HNHacker News
TopNewBestAskShowJobs

Fernicia

391 karma · joined November 18, 2013

submissionscomments
Fernicia··on Rules of good social skills (2025)
I take it to mean upsetting the flow of conversation.

For example, suppose you're at a party, talking in depth about a football team's season and they say something unrelated like "Oh by the way have you seen John?". It is usually a polite way to try to wrap up a conversation. A polite response would be something that graciously gives them permission to change the subject or leave, for example, "I think I saw him outside, maybe go take a look?".

Sometimes it takes the form of bored body language and sentences that don't lead the conversation onwards, e.g. "Yeah that's crazy" or "Well, what can you do...". In that scenario I like to give the conversation a respectable death, e.g. "Well, all we can do is hope for a better season in 2027!".

Fernicia··on The labor share of income in the US is at its lowest post-war level
[Citation needed]
Fernicia··on The real cost of owning a home
> Unless you think landlords are running a charity, some part of your mortgage is going to them as profit (over a large enough sample of renters anyways), and some percentage of your rent is covering 'bad tenants' (which you're not, right?).

You can make the same argument about a bank not being a charity and making a profit from selling you a mortgage (both are true but are not helpful indicators about rent vs buying). Similarly the interest you pay is insuring the bank against bad debtors, which you presumably will not be.

> With home ownership though, things like a modern kitchen, a shed, new laundry machines not only better your life today but also (likely) have some value add.

You can improve your living situation in a number of ways when renting. If you want a new kitchen or bathroom, rent somewhere new with those things. Renting also affords you the freedom to leave when things go from good to bad (crime, noise, building ammenities, etc.).

Fernicia··on Waymo pauses Atlanta service as its robotaxis keep driving into floods
His point is that humans are prone to the same error. The flooded engine damage doesn't come from humans recognising the danger of a flooded road and choosing not to attempt it.
Fernicia··on Singapore introduces caning for boys who bully others at school
I doubt his parents beat him because he bullied other kids though. In other words, if the kid thought that reducing his bullying would mean no beatings, perhaps he would have acted differently.
Fernicia··on Is my blue your blue? (2024)
This test finds the midpoints of people's spectrum. They're not asking is "is this completely blue or completely green" but rather "is this more blue or green"
Fernicia··on Testing Ads in ChatGPT
The only paid subscription getting ads is the one they created last week which is less than 50% of any other SOTA AI subscription on the market. Normal Pro users aren't getting ads.
Fernicia··on Amazon closing its Fresh and Go stores
> Reports said the “AI” was largely 1000+ people in India watching the cameras.

This was totally fake news though. Those people were labeling training data and reviewing low confidence labels, after the fact. There wasn't ever live monitoring of shoppers.

Fernicia··on ChatGPT Containers can now run bash, pip/npm install packages and download files
Has Gemini lost its ability to run javascript and python? I swear it could when it was launched by now its saying it hasn't the ability. Annoying regression when Claude and ChatGPT are so good at it.
Fernicia··on Ireland wants to give its cops spyware, ability to crack encrypted messages
You've missed the sarcasm in the OP.

On a side note, the suggestion that police numbers don't affect crime is obviously false. We've seen what an arbitrarily large police presence does to Washington DC this year with the national guard deployment.

Fernicia··on ChatGPT wrote "Goodnight Moon" suicide lullaby for man who later killed himself
Ah yes thank you
Fernicia··on ChatGPT wrote "Goodnight Moon" suicide lullaby for man who later killed himself
OpenAI keeping 4o available in ChatGPT was, in my opinion, a sad case of audience capture. The outpouring from some subreddit communities showed how many people had been seduced by its sycophancy and had formed proto-social relationships with it.

Their blogpost about the 5.1 personality update a few months ago showed how much of a pull this section of their customer base had. Their updated response to someone asking for relaxation tips was:

> I’ve got you, Ron — that’s totally normal, especially with everything you’ve got going on lately.

How does OpenAI get it so wrong, when Anthropic gets it so right?

Fernicia··on Vietnam bans unskippable ads
The only real results on Google are the article and this HackerNews post...
Fernicia··on Steam Frame
Couldn't you get around that by having a "zoom" feature on a very large but distant monitor?
Fernicia··on Reminder to passengers ahead of move to 100% digital boarding passes
Anti theft perhaps? Last March a guy was able to sneak onto a Delta flight by taking a picture of someone else's QR code. Some ticketing apps have temporal QR codes that are resistant to this exploit.
Fernicia··on Reminder to passengers ahead of move to 100% digital boarding passes
You can reject all of these permission requests and the app still works.
Fernicia··on The game theory of how algorithms can drive up prices
> use VC money to subsidize cost until all competitors are bankrupt then hike prices to recoup

Can you give some examples of this happening in real life?

None of the examples I can think of where people criticised the companies for operating unprofitably, such as Amazon retail or Uber, were able to corner their markets.

Harvey Normans, Targets, Argos's, Walmarts, all still exist and compete with Amazon retail. Most towns still operate normal taxis services, Lyft, FreeNow, Bolt, all compete with Uber.

VC funding subsidising pricing, albeit temporarily, is still good for consumers. It doesn't seem to imply higher eventual prices. The opposite seems true, in fact.

Fernicia··on The game theory of how algorithms can drive up prices
> The principles behind the free market are flawed

Can you go into specifics?

Fernicia··on Claude Skills are awesome, maybe a bigger deal than MCP
>they make some todo app, then they post the same video with a new language completely forgetting they've done this already 6 times

I don't see how this is bad. Technology makes iterative, marginal improvements over time. Someone may make a video tomorrow claiming a great new frontend framework, even though they made that exact video about Nextjs, or React before that, or Angular, or JQuery, or PHP, or HTML.

>Something in tech went very wrong at some point, and as soon as money men flood the field we get announcments like this

If it weren't for the massive money being poured into AI, we'd be stuck with GPT-3 and Claude 2. Sure, they release some duds in the tooling department (although I think Skills are good, actually) but it's hardly worthy of this systemic rot diagnosis you've given.

Fernicia··on AI Is Too Big to Fail
When did the HackerNews comment section turn into this? Low quality, aggressive, fervently anti-establishment.
Fernicia··on The dangerous intimacy of social location sharing
If those risks outweigh the benefit of having an impromptu lunch with them, or the sonder comfort of seeing them enjoy a Friday night at home, then don't share your location with that person.

If you feel that way about everyone, then you are a very different person to me (and probably OP).

Fernicia··on How Israeli actions caused famine in Gaza, visualized
I think the idea is that they sell it
Fernicia··on Slack has raised our charges by $195k per year
"This one thing I think is important, and could easily stipulate in a contract, should be law"
Fernicia··on AirPods live translation blocked for EU users with EU Apple accounts
Tourists visiting EU who don't live there will be able to use the feature. Or EU users when outside the EU.
Fernicia··on Is the A.I. Boom Turning Into an A.I. Bubble?
He did though. The S&P 500 fell 18% around Mar/Apr. That's unprecedented for a US market experiencing no external shocks.
Fernicia··on Human coders are still better than LLMs
I think both will happen. I was merely demonstrating that just because an AI can't replace the entirety of your work, doesn't mean it won't make you redundant.
Fernicia··on Airlines are charging solo passengers higher fares than groups
Unsurprisingly airlines imposing a fat tax is not an optimal marketing strategy.
Fernicia··on Human coders are still better than LLMs
If it automates 1/5th of your work, then what's unreasonable about thinking that your team could be 4 developers instead of 5?
Fernicia··on Show HN: Browser MCP – Automate your browser using Cursor, Claude, VS Code
Any plans to make a Firefox version?
Fernicia··on Microsoft is plotting a future without OpenAI
Well, a model with PhD level intelligence could presumably produce research in minutes that would take an actual PhD days or months.
Page 1 of 5Next →