spends another $2.7B on Anthropic
This is beyond the point, these practices cause economic bubbles and when such bubbles grow too much eventually they pop and a lot of other people pay the price.
dimask··on Is GPT-4 a good data analyst? (2023)
If you already know the right answer it is actually easy
dimask··on Unbounded Recursion
See also https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39764360
dimask··on U.S. sues Apple, accusing it of maintaining an iPhone monopoly
I don't think nobody else should be able to build a "mobile payment service", I just do not care and I do not think this is about consumers.

If it was just up to me, the "mobile ecosystem" would just burn to the ground.

dimask··on U.S. sues Apple, accusing it of maintaining an iPhone monopoly
> What I don't understand at all is why Europeans think Facebook is superior to Apple.

It is not facebook vs apple, it is cross-platform vs platform specific (if you do not have an iphone imessage is not even a choice).

dimask··on U.S. sues Apple, accusing it of maintaining an iPhone monopoly
> Sure, let's trade international protocols for Zuckerware. What could go wrong?

Whatsapp uses the signal protocol, not sure why you would prefer RCS to that.

dimask··on U.S. sues Apple, accusing it of maintaining an iPhone monopoly
It is interesting that in this case "pro-competitive" does not necessarily mean "pro-consumer". I am not sure how stuff like "super apps" are a good thing for consumers (sounds like a nightmare mass surveillance scenario to me). Similar cloud streaming apps where the whole fuss is really about microtransactions in games or less regulation. Message interoperability is not a bad thing, but not sure why we still talk about "MMS" in 2024 when so many different chat apps are around. I don't know about smartwatches, maybe that is a fair point. And as for digital wallets, I already trust apple for the OS, I would not see why I would put the effort to download an extra app from a third party I would need to also trust to put bank details, except if we were talking about some open source gold standard of trust and privacy. I do not care if it is apple or a third party that gets a commission from banks or who gets my transaction history to sell to brokers.

On the other hand, I would like to see interoperability in stuff like airdrop. But that would not be something that other FAANG would make money of, so that is probably not so interesting for these regulators.

dimask··on Hackers found a way to open any of 3M hotel keycard locks
Well it is apparent that so many people got confused (me included) that it deservedly became part of the conversation.
dimask··on Root cause of Alzheimer's may be fat buildup in brain cells, research suggests
"Being fat" and having too much fat (or the wrong kind of fat) in the blood or brain are not equivalent. Eg people with high cholesterol can be quite slim also.
dimask··on Root cause of Alzheimer's may be fat buildup in brain cells, research suggests
You try to avoid oxidised UFAs and you get oxidised cholesterol instead [0], which is at least as bad and probably worse [1].

[0] https://sci-hub.se/https://pubs.acs.org/doi/pdf/10.1021/jf97...

[1] https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/mnfr.200500063

dimask··on macOS Sonoma 14.4 might break Java on your machine
Not so simple for apple silicon.
dimask··on Don't upgrade to macOS Sonoma 14.4 yet: plug-in compatibility issues
How else can apple market that using a mac is a _different experience_™.
dimask··on macOS 14.4 causes JVM crashes
I would not update for the time being. If it works it will probably break, if it is broken it may break more.

Btw what sort of problems are you facing? I have had problems with closing figures, but figured it out eventually with a workaround [0].

[0] https://se.mathworks.com/matlabcentral/answers/2027964-matla...

dimask··on Show HN: A user-friendly UI for viewing and editing Markdown files
https://hackmd.io looks great, though I have not used it as much as I would have liked to.
dimask··on Show HN: A user-friendly UI for viewing and editing Markdown files
I use obsidian as general note taking (I use a daily zettelkasten note to dump whatever stuff inside in situations where thinking and deciding about making a new file, with which name and where would disrupt the flow or would be too slow. I may put the content somewhere else after). I also use it for more organised stuff, like I have a folder in my obsidian vault about job/conference etc applications, another folder about work presentations etc.

I use zettlr on more project related documents, that typically reside in a `doc` folder in the respective project directories rather than in my obsidian vault. This is much faster as usually I am already working in that directory, and opening things in an obsidian vault is too distracting then. I would say that in general compartmentalising between work within a project and the general context/structure of my notes helps me a lot with not interrupting my flow states, even if this just began because of different software conveniences.

Sometimes I also work on md files in my obsidian vault using zettlr because I like a bit more how it handles pasting images from clipboard memory (gives you the option to resize the image on the fly, not sure if this is possible somehow in obsidian).

dimask··on Show HN: A user-friendly UI for viewing and editing Markdown files
I use obsidian and zettlr [1]. The great thing with markdown is that, as long as you do not use an editor or plugin with some extreme "flavours", you are not locked in one specific editor. I have found that using two editors (obsidian and zettlr) for different needs/contexts works amazing for me. I am curious about this one also, though it is hard to think of use cases that I am not covered right now already.

[1] https://www.zettlr.com/

dimask··on Show HN: Comma Separated Values (CSV) to Unicode Separated Values (USV)
Funny thing, excel, which is the most common spreadsheet editor, does not practically support CSV files if you happen to live in countries where the default official convention is using commas for decimal points in numbers. Unless you go around and manually set stuff in how it imports it or you change your default settings. It has reached meme levels at my work.

Tab separated files are much better imo in not getting confused with the delimiter for a sufficiently sane tsv file.

dimask··on Show HN: Comma Separated Values (CSV) to Unicode Separated Values (USV)
There are a lot of cases where I would rather inspect/quickfix a csv file in a text editor rather than open it as a spreadsheet. Especially cases where something is wrong in the format, and it will just not open as a spreadsheet at all. Adding unnecessary levels of obfuscation to your data should never be considered a good idea imo.
dimask··on Apple's hysterics over new EU antitrust law have led to two climbdowns already
Imo phones where never used or intended to be used as computers. This is not just about monopolies; a touch interface offers a completely different UX than a keyboard and affords very different relationships with the hardware. I am not even sure if any alternative to this user experience and relationship exists (and I am not talking about geeks and hackers who are gonna make anything out of anything).

And you are not even free to switch really except between android and ios. I do not know what others here used their phones as, but for me it is a lot about essential and quasi-essential apps ranging from banking, mobile paying, 2fas, chats, and several service-related apps. A lot of these are almost essential in everyday life and not replaceable by something else. I do not want to risk to get some custom OS that offers some interoperability and discover one day that app X that I need cannot work there. I do not really use my phone as something that replaces my computer.

dimask··on Apple's hysterics over new EU antitrust law have led to two climbdowns already
It is a whole package that creates a different experience. And customers are not one thing. There are different stuff that different groups may prioritise, and not all care about "better screen". For example, people may go for lower resolution screens because they prioritise batteries. And cameras nowadays are much more than purely hardware. Having better processing hardware and OS results in a phone that can last better and longer for instance, and this is a strength of iphones.
dimask··on Apple's hysterics over new EU antitrust law have led to two climbdowns already
iPhones have better CPU/GPUs though.
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