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frithsun

255 karma · joined September 30, 2022

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frithsun··on Grief gets an expiration date, just like us
I'm all about hating on the psychiatry profession, but I believe what may be missing here is that these diagnoses are always optional.

If you like your grief, you can keep your grief. But if you need help, the criteria need to be there for you, for insurance companies, employers, and such to systematically do all their accounting and such.

It's a bit similar to a lot of controversies around the autism spectrum. If it's just a personality quirk and you're a functional adult then it doesn't really matter if you meet the this or that criteria. If you like your autism, you can keep your autism.

frithsun··on Equal Earth – Political Wall Map (2018)
It's not the size of the landmass that counts, anyway. It's how you use it.
frithsun··on The Hater's Guide to the AI Bubble
I believe this is a "good" bubble in the sense that the 19th century railroad bubble and original dot com bubble both ended up invested in infrastructure that created immense value.

That said, all of these LLMs are interchangeable, there are no moats, and the profit will almost entirely be in the "last mile," in local subject matter experts applying this technology to their bespoke business processes.

frithsun··on Banned Books: Analysis of Censorship on Amazon.com (2024)
This is leftist propaganda masquerading as objective research, entirely ignoring the significant amount of "hate speech" censorship that goes on, as well.

Whatever your opinion about what books should or shouldn't be banned, claiming the issue is pretty much exclusively one of censorship of LGBTQ material is inane.

frithsun··on The Burnout Machine
Let's make us American workers even less attractive in the most globalized and exportable industry of all by playing Wagner Act games.
frithsun··on Bluesky is on the verge of overtaking Threads in all the ways that matter
It's inevitable that social media will split up into separate and distinct networks of people who can no longer stand or even undertand the other sociopolitical tribes.

All of us sharing a singular global network was an exceptional and ephemeral circumstance.

frithsun··on Please stop the coding challenges
They're just encrypted IQ tests, working around the Duke Power supreme court ban on IQ testing employees.

You're being tested on your general intelligence, not because anybody cares about binary trees or reversing linked lists or whatever.

frithsun··on Window Maker: X11 window manager with the look and feel of the NeXTSTEP UI
I'm in my forties and have been doing ironic retro window managers since I was a teen rocking olvwm on my slackware 486 box in the mid-nineties.

Months fade into years, which have faded into decades. My hair is graying and thinning, and the light at the end of the tunnel draws nearer. Yet not one single human soul has ever noticed or cared about my really impressive desktop setup.

frithsun··on Low level of Magnesium linked to disease-causing DNA damage
Gonna stick with my gummies, thanks.
frithsun··on Just use Postgres
Try to avoid the bespoke features of psql in favor of generic SQL unless cornered by circumstances into doing so, methinks.

If there's one complaint I have about pg, it's that it has too many features that encourage finding cute, non standard, non obvious ways of going about things.

frithsun··on Just use Postgres
Yup. With nothing but love for sqlite.
frithsun··on New data shows violent crime dropping sharply in major U.S. cities
Garbage data analysis, reporting the statistical rebound from a statistically anomalous period (covid) as if it's some kind of trend. To the article's credit, they make no effort to hide their political motives behind misinforming their audience.
frithsun··on My favorite device is a Chromebook
I'm big on digital minimalism and have relied on Chromebooks for everything for well over a decade now. I have Gimp, Inkscape, and the other flagship Linux apps I need. I have ssh and my tmux/shell/vim development environment I prefer.

It would be nice if there were an open source alternative, but all that the open source community wants to deliver is rip-offs of the Windows XP experience. Chromebook is what desktop Linux was supposed to be, but nobody understood that the browser was the Linux desktop the whole time.

frithsun··on The upstream cause of the youth mental health crisis is the loss of community
Immigration and assimilation policies in the west have been too rapid, faster than even those who think they're open minded can adapt to new people.

The result is a pervasive societal siege mentality with everybody retreating into their homes. The Starbucks data on where "third places" are thriving or dying aligns very well with this model.

The answer is as obvious as it is unwelcome, which is it slow down a bit and give people and families time to adapt to their strange new neighbors and neighborhoods.

frithsun··on The upstream cause of the youth mental health crisis is the loss of community
We lack the moral courage to be honest about why real world community disintegrated and are therefore doomed to suffer these pedantic lectures that miss the point and point in random directions.
frithsun··on [dead]
Hopefully they double check, as I would hate for him to be buried alive in a box.
frithsun··on Goldman Sachs: AI Is overhyped, expensive, and unreliable
AI is enabling a new generation of exploits and hacks that will force tech to get a lot simpler, more human readable, and more privacy oriented.

Everything is going to need to be refactored for a world where bad actors have truly unlimited time and attention to invest in identifying privacy and security vulnerabilities.

frithsun··on Iconography of the X Window System: The Boot Stipple
Holding my first child for the first time decades later approached the sense of otherworldly bliss and joy that I experienced when, as a young teen in the mid nineties, I got X to work on my 486.
frithsun··on A New Age of Materials Is Dawning, for Everything from Smartphones to Missiles
A swing and a miss. The future of materials is going back to plant fiber; wood, hemp, etc. There will be plenty of fancy composite materials for specialty applications; but our world has been made out of plastic for generations now and updated, improved plant fiber materials will replace it as the affordable, more sustainable, and equally functional alternative.
frithsun··on Mongo but on Postgres and with strong consistency benefits
Programmers would be better served by learning nothing except SQL instead of their current strategy of trying to learn everything except SQL.
frithsun··on Let's stop counting centuries
I am emotionally invested in having been born in "the twentieth century" instead of "the 1900s."
frithsun··on Google takes first major step: E2EE interoperability across all messaging apps
Google is evil and all, but they're on the right side of this fight.
frithsun··on Let's Stop Asking "Why Do You Want to Work for Us?" In Interviews
Maybe the question is there to filter out crusty cynics who aren't up for the very basic bullshitting it takes to get along in a team setting.
frithsun··on Show HN: From dotenv to dotenvx – better config management
Thanks, but I would rather go with the imperfect setup that I understand than an allegedly perfect setup with dozens of third party dependencies that I don't understand.

Doubly the case now that env is natively supported by node now.

frithsun··on A Book on Linux
Unix Power Tools

The Linux kernel doesn't matter. What matters is understanding the history, philosophy, and purpose of the unix environment.

You needn't become a religious zealot committed to the unix philosophy, but if you don't take the time to understand it, you'll never get the most out of the environment.

frithsun··on Ask HN: Tell me your stories of taking lower paid work to be happier
I'm not trying to sell anybody on it, but it was certainly the right choice for me. Maybe it's just that I'm, burned out, in my forties, and I would rather make widgets all day than learn another framework.
frithsun··on Ask HN: Tell me your stories of taking lower paid work to be happier
After decades in the software industry, I decided to just get a factory job within bicycling distance of my house and only do programming as a hobby.

I can't take the hype cycle anymore. First it was big data this and big data that, now it's all AI. It's always about something other than crafting sensible solutions to real problems.

A breaking point for me was getting scolded to figure out how to apply LLM technology for a sewage utility contractor. Like, WTF.

I'm not too moral to take money for stuff people want but don't actually need. But it gets old. I'm tired. Now I can do little projects that I enjoy after work.

Maybe they'll go somewhere. Maybe they won't. They're not my real job anymore so it doesn't matter.

frithsun··on McDonald's is ending its drive-thru AI test
McDonald's has screwed up my order less than any other restaurant, provided better, warmer food than any other restaurant, is cheaper for the quality than any other restaurant, and their Ronald McDonald House charity rescued my family during our darkest hour.

Sorry your AI partnership with them failed, guy.

frithsun··on Spaced repetition for teaching two-year olds how to read
That's great, and they're probably on to a cool learning technique. But it's really just another case of smart parents with a smart kid thinking they reinvented education because the kid is smart.
frithsun··on Microsoft to delay release of Recall AI feature on security concerns
What's interesting to me is that AI hype accidentally got non technical people thinking and talking more about their privacy and security concerns relating to software.

There's nothing sinister about LLMs relative to the kind of data collection big tech has been up to for years and years. It's just that all the AGI spin has triggered a defensive response in people.

Positive, in my opinion. People should be approaching tech privacy concerns with fear, uncertainty, and doubt.

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