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pharrington

2,634 karma · joined December 30, 2010

Create video game. Play video game.

xenogenesis@gmail.com

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pharrington··on The Rise and Fall of Music Ringtones: A Statistical Analysis
I have a much better hypothesis, and I will not support it with an errorprone statistical analysis. Custom ringtones are less popular because phone UI developers made it harder to customize ringtones.
pharrington··on PuTTY has a new website
The man himself also posted about it on his social media https://hachyderm.io/@simontatham/115025974777386803
pharrington··on GPT-5
No problem. The AI runs the company, and the CEO still gets all of the money!
pharrington··on FDA approves eye drops that fix near vision without glasses
When you navigate to the Clinical Trials section[1], the "View Clinical Trials Guidance Document" link[2] currently stalls, and then gives a 403 error page that says "Page Not Found". All of the information is not there on fda.gov, and whoever's in charge is doing a very sloppy job.

[1]https://www.fda.gov/science-research/science-and-research-sp...

[2]https://www.fda.gov/node/358362

pharrington··on AI is a floor raiser, not a ceiling raiser
Large Language Models aren't general AIs. Its in the name.
pharrington··on My 2.5 year old laptop can write Space Invaders in JavaScript now (GLM-4.5 Air)
No preexisting framework.
pharrington··on How We Rooted Copilot
It's called "I use the software, I already want to improve the software I'm using, so after I improve it I'll contribute the improvements I've already made to the broader community."

Granted, I myself have been guilty of not giving back to the open source community this way in the past, but I won't pretend that was reasonable or ethical of me!

edit: after reading some commemnts, i realize i may have meant to say "free software" instead of "open source"

pharrington··on There is no memory safety without thread safety
Your fantasy language doesn't have a race condition.
pharrington··on Show HN: Tinder but it's only pictures of my wife and I can only swipe right
PHRASING?
pharrington··on Don't animate height
You can animate height without forcing a relayout, as long as the element is out of the document flow.
pharrington··on I watched Gemini CLI hallucinate and delete my files
Big enough to peddle broken AI software to billions of people. The entire subject of this thread.
pharrington··on I watched Gemini CLI hallucinate and delete my files
A failed CEO is not a CEO, just as a failed mkdir command does not actually create a directory! Anyone can call themselves anything they want. You can also call yourself the queen of France! Just say or type the words.

I'm talking about the difference between filling out some government form, and the real social power of being the executive of a functioning company.

pharrington··on I watched Gemini CLI hallucinate and delete my files
You're right, being a CEO doesn't mean someone's necessarily right or wrong. But it does mean they have a disproportionate amount of socioeconomic power. Have we all forgotten "with great power comes great responsibility"?

saying "You can become a CEO too if you found a company and take that role" is just like saying you too can become a billionaire if you just did something that gets you a billion dollars. Without actually explaining what you have to do get that role, the statement is meaningless to the point of being wrong.

pharrington··on I watched Gemini CLI hallucinate and delete my files
Individuals trying to avoid the garbage products is one side of the social relation. Another side of the social relation is the multibillion dollar company actively warring for you attention—flooding all of your information sources and abusing every psychological tool in its kit to get you to buy into their garbage products. Informed individuals have a small amount of fault, but the overwhelming fault is with Google, Claude, etc.
pharrington··on AI comes up with bizarre physics experiments, but they work
I'll bet that almost everyone who reads Quanta Magazine knows what they mean by AI.
pharrington··on AccountingBench: Evaluating LLMs on real long-horizon business tasks
"a better auto complete" than what, specifically?
pharrington··on Zig's New Async I/O
Stockholm syndrome? Many years ago, I was specifically wanting a programming language where I could specify an allocator as a parameter! That's one of Zig's selling points.
pharrington··on Bypassing Google's big anti-adblock update
Billions of non-programmers, who have no idea what an extension manifest even is, use Chrome.
pharrington··on Vibe-Coding a PCB – surprisingly good
Shouldnt this new labeled as a "Show HN"?
pharrington··on Linda Yaccarino is leaving X
Legacy means having a lasting impact on society or culture. As another example, the average Joe Schmoe has no clue that Fabrice Bellard even exists, yet Bellard inarguably has one helluva legacy.

On the other hand, there are many people who are famous, but will probably leave no legacy.

pharrington··on A new law in Sweden makes it illegal to buy custom adult content
Sometimes you just miss!
pharrington··on A new law in Sweden makes it illegal to buy custom adult content
Why did you say 12 year olds, ie children, instead of adults?
pharrington··on The Moat of Low Status
I absolutely would want someone who's becoming a surgeon or pilot to ask the "stupid questions." This discussion is about growth and change over time as a person.
pharrington··on Managing time when time doesn't exist
While I think I now understand what you're going for, remember that the overwhelming amount of people who will now read this don't have the scientific knowledge to understand your blog's sarcastic tone. I know I didn't have a clue that your post was a deliberate joke until reading your comments here!
pharrington··on Managing time when time doesn't exist
"in the rigorous scientific sense where quantum gravity’s most fundamental equations contain absolutely no time variable whatsoever"

Immediate BS. Rigorous science doesn't have a model of quantum gravity, because they're trying to find one.

edit: did not know that this blog was sarcastic

pharrington··on Officials concede they don't know the fate of Iran's uranium stockpile
Yes, that happened 5 years after Trump unilaterally destroyed the Iran nuclear weapons ban deal.
pharrington··on The hamburger-menu icon today: Is it recognizable?
Absolutely just use the word "MENU" instead, if the button's already in a textual interface. And if not, labeling the hamburger is almost always better than leaving it naked. But I think there are better overall solutions to be found outside of the local maximum, if you will.
pharrington··on The hamburger-menu icon today: Is it recognizable?
Hamburger is pretty bad, but we adjust if the pattern is repeated enough.

Which means we can also adjust to a waaaay better alternative to the hamburger menu (but i dont know what that is rn).

pharrington··on The Renegade Richard Foreman
He certainly gave interviews to people who'd then write biographies pseudonymously under Fenymans own name, but I'm not aware of any autobiographical stuff he wrote. What are some works he self-published pseudonymously?
pharrington··on Quantum mechanics provide truly random numbers on demand
This is a press release for the University of Colorado's CURBy - CU Randomness Beacon @ https://random.colorado.edu/
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