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pj1115

29 karma · joined October 23, 2019

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pj1115··on Apple’s grey list: Words and phrases your iPhone won’t help you spell
The problem is not accuracy -- the words from the problem phrases are never suggested either. Worse, on the three-word phrases, iOS goes back and changes earlier words to avoid completing the phrase, and removes the original from the suggestions.

I tried typing "propaganda" ten times with 100% accuracy. When it's preceded with "[left] wing", the accuracy drops to 0%.

pj1115··on Apple’s grey list: Words and phrases your iPhone won’t help you spell
I'm a pretty quick and accurate swipe typer, and it's so frustrating to repeatedly get the wrong result and get NO signal that it's not my error, meaning I usually try one or two more times.

Picked at random: "right wing propaganda" isn't severe enough a phrase that I instinctively know I'm hitting a swear filter. After swiping the last word iOS goes back and changes the second word to "Wong". In order to understand what was happening and then fix it, I had to backspace (deleting the whole phrase), re-swipe both words, backspace, re-swipe both words again, double tap the incorrect word, backspace, type the word, tap to return to the end of the sentence, and hit space. All to fix one letter.

If this was really about protecting people from accidentally typing these that might land them in hot water, why wouldn't iOS at least offer the word it knew I wanted in the suggestion bar?

pj1115··on Show HN: I built an online productivity tools website
I wish you the best, but you do not have a product to monetise yet.

IMO: if your goal is to attract users or to make money, you have too many strong free competitors to be using ads like this, especially if your audience read Hacker News. It's not the right business model. Any amount of time spent making these ads 'smoother' is better spent on the product, because you won't earn enough ad revenue to make it worth it.

If you need revenue to pay for hosting, you'd be better off making it open source or self-hostable.

If your goal is getting feedback, you have to recognise that people are doing it for you, not for them. Don't make them pay you to do it.

pj1115··on Show HN: I built an online productivity tools website
I'm not sure I agree with 'minimal ads'. On a 27" monitor, 3 banners and an ads privacy pop-up don't take up much screen real estate, but visually some pages have as much ad as content. It's not a great experience when you're competing with other free (or OSS) products. If you're really only looking for feedback, you might have better luck if you aren't trying to monetising the people giving up their time!

Congrats on building this for yourself, I can certainly see the benefit of building writing tools to suit your own needs.

pj1115··on I built an open source AI tool to find my autoimmune disease
I'm not clear on the timeline - did the patient use a tool to help doc get to a diagnosis, or did this happen in retrospect? My read is the medical profession did, but it took longer to get there. The tool is redeemed in this case because it landed on the same (correct) diagnosis as the rheumatologist, using the test results, notes and diagnostic journey that resulted from $100K and 30 hospital visits.
pj1115··on I built an open source AI tool to find my autoimmune disease
This is super cool, but maybe it's important to distinguish projects like this from frontier medical AI research (i.e. new models). This however does exactly what lots of health advocates and even pharma companies have been getting at for decades: informed doctor-patient discussion and patient self-advocacy. Organising and interpreting medical records is an awesome use case.

I imagine any potential user of a tool in this state would know what be wary of, but I do worry a little that LLMs have been trained on bad health advice or misinfo, and there will be very limited training data from real patient diagnoses. Even if dangerous data is minuscule in training terms, can good prompting de-risk dangerously bad advice?

pj1115··on FDA proposes ending use of oral phenylephrine as OTC nasal decongestant
Pseudoephedrine, banned? That's news to me, I bought some OTC a couple of weeks ago.
pj1115··on Ask HN: What's the most creative 'useless' program you've ever written?
I found this just yesterday! I'm sure one could build something better with recent models, but I think the approach is solid.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uWZu3rnj-kQ

pj1115··on Tell HN: Uber has blocked my account for years, won't tell me why
I had the same thing happen in my city. After I had been waiting for 20-30 minutes, I was attacked by a stranger and left unconscious and bloody in a nearby alleyway. After explaining this to Uber, they informed me that the 'no-show' fee I was charged would stand. It wasn't their fault I was attacked, but I will never use Uber again.
pj1115··on Pausing “Instagram Kids” and building parental supervision tools
As I get closer to thirty years old, the idea of a person or machine asking for a grown-up to verify my identity gives me feelings that are more mixed than I expected.
pj1115··on Pausing “Instagram Kids” and building parental supervision tools
I think this is the better question - will teens stop participating in grown-up spaces just because there's a 'safe' version just for them?

However, for younger kids (say, 5-11) I think a separate environment is the best solution. Up to a certain point, parents have more influence on what their child does. For all its problems, most parents I know are comfortable with YouTube Kids because it's the lesser of two evils. I know that my child is going to participate in social media either way, so I want them to do it in a sandbox until the day I don't get a say.

pj1115··on WhatsApp moderators can read your messages if someone you talk to reports them
It's in their "Security and Privacy" FAQ, for one: https://faq.whatsapp.com/general/security-and-privacy/about-...
pj1115··on The unusual ways Western parents raise children
I was trying to say that this is common in Japan, where poverty is almost certainly not the major factor. A counter to the parent comment's assertion. Should have been clearer.
pj1115··on The unusual ways Western parents raise children
I think you'd find some evidence for historical poverty being one factor of several in cultural practices of bed sharing. Japan would be a notable exception (plenty of co-sleeping, unremarkable poverty rate).

I also don't think it has become much less common in communities where poverty levels have fallen. Anecdotally, my SO is part of a community originally displaced from India and now settled all over the world, where members have disproportionately become very wealthy. Bed sharing is absolutely the norm in those households, much to my distress when we visit her family!

pj1115··on Firefox Relay
This looks great. What I couldn't easily find for any of these services was a comparison with just using a catch-all address. I already have that in place. What sold SimpleLogin and AnonAddy for you?
pj1115··on Zoom iOS app sends data to Facebook even if you don’t have a Facebook account
If you 'supervise' your iPhone you can also configure an adblocker with a proxy auto-config. Less fiddly than a VPN but harder to customise! Supervising requires a wipe too. https://github.com/essandess/easylist-pac-privoxy
pj1115··on Can a USR command damage a ZX Spectrum?
That's great. Any articles about the Gamecube issue? I can't find any info.
pj1115··on U.S. senators want social media users to be able to take their data with them
If I want to migrate my "list" to another network, wouldn't I need to take some form of PII (and therefore consent) from each person on the list to make it valuable on the new network?