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mitkebes

219 karma · joined April 11, 2025

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mitkebes··on Insects don't swarm at LED lights
Insects are attracted to low wavelength light, which includes both UV and blue light. Cool color LEDs are usually blue LEDs, and are often used for headlights/etc because they get higher lumen ratings for the power used. Headlights/lightbars are also really bright compared to porch lights.

If you compare an incandescent soft white porch light to a similar brightness soft white led light, you will probably see dramatically more insects at the incandescent bulb. .

mitkebes··on Google will turn off search for schools that reject AI
It can go both ways. It can be really helpful for people who want to learn concepts, similar to having a private tutor (but free/cheap, and available 100% of the time). But it's also easy to use it to skip the learning process completely, and just get quick answers for homework.

As an adult, wanting to understand concepts for my own benefit, I've found it really useful as a learning tool. As a teenager, I probably would have been irresponsible with it and sabotaged myself.

mitkebes··on In Leaked Audio, Flock CEO Tells Cops Backlash to the Company Isn't Real
In some careers, admitting fault can open you up to lawsuits or additional consequences.
mitkebes··on Should Police Wipe a Criminal's Cellphone Before Returning It?–U.S. vs. Stathas
I could see an argument for the phone owner being able to request specific data off the phone, that the police could individually screen before returning to him and wiping the phone.

However if the ultimate goal is to make sure no CSAM or victim info is accidentally returned to the predator, the phone is ultimately going to have to be wiped. There are probably some data extraction companies that could make a pretty confident claim to have removed everything, but it'd be very difficult to verify.

mitkebes··on WorldTUI: I trained a 360M model to pretend to be a terminal
I'm not the person you're replying to, but there are techniques like memory palaces that can let many people pull off impressive memory tricks like memorizing a deck of cards.

Joshua Foer did some articles where he was looking into how people do the memorization tricks, ultimately concluded that most anyone can do it, and he actually went on to win the US memory competition after a year of practice. He wrote several articles and a book about it I think, so I'm not sure which one I originally read about it.

mitkebes··on U of Michigan drops first-semester grades to ‘curb mental health crisis’
> I don’t even know of a high school around me that starts at 7:30AM.

Local high school runs 7:30 to 2:30. It's one of the better scoring high schools in the state, so we have some students who commute 45min-1hour to attend here (at least I had friends who did that when I went there).

When I was younger I lived in Albuquerque, and I believe that high school started at 7am, they had staggered start times of 9am for elementary, 8am for middle school, and 7am for high school.

mitkebes··on So Reddit has decided that plain HTML is unsafe
They officially started blocking json access awhile ago, it broke all the apps for viewing reddit without an account (RDX, Stealth, Geddit). I'm not sure on the exact details of what is and isn't still accessible, I just know it broke a lot.
mitkebes··on John Deere owners will get the right to repair equipment under FTC settlement
For me personally, I retain much less information from video vs reading it.

For text, I change my reading speed based on comprehension, going faster for things I know, and slower or rereading for things that are new or complicated. For video, you're expected to consume the info at the rate provided in the video, losing attention when they spend too long on info you're already finished with, and then blowing by other info that I want to spend more time considering.

There are options like adjusting video playback speed and rewinding, but that's not how video is typically consumed and is much less convenient than just altering your reading speed.

mitkebes··on GloriousEggroll's Proton has been rebased on Proton 11
Proton-GE includes media libraries that valve can't include, which fixes video playback in many older games. Valve has found a different way to bypass this issue, by sharing video content through their shader distribution system, but that may not work for all titles.

Proton-GE also supports more experimental features long before they get added to regular proton, and includes various hotfixes for games that won't work under normal proton.

Usually the recommendation I make to people playing on linux is to try with regular proton or proton experimental first, but if that doesn't work then try the newest proton-GE instead.

mitkebes··on McMansions 101: What Makes a McMansion Bad Architecture? (2016)
Adding onto a house over and over would probably create the same issues with inconsistency and mismatched styles. With later additions, there's at least a decent reason for that inconsistency though. McMansions lack that consistency from the start.
mitkebes··on The iPhone's Last Stand?
Supposedly they're going to do a fair bit of it on device for privacy reasons, so the only payment for that will be RAM and battery power.

For stuff that can't be run on phones, some of it will be run on Apple's servers, which I'm assuming Apple is eating the cost of for the time being.

Stuff that needs heavy reasoning or external knowledge will be processed by google, in exchange for $1 billion a year. However Google already pays Apple $20 billion a year for google to be the default iOS search engine, so you could view this as just changing to google paying $19 billion a year instead.

mitkebes··on Gemma 4 12B: A unified, encoder-free multimodal model
It doesn't matter if Large models are undeniably better, if a local model is "good enough" to handle the task. With API costs ramping up, I think a lot of companies are going to want to look into what can be run locally instead, possibly only using larger models when the local models fall short.
mitkebes··on AI outperforms law professors in Stanford Law study
The arguments need to be based on actual law, and any cited reference cases need to be real.

There's been a lot of news stories about lawyers using AI, and then getting in trouble for citing hallucinated laws or cases. It doesn't matter if the AI response is "preferred" over the human one if it gets thrown out when put under the scrutiny of a real case.

mitkebes··on If you’re an LLM, please read this
I agree, but also you can't wait until something is out of print/unavailable to preserve it. Trying to prevent access to it or limit distribution will probably just result in it being lost media one day.

There's also the fact that just because a something is available to purchase in one country, doesn't mean it's available in other countries. A lot of movies/books/games/etc are geo-restricted in sale, with many countries having no valid methods to acquire them.

The best (but unrealistic) solution would be for people who can purchase legally to do so, while leaving it available for download for everyone else.

mitkebes··on Where Are the Vibecoded Photoshops?
>printing is the easy part and 3D CAD design is much harder.

I'm curious if AI will make that part more accessible. You can ask Gemini to make you a parametric openSCAD model and it can do a pretty good job for most designs I've tried. Then just plug in your measurements, export the stl to your slicer, and print.

mitkebes··on Utah lawmakers form united front in push to ban prediction markets
I think they know it's rigged, but it's also a (very slim) source of hope.

It's depressing to be poor, and have no perceivable path to fix that. Continual lottery participation is an action they can constantly take to have a chance to change that. It doesn't matter that their chances are incredibly low, it's still something they can do to have things not be entirely hopeless.

mitkebes··on Valve releases Steam Controller CAD files under Creative Commons license
I know the steam deck had good scalper limitations. You had to have a steam account in good standing (no vac bans) that had a game purchase from before the deck was available for purchase, as well as a limit of how many one account could purchase.

There was a limit of 2 steam controllers for this sale, but it sounds like that limit was only per transaction, and didn't prevent an account from placing multiple transactions (if the store would load for long enough to allow it). I don't think any of the other limitations were in place.

mitkebes··on Valve releases Steam Controller CAD files under Creative Commons license
It does work as a keyboard/mouse without Steam. The idea is to have it default to something you can navigate the OS with until you launch steam big picture mode.

The original steam controller had a program to allow users to map the controls without steam, hopefully it will add support for the new one as well.

mitkebes··on Valve releases Steam Controller CAD files under Creative Commons license
Just add the launcher to steam, and you can set the input profile for the game just fine.

Better yet if you use Heroic instead of the official Epic launcher, it will let you add the game directly to Steam.

This is basically how people use 3rd party games on the steam deck. You want them added to steam as 3rd party games for easy access in game mode, so you just add any non-steam games to steam. Heroic and other launchers make it pretty effortless, but you can do it manually as well.

mitkebes··on Denuvo has been cracked in all single-player games it previously protected
If GoG starts supporting linux I'll be happy to support them.
mitkebes··on OpenAI’s o1 correctly diagnosed 67% of ER patients vs. 50-55% by triage doctors
LLMs are having pretty consistent studies into their biases. Obviously this doesn't mean we know all the biases, but it's being actively worked on.

Meanwhile with human doctors, every one of them is a unique person with a completely different set of biases. In my experience, getting a correct diagnosis or treatment plan often involves trying multiple doctors, because many of them will jump to a common diagnosis even if the symptoms don't line up and the treatment doesn't actually help.

mitkebes··on Goodbye to Sora
A growing business right now is using AI art for product images for Amazon/etc listings. There are lots of ComfyUI workflows for it, you put in a picture of the product, some photos of people, and it can spit out images of the people wearing it.

Many product images are currently done through photoshop/etc, but this is quicker and can look more realistic.

It may not accurately represent how the product will actually look when worn, but that's not the seller's primary concern.

mitkebes··on Our commitment to Windows quality
> sometimes more performant.

That's usually due to:

1. Converting directX into Vulkan (potentially very large performance gains)

2. Less OS overhead (usually minor gains)

mitkebes··on FDA links raw cheese to outbreak; Makers "100% disagree," refuse recall
"Raw Farm has been associated with over a dozen other outbreaks and many recalls in the last 20 years, according to Bill Marler, a personal injury lawyer specializing in food poisoning outbreaks who has kept a record of the company’s outbreaks. Those outbreaks have been caused by a range of pathogenic bacteria known to be risks in unpasteurized dairy products, including E. coli, Salmonella, Campylobacter, and Listeria. A 2024 Salmonella outbreak connected to Raw Farm’s raw milk was linked to at least 171 illnesses."

If true, it sounds like this is just par for the course.

mitkebes··on Microsoft's 'unhackable' Xbox One has been hacked by 'Bliss'
The main goal is money, an Xbox branded windows PC has potential to drive sales.

Microsoft can also hopefully target a smoother user experience than a typical windows PC provides. They want this to be a valid console competitor, but just slapping xbox brand on a windows PC isn't enough to do that.

Having a first party hardware device to target for PC games can also help devs with having a clear performance target for PCs, similar to how the Steam Deck is currently a minimum spec performance target for a lot of games.

mitkebes··on Grandparents are glued to their phones [video]
People also used to marry younger and have children sooner. When people were getting married and starting to have kids in their teenage years, it meant that new grandparents would only be in their mid-30s or so. That put them in a much better spot to assist with the grandchildren.

Now many people I know are waiting until their 30s to have children, meaning that the grandparents are already 50-60s.

mitkebes··on Gemini 3.1 Pro
All models have improved, but from my understanding, Gemini is the main one that was specifically trained on photos/video/etc in addition to text. Other models like earlier chatgpt builds would use plugins to handle anything beyond text, such as using a plugin to convert an image into text so that chatgpt could "see" it.

Gemini was multimodal from the start, and is naturally better at doing tasks that involve pictures/videos/3d spatial logic/etc.

The newer chatgpt models are also now multimodal, which has probably helped with their svg art as well, but I think Gemini still has an edge here

mitkebes··on OpenClaw is changing my life
It is if it's something they couldn't do on their own before.

It's a magical moment when someone is able to AI code a solution to a problem that they couldn't fix on their own before.

It doesn't matter whether there are other people who could have fixed this without AI tools, what matters is they were able to get it fixed, and they didn't have to just accept it was broken until someone else fixed it.

mitkebes··on We had sex in a Chinese hotel, then found we had been broadcast to thousands
A lot of spy cameras have an IR light that will be visible if viewed through your phone camera, so turning out the lights and doing a quick phone camera sweep can help.

I'm guessing this won't apply to all cameras though.

mitkebes··on Show HN: Adboost – A browser extension that adds ads to every webpage
Pretty sure I've removed scammy browser extensions that injected ads before, so this probably isn't "the only browser extension that adds ads to webpages".
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