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potamic

2,364 karma · joined August 22, 2020

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potamic··on New 'Circadian' Subtype of Depression Affecting 1 in 4 Patients
Breaking news: Guy on internet reduces an enlightening and constructive article to a triviality.

I'm sorry, but you did it first. I mean, being able to show correlation between variables in a formal, peer-reviewed study is something? What else do you expect scientists to do? This is how science works. You take an assumption, gather data supporting the assumption and establish facts from the assumption. You can't expect researchers to go by anecdotes and vibes when coming up with treatments, can you?

potamic··on The Curse of Soldered RAM
LPCAMM2 sockets were supposed to provide all the benefits of soldering while still being a socket. Anyone know the state of adoption?
potamic··on Indian government sites are serving revoked eMudhra certificates
I don't think so, I think the roots are deeply cultural. India is a collectivist society where family hierarchy, community loyalty feature strongly, with sayings like "Do not question elders" widely expressed. A lot of this reflects onto work culture as well, among other places, and you see similar things play out across other collectivist cultures as well. So, while arguing with colleagues who are your peers is fine, you will find people will shut down to a large extent when there's hierarchy involved.

To see first hand how this "Do not question authority" plays out, see this every day meeting [1] at one of the largest banks in India. Disclaimer, this video is not AI generated. Sadly it is not even satire.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_SL8-kW7-5A

potamic··on Ask HN: If the models are so good, why doesn't OpenAI just start 100 companies?
How big are those verticals? When it comes to management consulting, they enjoy the Big 3 fame, but you don't hear much of them outside of that.
potamic··on Tell HN: I unknowingly broke the PHP RCE embargo. I am sorry
It means they agree they are culpable in the specified activity, and are ready to accept its consequences. The consequences depend on the nature of the activity and the actors involved. If the activity was illegal, they agree to be charged with the crime. If the activity was unethical, they agree to be censured by their peers. If the activity was uncompassionate or immoral, they agree that their standing in community may be affected accordingly.

But most importantly, by assigning blame, they have cleared the contention at hand, taking the critical first step towards resolution of the matter. Without this, the issue may simply be stuck in limbo, taking up valuable time and resources and may never be resolved even. By acknowledging their mistake, they also wish to signal to others that they have learnt a peronsal lesson and would try to avoid making the same mistake in future. So it carries a lot of implications and is not an empty phrase at all.

Sure there may be people who throw around the phrase lightly, whether one believes them or not depends on how they are viewed in the eyes of others. So unless there is reason to believe otherwise, I would give them the benefit of doubt. If you want to imagine a world where the concept of "taking responsibility" doesn't exist, look at politicians. Is that how we want our society to function?

potamic··on The Other Epidemic: Trying to get off benzodiazepines
Very interesting!
potamic··on The Other Epidemic: Trying to get off benzodiazepines
Could you elaborate on the nature of the work? I'm really finding it hard to imagine what kind of work would require one to work in the dark at all times.
potamic··on Facebook Pages require paid subscription to post more than two links per month
You can move, but if your followers stay on the same AppView which decided to penalize you, you're effectively ex-communicated.
potamic··on The Other Epidemic: Trying to get off benzodiazepines
Why does this need a black room with no windows?
potamic··on Triplet of 'ghostly' galaxies hints at what dark matter is and isn't
What the article above posits, that dark matter could be stripped out from a galaxy after a collision.
potamic··on How Corruption Got This Bad
The elephant in the room is that the concept of separation of powers has been shown to be a farce. Checks and balances can only work when there is independence between the branches. When a single ruling party is able to influence all three branches, there is concentration of power. And we know very well from history, power corrupts.

This is a problem not just in America but every democracy in the world. Some countries are just fortunate to be blessed with abundance that there's plenty left for everyone even after skimming off the top. But it's a ticking time bomb nonetheless ready to set off when the circumstances align.

I think people need to think about the fundamental structure of government. The three branch system as it functions today in many countries is clearly compromisable. The system needs to change, there must be a better mechanism to guarantee independence and integrity within the branches without the honor system.

potamic··on Triplet of 'ghostly' galaxies hints at what dark matter is and isn't
> If two typical galaxies met in a head-on collision, the dark matter would experience very little friction, or drag, and would keep on rocketing by. But ordinary matter, which interacts using all four fundamental forces, would get all tangled up.

Isn't a galaxy mostly empty space? I thought I read before that when galaxies collide there's actually very little physical contact between the matter. Stars mostly pass through affected predominantly only by change in surrounding gravity. Is this not the case?

potamic··on The Elizabeth Holmes documentary “You Can See Everything” is deceiving
What gets lost more is that Balwani was convicted of defrauding patients, so it's not even like Theranos was absolved of those charges. The kicker is that the CEO and co-founder of a company that has been established to willfully defraud patients somehow managed to escape conviction.
potamic··on Modernizing the VS Code UI
It's perhaps a good time to bring attention to this open issue [1] on vscode from 2015 with thousands of upvotes, hundreds of comments pleading, the collective hive mind losing their minds over how a usability requirement so basic can be left neglected for years altogether even as so many other not so requested features seem to have no problem getting piled on.

While this issue has been a personal pain point, I do recall there were quite a few widely requested usability issues that went unaddressed over the years. So I'm not sure about how to react when I read this blog post about "modernizing" vscode UI in 2026. How can you talk about modernizing and journey through a 5-stage evolution when fundamental aspects are so obviously unaddressed? What is a modern UI anyways and how is it better than ancient UI? What specific advancements in HCI research from the last 10 years are being incorporated here to call the UI modernized?

I have to take a dig at the larger design community because I think this is not an isolated problem. Software usability in general has been going down for me over the years. There was a time when you would hear more from the community about the science of interaction and why you would design an interface in a certain way. Of late I feel the emphasis shifting more towards visual design with things like colors, spacing, border radii etc. with this blog post being a case in point.

If HN were to be launched today, I'm sure it would look nothing like what it does and instead have a more "modern" UI. But, would it be an improvement?

[1] https://github.com/microsoft/vscode/issues/519

potamic··on Danish Supreme Court Finds That AI CSAM Is CSAM
If you cannot tell the difference, you cannot tell the difference. Unfortunate as it may be, the standard of proof for criminal conviction must be high. There's a reason that various legal systems across the world have converged on such principles as proof beyond reasonable doubt, in dubio pro reo, intime conviction etc. basically stating that the legal burden of proof is on the prosecution to present compelling evidence of crime and that the benefit of doubt must go to the accused. It is considered so fundamental and so important that it has made it into the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights which a majority of countries in the world (including Denmark) have ratified. There must no doubt have been painful lessons in history which led humanity to eventually adopt such ideas. We must be careful to forget those and inadvertently take steps going back towards that direction.
potamic··on Redesigning source control at Anthropic
This is why you are not an investor. (Cue McMahon meme), A marketing campaign to get eye balls across all the major tech outlets and take up headspace in everyone's trending feed? Oh yes. A potential, closed source alternative to github you can slowly wrangle your users to move to? Hell yeah. An always online centralized design requiring users to stay connected with the server for every operation? Let's go!
potamic··on Theranos.world
This is an ad for her upcoming, self-starred documentary. So nothing much has changed?
potamic··on Zerobrew: A faster alternative to Homebrew
mise is great with running multiple versions of a package, something I've found not very seamless with brew.
potamic··on Study: Claude, ChatGPT Offer Different Shopping Prices Based on Wealth
Allowing dynamic prices only hurts people with less means who will find themselves wasting a lot of time hunting for the lowest possible price. And businesses may claim to charge based on wealth, but what they will do is charge based on desperation. There are also repercussions on wage, like what's the point of a raise, if I'm going to be paying more for expenses and make the same savings at the end of the day? Fixed prices simply eliminate a lot of inefficiency and headache from the system and prevent everyday shopping from being a cortisol ridden experience for the average person.

Besides, what you're proposing does not result in draining of wealth. It simply moves wealth within the capitalist class and keeps it there. If Bill Gates is paying 150k for a banana at Whole Foods, he's just paying himself because he likely owns a big chunk of equity in Amazon. To fix wealth inequality you have to transfer wealth to the working class. It has to be a tax so that the money moves to the public and is spent for the benefit of the public.

potamic··on Visa, Mastercard, major banks facing new litigation over 'anticompetitive' fees
Countries like India and Brazil have shown that you can successfully run payments infrastructure nationally. Turns out it's not all that difficult or expensive or at all. India's NPCI processes 500m transactions daily with an annual budget of about 50m dollars. They make a profit over that while keeping the system free for a majority of users.

[1] https://www.indiatoday.in/business/story/npci-rs-500-crore-p...

potamic··on A 100x faster* alternative to homebrew
What's the significance of warm speedup in the benchmarks? For most new installs, cache would mostly be empty, shouldn't the cold numbers be more significant for day to day use?
potamic··on Ask HN: Is this the beginning of the end of open source?
> If some vibe-coded clone can compete, can manage updates, win market share, produce value superseding the original does that version not deserve it's share?

I don't mean to judge whether the outcome is better for society over all, but just wondering on the kind of impact it can have on the production side for now. Whether people are going to hesitate going open source and guard their IP in more ways than previously.

potamic··on F-Droid 2.0
The builds are reproducible. Developers can also choose to fetch binaries directly from their repositories, and fdroid will verify that those binaries match the sources. So this is actually safer than downloading directly from developer's repo.

https://f-droid.org/en/docs/Reproducible_Builds

potamic··on F-Droid 2.0
Do you rely on Google Play reviews? Those are known to be highly manipulated and you can find any number of services offering to "boost" your reviews. I personally find online posts where people discuss about some app to have more meaningful feedback on it.
potamic··on AI-generated posters don’t have to be horrible
DDO website is refreshingly clean. Very reminiscent of early 2000's era, it just gets out of your way inviting you to browse through all the content. I wish more websites retained such functional design. The amount of visual stimulus thrown at you these days can be quite overbearing. While I just glanced through pentagram's site, I found myself spending a lot of time going through DDO's pages. They seem to have some really solid articles too. Thanks for sharing!
potamic··on How Hacker News ranking works: scoring, controversy, and penalties (2013)
Do they want to buy your account or do they want you to perform some activity for an incentive? Possible to share some of those emails?
potamic··on AI-generated posters don’t have to be horrible
Going through pentagram's site, their shakespeare in the park posters do give me that AI vibe. Perhaps AI has been trained in many such similar posters, but as a layman, I'd be hard pressed to be able to distinguish these from AI generated ones.

On a side note, I wanted to link that collection here, but unfortunately there's no hyperlink, it just opens in a popup. You'll have to scroll down to the bottom of their home page to find it. I hope for their sake they just overlooked this one thing, because if designers don't see the role of hyperlinks in user experience, I can't take them seriously.

[1] https://www.pentagram.com

potamic··on South Africa is at risk of becoming a mafia state
Even a cursory search will find you literature from respected economists on this subject. There may be debate on how much wealth transfer or the actual impact of it, but there's wide consensus on the fact that there was. Comparing these ideas with flat-earthism is quite extremist, I'm curious if you've reached this conclusion on your own or have been led to it by some sources?

[1] https://cepr.org/voxeu/columns/economic-impact-colonialism

[2] https://economics.mit.edu/sites/default/files/publications/r...

[3] https://monthlyreview.org/articles/the-drain-of-wealth/

[4] https://wid.world/document/unequal-exchange-and-north-south-...

[5] https://ideas.repec.org/p/gnv/wpaper/unige144406.html

potamic··on South Africa is at risk of becoming a mafia state
The first world overcame those problems by extracting obscene amounts of wealth from the third world to make their populations handsomely rich. When you have everything and lead a comfortable life you're more likely to spend your free time at the pub than go enlist with some private gang or militia. If you look at all the places where organised crime is rampant, the common denominator is always extreme poverty. People living a wretched life, unable to meet their basic needs, with no glimmer of hope for their future are just begging to be recruited into a gang for even the smallest of incentives.
potamic··on Ask HN: Are others seeing Google's reCAPTCHA rejecting Firefox users?
How do you know they are spam? I use disposable emails for registration wherever I can, and if there's too much friction I'll just drop it.
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