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jozvolskyef

424 karma · joined January 5, 2018

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jozvolskyef··on I’m Not a Robot
A simple way to "map" the keys to use both hands, two arrows each.
jozvolskyef··on Why SSL was renamed to TLS in late 90s (2014)
I second this, started around the same time.
jozvolskyef··on Lieferando.de has captured 5.7% of restaurant related domain names
Personal experiences with physical mail:

- Post office clerk offered to fill in cheque details for me. Recipient didn't receive the payment and sued the broke 18 year-old me. The clerk likely pocketed the money. This was over a decade ago, but coincidentally a Czech post office clerk was sentenced this week for pocketing ~$140k over a 2-year period.

- The recipient's lawsuit letter didn't reach me in time and was automatically considered delivered, causing further complications.

- DVLA refused to send mail to non-royal mail PO boxes even if the address is the official business address (UK), preventing international travel with the vehicle.

- On a separate occasion, striking Royal Mail workers prevented me from travelling internationally by delaying the delivery of my driving license.

- I used to live in an apartment with an awkwardly positioned letter box. My mail would end up in random places, usually the neighbours' more easily accessible letter box.

- Every now and then my mailbox contains mail addressed to adjacent buildings.

I also help manage a small B2C family business that is on its third address at the moment. We're renting a small section of a larger shop that is within a commercial estate. We don't have access to mail delivered to the official address. It could probably done, but it may be complicated.

> What else am I missing?

Royal Mail is one of the largest employers in the UK.

jozvolskyef··on Lieferando.de has captured 5.7% of restaurant related domain names
Physical mail, too, is a source of gatekeeping and bureaucracy. It is labour-intensive, expensive, and you are trading your false positive rate of digital impostors for a false negative rate of legitimate businesses struggling with unreliable mail delivery.
jozvolskyef··on Faulty 120W charger analysis (Anker GAN Prime) [video]
This accent is common among Czech people who learnt English by reading without much exposure to English audio. Some of Danyk's apparent pronunciation idiosyncrasies used to be common among English teachers in Czechia. I presume they learnt English pronunciation from written descriptions of it. It is fairly rare today thanks to internet streaming. Danyk's blog is older than YouTube.
jozvolskyef··on Faulty 120W charger analysis (Anker GAN Prime) [video]
To my native Czech ear, this sounds like the English accent of a native Czech speaker who learnt English primarily by reading, back when English audio wasn't readily available.
jozvolskyef··on Expanding on what we missed with sycophancy
The side-by-side comparisons are not a good signal because the models vary across multiple dimensions, but the user isn't given the option to indicate the dimension on which they're scoring the model.

The recent side-by-side comparisons presented a more accurate model that communicates poorly vs a less accurate model with slightly better communication.

jozvolskyef··on Baseline pupil size related to cognitive ability in proper lighting conditions
I don't have much experience with the police, but almost every drug dealer gets excited the instant we make eye contact.
jozvolskyef··on Multimodal Canvas: An experiment of Pictionary powered by Gemini 1.5 Flash
I appreciate the simplicity of a system that allows you to provide your own API key. All the complexity of authentication, rate limiting, cost capping, scaling, is offloaded to someone else, and you can just focus on the essence of the thing that you're building.
jozvolskyef··on Don't Return Err in Go
Your thesis is contradicted by almost every open source distributed system written in Go, including Kubernetes.
jozvolskyef··on How I write unit tests in Go
One day, I will be working with someone who will have read this article when they were learning Go, and we will disagree about these three points. I was hoping someone would add their own opinion about these, so that when it happens, I can go back to this thread and have enough information to decide whether to change my mind or not.
jozvolskyef··on How I write unit tests in Go
I would vote this down if I could for the following reasons:

- I prefer state-based TDD as opposed to interaction-based (see https://martinfowler.com/articles/mocksArentStubs.html).

- I've used both testcontainers and dockertest, and from my experience dockertest is more robust.

- The capital T for the outer argument comes across as being hypercorrect. Why would one consider the shadowing of this argument bad?

jozvolskyef··on I'll refrain from providing code that involve concepts as you're under 18
Gemini being confused by distinct concepts that share the same word is akin to people being offended by and trying to prohibit the use of certain technical terms. The machine is mimicking its moderators and their flaws.
jozvolskyef··on Gene-Engineered Mouth Bacteria
I mean these: https://www.amazon.co.uk/Interdental-Original-0-4-1-5mm-effe... The problem is that when they encounter a sharp edge, they get torn or cut off. I doubt there has been any research on the ingestion of nylon cuttings, which is why I would prefer to find something as effective but known to be safe.
jozvolskyef··on Gene-Engineered Mouth Bacteria
It would apply to all to some extent, but when you make the wrong move with an interdental toothbrush it can lose a quarter of its bristles in one session.
jozvolskyef··on Gene-Engineered Mouth Bacteria
A conversation with my friend who was a dentistry student, ~2013.

  > [The friend, let's call her L, trying to dissuade me from drinking some fizzy drink]
  > J: But I won't get a cavity if the liquid doesn't touch my teeth.
  > L: Cavities are caused by the ensuing low ph environment, not by contact with teeth
  > J: Does that mean I can drink as much of it as I want as long as I rinse my mouth with water afterwards?
  > L, with a hint of defeat in her voice: yes.
After this conversation, I started the practice of rinsing my mouth with water after eating anything sugary or associated with tooth decay, as well as using interdental toothbrushes. My rate of cavities dropped from one on most years to zero - I haven't had a cavity since. Even the one noticed by my dentist at the time and left untreated for being too small hasn't developed yet, and that was ~ten years ago.

On a sidenote, I have yet to find interdental toothbrushes whose use doesn't lead to ingesting nylon.

jozvolskyef··on How to get ChatGPT to stop apologizing?
I don't know what exactly happened there. The two of us conducting the interview advised against this candidate in our report. About a month later the candidate was introduced as a new hire on a different team and I never saw them again in a company of <100 people.
jozvolskyef··on How to get ChatGPT to stop apologizing?
I once concluded an interview with a candidate who was rather conspicuously engaged in clandestine typing, subsequently rectifying their previously incorrect answers. I suspected they were resorting to Google, given this was before ChatGPT came out. Much to my surprise, they ended up landing the job.
jozvolskyef··on Mega-dose vitamin C in treatment of the common cold (2001)
And yet widely believed, even by recent MD graduates*.

* n=1 MD graduate, 3rd Faculty of Medicine UK

jozvolskyef··on Banana Equivalent Dose
The Banana Equivalent Dose is a misleading and incorrect because it has an implicit "over a lifetime" in its definition where instead it should be "until potassium level returns to normal". It is the lifetime dose one would be exposed to if the body didn't replace old material with new and instead stored the banana forever.
jozvolskyef··on Show HN: AI Playground by Vercel Labs
You didn't tell it to act as an assistant so it just assumes that your input is some list of questions that it's supposed to complete.
jozvolskyef··on Diverging Diamond Interchange
In Czech all traffic must yield when entering a roundabout, including the tram. As far as I can tell the yield signs are there for foreigners might be used to different rules.

Regarding your second point, if you mean a car changing lanes from an inner lane to an outer lane, it does need to yield to everyone in that outer lane. This includes yielding to cyclists whose trajectory would intersect with the car. Again, the same applies to all traffic.

jozvolskyef··on Diverging Diamond Interchange
It could be just five or ten meters in each direction. For example this crossing always felt unsafe to me. The original crossing has been obstructed to prevent crossings and moved about 5 meters out, and it feels much safer now: https://goo.gl/maps/ipe8RXkdSgpZz72r6
jozvolskyef··on Diverging Diamond Interchange
I wonder if the distance of a pedestrian crossing from the centre of the roundabout relates to pedestrian safety. Subjectively, I feel like safety could be improved by moving the crossings farther from the centre.
jozvolskyef··on Dropping the SAT requirement is a luxury belief
When I applied to secondary school, I barely made the cut and was one of the lowest-scoring students to be accepted that year, only ranking around the 4th percentile of those accepted. Once I started attending, I performed exceptionally well, ranking around the 95th percentile, give or take 5. It was mainly due to the fact that a large minority of my primary school teachers had biased opinions about me and our personal differences affected my grades.
jozvolskyef··on Google's live from Paris event private/deleted immediately
The disruption isn't hypothetical. People like me are excited about the technology because it already has disrupted search for us. My brother has been using it for the majority of his queries because he doesn't speak English and ChatGPT is a gateway to the knowledge that only exists on the English-language internet.
jozvolskyef··on Schooling improves intelligence, but not the impact of socioeconomics, genetics
I remember reading about this idea over a decade ago, and it comes to mind whenever I observe that I am becoming more like my father, despite living in a different country and culture, and less like other people who had an impact on me. The effects of education slowly give way to genetics in the absence of continued training.
jozvolskyef··on LastPass user vaults stolen in recent hack
That's the exact setup I use on my main phone. There's also https://github.com/android-password-store/Android-Password-S..., which I use on throwaway phones.
jozvolskyef··on Europe is in danger of rolling electricity shortages
Are you implying that France, Germany, and Netherlands don't have homeless and elderly people? These two groups are the most at risk of dying form cold.

edit: I'm glad that you mention Eastern Europe, which is where I come from. Paradoxically, more people die from cold in the West, because their milder climates don't force them to invest in insulation.

edit2: the previous claim may be based on flawed methology, see https://academic.oup.com/jpubhealth/article/38/4/806/2966950

jozvolskyef··on Europe is in danger of rolling electricity shortages
European != middle class.
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