elbigbad

It’s also, like, Reddit. Not some financial or health database. It’s an Internet forum largely populated by literal children and teens.

And among the worst sorts of people imaginable. Maybe they should be paid positions that are interviewed for and regularly undergo performance reviews.

Just in case anyone sees this and takes it seriously: this is absolutely not now that works.

Can you talk more about this source of error? When I google this, your post is the main thing that comes up for the term…

The sports cars analogy doesn’t resonate with me because there’s a functional difference between regular cars and sports cars. And plenty of people buy sports cars like Miatas, which have less than zero cachet or coolness factor, and thus can’t really project being “above” anyone.

Clothing with the modifier “extremely” probably makes sense though.

I found Apollo to be fairly shady. I paid for the app and they “lost” my account or something so suddenly I could no longer use the pro features. Pretty lame, no amount of support could help, so I used the app for a while as a free user because I didn’t want to pay twice. One day they pushed like 50 modals over the course of a day to “upgrade to pro” and eventually moved to a monthly subscription service, which suddenly made me realize why they “couldn’t find” my previous account.

Love the features, but feels shady to me still. The API pricing thing does suck, but at this point I’m not willing to throw any money at them.

Better discoverability and so people could very easily install and run. Git adds more overhead.

Cixin Liu of course. Now let me tell you about “elbigbad’s Theory of Relativity” (hat tip to Einstein who had a hand in its development). More modernly phrased: “‘You miss 100% of the shots you don’t take’ -Wayne Gretzky” - Michael Scott

I’m guessing the admin stopped caring as much about the mission of the site, which actually seems quite compelling, or it wasn’t as profitable as they thought, and was looking for a reason to divest themselves of it. Spam is hard to fight, it does suck in that manner, but certainly possible and certainly pulling the plug on an otherwise passion project screams “don’t care anymore.”

I don’t know who Yancy is but they have some complete lack of shame to steal someone else’s idea almost word for word and prepend their name to it. I don’t know what I could muster that absolute “I don’t care at all what people think of me” if I tried, and I have here and there I just don’t have it in me.

Of course it’s not. Neither of my children’s faces have ever appeared on social media. It just requires a little discipline on the parents part, which seems to be in short supply these days.

The most woo woo articles somehow get traction outside core hours.

The largest city in the world is Tokyo which is about 40M people.

Boomers love this sort of thing. Or at least talking about loving this sort of thing. Maybe they’re too addicted to Candy Crush style games though where they won’t actually patronize these sorts of places though.

I had to look this up to make sure this wasn’t some low effort trolling. It does seem real, which raises the question: With regard to getting people to listen to your advice, wouldn’t it have been better if you had created or done something notable in the past 25 years rather than be a self-titled “Visionary” on LinkedIn?

This is unnecessarily reductive, but it probably sounded good in your head or if someone only considers it for a few seconds before thinking about it.

Of course meaning can be instant, and value can be delayed.

No more than Microsoft Federal’s value add is the same, which is to say very little, even though MS Federal sends plenty of people to help set up Azure cloud services and has a consulting arm. The whole Palantir model is built around scaling their software platform and making it as sticky as possible, not specifically throwing consultants or staff augmentation at a problem.

I have no love for Palantir, or Peter Thiel, but you seem to be under a misapprehension about some of the basics of the company.

If I see an army forming over the horizon, it would be foolish to not build defenses, even if they’re not actively attacking at the moment.

It would lose its FUD-factor if it became too much more specific…

It’s basically a vacuum for any and all data that categorizes and raises relevant insights to the end user while making it “easy” to find what one is looking for. Fairly straightforward. I think the value add is that this isn’t really available on government networks to this scale. I know lots of people who love their software, and many who dislike it.

Every part of the government, particularly defense, is made of closed-off enclaves with their own unique integration or deployment constraints, which leads to needing “forward deployed engineers” to integrate their platform for each program. This is part of the scale issue, another part is that there are only so many customers. This isn’t really like infosys at all because these engineers are not only paid very well, but they’re not straight up staff augmentation (though they can be to some degree, sometimes, especially during the training phase of getting the users to understand the platform).

Everything you said in this comment is way off I think.

I like the sentiment a lot but curious what law this is against that has prison time as a consequence? I can’t think of any, but if there are none, we should pass laws that allow this to put these people on notice and then aggressively prosecute.

I can’t even imagine giving so much credence to every conspiracy theory or supposed breakthrough that only appears on YouTube that I spend time watching everything. There are only so many hours in the day, time is precious, and the onus is on the person making the claim to support them, not the other way around. It’s like someone telling me to watch everything on YouTube about copper bracelets taking bad energy and putting the onus on me to disprove it, but that’s not how science works.

I will share though that I have heuristics that help me gut check new claims. None of them are infallible but they can give a good indication that saves me watching every layperson video making outrageous claims. Those heuristics include things like getting published in major journals, getting peer reviewed, having large and well thought out studies controlling for confounding variables, having leaders in a field support or coauthor the studies, and more. There are also heuristics in the opposite way, which I won’t get into, but suffice to say that the position of “everyone thinks I’m a ‘nutter’ but this one thing happened to me in one case and it has never been repeated but I believe it and the establishment/BIG GENETICS is trying to keep the research under wraps but here’s a video you can watch that proves everything” is not only not compelling to me, but in fact ticks a lot of the anti heuristic boxes. ;)

My comment was assuming you’re the average person. I don’t know you or your reputation at all and I think it’s unfair to assume some random HN poster like me should. But if most of the world thinks that, who am I to disagree?

Somewhat related anecdote: I’m reminded of a good friend who is preeminent in their field. No one would know them outside of their area of expertise, but anyone within that area of expertise (or who has learned that area of expertise from their college textbooks) knows their name. I got dinner with them over the holidays last year and they lamented that, I’m guessing based on name recognition, they receive a steady stream of communications (letters, email, etc) from laypeople who always think they have done something amazing previously thought impossible, or they have a new insight that everyone else ever has missed. Invariably my friend no longer spends time going through these because in every single of the hundreds of comms they’ve read, there’s always some confound factor or something basic the writer missed that invalidates everything. I am not an academic, but my impression is that while laypeople like you and me can brute force things and have amazing insights, mostly we’re just wrong for some reason that a trained scientist or academic would have spotted immediately.

> Some guy who knows enough about genetics he created his own home pill to deliver genes into his gut to fix his lactose intolerance is being ignored by the world. Someone recently told me on HN that his video sounds like a scam video of a sort that is common (probably in a redacted comment).

To be honest, I know nothing other than your description and it 100% sounds like either a scam or there are some variables that are not being controlled for. I’m a little shocked that you seem to have fallen for it, unless there is just a lot more to the story…

Run output through a regex that searches for words in the prompt and doesn’t return if so. It’s not a real real solution but I’ve found it works effectively so far and is really no different than anything else in software engineering.

I lost some new model Pros and learned a lot of the same lessons. It’s weird that anyone would be able to use them? This is the case with the iPhone I believe, where the iPhone is completely useless (except for parts) if it’s connected to someone else’s account.

In my case at least my AirPods ended up in lost and found. I was able to go back to where I lost them with find my, then assist the person working there in finding them by continually playing the sound with a button on my phone.

I was a user of Fi for years and I think you’re misstating the premise here. It’s good customer service, not just good in comparison to telcos.

But then the length of the article wouldn’t seem substantial and you wouldn’t bother reading it at all because you’d assume it wasn’t worth your time and the author wouldn’t get to tell you about whatever random app they’re building and shilling for. Key insight: the article isn’t about the tech, the article is about them trying to drive traffic to their app or whatever.

I always thought Wikipedia contributors and open source authors were unpaid?

Ironically ChatGPT would have made whatever point the author was trying to make (I’m not really sure what the point was to be honest…) much more succinctly and clearly. Maybe one use of ChatGPT as an anti-bloviating converter.