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nerdo

558 karma · joined May 16, 2011

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nerdo··on Geist Serif
Outside-the-box big brain idea for font webpages with walls of gibberish: Make the font for the gibberish the font.
nerdo··on For the first time ever, Google Search is less than 50% of Alphabet's revenue
You can't legally make a crawler to compete with Google anymore, it's explicitly stated in a lot of robots.txt's.
nerdo··on How the Claude Code team does code review
Not true, LLM’s will struggle with badly organized and designed large codebases just the same, though likely with less errors and profanities.
nerdo··on I stopped drinking the AI Kool-Aid
You literally cite the wikipedia page that explains this? Or was this anti-AI slop also written by AI..
nerdo··on What algorithm did Windows XP use to choose your initial user picture?
There's a better way to do this, you use inverse CDF to avoid all the RNG calls. Generate a random number, then skip items until you reach that number:

selectRandomFromIteratorOptimized(iterator) { if (!iterator.moveNext()) { return null; }

    var winner = iterator.current();
    var count = 1;

    while (true) {
        var u = random_float_open(0.0, 1.0);
        var skip = (int)Math.Floor(Math.Log(u) / Math.Log(1.0 - (1.0 / (count + 1))));

        for (var i = 0; i < skip; ++i) {
            if (!iterator.moveNext()) {
                return winner;
            }
            ++count;
        }

        if (!iterator.moveNext()) {
            return winner;
        }

        ++count;
        winner = iterator.current();
    }
}
nerdo··on Online age verification is the hill to die on
The EFF has long been a skin suit my dude, they're just here to dissipate and confuse opposition.
nerdo··on Tesla’s 4680 battery supply chain collapses as partner writes down deal by 99%
What is TSLA's valuation based on anymore? Maybe next week it'll be the moon colony they’ll have up and running in 2028.
nerdo··on "We're Definitely Going to Build a Bunker Before We Release AGI"
https://archive.is/xe77F
nerdo··on Reverse engineering OpenAI code execution to make it run C and JavaScript
The escalation of commitment scam, interesting to see it so effective when applied to AI.
nerdo··on Imgpls – An extension to load Imgur images directly
For iOS: https://apps.apple.com/us/app/sink-it-for-reddit/id644987363...
nerdo··on Jeff Bezos' management rules are slowly unraveling inside Amazon
https://archive.ph/iDMXO
nerdo··on Why does part of the Windows 98 Setup program look older than the rest? (2020)
Ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny.
nerdo··on Are We Watching the Internet Die?
They’re burning 30 million dollars a year on a site that’s torched over a billion since its inception. Just give the product manager one signup for their kpi before they/them are put out on the street.
nerdo··on Are We Watching the Internet Die?
You can't, it's very expensive and controlled now: https://www.tumblr.com/photomatt/696629352701493248/why-go-n...
nerdo··on Eternal Shell History
What's the deal with bash history on macos anyway? It absolutely refuses to persist, no matter which combination of incantations are entered.
nerdo··on ICANN Is Not the Internet Content Police (2015)
What “kinds of things” are “we” really worried about? Representative government, public referendums? Very much on what table?
nerdo··on Google's Gemini Headaches Spur $90B Selloff
No, perfectly sane. The party says there are five fingers.
nerdo··on Phind-70B: Closing the code quality gap with GPT-4 Turbo while running 4x faster
> Phind-70B is also less "lazy" than GPT-4 Turbo and doesn't hesistate to generate detailed code examples.

OpenAI's leaked prompt literally encourages it to try harder[1]:

> Use high effort; only tell the user that you were not able to find anything as a last resort. Keep trying instead of giving up.

1: https://pastebin.com/vnxJ7kQk

nerdo··on What happened with the Web Monetization API?
The regime doesn’t want people saying or thinking things they aren’t being currently told to say and think. The regime is technically not allowed to use the legal system directly to punish people for this quasi-crime but is very happy to ruin everything else in same pursuit. So why should a protocol for p2p financial transactions the regime doesn’t control be allowed to exist?
nerdo··on What happened with the Web Monetization API?
Porn can be an understandable concern because of the amount of chargebacks it can create for processors, though the excessive chargebacks should be the rule not the porn. Hate speech they never tried to explain afaik. FWIW repealing fair banking[1] was immediate priority for Biden up there with fortifying elections[2].

1: https://reason.com/2021/02/11/biden-administration-suspends-...

2: https://www.congress.gov/bill/117th-congress/house-bill/1

nerdo··on What happened with the Web Monetization API?
In the US the receiver gets unbanked without warning or explanation and permanently loses the ability to accept money through any service via systems like MATCH.
nerdo··on What happened with the Web Monetization API?
What if money gets sent to websites that host hate speech?
nerdo··on Vesuvius Challenge 2023 Grand Prize awarded: we can read the first scroll
Incredible effort. Text of scroll is essentially "drink more Ovaltine" which is on theme.
nerdo··on Uber is closing alcohol delivery service Drizly three years after acquistion
Did they ever explain the logo thing? https://longform.asmartbear.com/logo/
nerdo··on Ask HN: Why doesn't Tesla disable all features unless you pay them?
What lawsuits? They send updated terms of service ahead of it so it’s all totally legal.
nerdo··on Ask HN: Why doesn't Tesla disable all features unless you pay them?
No, Tesla already sold these cars and took people's money. They continue to sell cars the same. This is about charging the existing and new customers $100/mo because it's a number Tesla thought of. It's not for extras it's for all non-legally-required safety functionality- e.g. the tablet screen, a/c, ability to adjust your seat.
nerdo··on Ask HN: Why doesn't Tesla disable all features unless you pay them?
How would it collapse? People will pay $100/mo instead of buying a new car and even then what would they buy? Other car companies will see Tesla getting free money and push their own updates the same.
nerdo··on Ask HN: Why doesn't Tesla disable all features unless you pay them?
Context: I recently had a set of lightbulbs lose all functionality a couple nights ago, now insisting I had to get an account, sign in with 15 character password with certain symbols and mixed case, receive constant marketing emails whether I accept them or not, accept terms of service numbering 10000+ words, and then re-pair the bulbs which could no longer be recognized anyway after long failure attempt cycles. Humiliation ritual complete, bulbs are now e-waste I guess.

$1000 Peloton bike signed out of account and insisted on payment to sign back in at all, though still functions as a $20 salvage bike without any functions.

Is it optimal for all companies to completely cripple products once they've been sold? What's holding them back here?

nerdo··on [dead]
Yes, he’s the poster of the linked video.
nerdo··on Helen Toner shares her side
> Toner maintains that safety wasn’t the reason the board wanted to fire Altman. Rather, it was a lack of trust

> Toner declined to provide specific details on why she and the three others voted to fire Altman from OpenAI

Does she see herself as more trustworthy? She can't even be bothered to give an excuse for the firing.

Someone like this couldn't be trusted in literally any function, how did she get a board seat on OpenAI?

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