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DannyPage

772 karma · joined December 23, 2011

http://danny.page
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DannyPage··on The Board Game of the Alpha Nerds (2014)
I clicked and hoped it was Diplomacy. I'm so glad to be right. I've only played it once 20 years ago in high school, and it was a remarkable experience that I'm not sure I'll be able to repeat. You and a few folks have to really dedicate the entire day to it to get the most out of it, something that is very hard to do now as a parent and with many possible distractions within reach.
DannyPage··on V1.1 state of open source- OS 4.4 months behind frontier [pdf]
> Read what follows as a map: where open AI is winning — some numbers surprised even us — and where it is exposed. A case that hides its weak points is an advertisement. In the six weeks since our first draft, a major US lab returned to open weights and Washington debated a ban and declined it. The map moved while we drew it.

Some interesting numbers throughout, but I'd love to read the presentation without the obvious Claudeisms.

DannyPage··on AI Data Centers Are Driving Up Power Bills – This Map Shows Where
Crap article. Why is it filled with LLM-isms?

- "The state-level numbers make that abstract claim concrete"

- "That’s not a market failure. That’s a policy choice."

And the map doesn't seem to link with the information in the article, and states like Hawaii don't link up at all with the points made. Very little data to back it up too, and instead it's linking to its own site. One weird example is when Microsoft is mentioned in regard to covering its own costs, but the link goes to an article about a protest at a Microsoft data center and has nothing to do with the pledge.

A brief skim of a few other articles on the site have similar issues. Is there a way to ignore or down-vote an entire domain?

DannyPage··on Jerry's Map
First found out about Jerry’s Map over 10 years ago thanks to this video on Vimeo and it really stuck with me. Glad to see the project continue. Also I miss finding these smaller documentaries on the site, so many neat subjects covered before Youtube became the home of all things video.

https://vimeo.com/13596774

DannyPage··on 1-Bit Bonsai Image 4B Image Generation for Local Devices
Not as much competition on the weekend?
DannyPage··on A statement from members of the Toki Pona community
I think the statement is more for folks who may have happened across her profiles or the website itself and would be rightly confused if they saw a big change. I've seen similar episodes with friends and it's extremely hard to get them out of it, if at all, for reasons noted in the post. I hope they get the help they need.

Compare the tweets now versus the profile from a few years ago: https://x.com/tokipona vs https://web.archive.org/web/20220511012717/https://twitter.c...

Other links: https://tokipona.org/ https://bsky.app/profile/tokipona.org

DannyPage··on ArsTechnica seemingly using AI to write an article about AI impersonation
https://arstechnica.com/civis/threads/journalistic-standards...

> We have pulled the story over concerns that it may have gone against our content policies. I locked the comments, and I'm going to lock this one too, we need some time. We are doing an investigation right now to figure out exactly what happened.

DannyPage··on Custom Firmware for the MZ-RH1 – Ready for Testing
It's a great combination of physical and digital. Similar to vinyl records, having a resurgence, MiniDisc really stands out as a very good portable physical solution:

- MiniDiscs are easier to write/re-write than CDs if you have a NetMD capable device, just load up https://web.minidisc.wiki/ in your browser and MP3s will get converted for the disc. - Smaller and more robust than CDs - Feels very "RetroFuturistic" compared to cassettes and records, if MP3 players hadn't taken off, it could have easily been the next big format

DannyPage··on Custom Firmware for the MZ-RH1 – Ready for Testing
I’m so glad Minidisc is having a resurgence. I don’t know if I’ll end up getting a MZ-RH1, but for the lucky folks who do, nice to see they’ll get some nice QoL upgrades!
DannyPage··on 221 Cannon is Not For Sale
Owning a vacant lot far from where you live seems to come with some risks. In Hawaii, a woman found out that a house was built on the wrong lot and inspectors missed it until the completed house was being sold. I'm curious if there are other proactive measures folks could take to ensure that doesn't happen to their land.

https://www.sfgate.com/hawaii/article/hawaii-home-built-on-w...

DannyPage··on Co-founder Joe Lonsdale: Palantir was founded to kill communists
The Communists defeated the Nazis in World War II, so that's a big point in their favor.
DannyPage··on Are Apple gift cards safe to redeem?
> Update 18 December 2025: We’re back! A lovely man from Singapore, working for Apple Executive Relations, who has been calling me every so often for a couple of days, has let me know it’s all fixed. It looks like the gift card I tried to redeem, which did not work for me, and did not credit my account, was already redeemed in some way (sounds like classic gift card tampering), and my account was caught by that. Obviously it’s unacceptable that this can happen, and I’m still trying to get more information out of him, but at least things are now mostly working.

It’s great that it has been resolved, but I’m still baffled by a number of things:

1) Why would redeeming a bad gift card result in a complete shut-down of the account? 2) Why is it seemingly impossible to get any support now unless you drum up a ton of press? 3) Should companies be restricted from growing too large where they can’t support their customers?

In my personal and professional experience, banks are the only companies that seem to actually know how to handle these issues appropriately when it comes to fraud or access. Rather than move to outright banning the account, there are intermediate steps that can be taken. Personal example, my Facebook account was recently banned because a hacker accessed my account uploaded a bad ID when FB requested an ID verification. Despite the request coming from a country I have never visited and would likely be on any high-risk list, my 20 year old account was banned literally overnight without having any recourse. There’s no number or even any email to use. Maybe I can see if the Register will write it up… (I do have all the info from my Facebook account download to show how it was compromised, and any internal support should have been able to see the same… if they cared.)

DannyPage··on The Typeframe PX-88 Portable Computing System
The website design and product reminds me of the c100 - https://caligra.com/

But this makes a lot more sense, can DIY, and uses the full body with the embedded touchscreen.

DannyPage··on No more O'Reilly subscriptions for me
You can quite often get a $300 yearly sub to O'Reilly, they run a discount ~4 times a year.

That said, like a lot of other content subscriptions, it can be quite anxiety inducing to make it seem like you're getting your money's worth. I've gotten the sub via my work, and I think the labs and videos are quite good, plus the occasional opportunities to do live-chats with the authors. But you have to sift through a lot of content and dedicate a lot of hours to use them. For most folks, I think buying a few technical books a year as needed would be a much better use of time and money.

DannyPage··on The Programmer Identity Crisis
The article itself is very skeptical of AI, so I highly doubt that's the case.

Also in the footer: "Everything on this website—emdash and all—is created by a human."

DannyPage··on Talk Python in Production
But there was no care in the images, which made me skeptical of the content. The free chapters are also poorly written. It reads like he dictated the content and didn't do a single review pass on it. The Docker Compose chapter especially is very light on details and doesn't explain how to use the various features and what tradeoffs or issues you may encounter. Like the AI images, the whole product feels rushed and haphazard and lacking in quality.
DannyPage··on Brutalita Sans: An Experimental Font and Font Editor
It would also help to indicate which dot is starting point and which is the ending point.
DannyPage··on Ruby Central's Attack on RubyGems [pdf]
> We want to express our deep gratitude to the many cohorts of maintainers who have contributed to Bundler and RubyGems over the past two decades. Ruby tooling would not be what it is today without their dedication and leadership. Their work laid much of the foundation we are building on today, and we are committed to carrying that legacy forward with the same spirit of *openness and collaboration*

- The bolded part doesn’t track with locking out the entire team without notice or explanation.

- “Thanks for the hard work, the adults will take it from here” rarely works out.

DannyPage··on Iceberg, the Right Idea – The Wrong Spec
We just finished implementing Iceberg on top of a large set of Parquet files, stored in S3. It’s a neat idea to be able to turn a lot of data files into a SQL database, but I absolutely understand the pain and confusion the author writes, especially around how it handles metadata. It creates a lot of those files and makes a large mess of the directory. Some queries that I know would return a single parquet file take up to 30 seconds.

I don’t think we’ll scrap it and there are certainly ways to speed up the problematic aspects of querying the catalog, but I’m also rooting for DuckLake to make it a lot more approachable by not completely shying away from the database as an idea.

DannyPage··on Improving River Simulation
Very cool project! Going to try having it on a separate monitor this week and watch it develop. In case other folks were looking for the download link (and code!), it’s here: https://github.com/JonathanCRH/Undiscovered_Worlds_Classic
DannyPage··on RSS Server Side Reader
Interesting idea, but it mentions the idea of notifications. Is the notification when happens to be new article is at the top on the page? Or is there an external service he forgot to metnion?
DannyPage··on Should we design for iffy internet?
A big focus is (rightly) on rural areas, but mobile internet packet loss can also a big issue in cities or places where there are a lot of users. It's very frustrating to be technically online, but effectively offline. An example: Using Spotify on a subway works terribly until you go into Airplane mode, and then it suddenly works correctly with your offline music.
DannyPage··on Research suggests Big Bang may have taken place inside a black hole
Asimov already covered this in The Last Question: https://users.ece.cmu.edu/~gamvrosi/thelastq.html
DannyPage··on We’ll be ending web hosting for your apps on Glitch
I really enjoyed using Glitch as it allowed me to quickly publish and iterate on various experiments or try out new libraries like Datasette or HTMX.

I am curious what Glitch will look like after July. If they aren’t hosting apps, will they still be hosting code and letting it deploy elsewhere? It says it’s not a full shutdown, but it doesn’t appear to say what will be left to do on Glitch after that date.

DannyPage··on Show HN: memEx, a personal knowledge base inspired by zettlekasten and org-mode
Found some documentation & sample website that answers a few of my questions, but I’d love to know more about pipelines and how they work with your notes. https://memex.bubbletea.dev/faq
DannyPage··on Apache ECharts + Leaflet + shadcn for data viz
I would agree: this is a nice showcase for Evidence’s charts and the title should reflect that.
DannyPage··on Mountains, Cliffs, and Caves: A Guide to Using Perlin Noise for Procedural Gen
I really wish the header image used ProcGen to create a landscape image, rather than Yet Another OpenAI Image that sours me on the article as a reader before I start to read it. It sells the wrong idea and makes me distrust the author.
DannyPage··on Lynx: Open Source Native Cross Platform framework used in TikTok
Open-sourcing is/was the perfect time to change it. Otherwise it might be even more painful if a name change is needed later.
DannyPage··on Understanding Smallpond and 3FS
“Releases” is used in the article - instead of “drops” - and would be a clearer title.
DannyPage··on Mark Cuban offers to fund former 18F employees
Mark Cuban is welcome to advocate for a wealth tax that can fund 18f and many other portions of the government, while keeping it public and free of interference from private billionaires.
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