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norhi999

37 karma · joined March 2, 2022

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norhi999··on Ask HN: Why do you consider “echo chambers” bad?
Because they:

a. Effortlessly gather people that have similar ideas but don't want to challenge them for their validity and only want peer approval, which they receive. It started mentioned recently mostly because of advent of simple and far-reaching communication means which exacerbated the problem that existed even before that.

b. Implicitly use such approval, clarification and repetition of the same ideas as key ingredients for long-term learning. That's why such communities are all too easy to radicalize, making vague assumptions and feelings into established worldviews, and becoming toxic or even aggressive toward out-groups and out-ideas.

c. Prone to become target for informational poisoning and manipulation as ideas are rarely challenged there.

d. Create and amplify skewed norms because they tend to miss on naturally occurring diversity of opinions.

norhi999··on DeepL
From my experience of couple of differently structured languages' pairs, while the service produces nice sounding translations, about half of them are nice sounding bullshit. And it utterly fails at common onomatopoeias.

In addition it suffers from strange AI brainfarts like duplicating the same word after "and" where there obviously an alternate meaning, totally skipping some key words, generating irrelevant garbage, or not producing even a perfunctory result at all.

So it's generally a step forward over Google Translate, but still needs several layers of manual corrections and switching back to GT to be sufficiently clear.

norhi999··on Using Stable Diffusion's img2img on some old Sierra titles
Those art ML models indeed operate on wrong premise that the input and output images are entirely raster fields, but most of them should actually be considered curve fields with the curves internally extrapolated to complete color or texture filled 3D-shapes by what's known as gestalt principles*, volume estimation from shading etc. What should be raster is only filling textures.

The current approach creates huge limitation of input/output images being like 512x512 small and a whole load of texture-turning-to-shape and vice versa artifacts.

It could be possibly overcome with a paradigm shift, though.

* https://encyclopedia.pub/entry/history/show/399

* http://www.scholarpedia.org/article/Gestalt_principles

norhi999··on Python multi-level break and continue
I don't get why they discarded

for/while... as label1:

__for/while... as label2:

___break label1

suggestion. It actually seems a good enough idea to implement that. And it's rather concise. I often need to break deep inner loops to outermost and doing it with flags is... strange.

norhi999··on One Good Engineer Is Better Than Three Normal Ones
There is such thing as the bus factor*: he/she can get sick, force-major'ed etc. and that will stall any progress whatsoever, as engineers are people too. Plus can't assign one person to a three different tasks/locations that require attention simultaneously.

*https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bus_factor

norhi999··on If your site does not use HTTPS, Rostelecom will insert pro-war propaganda in it
Something like this maybe: https://tools.ietf.org/id/draft-hallambaker-httpintegrity-02... although it's an unimplemented draft.
norhi999··on If your site does not use HTTPS, Rostelecom will insert pro-war propaganda in it
Given its previous history of breaking and slowing connectivity in favor of harder blocking of government-critical sites, I'd say they should've done it way before this. The routes through their nets remind me a black hole.
norhi999··on A GitHub issue where every Russian user was just mentioned
Because the people who would decide to actually reply there are likely either annoyed, trolls or idiots as it looks like obvious flamebait. In no way this helps to resolve any actual problems in any meaningful ways.
norhi999··on Ask HN: Why do I see ads about what I read/write on my offline laptop?
Looks like a typical case of Baader–Meinhof phenomenon* to me.

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frequency_illusion

norhi999··on Researchers control brain circuits from a distance using infrared light
I think this approach is almost impossible to apply to humans, because it needs additional chemical introduced into neurons.
norhi999··on FBI trolls Russian embassy with geotargeted ads for disgruntled spies
Meta is supposed to be blocked in Russia, wouldn't the embassy admins block access to the site from their offices too? And do they allow their personnel to visit such sites in the first place when they are considered illegal or possible source of phishing attacks?
norhi999··on Ask HN: How can the tech community help during this crisis?
The sad truth is - it can't. Because it's not a technical problem, but a socio-political one.

Many IT-people have a bad case of "when you have a hammer everything looks like a nail" moment recently. They try to block, attack, force their points. But the reality is that they won't be able to undo years of propaganda and inter-country tensions with a bunch of badly crafted and delivered messages and measures. Such attempts only make the situation worse.

And I highly doubt any additional sanctions beyond the ones against the government, propagandists, military and oligarchs will do what their implementers expect them to, baring being a moral high ground based self-promotion.

Donating, relocating, employing and providing situational awareness really helps but it addresses symptoms, not the illness itself.

norhi999··on Google stops selling ads in Russia
Common Russian users without adblock be like "spasiba, Google!".
norhi999··on 4 Chinese students, 1 Indian killed by Russian attack on Kharkiv college dorm
Yeah, countries should stop warring and deal with stuff behind negotiation tables. Because during any military confrontation in densely populated areas such things happen, as for reasons: Ukrainian military probably placed some weaponry or relocated a militant group nearby. For objectivity point - Ukraine did the same during the Donbass conflict: https://www.hrw.org/news/2014/07/24/ukraine-unguided-rockets... (legit Human Rights Watch source)
norhi999··on Official Russian Information Agency Newsfeed for past few days (translated)
It looks kinda funny how from their representation of the events Russia does absolutely nothing while the rest of the world suddenly started to harass it. It looks exactly like USSR 2.0.

Also "Benefits for IT-companies will slow down an outflow of personnel from Russia, an expert said". Mhm.

norhi999··on Password Manager for Home Network (free and opensrc)
It looks pretty nice but seems like overengineering because it needs db and node.js for a basic-level local tool.
norhi999··on GitHub needs to disable its Roskomnadzor filter
Which Russian authorities will use as a pretext to IP-block the entire GitHub there...

And that will in no way help the situation in Ukraine while migrating a lot of good programmers off the platform cause nobody wants to use VPN each time they try to access their FOSS project.

norhi999··on Ask HN: Is it better to work on a low-passion project or work on nothing at all?
You can work on the top idea and just fast-forward to finish it when you find a new one. People are time-structuring creatures.
norhi999··on Ask HN: Would it be helpful for websites to geofence Russia?
That's pretty dumb idea, actually. Russians mostly use local sites. To get to them you need to use either mega-services that all the world uses like YouTube, Twitter, Instagram, Google News or TikTok or post on those local sites directly.

Geofencing or network disconnects would turn liberal part of the population, that actually uses foreign sites inside the country, and thus knows the truth of the events already, against you instead, meaning you will actually _help_ Putin giving him more pretexts to use and supporters to rely on. If you aren't planning that in the first place, because it seems rather obvious if you think about it even a little.

Russia needs more unbridled Internet, not less.