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Pikamander2

958 karma · joined July 2, 2023

https://linktr.ee/pikamander2
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Pikamander2··on Twice-Yearly HIV Shot Shows 100% Effectiveness in Women
What's not a matter of opinion is low adherence rates; doctors regularly struggle to get patients take their medication consistently and on time.

Having a shot like this be widely available will be an important stepping stone for eradicating HIV.

Pikamander2··on $2000-$3fff &D (2014)
Normal spaced version:

$2000-$3fff was made for the Ludum Dare #31 Game Jam in December 2014. It is actually more than just a game. Some of you will say it's crap, but we would point out that it's both a game and a piece of art. The idea and concept is actually great.

$2000-$3fff is a Commodore 64 program which displays its entire memory on the screen, then draws missiles into it. Use a joystick in port 1 to target your dangerous explosive weapon. If you don't have a C64 handy, feel free to use an emulator like VICE. Defend program data and program code.

Pikamander2··on Breaking the 4Chan CAPTCHA
It adds another layer of analysis. For example:

If the user solves the CAPTCHA in 0.0001 seconds, they're definitely a bot.

If the user keeps solving every CAPTCHA in exactly 2.0000 seconds, each time makes it increasingly likely that they're a bot.

If the user sets the CAPTCHA entry's input.value property directly instead of firing individual key press events with keycodes, they're probably either a bot, copy-pasting the solution, or using some kind of non-standard keyboard (maybe accessibility software?).

Basically, even if the CAPTCHA service already has a decent idea of whether the user is a bot, forcing them to solve a CAPTCHA gives the service more data to work with and increases the barrier of entry for bot makers.

Pikamander2··on Breaking the 4Chan CAPTCHA
> The official TensorFlow-to-TFJS model converter doesn't work on Python 3.12. This doesn't seem to really be documented.

> TensorFlow.js doesn't support Keras 3.

I tried getting into some casual machine learning stuff a few years ago and more or less gave up because of stuff like this. It was staggering how many recent tutorials were already outdated, how many random pitfalls there were, and how many "getting started" guides assumed you were already an expert.

Pikamander2··on Send someone you appreciate an official 'Continue and Persist' Letter
I've thought about doing that kind of thing but always worry that it might end up hurting them if the company has some kind of binary "number of complaint line phone calls" metric for each employee.

I've heard too many horror stories about employees/stores getting punished when you give them 4 out of 5 stars since (according to upper management) it implies that something was less than perfect.

Pikamander2··on Show HN: I am Building a Producthunt alternative
Looks like the site is broken? The login feature doesn't work, and trying to post a product gives a 500 error.

{message: 'Request failed with status code 500', name: 'AxiosError', code: 'ERR_BAD_RESPONSE', config: {…}, request: XMLHttpRequest, …}

Pikamander2··on Deprecating outdated issues on the GitHub public roadmap
If they were all truly outdated, then sure. But as the comments have pointed out, Github also closed at least half a dozen still-relevant issues like "Commenting on unchanged lines in a pull request" that would be significant UX improvements.
Pikamander2··on Foursquare Open Source Places: A new foundational dataset
Cynically, a desperate attempt at restoring its own relevance, which it hasn't had since 2011.

Not that I'm complaining; it's always nice to have more options.

Pikamander2··on Bhutan, after prioritizing happiness, now faces an existential crisis
TL;DR - The leaders of a highly-religious, homophobic, low-HDI, faux-democracy country get surprised when some of their people want to leave for greener pastures.

Turns out that inventing a specific measure of happiness that makes your country look more favorable than it is doesn't change reality.

Pikamander2··on Pokemon TCG Pocket Hub – Open-Source Multilingual Card Game Resource Platform
Your ad provider is serving tons of malicious ads. I've had at least five "your computer has a virus" type popup ads while refreshing the site.
Pikamander2··on MomBoard: E-ink display for a parent with amnesia
That's also been one of my biggest CSS wishlist items for years.

I've had dozens of clients complain about headings wrapping onto the next line when they add one too many letters, and ask if we can make the font size smaller without affecting the others. There are several ways to accomplish that, but they're all annoying compared to a theoretical one-line CSS solution like:

font-size: 12-18px 400px;

Or something of that nature that could hopefully do it automatically.

Pikamander2··on Daisy, an AI granny wasting scammers' time
I'd imagine India will gradually crack down on it more over time. The tech industry there is growing massive and they surely aren't happy about being associated with scammers.
Pikamander2··on Daisy, an AI granny wasting scammers' time
We accidentally registered a domain once without the privacy setting enabled and proceeded to get dozens of spam/scam calls about it over the next few months.
Pikamander2··on Show HN: IMDb SQL Best Movie Finder
> I prefer for my UI to be discoverable.

I'm not quite sure what you mean by this.

If you gave the SQL a light gray border and perhaps overflow-y:scroll, it would make it much more obvious that it can be edited directly without needing any other adjustments.

Pikamander2··on Intel might be too big to fail
> healthcare.gov

Are people really still citing this website as a government failure? It had some scaling issues at launch that were fixed within 2-3 months and has been serving tens of millions of Americans without any major incidents since then.

Pikamander2··on Signal: Online MIDI Editor
Any idea how this compares to the Online Sequencer? I like the idea of the Online Sequencer but it feels pretty limited at times.
Pikamander2··on ChatGPT Search
Same here. I've generally found complaints about Google's recent decline to be overblown, but lyrics are one area where it's truly gone off the deep end.

Even if I type in 2-3 lines worth of nearly-exact lyrics that show up on multiple lyrics websites, it'll give me completely unrelated songs that match several words at most.

On that note, if anyone needs a good browser-based song finder, the "Aha Music Identifier" extension is pretty good. It's a life saver when watching Twitch streams that don't list the currently-playing song.

Pikamander2··on Evolution in real time: Scientists see evolution in 30-year snail experiment
The blame for that mostly lies on religion and human ego; the idea that humans gradually evolved like everything else and are no more biologically special than rats or monkeys is too much for some people to handle, so they cling to what they want to hear rather than what they can see with their own eyes.
Pikamander2··on How JPEG XL compares to other image codecs
> With videos it seems you have to hope that the video player has an option to loop

<video playsinline muted loop> should be nearly as reliable as a GIF in that regard.

The one exception that I've found is that some devices will prevent videos from autoplaying if the user has their battery-saver on, leading to some frustrating bug reports.

Pikamander2··on Before you buy a domain name, first check to see if it's haunted
A client of mine once swapped over to a new domain that was coincidentally one letter away from another major domain. It wasn't an attempt to typosquat or anything nefarious, but Chrome started automatically showing everyone a big scary warning page before entering the site. We looked into appealing it but there was no guarantee of it getting whitelisted in a timely manner, so we ended up canceling the domain migration before they lost too much traffic.
Pikamander2··on A Controversial Rare-Book Dealer Tries to Rewrite His Own Ending
It also crashes my Chrome tab on Android.
Pikamander2··on WordPress retaliation impacts community
WordPress's core dev team has had a longstanding aversion to including "unnecessary" features in the core to avoid bloat, with the idea that plugins can take care of any gaps in functionality.

It sounds like a reasonable philosophy until you see just how many basic CMS features it's missing and subsequently how many sites are running 20+ poorly-coded plugins that spam the dashboard notifications and have numerous PHP vulnerabilities.

Pikamander2··on Medical student's apparent celiac disease responded to giardiasis treatment
The flip side of this is that doctors aren't infallible, and will often struggle with rare diseases that they don't deal with on a daily basis, or in some cases were never even taught about in medical school (such as recent discoveries).

It's true that doctors have to deal with a constant flurry of "I did my own research and think this bruise I got yesterday might be liver cancer", but sometimes people with legitimately debilitating illneses slip through the cracks and have to aggressively advocate for themselves to get any real testing done, particularly if they have a very "let's wait a few months and see what happens" type doctor who never seems to make any progress on their own.

Pikamander2··on Life expectancy rise in rich countries slows down: took 30 years to prove
Obesity's definitely a factor, but other developed countries haven't seen the same level of stagnation despite their own skyrocketing obesity rates. For that matter, Americans also smoke less compared to most of Europe.

There's likely at least one other major factor, and I would assume that it's some variation of "inability to access high-quality care for financial reasons" given how much of a wealth disparity there is in various healthcare outcomes.

Pikamander2··on Life expectancy rise in rich countries slows down: took 30 years to prove
We don't, but there's also no particular reason to believe it will unless some evidence for it appears.

Similar to zero-calorie sugar substitutes, "too good to be true" isn't always the case. Sometimes new inventions really are just better.

Pikamander2··on Life expectancy rise in rich countries slows down: took 30 years to prove
Even more fun is when your doctor refers you to a specialist that's in-network, but your insurance comes up with a bunch of reasons to deny it.

How did we collectively decide that it's okay for insurance companies to overrule medical professionals?

Pikamander2··on Gosub – An open-source browser engine
> unless you actively disable your brain's pleasure center

Wait, you can toggle that thing on and off? I knew I've been doing something wrong!

Pikamander2··on Routine dental X-rays are not backed by evidence
> I don't know why you're being downvoted

Because it's unrelated to the article, doesn't have a source, has multiple typos, and even if it's true, I'm not going to give up hot beverages and food just to avoid (what I assume they're implying to be) a tiny increased mouth and throat cancer risk.

Pikamander2··on Helping wikis move away from Fandom
I tried adding some helpful links to the new Runescape wiki back when the split happened, and within a few hours Fandom had permabanned my decade-old account across their entire network.

Not a huge loss, although it still feels like a bitter ending after I spent years sprucing up a bunch of their wikis.

Pikamander2··on Can you get root with only a cigarette lighter?
When I saw the title, I was expecting this to be about hacking a modern car with one of those USB-C cigarette lighter devices.
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