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dirteater_

77 karma · joined June 13, 2023

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dirteater_··on We made Grok 4.5, GPT-5.5, and Claude build the same apps
> The receipts: speed and cost

I don't get why cost per reply is at all relevant here?

Why do so few who attempt comparisons actually compare dollars per task.

dirteater_··on Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs Video Lectures (1986)
I tried SICP straight from the book once, but I think the lectures are much better and the book acts as a supplemental reference.
dirteater_··on Ternlight – 7 MB embedding model that runs in browser (WASM)
This is cool!

but also maybe you could put a button on the landing page to trigger the demo because it's a bit startling to hear my fans go crazy when opening a webpage.

dirteater_··on Maybe you should learn something
> just find some starting point that doesn’t look like a sales funnel

this adds to the difficulty in getting started; so many times you start down a path, don't make good progress and hit a paywall or realize the path you started on is just marketing for some (not even valuable) learning resource

this is super common with language learning stuff, especially because AI makes it seem so cheap to produce learning content

dirteater_··on Show HN: Turn native language audio into flashcards and shadowing practice
What are you doing for Chinese word segmentation/pinyin?
dirteater_··on Show HN: Got sick of ads, so I made my own logic puzzle site
Cool but why do I have to create an account to keep playing? I hit the back button to review the rules and now I can't even try the game out.
dirteater_··on How to convert between wealth and income tax
Because billionaires accumulate wealth through assets and unrealized gains, many of them skip taking a traditional income and pay. If the numbers in the links below are to be believed, according to paulgraham's calculations, this might bump them into a ~fair range (when comparing to average/median earners).

https://www.nber.org/papers/w34170 https://www.propublica.org/article/how-we-calculated-the-tru...

dirteater_··on Magic: The Gathering took me from N2 to Japanese fluency
This is awesome. I'm doing something very similar with Chinese and Yu-Gi-Oh right now. So many language courses seem to cater to certain topics like interviewing for a job, getting through college, traveling, home life. But I want to engage and connect with people who share similar interests.

Not to mention trading card games are pretty complex themselves and using them as a learning tool forces you to think in the language.

dirteater_··on Just 'English with Hanzi'
The biggest shift in the past ~100 years or so was the fact that mass-literacy became a thing. People started writing how they speak.

The written language's disconnect from the spoken language had a bunch of different reasons: bridging the gap between mutually-unintelligible regional dialects, political gatekeeping, etc.

I think the main claim of "Modern Chinese can read as English in Hanzi camouflage" owes a lot to the fact that they're two "subject verb object" languages with similar formal/written registers.

dirteater_··on Claude Code Cheat Sheet
Ctrl + S - Stash
dirteater_··on Facebook seemingly randomly bans tons of users
Update: my friend at meta escalating my ticket got me unbanned with no notification or explanation. Just that internal person telling me was the only indication I was unbanned.
dirteater_··on Facebook seemingly randomly bans tons of users
This is a subreddit full of users who have, according to them, been unrightfully suspended (appealable) or disabled (permanent, no appeal process).

A few months ago my dad went through this. He runs a community theater and a small business — both of those pages were also taken offline, which directly affected both organizations. Eventually he got his account back, and when he did, his ads account had run up a $700+ balance in a language he doesn't recognize. Clearly his account was compromised, and the attackers left an easy enough paper trail that he was able to get his account back after weeks of fighting. He still can't run ads for his business. For many others, it seems they were banned without explanation. Some can't even access the download of their personal data — which I believe is legally required in some jurisdictions — to either preserve memories and photos or try to find an explanation for why they were kicked off the platform. A small few have successfully hounded Meta's support and regained access, but this seems rare. Some have even filed in small claims court to at least get access to their own data.

A few months after my dad's ordeal, I'm now disabled. According to Meta's help page, there is no appeal process. No email, no notification — I just tried to check Messenger, my primary way of contacting several friends and family members, and I was logged out. On logging back in I saw the ban message. Following steps others took on that subreddit, I paid for Meta Verified through Instagram and was able to talk to someone on the phone pretty quickly. They said the tool they have access to kept giving them errors, and all they could do was give me a case number and tell me to keep checking back until I got an email or an appeal button showed up. (I think even Meta's own support is confused about the difference between Suspended and Disabled.) Obviously, neither of those things happened.

I gave my case number to a friend who works at Meta, like I helped my dad do, to hopefully get the ticket escalated. They told me "Disabled" is really severe and not to expect much. Supposedly, some AI system automatically scans for behavior that may lead to a ban. I don't post. I don't comment. All I do is occasionally doomscroll, buy/sell home goods on Marketplace, and chat on Messenger. I was under the impression Messenger was E2E encrypted — and while I'd fully expect them to have a backdoor, I think that label means absolutely nothing if a bot is regularly scanning that content.

For me, this is a bit of an inconvenience. I still have my Instagram and WhatsApp, so whatever Community Guidelines the bot determined I violated apparently only apply to Facebook. But I think it's pretty awful on Meta's part in a number of ways. They're big enough that people rely on them for day-to-day communication. Groups are a tool used for organizing. Getting banned seems potentially damaging to credibility. And while I understand a business trying to cover their ass by not providing a reason, I'm still uneasy — did I get banned because the bot made a bad call, or was my account compromised, implying my email or 2FA might also be compromised? And probably most damaging: Facebook is where people do business. Taking down business pages or removing their operator from the platform can seriously affect a business's credibility and day-to-day operations.

dirteater_··on Show HN: I trained a 9M speech model to fix my Mandarin tones
IMO the SotA for this is https://www.speechsuper.com/. Amazon suffers for similar

> One annoyance is that for Mandarin, the percentage is calculated at the character level, whereas with English, it gives you a more granular score at the phoneme level.

This is the case for most solutions you'd find for this task. Probably because of the 1 character -> 1 syllable property. It's pretty straightforward to split the detected pinyin into initial+final and build a score from that though.

dirteater_··on Show HN: I trained a 9M speech model to fix my Mandarin tones
the commenter's username (i'm guessing they mean 大胖子, feel free to google translate)
dirteater_··on Ask HN: Is building a calm, non-gamified learning app a mistake?
I'm also building a language learning app and after checking out Morpheem, it kind of rocked my world. It does a much better job than I'd expect on Mandarin. Wow.
dirteater_··on Ask HN: What are you working on? (May 2025)
App for learning chinese, aimed at intermediate learners. SRS, reader, import content. Lots of fun problems like word segmentation, relevant distractors, integrating with LLMs, local-first sync.
dirteater_··on Local-First and Ejectable
I'm currently building an offline-first app that has a custom sync between a local SQLite and Postgres (Supabase). The "ejectable" idea here is so good and I will definitely implement something that turns all your saved data into a spreadsheet with a few tabs.
dirteater_··on Ask HN: Is there any software you only made for your own use but nobody else?
I hate flashcards so I made my own app for studying Chinese after finishing HelloChinese. Very similar interface, but allows me to bring my own content.
dirteater_··on Cisco to acquire Isovalent
If you try to use every single feature of Istio, sure. If you just need encryption it's not that bad. And it looks to be getting better (no more sidecars, eventually).
dirteater_··on Why people in Google hate Go?
No OO?
dirteater_··on Ask HN: Show me your half baked project
https://www.landow.dev/posts/tech/3d-autotiling/

Wanted to make a cartoony dark souls with a built in level editor. Games have so many fun rabbit holes that it's hard to actually make something. Then I tried to make a writeup and found out writing is hard.. still had fun!

dirteater_··on Unity's Self-Combustion Engine
They have won "market share" I'm not sure exactly which competitors they've undercut in the process? Are there any examples of a legitimate competitor that failed because they couldn't compete on price?
dirteater_··on Unity's Self-Combustion Engine
They share upsides, but the major downside that end users tradeoff compatibility with the rest of the software on their system is something Godot does not share.
dirteater_··on Unity's Self-Combustion Engine
> I see a lot of developers talking about Godot, but I also see developers talking about Linux whenever Microsoft pulls some underhanded shenanigans with Windows and that doesn't seem to have cracked the OS market wide open

This is not even close to a fair comparison.

dirteater_··on Ask HN: Favorite Game Engine?
Godot. I've spent time with Unity and it bogs down my system. Unreal.. seems to bring a lot of FPS baggage and you _must_ use visual scripting to iterate quickly. Bevy is promising.

Godot and Bevy have a lot going for them:

* They provide a basic structure (nodes in godot, ECS in bevy)

* They provide some built in objects/libraries that you have the _choice_ to utilize

* They don't bog down your entire system when you are just making a simple toy.

I really want to learn Unreal, but after spending 2 nights trying to get direct control over cursor locking I decided the other fancy features weren't worth destroying my iteration time.

In the past LibGDX and Game Maker 8 were how I started programming in the first place. They feel pretty dated now though.

dirteater_··on Free and open source software projects are in transition
I work on a relatively large OSS project. There are parties that are successfully putting a lot of complexity in that provides minimal or zero OSS gain to enable monetization on their side.

I think this is destructive. It makes things more fragile and increases the barrier to entry for new contributors.

dirteater_··on Istio moved to CNCF Graduation stage
The CNCF doesn't really dictate that kind of stuff. If something doesn't play nice try the Istio slack or file an issue on the main repo: https://github.com/istio/istio
dirteater_··on Lima: A nice way to run Linux VMs on Mac
Funny to see this on the front page the same morning that I switched back to using a remote dev box.

Lima constantly has i/o issues (usually network hangs, local connections within the VM). It's pretty rough to use when I need to do docker in Lima.