Hacker News Reader

Interesting in the example of assembling the Cheers team how the otherwise great result genericizes Shelley Long.

Hard_Spaceon Flights cancelled at UK airports due to ATC issue

You could be right but that is not what I read on what seemed to be a reasonable authority site the day of the outage. Lost the link, of course.

Hard_Spaceon Flights cancelled at UK airports due to ATC issue

>What jurisdiction? EU?

Flights starting out from the EU and going anywhere (EU or beyond).

Flights coming into the EU from anywhere. If the plane at any point is set to land in the EU, it's covered.

Hard_Spaceon Jellyfin 12.0

I have had lifetime pass about ten years.

Hard_Spaceon Flights cancelled at UK airports due to ATC issue

Just had to cancel my 10-year passport renewal appointment for tomorrow morning, since it's in London and I'm in the EU. Man, this was a *miserable* way to spend a day. The flight kept getting bumped, heading for certain cancellation (it came, about midnight, long after I had returned from the airport); GPT was incredibly helpful on how to redeem (most of) the shit-ton of money I had paid for a 4-hour passport renewal appointment, and what my rights and obligations were in this situation.

In particular it pointed me to authority docs declaring that if a flight is 5+ hours late, you can refuse to fly, reclaim the money and exit the airport. So when the next update said that the flight had been bumped 9 hours, I had all I needed to secure that and went home. Two hours later, the app announced the flight was cancelled.

Sometimes (really a lot) I want to kick GPT's/Claude's/Gemini's collective rear ends. And then there are times like these, when, with me in a funk, AI cuts straight through to the essential knowledge I need and lowers the temperature.

Hard_Spaceon Jellyfin 12.0

I would be interested to hear from anyone who set it and can still access Plex over their LAN in a network outage. I have set this multiple times according to docs, and it worked only once ever, thereafter apparently resetting to online login. Of course, they do not make this an easy setting to change!

Hard_Spaceon C2PA Cameras Do Not Survive Contact with Reality

I sat in on a number of tedious C2PA meetings about three years ago. It was clear that no-one wanted to hear the hard truths, and one was certainly not rewarded for introducing them. I'm guessing there were a lot of consultancies to maintain, and a lot of snouts in the trough.

This was a technology that required international governmental prescription, not voluntary or viral adoption. Either way, it was horrifically flawed from the outset.

Hard_Spaceon An update on leaving Gmail for Fastmail

Switched to FastMail two years ago. Mostly, it's a pretty boring service, which is exactly why I'm willing to pay for it!

Hard_Spaceon How do I permanently disable random Google Photos popup to backup photos? (2024)

This is exactly what I did this year, moving photo backup to Syncthing and using Immich. So far it has been a very rewarding trip, even if the home server it runs on is not the fastest.

Hard_Spaceon Mars Bar from 1991 found – and it's 20g bigger than today's

I am guessing there is some kind of political incentive to create stealth inflation (though it's literally 'deflation'), which is largely unrecorded, vs. traditional inflation, which is a vote-loser.

Hard_Spaceon Don't credit the LLM

Sometimes AI's contributions may be diffuse, and more akin to the suffusion of a tea-bag, or even a drop of tincture, than the addition of an extra cookie on the plate. In such cases there is usually no distinct section that you can wall off and say 'AI did this'. In spite of this, it may have made a rather modest than overwhelming contribution to the work.

Hard_Spaceon Making Software: How to make a font

Previous discussion - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43678144

Hard_Spaceon Your 'app' could have been a webpage (so I fixed it for you)

I understand the anger. But I wish I were better able to resist fixing the world with code in this way, as I really am supposed to be working.

Hard_Spaceon The great blogging collapse: What happened to 100 successful blogs?

Yes, LLMs certainly learned these tropes somewhere. I'm just surprised that different models and different pre-processing methods arrived at the same dominant cliches.

Hard_Spaceon The great blogging collapse: What happened to 100 successful blogs?

I don't know - the 'great enshittification' of Substack seems an inevitable event, for which reason I have stayed away from using it as a platform, except for a few experiments. It was initially populated by refugees from Medium, itself enshittified, and there seems no reason that Substack refugees won't eventually become a thing for the same reason. Reminds me of that Twilight Zone (or was it Night Gallery..?) episode with the guy who keeps moving from one sinking ship to another (Titanic, Lusitania, etc.).

Hard_Spaceon The great blogging collapse: What happened to 100 successful blogs?

Yes, it was polluted with multiple 'Not just [x] but [y]' examples - the most obvious tell of AI-generated text, among other aggravating examples. It was hard to read, but I was interested enough in the subject to slog through it.

Hard_Spaceon Jellyfish can heal wounds in minutes. Scientists want their secrets

Agreed. I always hated the 'two part', 'payoff'-based drama of titles like these, even before the LLM era. If it was lazy before (it was), it now comes off as 'one-click' lazy. Sadly, The Guardian has become infested with this style lately.

Hard_Spaceon Big AI labs are hiring philosophers

This is interesting. Until autumn of 2024, when the company was subsumed into a better-heeled AI-VFX concern, I worked for probably the best-known and earliest all-AI VFX house, whose ethics department was headed by a philosopher, though the company struggled to place him to practical advantage.

The only comment I can make on the general trend is that it's apparently good PR for cash-saturated startups. Ultimately what AI 'means' is certainly not the business of those making it (who are arguably least-qualified to comment); and insider insights offer no benefit that I can discern.

Hard_Spaceon Converting Books into Visual Novels

Reminds me of 1990s multi-CD Mac games.

Hard_Spaceon I Fired Google

This is a chronic LLM style, particularly the multipart dramatic flourishes and the Haiku paragraphs. But at this stage, there's a good chance that LLM re-diffusion of this style is feeding back into human culture. God save us.

Hard_Spaceon Building an HTML-first site doubled our users overnight

Well, neither am I - I am talking about my own peer group, non-tech types just fine with computers.

Hard_Spaceon Building an HTML-first site doubled our users overnight

> 60 year people can't user your fancy site because then don't have an internal model of how a computer works.

I think this is a bit outdated. I'll be 60 in a month, and have been practicing and writing about machine learning, for money, for a straight 10 years now; and I was a young man (and a full stack developer) during the digital revolution.

If anything, GenX had to work harder to get into these brittle emerging technologies and paradigms. There's no-one of my age group, at least that I know of, who is remotely as tech-illiterate as your comment depicts.

Truth is that it took so long for smartphones to dumb down everyone's tech acumen that those of my generation had already learned to do it the hard way.

Hard_Spaceon The Structural Barriers to AI Lawyers

But these figures measure exposure, not integration.

Ach, it's probably a mostly human-generated piece, but any time I see the 'Not [x] but [y]' formulation, I tune out.

Hard_Spaceon FBI agent explains how easy it is to ID people posting AI porn without consent

Nothing to see here. The title suggests some hidden trick or tech wizardry, but the two people referenced were just...well, dumb: using Gmail in the first case, and retaining his icon of his own real face for an avatar in the second.

Hard_Spaceon Amazon Web Services – Four Years and Out

I used to see AI generated images with lots of unintelligible writing or misspelled words in slides, but the speaker left them in anyway. “Good enough” is not customer obsession.

This enforced adoption of immature GenAI reminds me of Milo Minderbinder trying to make people eat cotton in Catch 22, because he had inadvertently obtained a huge amount of it.

Hard_Spaceon Where Are the Vibecoded Photoshops?

I need Photoshop for an almost vanishingly small subset of all the things it is capable of, and this holds true for nearly all 'full-fledged' software that I use. So what may not be surfacing, in the absence of vibe-coded Photoshops, is the growing local script collections of many users.

Since I have had AI to knock up Python scripts and workflows incorporating local ImageMagick and FFMPEG, I have devolved a lot of tedious Photoshop work to scripts and routines of some kind. Likewise with text and data manipulation that I might have turned to software for before.

I don't have the slightest urge to incorporate this ad hoc collection of scripts into a central program, and I certainly don't intend to share them in any way, considering the growing hostility to sharing vibe-code.

So this particular iceberg may be 99% underwater.

Hard_Spaceon UK government replaces Palantir software with internally-built refugee system

Sorry for the dumb question, but why is there an archive.today link for this? Is BBC news now paywalled in some regions or under some conditions? I'm guessing that the Beeb can handle the traffic, and that the site is not hugged to death.

Hard_Spaceon Empty Screenings – Finds AMC movie screenings with few or no tickets sold

In the UK in the 1980s (and with more difficulty in the 90s) I would phone the theater and ask when the film actually starts, even though it was almost always 20 minutes after the advertised programme time. Now there are no humans to ask, and my wife wants to see the entire programme anyway.

Hard_Spaceon I Got Sick of Remembering Port Numbers

I use subdomains on an OVH VPS, since I want to access the services outside the network, so I can use freshrss.mydomain.com. But anything that can rationalize port number sprawl is welcome.

Hard_Spaceon Notepad++ for Mac – Independent community port

Not so for this port, which, besides not remembering sessions, crashed very early, and made me return to BBEdit.