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Ardon

545 karma · joined April 18, 2016

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Ardon··on StreetComplete on iOS is now in public beta
You accidentally found a good example reason for the rule to exist. It's only relatively recently (2019-2021-ish) that Germany had more pre-slided bread move than unsliced loaves.

Therefore scoping the claim being made with citations actually does improve the wiki's accuracy.

You can say bread is sold pre-sliced accurately in a colloquial sense, but actually making a claim - as an encyclopedia inherently does - should carry information on how general a claim it actually is.

Ardon··on 216M Spy TVs – The LG Smart TV Problem [video]
There really is a lot of processing between the signal and final display. It's pretty common for TVs to ship and then get a firmware update that does actually affect core display functionality.

I'd rather they just shipped finished firmware, but yanno. I got bit on a monitor that has actual firmware bugs but no firmware upgrade path that doesn't involve trying to ship it to a service center.

Ardon··on Grand jury declines to indict Ohio man charged with destroying Flock camera
People don't think the invasion of their privacy will 1. save lives, and 2. not take lives.

Faith in governments is not only low, people are pretty sure any power governments have will be abused.

The equation is a little bigger than that, basically.

Ardon··on Thunderbird's Desktop Calendar Visual Redesign
I still think we don't have good UI for picking start and end times. Anything that doesn't implement clicking and dragging to set events is missing the best way (In my opinion).

Google does it, I wish they went further. The calendar is a visual metaphor for time, let me interact directly with the visual metaphor, let me drag the boxes, resize them, etc.

Ardon··on Gemini 3.7 Flash
I already use GCP and Google for work, and getting an API key was so annoying that even I couldn't be bothered after a while of looking around.

Maybe things there have improved some, but when I was looking it was a huge runaround.

Ardon··on Show HN: Flashpaper – Self-destructing secret sharing with no database
This is very cool. I can't comment on the encryption, but I did want to mention that your page design is pretty bad, which is a shame for something so useful.

It looks AI generated, you can probably paste this into your LLM of choice to improve it.

It has pretty subtle information hierarchy. All the text sizes except for the main heading are withing 15% size of each other. More differentiation here would be the lowest hanging fruit, I think. I'd also say all the text needs to increase in size in general. It's pretty low contrast as well, made worse by the small font size. And some things, like button highlights, are too high-contrast. They pull too strongly away from the rest of the text and flow. You also have a lot of buttons, some of them are even just to pre-fill demo text. I'd cut it way down.

I think the goal should be that the critical path to making a 'burn link' is at the very top of the information hierarchy. Big heading "Your Secret", with very well signposted text box. Big heading "Link Expiration" with a big range slider (with number input.)

(Sliders have the advantage of structurally communicating what you're doing. You fill up the available slider to add more time, you shrink it to have less time.)

The overall idea is that the eye naturally snaps to the next step when the previous one is done with zero effort. Really blast the information and steps into people's brains.

I hope Flashpaper takes off!

Ardon··on Apple defeats liability for not scanning iCloud for CSAM
Yeah, /your/ nation maybe. I wonder if there's any other reasons that could explain this, especially given the pretty uniform distribution of video games, and the extremely uneven distribution of violence.

Oh, and everywhere in your nation? At the same time?

Sorry, I think I have a button.

Ardon··on Matrix Multiplications on GPUs Run Faster When Given “Predictable” Data (2024)
This isn't necessarily true, especially with consumer GPUs. Some actually can clock higher with less voltage. It's pretty rare, and mostly comes from factory overclocked cards. For it to help you need a card that 1. Thermal throttles 2. can sustain its max OC with less voltage than set at the factory. In that rare case you are removing thermal pressure which allows you to clock higher for longer. It's the silicon lottery though, and (often) lazy board partners just smashing the voltage up as high as the chip maker allows. You definitely won't get more performance from a datacenter GPU this way.
Ardon··on The RAM shortage could last years
No one at high levels is capitalist, in ideology or action. An ideological capitalist would be in favor of competition, but these people disdain it and collude regularly. The only 'capitalist' actions they take are by accident, the real goal is as much power/money as possible as fast as possible.

We don't even expect companies to plan long-term anymore, it's just moving wealth as fast as possible.

That isn't really a change, very few people could ever have been said to be ideological capitalists. (capitalist is not a word with a hard definition, but I'm considering it a different thing than the more modern pure libertarian zero-regulation ideology)

Ardon··on OpenAI puts Stargate UK on ice, blames energy costs and red tape
No no, you see, for a government 'leading in AI' is just spending the most money on it.
Ardon··on German implementation of eIDAS will require an Apple/Google account to function
As far as I can tell, people are getting blitzed. People I know are incredibly deep in their personalized bubble and genuinely aren't even hearing about it. It's genuinely distressing. In general and for the future of democracy.
Ardon··on Swiss e-voting pilot can't count 2,048 ballots after decryption failure
I agree with your point that attempts at cheating are inevitable, the rest is confusing though:

We have a long and storied history of coming up with extremely disturbing capitol punishments performed in public, and yet those punishments coexisted with much higher rates of criminality then now.

Stealing from the church in history carried some pretty gruesome deaths, and yet plenty of people still stole from the church, etc.

People are chronically bad at transferring future risk to their current decision making. Any consequence that relies on people being able to model a future problem against their current desires/needs is always going to have a lot of transmission losses. You end up trying to make ever more horrible punishments to overcome the losses in transmission.

I think the goal should be the smallest possible functioning consequence, which is possible by being close to the 'crime'. The very best way is when community can do it immediately. Like if someone does something fucked up, but then their buddies go 'that was fucked up dude', I am very confident this will prevent then from doing it again much more efficiently then a distant jail sentence. (among all the other ways too, there's never one clean action to take to solve problems on a societal level)

Ardon··on Why aren't smart people happier?
Might be useful to ask a different question: What makes people happy?

It's things like relationships, satisfying work, accomplishment. (and many, many more)

Then the real question emerges: How many of those happiness 'sources' are made better by intelligence? What percentage?

Relationships? Seems like no. Work? Also seems like no, lots of work doesn't make use of a high IQ that people enjoy nonetheless. Accomplishment? Strikes me as most likely of the three, but it's also very relative.

And another thought,

Asking why smart people aren't happier is a bit like asking why people who can jump high aren't more empathetic. There's no direct link between the two, you have to dip out to the material conditions. Like: someone who can jump high is fitter > fitter people are healthier > healthier people have more mental time to be empathetic with > people who can jump high are more empathetic. For intelligence, we say smart people are happier. Same thing, happiness is not directly correlated. Instead: Smart people are better able to create the outcomes they want > They select outcomes that make them happy > Their environment makes them happy > Smart people are happier. (These are illustrations of the idea, not actual logical chains or claims.)

Ardon··on Intel Arc Pro B50 GPU Launched at $349 for Compact Workstations
The only well-reviewed DisplayPort KVMs I'm aware of are from Level1Techs: https://www.store.level1techs.com/products/kvm

Not cheap though. And also not 100% caveat-free.

Ardon··on Google deletes net-zero pledge from sustainability website
Yeah that's true.

I was thinking more long term though, deserts see much faster yearly degradation than places with more normal temps. (up to 2-3% compared to the standard 0.5-0.8%)

That's just an economic factor rather than a blocker. PVs are cheap as right now, and could be even cheaper if they weren't tariffed. I wouldn't be surprised if PVs in the desert is nonetheless the right approach right now, and not concentrators.

Ardon··on Google deletes net-zero pledge from sustainability website
The solar panels would overheat (and lose efficiency), since ~80% of the solar energy hitting it is absorbed as (mostly) heat.

Generating solar energy in deserts is often done with a mirror based heating system for this reason.

Ardon··on Goblin.tools: simple, single-task tools to help neurodivergent people with tasks
Backing this one up with my own experience of ADD (I was never hyperactive):

I've tried all the distraction reducing techniques, and the distraction reducing techniques have been tried on me.

In school, I was, at least 70 percent of the time, sent to the isolation desk, facing a wall, only a pencil. This didn't help.

I've tried going to remote cabins, no internet. I've tried no devices. This did not help.

The problem (so far as I've come to understand) is not that I am unusually susceptible to distractions, it's that it's unusually difficult to convert 'needing to do something' into 'focus'.

The problem is not that something derails the train, but that there's no tracks. Starting something does not make it more likely that I'll continue it. Going in a direction doesn't have 'momentum'.

This is very difficult to understand, since it's not really 'a tendency that everyone has but more', it's a different brain. You aren't going to understand it by going 'oh like when I'm distracted', you have to try and create a picture from scratch, not based on your experience, but by listening to people.

Not that what people tell you should be just immediately imported into your worldview, people sure can be wrong about themselves. But you can't necessarily check other people's experiences against your own.

(The word "you" in this comment is referring to the general non-ADHD person)

Ardon··on The Origin of the Pork Taboo
Definitely not ruling it out, it's not 0% for sure. Though as a Canadian I don't think we got it as bad here, so I wouldn't say I really have any idea how big a factor it is. Especially in the USA.
Ardon··on The Origin of the Pork Taboo
Interesting framing, I've seen a similar 'If it's a meal, then where's the meat?' attitude from my own family, I've had some thoughts on where it came from, but I think part of it was escaping poverty in my grandparent's generation, and seeing 'success' as being able to afford meat in the first place.

Meat was then a part of every meal, because doing otherwise would be socially... embarrassing? Not necessarily in a conscious way, but in a way it would be like giving you kids gruel. (Not that I have a problem with savoury oatmeal now :P)

Then my parents grew up in that environment, and it was just part of the landscape of life. Meals have a meat ingredient. Or meat is the meal.

There's a similar resistance to breakfasts that aren't egg-based. (honorable mention oatmeal again for breaking through) Or a similar resistance to eggs as the protein source for dinners, notice it just doesn't happen in north american cooking very much. Happens in other cuisines all the time though.

I don't think it needs to be some deep seated gene-based flaw (at risk of putting words in your mouth) it only needs to be 'normal', and there's massive resistance to changing what's 'normal' when diverging from 'normal' isn't immediately more emotionally or physically comfortable than staying. Sometimes even then, if it makes you an outlier in the social landscape.

Ardon··on OpenAI scrubs diversity commitment web page from its site
I mean Costco kept theirs, and in a lot of cases federal grant money is now contingent on removing it, so this seems like a hasty conclusion.

That being said I'm sure a lot of companies just threw up a statement, maybe a meaningless committee or whatever with no interest in actually changing anything.

Ardon··on Quincy Jones has died
I wonder which way the causal arrow goes? I'm confident more complex (and also excellent) music is being made now than ever before so it wouldn't be a supply problem. Could be a demand problem, or a transit problem, maybe.

It wouldn't be terribly surprising if it's the audience that has dragged things towards simplicity.

Could also be the homogenizing effect of recommendation algorithms that select for mass appeal, a song that everyone likes at an average of 7/10 is selected for way harder than a song that 50% of people like at an average of 9/10.

Ardon··on Open Props – Supercharged CSS Variables
I thought so too, tried putting a max width on the body and centering it. Ended up looking substantially better to my eye.
Ardon··on Xylitol is associated with cardiovascular risk
I wonder how much this generalizes to other sugar alcohols, I've got some erythritol in the cupboard...
Ardon··on Show HN: Peanut Butter Spinner
Also you can mix a tiny bit of xanthan gum in on your initial stir and then it stays mixed. I've never noticed a textural difference.
Ardon··on A Canadian lobby group is promoting "widespread adoption of age verification"
True, but the causal link is hard to demonstrate. There's also a drop in friends, especially close friends. In-person social activity is down across the board.

Not that porn definitely isn't a factor, but I'm pretty certain there's larger factors at play.

Ardon··on Show HN: Kyoo – Self-hosted media browser (Jellyfin/Plex alternative)
For anyone who's game to run another service for audiobooks, I've found Audiobookshelf to be pretty good: https://github.com/advplyr/audiobookshelf
Ardon··on Steve Wozniak and Stuart Brand Discuss Control of IP (1984) [video]
It doesn't really need to be them doing the studying, making the code viewable allows end-users to choose who to trust or to get second opinions, instead of only having the word of the company producing the software.

One or multiple people who can study the software, even in small numbers, are still adding more information, and so more potential trust, than the alternative.

Ardon··on On being listed as an artist whose work was used to train Midjourney
I think it it's a reference to the media landscape, Facebook and OpenAI inclusive.
Ardon··on Cities: Skylines 2's troubled launch, and why simulation games are freaking hard
I know what you mean, it starts to feel like software, instead of a game if that makes sense.
Ardon··on FTC Chair Lina Khan looks for allies and leads in Silicon Valley charm offensive
I mean to call her ineffective we'd need to know how hard the task is. Given the FTC has been a regular target of budget gutting and having hostile chairs appointed for decades, we don't have that information.
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