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Thanks. This is the first time I've tried it. I have no idea what the rules are. Oh well.

nefittyon Apps commandeered the age-old idea of takeout

My brother worked at a fast food place for a few years as a teen. He gave me two pieces of advice: don't eat at fast food places, but if you do, you'll get better food if you dine in.

nefittyon Did HAL Commit Murder?

Or people who still believe in free will.

nefittyon Did HAL Commit Murder?

I see No Country for Old Men as partly a study on the conflict between those who believe in free will and those who don't. The villain, Sugar, has shed the illusion of free will, and has thrown himself into the thing he knows motivates him: prejudicial termination of other people who stand in the way of his current clients' goals.

This is in contrast to the backdrop of a community reeling with outrage at and fear of his brutality. They see him as an agent of evil, some sort of amoral if not immoral demon, a spawn of the escalating narco wars. Normal people imbue themselves and others with causative powers. This is exemplified by the exchange with Norma Jean.

"You don't need to kill me. I ain't got any money."

"I'll flip a coin. It's the best I can do. Call it."

"No, I ain't doin' that. It ain't the coin that decides. It's you, it's always been you."

"I got here the same way the coin did. Call it."

nefittyon Did HAL Commit Murder?

So if one corporation, let's say Skynet, built an autonomous killer robot and sold it to any interested government, who would be responsible?

Is Skynet suddenly responsible for the outcome of every situation the robots are placed in? What about the secondhand robot market? Are the governments who own the bots responsible? Are the governments responsible for errors? If your car's brakes get stuck and you hurt someone, isn't the manufacturer responsible? If a gun you own misfires due to a defect, wouldn't the manufacturer be responsible?

To me it seems that autonomous warbots are going to put the world in a tighter MAD bind. If X has killer robots, Y better have killer robots or strongly align themselves with X.

To break this down further in a sort of visual way:

- Agents involved in a bot-involved death

-- Operator

-- Owner

-- Manufacturer

-- Programmer/Engineer

-- Government representatives

-- Victim

-- Represented populace

What would make sense to me is that the represented pressure their representatives to regulate manufacturers in terms of sales and safety controls. If a sale is found to be by regulation then the manufacturer should be less liable, presuming their programmers and engineers followed safety regulations. If the sale is valid, then the operator should be responsible, otherwise the manufacturer is responsible as well. In the case of malfunction, the manufacturer should be held responsible along with individual engineers and programmers. If the malfunction was due to a gap in regulatory strictures, then the government responsible for the regulation, along with the manufacturer, should be held responsible.

See? Easy.

nefittyon The performative quality of computer-generated art

When I was young I thought photographers just took like one photo and by sheer willpower and skill, they sometimes captured beautiful scenes. I then found out that they actually sit there and click the shutter thousands of times, then they go somewhere else to sit and scour through the "generated art" to find the gems. Then they polish the gems. Then they publish those.

My novice AI-art workflow involved a similar pattern. I come up with some topic or thing I want to see, then I iterate on the wording of the prompt and all the little variables the tool takes. I end up with dozens of crap pictures, but sometimes cool stuff comes out. If I keep working on this, alongside increased generation speed, I could see myself "creating" really good art.

To me it is about the process. It's the human input that makes art valuable. I mean, if AI becomes sentient then those judgements would be a valuable input in themselves too.

nefittyon Starlink lost 40 satellites to a geomagnetic storm

My list:

1. Solar flares

2. Rogue AI

3. World war

3. Water scarcity (tied to war above)

5. Pandemic

6. Climate disasters

My naive perception heavily weighs future possible technological progress. Solar flare collapse is basically unmitigable due to a combination of unpredictability and deep systemic interdependence and dependence on susceptible technologies. Some governments paid lip service to this risk in the past, allegedly pushing to plan for this risk. Ultimately, only some organizations will have the resources to sustain the acute impact of a solar flare, but what good is Google if they're the only ones with working computers?

With climate, I'm very optimistic about the innovation that will result from economic and social pressures. I think 10 years ago I would have rated it at #2.

Edit: What are the chances. As I wrote this, JET started live-streaming an announcement about fusion energy...

nefittyon Ask HN: Is ADHD Real?

Right on. I hope you quickly find something that helps. Kick some ass.

nefittyon Ask HN: Is ADHD Real?

Ah yeah, I get that. I guess the optician's comment just struck me as deep in an abstract sense. It's like he pointed at some truism about specialization in contemporary society. That's completely counter to the extremely-online punk/hacker DIY ethos that resonates with me, so the effect was like getting my spine realigned.

nefittyon Ask HN: Is ADHD Real?

I should have added smiley faces or something because our exchange was pretty cordial. I cracked up when he told me the coding thing. I knew from years of firsthand experience how easily and badly messing with glasses frames can go lol

nefittyon Ask HN: Is ADHD Real?

Cool. I have a consumer-grade Muse EEG thing. I learned about theta and ADHD links and thought it was probably bullshit. I figured out how to get the raw data with nodejs after years of using their app.

The patterns were jaw-dropping. My graphs were all theta. It's like I'm driving my brain around with the handbrake on. It was pretty startling. I dropped that EEG project after a few hours lol I should get back to it to see if I can change my brainwaves...

Anyways, here's some links to give a cardinal direction on this:

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/23086616/

https://www.additudemag.com/slideshows/neurofeedback-for-adh...

Btw, in light of the EEG, what sort of treatments or interventions did your doctors prescribe?

nefittyon Starlink lost 40 satellites to a geomagnetic storm

Right. I imagined some solar flare or something.

From my understanding, they are the biggest existential risk to modern humanity, slightly ahead of rogue AI. From that context, whether misguided or otherwise, you can imagine that my heart skipped a beat when I read the link title.

nefittyon Ask HN: Is ADHD Real?

Did you get the theta-dominance signals?

nefittyon Ask HN: Is ADHD Real?

I got new glasses a few weeks ago. As I was being fitted, I asked the guy if there were any tools I could buy that would help me adjust my glasses myself. He asked me what I do for a living. "I'm a programmer." "Well, would you want an optician messing with your code?"

People that specialize in mental health, psychiatry and brain research have concluded that ADHD is a diagnosable mental disorder. I'm glad they're doing that instead of trying to write books on rust or go.

More to your question, I think a lot of the common hesitance and skepticism is the result of stigma in the vein of anti-vax ideas. Some lay people think they know better than the medical community and won't hesitate to tell you their unqualified opinion. Consider them nuts. Try some treatments, read some books, work on your systems of support, and always remember it's REAL, don't be ashamed to struggle. You're not making it up. You're not faking it. You're not bad.

It might not be obvious to other people, but you just need a little help, like when someone breaks their leg or gets the flu. It's no one's business anyway, unless you decide to confide in them.

nefittyon Heuristics that almost always work

Psychologically, behaving in a certain way makes it more likely that you'll behave in the same way in the future. That's an integral idea underpinning justice systems.

nefittyon Recruiters lying about salary? Is this just me or is it getting out of control?

I always start with, "The job posting mentioned $1M/year. I'm flexible, I'll work with you. I'll consider 50% of that."

nefittyon My thirty years of dodging repetitive work with automation tools

I have had a lot of fun and success with Keyboard Maestro for Mac and Shortcuts for iOS. For my work, I try to automate Terminal commands. I also dabbled a little with bash scripts. I love that Shortcuts lets me think programatically and flex those muscles for fun tasks.

Here's some stuff I have set up:

Mac:

- I use several displays, and don't usually use the built-in monitor. I have an automation that dims it until it turns off.

- I have recurring KM script that deletes Yarn and NPM caches. They get huuuuge.

- I have a bash script that shows me the temperature of my Mac. I might be able to add an alert if the temp goes above x.

iOS:

- I hooked up my Pavlok shock bracelet to Reminders. I get a percentage chance of getting shocked every 15mins if tasks aren't done. The more tasks done, the less likely it is.

- Shortcut to pull up Youtube videos for PiP without a Youtube Premium account. You can find that online. Game changer.

- Sci-Hub and Meta.org search shortcuts made available in the share menu. You can get my Sci-Hub shortcut here (a good starting point for other search shortcuts): https://observablehq.com/@iz/sci-hub-mirrors

- To help me debug shortcuts, I created a logger that writes to Data Jar or to a Note. Helps soo much. I haven't released it but you can get my Twitter at the link above if you're interested.

Node dev:

- Semantic commit template accessible through Dash's text-expander

- Next.js sucks but I made some scripts to automate that work. I had to use a Chrome-watcher that let's me refresh specific tabs from the command line.

There's many more. I wanted to share mine to maybe give you an idea of what tools to check out and what to automate to approximate your robotic luxury communist future.

nefittyon Web3 doesn’t care about privacy

Crypto is sort of like the increasing plethora of streaming services, except crypto projects seem to reproduce at a much higher rate and further deprioritize UX. It's not every day, if ever, that I'm dealing with fiat currency conversion. In crypto, it's another one of those seemingly unnecessary hassles that is tolerated as a matter of course.

nefittyon JRE Missing (Rogan episodes removed by Spotify)

It doesn't matter how much research I do, I'll never be as knowledgeable as a medical professional. That's due to the sheer fact that they have internal mental models based on first, second and third-hand experience which make them capable of intuition on their specialty.

Something that seems incongruent to me might be a product of those intuitions. Intuitions I can't build from reading alone.

nefittyon JRE Missing (Rogan episodes removed by Spotify)

The worst impact Rogan has is the normalization of paranoid-conspiratorial logic under the guise of critical thinking. I mean, he's basically primed millions of people to be ready to eagerly accept bullshit.

nefittyon JRE Missing (Rogan episodes removed by Spotify)

Public taste is unpredictable. Podcasting success depends on so many little factors going right. I imagine it's like a developer doing freelance work. Inevitably they have to spend time managing the flow of work instead of actually developing. Getting money from Spotify probably meant "Hey, we don't need this whole folder of spreadsheets anymore. Let's redirect that effort toward a better production!"

nefittyon JRE Missing (Rogan episodes removed by Spotify)

I don't like the entitlement oozing from this comment. The site was made by one person as a side project.

nefittyon Why is LinkedIn so cringe?

Oh God, humor. How unprofessional.

nefittyon Do things, tell people (2012)

The filter is the skill of self-directed learning. It is a meta skill that can be built, which then increase opportunities dramatically.

When I see the jib "they skipped a bunch of steps", it tells me that the person who received the advice needs to work on creating their personal learning system. Ideally, you feed your system a topic or idea, and it walks you through the exploration and work of understanding and applying that knowledge. It's not necessarily a piece of software. It can be a checklist, a journal, doodling on whitebords, blogging, whatever. Ultimately, all human knowledge is accessible through language. Whether that is true or not, if you act from that frame, there's nothing you can't learn with the right support and systems in place.

nefittyon Target shares its own web skimming detection tool Merry Maker with the world

https://github.com/target/mmk-ui-api

> Fundamentally, Merry Maker operationalizes three key processes:

- Preserving a baseline of existing pages by saving the code being served by a website along with the network traffic generated by test transactions

- Scanning the saved code for any malicious indicators

- Scanning the saved network traffic for any potential compromise

nefittyon For some searches the whole screen on Google is now ads

You can recreate this behavior with HN's Algolia search API. The common parameter that behaves how we expect is "query". Using "similarQuery" causes all sorts of weird behavior. I think it drops words until it find results, and considers each token optional.

It kinda gave me insight I to why Google is sucking so bad. Give us the option at least.

nefittyon Don't allow animated favicons (2001)

Sound is weird on iOS web. Also, they basically unilaterally decided to say "nah, we're good" to web Bluetooth. I think that could have opened up a lot of awesome stuff. As it stands, getting that to work is possible but the steps to get there are multiplied ten-fold.

nefittyon Satellite finds methane leaks from gas pipelines

You nudge the drug addicts and prosecute the drug dealers.

Also, re: veganism. Go vegan to reduce suffering.

nefittyon What the Omicron wave is revealing about human immunity

Yes, thank you! Just because I only have a high school degree does not mean my opinion is not as valid as a medical professional's.

Wait. No, that doesn't make sense at all actually... Hm.

nefittyon Ask HN: I am a slow developer. What can I do with this?

How did you uncover or discover these tips?