krick

Uh… It's not that you are wrong, but then you can also just abbreviate it to "capitalism is bad, because <…> it forces a non-negligible number of humanity [like all of it] to waste time and/or energy <…> and just generally waste human potential on something that should be a simple commodity"

I mean, yeah, sure. Capitalism is totally stupid and wasteful and evil. Any proposals? Oh wait, no, I'm afraid I don't really want to hear any proposals on this subject. I sincerely wish we don't have to live in interesting times. (Alas, I'm afraid it's past the point we could wish that anyway, so…)

Never heard of Fakespot, but Pocket is a loss. I don't use it as much anymore, but it was a very convenient way to keep my reading queue. I mean, honestly, it didn't really solve the problem for me completely, because I saved way more that I read, but at some point I relied on it heavily.

Maybe when this was invented, the bundle of straw was the best they could do, I don't know, but surely today you can produce a more visible, more robust, reusable and, ironically, cheaper sign than that.

Obviously, I don't know what baxtr meant, but I really hope it's not that. Because this critique of projects like ITER and CERN is really misguided IMO (and honestly just harmful). These are not startups, these are pure science projects, they are pretty much supposed to have negative ROI. It's not even fair to call giving them money an investment, these are grants and donations. Money that you sacrifice to a worthy cause, that supposedly would be the only cause in the fantasy world of communism-utopia, but that absolutely cannot get an investment in the world of pragmatic capitalism, because it is not about making money.

> they’d also fund insane-risk pie-in-the-sky academia dreams

Just out of curiosity, can you throw a couple of examples?

Skimming the comments, this is pretty much what everyone is saying. And I'm sure it's true, but I'd like to also point out the amount of money in question. What was the investment amount for that toy project of Altman? Right.

I don't mean to say 70B is not a lot of money, of course it is. But perhaps that's part of the point: it's a lot of money to feed these technology partners of academia and other friends of friends you are talking about, it's also big enough to make the frontpage on HN, but when it's seen as a sudden huge investment into the whole market, it's kinda telling by itself that startups are not exactly thriving in EU. And also that money is cheap now.

Very much this. I cannot even fully agree with "plug-in heavy" remark: I mean, how heavy must it be, to be considered "plug-in heavy"? I consciously tried to limit plugin usage. But it really gets pretty wild soon. I was relatively lean for maybe the first 6 months, but when some patterns of how I use it become clear enough, it becomes pretty evident how inefficient many super-common situations are and how I can fix them just by installing a plugin.

Fast-forward a year, and all your vault structure implicitly relies on the quirks of Obsidian search behavior, the markdown you write is extremely obsidian-flavored markdown, and you don't even remember how to write LaTeX without LaTeX-Suite shortcuts.

Should I be paranoid? I never tried Tailscale, and the idea of trusting 3rd party with managing access to my network does give me chills. But IDK, honestly, maybe it's silly? Is it in all honesty less likely that I'll fuck things up setting my own Headscale server, than that Tailscale™ will (consciously or otherwise) fuck me up?

There are community plugins to self-host the sync-server though.

Anyway, I hate the fact I'm using closed-source editor, because it kinda is a sensitive thing, but the more I'm using Obsidian, the more unlikely the switch seems. I was kinda stingy with installing new plugins too, but, well, you cannot just ignore the productivity benefits. It doesn't seem feasible to build something like than on my own (for multiple platforms too!), and nobody brave enough seems to have made it so far.

I'm not really following the research, so it's rather a lazy question (assuming you do): does any of it follow the path Derek Vogt was suggesting in his (kinda famous) videos (that he deleted for some reason)? I remember when I was watching them, it felt so convincing I thought "Alright, it looks like there must be a short leap to the actual solution now."

Yet 10 years later I still hear that the consensus is that there's no agreeable translation. So, what, all this mandaic-gypsies was nothing? And all coincidences were… coincidences?

These are extremely opinionated, and shouldn't be treated as a rule of thumb. As somebody else said, there isn't a rule of thumb here at all, but if I was to make up one, I would probably tell you the opposite:

- You have to push ifs down, because of DRY.

- If performance allows, you should consider pushing fors up, because then you have the power of using filter/map/reduce and function compositions to choose what actions you want to apply to which objects, essentially vectorizing the code.

I wouldn't even call it pedantic. I mean, they seem to be the only sane humans in the company. The most faulty is obviously Page, who made the decision that seemed nice and progressive, but was problematic because the subordinates cannot oppose stupid intrusions from above and ignore bad policies. 2nd faulty party is the author of the story, i.e. guys, who use the room when it isn't booked, i.e. after 50 minutes of the meeting. This is natural, of course, because indeed it always happens, it would happen if it was booked for 2 hours too. But the point is that they are in a booked room, and it isn't booked by them.

Honestly, for me it's kinda minimal, simple and ergonomic UI is the point. It has some more sophisticated features, but they don't distract me, nor I actually need them. For instance:

- bookmarks (I tried to use them, but it's too much work, if I really need to take a note, I better do it in written form)

- UI to write down characters (same: I used it a couple of times, just because it's there, but it's not worth it, use normal note-taking app for note-taking)

- equalizer (I'm sure somebody uses it, but I never truly needed it for audio-books)

And many more.

What actually matters are small details:

- Granular playback speed control. ABS seems to have it done right too, but some players have like 1-1.25-1.5-..., which is not granular enough to get normal conversational talking speed out of somebody way too slow.

- It is possible to enable ID3, but it doesn't force it either.

- It recognizes chapters in whatever I have. m4b, mp3, cue, many files in a single folder, many nested folders, whatever. If it gets things wrong, it is possible to merge books in the library. I guess, the worst case is if I am overzealous with chapters (like marking chapters in a youtube podcastwhich has a mark like every 2 minutes), but then again, it only means "stop at the end of the chapter" becomes not feasible, but otherwise it's fine.

- I guess, every audio-book player does, but still: it does remember positions in multiple books, so I can switch between lectures and fictions and get back to where I stopped.

- It takes into account the current playback speed when estimating how much time is left.

- It is possible to remove buttons you don't need, it's possible to choose an action at the end of the book, it's possible to choose a lot, but defaults are really just fine for me.

- I never used it, but thinking about your question I just found out it has "Skip start/end" functionality. This is just great, I'm excited to try it out ASAP.

Anyway, I probably forget some small details, so you better take a look yourself. It's not perfect, but good enough to study when building something similar. I can also suggest 1 thing that is not in SABP, and, again, it's important to not overload the UI, but I sometimes wished it was there. In SABP it's only possible to either stop after X minutes (with sleep-suggestive volume fade), or at the end of a chapter (without fade). Sometimes I wish I could tell it to stop at the end of a chapter approximately after X minutes (like, if it has a chapter every 7-15 minutes, and you are planning to listen for about 30-40 minutes more, but you don't want it to fade volume an to stop in the middle of a chapter overall). So it's either "approx X minutes" or simply "N more chapters". Neither is possible in SABP.

Also, I don't know it I actually want it, but it seemed nice listening to podcats in NewPipe (SABP doesn't have it). There is an option to skip silence in NewPipe. I didn't actually use it too much, and the last time was a while ago (I pretty much stopped to listen podcasts on it), but I seem to recall it worked nicely.

Cannot tell if it's sarcasm or not. Obviously everyone who reads the headline assumes it's his current computer, and it had some, uh, consequences. That's why they click. That's what makes it clickbait. Nobody would care otherwise.

(Also, if you are willing to be pointlessly formal, it goes in both directions, since it can be argued that a computer, which belongs to a person, who in the future will become DOGE's software engineer, but hasn't become yet, also formally isn't a "DOGE software engineer’s computer".)

How is the Android app? The only good app for local audio-books I know is "Smart AudioBook Player". The web-app GUI in the demo is less than perfect, but kinda ok, if you enable chapter-view. The biggest problem is a single set of ±10 s rewind buttons: for a dedicated audio-book player it's not enough, a separate ±1 min button set is a must. But since the authors didn't think of that, I don't expect it to be different in the Android app. I'm rather asking about mobile-specific features:

1. Does it properly stop the playback when headphones are disconnected?

2. Is there a usable lock-screen widget?

3. Does it auto-rewind after a pause? It's best when the pause duration is taken into account: it shouldn't rewind more than a couple of seconds if you pause for a second, but a whole minute may be better if you left it off yesterday.

4. Does it handle well situations when the server is not accessible? Can you just pre-download a couple of audio-books for your 10 h long flight? I mean, honestly, streaming is never desirable, the only point of a self-hosted server is that you don't have to download and delete your collection manually. It's a tricky problem when the playlist is highly variable (as with music), but for an audio-book player should be a non issue: just pre-fetch a whole book (maybe manually), storage space is a lesser issue than mobile internet.

Cool for a weekend project, but honestly ChatGPT is still kinda shit at dialogues. I wonder if that's the issue with technology or OpenAI's fine-tuning (and suspect the latter), but it cannot talk like normal people do: shut up if it has nothing to add of value, ask reasonable follow-up questions if user doesn't understand something or there's ambiguity in the question. Also, on topic of follow-up questions: I don't remember which update introduced that attempt to increase engagement by finishing every post with stupid irrelevant follow-up question, but it's really annoying. It also works on me, despite hating ChatGPT it's kinda an instinct to treat humanly something that speaks vaguely like a human.

It makes me realize how ignorant about power grid I am. It is kinda unfathomable to me, that 2 countries completely black out for 10 hours, then somewhat "magically" go up again, and a week later nobody knows what went wrong and how it got fixed. Or maybe someone knows but doesn't want to say? Anyway, it makes an impression that the whole power grid is this magical black box that somehow works on its own, breaks, fixes itself, and humans can only pray gods to let them have good harvest and uninterrupted electricity next summer. Maybe it's time to renew sacrifices at the temple of Jupiter or somebody else.

That's kinda the point. As silly as what you wrote is, it's still a whole level above what ChatGPT can make up. The fact, that it produces human-like text doesn't make it any good, but somewhere there is a manager (and I bet he is not the only one) who just uses it to generate some nonsense announcements and gets paid for his work. Maybe he'll even get a promotion because of how effective he is.

I don't think that people forget, but it definitely gets normalized. It's disgusting, but many people obviously embrace it, and since to order ChatGPT to do some lame stuff for them is by design orders of magnitude faster than actually create something, the internet is getting filled up by lame stuff every passing minute now.

But it's not like this only happens because of LLMs. If you worked in corporate culture you most definitely received some automated HR emails congratulating you with spending half of your life at the workplace, or something like that. I always felt almost insulted by these, they are literally just spam at best. It's kinda mocking: these are generic depersonalized texts that no one actually wrote for you, yet they always speak about "gratitude", about you being "valued" and such. In fact, it's the only thing they are meant to express: you being valued. It's so cynical.

But, I mean, it's just me. Ostensibly, these folks in HR department do know their job? Maybe most people don't feel like vomiting when they get these emails? Maybe it brings them joy? I never stopped wondering about that. I cannot just ask the closest coworkers, because of course they feel the same as me. But maybe there are other ones? Another social bubble, where this thing is normal, and it is bigger than mine?

Anyway, everyone is kinda used to it. What I am trying to say is that the phenomena is not entirely new, and LLMs don't change the essence of it. Even back when people sent paper mail to each other, I remember these pre-printed birthday/christmas cards, which are ok, because the entire point is that they are not automated and that you remember to send it to someone, yet it was always considered a bit of a poor taste to not add a sentence of yours by hand.

> Galileo was notoriously cantankerous, and it was his habit of insulting and assaulting public figures <...> that landed him in hot water.

That is very well put. On the topic of his punishment, I must say, you seriously downplayed it, but it really must be emphasized just how much he brought it onto himself. It's not even that there was "no possible doctrinal basis", but the Church was very purposefully evasive about this, trying to keep its official position somewhat neutral, and it was Galileo who really insisted on starting a process he wasn't going to win.

And you really don't have to dig deep to understand why — simply reading his "The Assayer" by any somewhat socially-aware adult must be enough to get what was the issue with Galileo. The man really knew no chill.

It took me way too long to realize "brother" is not some postmodern hippie "them/it" kinda stuff.

I'm so tired of this shit already. Honestly, I wish it just never existed, or at least wouldn't be popular.

Very cool, but lacks volume controls.

Some of the most annoying, that's for sure. I uninstalled it when it started to uglify the icon on my desktop when I neglect daily exercise. I mean, it's totally fine if it's just me, but since it was an impulsive action on my part, I would be curious to see if I wasn't one of the many. I wouldn't be fond of my company's PR department if they lose customers over stupid jokes.

That said, after spending too much time on DuoLingo, I should have dropped it anyway. First off, one should be honest to himself and admit that it is a game, not a language study material. Which is ok, but still, I would really like to have an app that is a bit less of a game and a little more of a interactive textbook (I don't know one). Second, honestly, most of the course materials are surprisingly low quality. They kept adding all these gimmicks, animations, icon uglifying, etc., yet the core content was barely worked on. After a couple of years you start really wondering what are they spending money on. I mean, literally, do they even have paid staff working on some less popular languages, or it's just community?

I know I shouldn't get into this thread, but I'm extremely curious: what did you expect should have happened? I mean, literally, what do you mean by "just work", what work did you expect a type checker to perform if not to show you errors?

No idea when your pre-AI era begun, but I was much more excited to host Wikipedia locally 15 years ago than I am now.

I would like if you could refer me to that reading as well. I really know nothing about, uh, any of that, so I cannot judge. But your description strikes me as rather weird: "dedicating his life" seems a bit dramatic, since Principia is a pretty early work of his. He was active for 50-60 more years since he must have been "driven insane", as you say. Most of his famous works were written after that. Also, all of famous results of Gödel were after Russell finished with Principia. Not that he ever finished, but given the fact Second Edition was 15 years after the First one, and mostly contained relatively minor fixes… it seems only logical to conclude that he wasn't pursuing the topic after the first publication, basically, ever since realizing how big of a task would it be to try and formalize all of math like that.

Thanks. It appears, however, that Dyson considers the whole approach a failure (referring to Gödel as a demolisher of it). So while he is saying it about a book, ironically, it seems hardly applicable in this context anymore. Because with this reasoning, any program in Lean (and the Lean programming language itself) should be seen as "a monumental failure".

> Although the Principia is thought to be “a monumental failure”, as said by Prof. Freeman Dyson

I'd like some elaboration on that. I failed to find a source.

Technically, it isn't "wrong". It well could be the guy's mother. But I'm nitpicking, it actually is a good example. I tried ChatGPT twice in new chats, with and without "Reason", and both times it gave me nonsensical explanations to "Why mother? Couldn't it be a father?" I was actually kinda surprised, since I expected "reasoning" to fix it, but it actually made things worse.