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998244353

195 karma · joined September 16, 2022

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998244353··on AI and the Destruction of the Creative Commons
You can watch a lot of TV series online on some random pirate sites by simply googling "show x free online". It doesn't even require the relatively simple technical knowledge of using a BitTorrent client.
998244353··on Anonymous GitHub account mass-dropping undisclosed 0-days
I now use "ASCII em-dashes" by using two hyphens -- like this. Or--if you prefer no spaces--like this.
998244353··on Fake Fans
I cannot understand what you're trying to say at all.
998244353··on Can I run AI locally?
Ok but no one here actually implied that they think like this.
998244353··on No AI* Here – A Response to Mozilla's Next Chapter
YouTube already supports that natively these days, although it's kind of hidden (and knowing Google, it might very well randomly disappear one day). Open the description of the video, scroll down and click "show transcript".
998244353··on Yann LeCun to depart Meta and launch AI startup focused on 'world models'
In that case, how come they "left in the first days of the job" because "they saw what they were going to work on and peaced out"?
998244353··on Nobel Peace Prize 2025: María Corina Machado
I seriously doubt saying "big blond haired baby who likes burger and fascism" instead of "Trump" would have made a difference for these people.
998244353··on At 17, Hannah Cairo solved a major math mystery
No, it's both.

The purpose of high school is to give you a wide foundation on everything.

The purpose of an undergraduate degree (in math) is to give you a wide foundation (in math).

In a (math) PhD, you are generally hyper-specialized in a very, very narrow area (of math).

998244353··on Show HN: Tinder but it's only pictures of my wife and I can only swipe right
What?

This doesn't "need to" exist, it's just a funny parody that someone made.

998244353··on Functions Are Vectors (2023)
No, and this is where this formal notion of basis I mentioned unfortunately diverges from what is perhaps more useful in practice.

You can represent any function f: [-pi, pi] -> R as an infinite sum

    f(x) = sum_(k = 0 to infinity) (a_k sin(kx) + b_k cos(kx))
for some coefficients a_k and b_k as long as f is sufficiently nice (I don't remember the exact condition, sorry).

This is very useful, but the functions sin(x), sin(2x), ... , cos(x), cos(2x), ... don't constitute a basis in the formal sense I mentioned above as you need an infinite sum to represent most functions. It is still often called a basis though.

998244353··on Functions Are Vectors (2023)
The set of all real->real functions is still a vector space.

This vector space also has a basis (even if it is not as useful): there is a (uncountably infinite) subset of real->real functions such that every function can be expressed as a linear combination of a finite number of these basis functions, in exactly one way.

There isn't a clean way to write down this basis, though, as you need to use Zorn's lemma or equivalent to construct it.

998244353··on US Securities and Exchange Commission beginning to bring on DOGE staff
GP's comment was about accepting this actively vs passively, not about being complicit.
998244353··on The Origin of the Pork Taboo
Is there any reference to pigs being possessed with spirits that predate the New Testament?
998244353··on Practical UX for startups surviving without a designer
> This might be okay for consumer apps, but maddeningly, the same doctrine gets applied to enterprise applications as well. I've literally heard non-techie employees of a Fortune 100 company ask for their legacy green screen terminals back because the new, flashy SPA was slowing them down.

Applying general design principles without taking actual use cases into account is the worst.

A common one is putting heaps of whitespace around each cells in a table. Visually appealing, sure. But unusable if I need to look at more than 8 rows at the same time.

998244353··on Happy 20th birthday, Y Combinator
I feel like this is kind of pedantic - if your definition of the word "political" renders their point moot, then clearly they must be using a different definition.

But I understand what you mean. The problem is that 99% of online discussions about politics are not about how it relates to anything else. They are usually the same 5 conversations rehashed over and over again. And for some reason, they are aggressively derailed in that direction.

998244353··on Show HN: Seven39, a social media app that is only open for 3 hours every evening
I once had to solve a captcha in a foreign language because of that. Wasn't something obvious like motorcycles either, it was something like "click on all hamsters" in a grid full of various rodents.
998244353··on Transfinite NIM (the game, not the programming language)
Here's another (seemingly finite) problem being analyzed with the same "Nim but with ordinal numbers" approach: https://codeforces.com/blog/entry/85984
998244353··on Honest Ahmed (2011)
I suppose the point is that it's not the voiceless glottal fricative?

To my ears [ħ] sounds closer to [x] and [χ] than to [h] (even though the place of articulation is closer to [h]), but I'm sure it's different for people who (natively) speak a language with all three.

998244353··on Trying to use Bluesky without getting burned again
> FluffyChat, Nheko, Cinny are all great fully featured apps and separate codebases

Ok, I was mistaken about everything being an Element fork.

To move the goalposts slightly though --- do any of these apps properly support threads (i.e. messages in threads show up in and only in separate views)?

998244353··on Trying to use Bluesky without getting burned again
My team uses Matrix and I must say I'm not satisfied. There are messages that I get a notification for every time I open the app, and "mark as read" buttons that do nothing, especially if you use threads. This is something that has supposedly been fixed many times, but it's one of these persistent issues that keep coming back.

Also, as far as I can tell, there is no real diversity in clients even though Matrix is in principle an open protocol. Everything is either Element or a fork of it, or at least is built on matrix-react-sdk, which makes them all effectively the same.

998244353··on Chatbot hinted a kid should kill his parents over screen time limits: lawsuit
> the kids wouldn't have even been able to download the app, which is explicitly marked as 17+

The kid is 17.

998244353··on A Student's Guide to Writing with ChatGPT
I'm not saying you're wrong, but I wonder if this "missing piece of insight" is at least sometimes an illusion, as in the "monads are like burritos" fallacy [0]. Of course this does not apply if there really is just a missing fact that too many explanations glossed over.

[0] https://byorgey.wordpress.com/2009/01/12/abstraction-intuiti...

998244353··on It's hard to write code for computers, but it's harder to write code for humans
What does a more recent language offer that C# doesn't and that would enable more powerful IDEs?
998244353··on Show HN: Bullshit Remover
That doesn't sound like the original was the Agile manifesto?
998244353··on Facebook Banned Me for Life Because I Help People Use It Less (2021)
In fact, Facebook is so sure they already have everyone that new users are often flagged as suspicious and banned by their automated tools without even doing anything. No other site could afford to do that.
998244353··on Imgpls – An extension to load Imgur images directly
I feel like at this point, browsers should at least not prefer text/html if "open image in new tab" or similar is used.
998244353··on Google removed Organic Maps from the Play Store
You're right that discoverability is not really the issue.

However, I still agree with the GP that if you are not on the Play Store, you lose most of your installations.

If someone has already discovered your app and can't find it on the Play Store, they are more likely to assume that it's not supported on their phone, unavailable in their region or whatever. Even if you explicitly tell them to just download the APK, most people will not do that. Keep in mind that the average user probably doesn't even know that you can install apps from outside the Play Store. Or even if they guess that it's probably possible, they might well perceive it as complicated and sketchy.

998244353··on Isometric Projection in Game Development
As a customer of Kagi, it's better than the current Google but it's still not the Google of 2010. Google sponsoring irrelevant results is one thing, but the bigger issue remains: in 2024, creating a trove of worthless "articles" and optimizing the crap out of search result performance is a viable business model. Even if the SEO is done with mostly Google in mind, Kagi still picks up enough of this junk to be a nuisance. No doubt the same is true for all alternative search engines.
998244353··on Twitter kills its San Francisco headquarters, will relocate to South Bay
I remember it being the case before too. It wasn't unconditional like it is now. For example, I distinctly remember being able to scroll through someone's profile in a normal browser window without being logged in, but in an incognito window, I was immediately told to log in or create an account.

They may have had other heuristics too that led to inconsistent behavior between users. So it should not be so surprising if some people report that that happened even though it didn't happen to others.

998244353··on How the continuum hypothesis could have been a fundamental axiom
It is, and if you choose the number uniformly at random, it's not just "effectively" zero, it is precisely zero.

GP's point, as I understand it, is that it is not actually possible to choose a number from [0, 1] uniformly at random in "real life".

I think you could argue that, e.g. in the dartboard thought experiment, the probability of choosing individual points doesn't really matter: only probabilities of measurable subsets with positive measure matter.

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