LordGrey

This is awesome. I love the format.

I will be throwing money at these people. This magazine needs to live and spread its wings.

Buckaroo Banzai: You can check your anatomy all you want, and even though there may be normal variation, when it comes right down to it, this far inside the head it all looks the same. No, no, no, don’t tug on that. You never know what it might be attached to.

I had an acquaintance who was a county constable. He once told me, "Let me watch you drive down the road, any road, for 30 seconds and I will be able to find a valid reason to pull you over." He implied that some part of their training was focused on exactly that.

One data point, and a highly regional one at that, I know.

Step #5 is very much a "draw the rest of the fucking owl" step.

My wife and I just completed a jigsaw puzzle. Last night, I caught her trying to use her forefinger and thumb to zoom in to the picture on the box.

I have two border collies at the moment. The older one is definitely food motivated but also ball-motivated. If presented with both, she goes back and forth, undecided as to what she wants first. The younger one is "meh" on food and would easily ignore it entirely if given the chance to run flat-out in a wide-open space. Her nickname is "Speed" (though my Apple watch thinks it should be "Loud Environment").

I'm in a large org where Copilot is pushed. What I've heard from upper management is that even a very small average productivity gain, multiplied by the number of developers we have, means that we have "saved" x number of man-hours per year. Man-hours can be translated into "number of employees", so if the Copilot license comes in under that employee salary total, it is a win.

I really enjoyed his Daemon novel, and I think it would appeal to the HN crowd. Interesting intersection of code and the real world, and it is set more-or-less in the current time.

Daemon is the first of a trilogy. The remaining two books are good, but not quite as good IMO.

INPUT: Colorless green ideas sleep furiously.

OUTPUT: Nonsensical gibberish masquerading as profound.

+1 Insightful

My ex-wife was constantly losing nail clippers. My solution was to buy a box of 50 of them and put them everywhere.

I've been in a couple of meetings like that. Fortunately, the person running the meeting shut down the loquacious people and redirected to the people who followed the rules. That of course was a public reward, so everyone else followed the rules, too. It worked well.

Every time I get back to writing something in Common Lisp. It's my favorite language, but it's not what I use in my day job and I rarely have the free time for side projects.

But when I do have the time and can craft an elegant defun or two, I love programming all over again.

> And I've been in meetings and zoom calls where you can't get a word in edgewise until the meeting is over.

This often triggers the same reaction in me as when I start to write a reply here on HN, only to delete it without posting. "Why bother? No one will care what I say." Meetings where there are no opportunities for me to contribute send the message that my contributions are not wanted. That may not be true, of course, but that is the message I receive.

If I try to concentrate on my breathing I always feel like I'm not getting enough air. If I persist, I honestly start panicking a little bit.

Related: I can't snorkel for the same reason, except I panic A LOT.

My trigger word for semantic satiation is "what" for some reason.

My understanding is that 25-30% of all credit card customers are deadbeats. I've worked with some fintech companies and that number came up in some discussions. I cannot, however, find a corroborating source.

> Credit card companies make a decent amount of their money from the interchange fees, but the majority of their income comes from interest, cash advance fees, and penalty fees, all of which the well-off credit card user paying off their balance each month does not contribute to.

Those customers are called Deadbeats[1]. All credit card customers should strive to be Deadbeats.

[1] https://www.investopedia.com/terms/d/deadbeat.asp

Both my wife and I did. She went first, and had bifocal lenses inserted. I waited a couple of years and got trifocals instead. I think I've had mine for five years or more by now; I don't remember.

My wife went from "can't read the big E on the eye chart" to only using readers for very tiny print. She had different prescriptions put in each eye, for different distances. It took her brain a little while to sort all that out, but she doesn't notice it anymore.

We both see concentric halos around light points (a side effect of the bifocal and trifocal lenses, I think), but eventually your brain edits those out and you don't notice them unless you try.

I'm in the U.S. and insurance did not cover them. I think we each paid around $7K.

All in all, they were a good buy and I would recommend the procedure. They may not be cost effective, but the quality of life change is amazing.

> Do you think there are relies you should have posted that you did not?

I think there are probably times where a reply I deleted would have added value to the conversation. Not always, but perhaps enough.

> Would it be a good thing?

That is the issue. More != better, for all cases, as it says nothing about quality.

There is not enough training data for an LLM to emulate me, but what about prodigious writers? Could we realistically emulate Paul Graham or Joel Spolsky?

I'm not sure about others here, but I occasionally spend time typing out a long reply to someone and then simply deleting the reply without posting. Most of the time I conclude -- a little too late -- that the effort was not worth it.

How nice it would be to have an LLM trained on all of my previous writings and simply be able to click a button to indicate "reply to this person, please." I know I don't have enough training data from HN, and maybe not even from all of the sites I contribute, combined. It is still a nice thought, though.

But: Let's say I do acquire enough training data to have a local LLM do exactly what I describe. My volume of "replies" would certainly increase. Is that a good thing, on average? If the tool became ubiquitous, would it be a good thing for the average social media user? Or more pointedly, would it be a good thing for consumers of that social media? The cynic in me thinks "no" -- the effort required today surely weeds out _some_ idiots....

(Full disclosure, I nearly closed this window without clicking the "add comment" button.)

> The ball is just an imaginary object, like an uninitialized variable.

As someone who has been coding for 45 years, this is absolutely the best analogy describing aphantasia I've ever read. Obviously, it works only when talking to another coder, but that is better than nothing.

I found homes via Mastadon! I posted what I had, including pictures, and added tags like #vintageapple, #retroapple, and #retrocomputing.

YMMV depending on where you live, but I'm sure you will get some positive responses.

I'm moving in a few weeks and just found new homes for my stash of 30+ year old Macs, CRTs, and LaserWriters.

Now I want it all back so I can go play....

I started using digital payments once I got an Apple Watch. Double-click a button on the side, tap the watch on the reader, I'm done. Very little friction and good security; it is really a no-brainer. Provided the reader accepts Apple Pay, that is....

If the corporation does not explicitly state that Signal is an acceptable chat tool, but Signal can be successfully used, is the corporation responsible for messages passed by an employee over Signal?

That page indicates that "Teams (Consumer)" is having an issue, but my enterprise version is also fubar'd. Messages are coming through, but with a 30 minute delay. A person's status is not realtime.

Weirdly, I am unable to hide an entire conversation, which is something I didn't think would require a round trip to the backend.

I worked at an Apple dealer when the Portable came out. We called it the "Mac Luggable".

Its carry bag had only a shoulder strap. It should have had a full-blown backpack to distribute the weight better.

Even light, which travels so fast it takes most races thousands of years to realize that it travels at all, takes time to journey between the stars.

-- Douglas Adams

Apple moved me from Cupertino to Austin (granted, ages ago). There was a region-specific salary adjustment then, and to my knowledge that adjustment still happens. I believe most large companies impose regional cost-of-living adjustments.

> In October, researchers at the Johnson Space Center in Houston, Texas, discovered that 2 of the 35 screws that fasten the lid of the sample-return canister couldn’t be removed — blocking access to the remainder of the space rocks.

That sounds about like every DIY repair around the house I attempt.

Joking aside, the article goes on to say that "NASA is now making new screwdrivers" to gain access. Does anyone have details on this? Why would NASA need to build something new?