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peterclary

510 karma · joined October 14, 2011

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peterclary··on Big Tech ruined the cloud, so we're renaming ours
You can choose whether to make a user an admin, and you can specify certain dashboards to be admin only. My wall panels are all logged in with a non-admin user specific to that panel, set to show only what I want anyone to access.

Some of us in the family are logged into dashboards on our phones with different users, which update depending on which room we are in.

If you want to gate access to certain functionality on a dashboard designed for a common area, you would need to route to a different dashboard upon providing some kind of authorisation, e.g. an onscreen PIN pad.

Happy to discuss.

peterclary··on A deadly fungus that can infect cats and people is spreading
"We report the first three cases of cat-transmitted sporotrichosis caused by Sporothrix brasiliensis outside South America, and the first ever cases of cat-transmitted sporotrichosis *in the United Kingdom*".
peterclary··on Shame them, shun them, ban them, beat them
A thought-provoking piece, albeit a depressing one, because we've been cooking for decades in the fetid juices of compassion-destroying propaganda (largely to support unfettered capitalism), and the diagnosis here suggests that trying to "uncook" society is impossible; some kind of lightning bolt would be the only salvation and I cannot imagine what that would look like.
peterclary··on What is a database transaction?
Looks like the author is geoblocking in protest of the UK Online Safety Act (and fair enough).
peterclary··on Tell HN: Happy Thanksgiving
14 years here. Thanks @dang and @tomhow.
peterclary··on The staff ate it later
"That's the hoof! That's the best part of the stew! Oh, man, think of it as a marrow nugget wrapped in a thick toenail."
peterclary··on Pebble Time 2 Design Reveal [video]
Fellow Home Assistant/Apple Home user here.

You may already be aware, but Apple Home/Siri can talk to Home Assistant directly using https://www.home-assistant.io/integrations/homekit/ which is how I have it set up. You can also have HomeKit devices paired directly with an instance of the HomeKit Bridge, or expose devices in your Apple Home to Home Assistant.

Out of interest, what API access are you missing?

peterclary··on Show HN: I built an AI that turns any book into a text adventure game
Feels like only a couple of years before AIs can take a movie and reconstruct it entirely as an "open world" VR experience.
peterclary··on Self-hosting your own media considered harmful according to YouTube
Even if you don't care about those people, what about the people who would be affected by them? A would-be bomb-maker might only blow themselves up, or they may kill many in a crowd. Somebody walking around with a deadly pathogen infects and kills others. Children die because their parents believe in anti-vax nonsense. Individual freedom ends at the point at which it causes real harm to other people.

Also, you know who tends to be most in favour of "let stupid people face the consequences of their poor choices"? Those who want to profit from those people and their choices.

peterclary··on The Darwin Gödel Machine: AI that improves itself by rewriting its own code
Too few people recognise this. Corporations are already the unrelenting paperclip machine of AI thought experiment.

God knows what hope we could have of getting AIs to align with "human values" when most humans don't.

peterclary··on Robin: A multi-agent system for automating scientific discovery
Will we have AIs doing an increasing amount of the research, theory and even publication, with human scientists increasingly relegated to doing experiments under their direction?
peterclary··on Meta torrented & seeded 81.7 TB dataset containing copyrighted data
I strongly urge people to read Thomas Babington Macaulay's speeches on copyright, its aims, terms, and hazards. Very well reasoned and explained.

In particular, people often cited the case of authors who had died leaving a family in destitution, and claimed that copyright extension would be a fair way of preventing this, but in most cases the remaining family had never held the copyright; the author had initally sold the reproduction rights to a publisher who had then sat on the work without publishing it. The author, driven into penury, was then induced to sell the copyright to the publisher outright for a pittance. So in such cases a copyright extension only benefited the publisher, and indeed increased their incentive to extort the copyright.

peterclary··on How French Drains Work
That isn’t my experience. We own a 15th C house which was originally a coaching inn beside the main road, which ran along the bottom of a hill.
peterclary··on Uncovered Euripides fragments are 'kind of a big deal'
I only regret that several of my old Classics masters are no longer around to celebrate this.
peterclary··on EU Council has withdrawn the vote on Chat Control
We used to have some very nice beaches, but unfortunately the Tory government thought it would be a great idea to allow water companies to discharge sewage into the waterways at will (because shareholders), so I personally wouldn't take the chance nowadays, although it doesn't seem to bother everyone.
peterclary··on The 'Compact' Version of Stable Diffusion 3 Is Generating Monstrous Human Bodies
“I have no mouth and I must scream” territory.
peterclary··on I was at the clapperboard for Orson Welles' drunk wine commercial (2021)
Given that Welles agreed to do the outtakes to prove incapacity for insurance purposes, I wonder whether he'd hammed it up a bit to be sure that they met the necessary bar.
peterclary··on OpenAI board in discussions with Sam Altman to return as CEO
Pretty sure that Sutskever understands the technology, and it looks like he persuaded the others.
peterclary··on Unity announces layoffs despite increased revenue and reduced losses
In other words, they keep cargo-culting it, claiming responsibility for the wins and blaming staff, the economy, etc. for the losses.
peterclary··on Why the Culture Wins: An Appreciation of Iain M. Banks (2017)
I met Mr Banks once (empty bookshop signing) and he told me that he wrote the Culture books because he was sick of so much popular SF being “capitalism in space”.
peterclary··on Framework’s computers aren’t perfect, but they are exciting
The Framework laptop is particularly good if you have a family member who is clumsy or accident-prone because replacing the input cover (keyboard plus touchpad etc.) is dead simple. Replacing the screen is only slightly more complicated. You can replace the keyboard in isolation if you want or need to but that involves a lot more screws and is more fiddly so if you can afford the extra price for the whole input cover it may be worth saving the trouble.

He has had it for about 6 months now and he absolutely loves it. I'm about to replace the hinges with the stiffer variants.

No regrets whatsoever.

peterclary··on 200-year old heat pump technology is back
What is the impact on the immediate local environment? Drawing the heat out of the ground throughout the year surely means the ground will be colder going into winter. What impact does that have on plants, insects and small mammals when they are overwintering in the ground, etc? And what is the knock-on effect from that?
peterclary··on Why VR/AR gets farther away as it comes into focus
Some of this is people wanting to recreate the artificial scarcity of the real world so that they can profit from it, see the recent land rush in some nascent proto-Metaverse platforms, where people are betting that their purchase will have some medium-term value and an appreciating long-term value.

But this is also similar to the idea that some people want their MMORPGs to have a single, non-sharded instance, where everybody can play at once, which sounds hellish to me TBH. Millions of people all competing for the same items, quests, etc. If you were offered a VR version of Disneyland, which would you prefer? One where there were very few people and you could walk more or less directly onto the rides? Or one where the streets are packed and the queue times are multiple-hours long?

The rush to reproduce these less desirable experiences in VR is utterly depressing, and for that matter the descriptions of The Street in Snow Crash didn't sound that appealing to me either.

peterclary··on ‘Perpetual broths’ that simmer for decades
Reminiscent of Rincewind's roll-up cigarettes made from fragments of old roll-ups: "The implacable law of averages therefore dictated that some of that tobacco had been smoked almost continuously for many years now."
peterclary··on Dragon’s teeth – Stopping tanks in their tracks
There are Dragon's Teeth on the banks of the River Wey behind Waverley Abbey in Surrey, England. https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Dragon%27s_Teeth,_Wa...
peterclary··on David Chalmers considers the possibilities of VR
https://mud.co.uk/richard/How%20to%20Be%20a%20God.pdf
peterclary··on David Chalmers considers the possibilities of VR
Link for Richard A Bartle's “How to Be a God”:

https://mud.co.uk/richard/How%20to%20Be%20a%20God.pdf

peterclary··on Google doesn't want to pay Sonos for technology it copied
I wonder if this also explains the weird >1 year delay for Denon adding the promised wireless speaker grouping support to its Soundbar 550.
peterclary··on Pentagon and CIA shaped thousands of Hollywood movies into effective propaganda
Paging Dr Susan Calvin...
peterclary··on Never Been Seen: Science Museum Group Collection
This one has lots of linked records under it: https://collection.sciencemuseumgroup.org.uk/documents/aa110...

Including the interestingly-named "Works photographic negative of fan house before explosion, Hulton": https://collection.sciencemuseumgroup.org.uk/documents/aa110...

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