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ProxCoques

658 karma · joined May 9, 2016

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ProxCoques··on Tooltips need a delay, and then they need to skip it
I know right? It's like interaction design came and went over a period of 30 years and now we're back to the beginning again.
ProxCoques··on Tooltips need a delay, and then they need to skip it
It will never cease to amaze to me that Apple (under Jef Raskin who also wrote about this in The Humane Interface) observed and fixed problems with interactions like this in SYSTEM 6 in like 1993 or something - only for the same problem to have to be re-descovered and re-fixed decades later.
ProxCoques··on LLMs are eroding my software engineering career and I don't know what to do
"they can do that because there's plenty of articles on the web on how that shit works along with all the technical documentation, and we have blog posts explaining how to apply the technical tools to the domain."

Does this imply the future of LLMs is either that they acquire reasoning, or that they (or even engineering itself?) reach a plateau if humans are no longer writing about how to do things because the humans are using AI?

ProxCoques··on The Fannie and Freddie trade is back
> In a crisis, state intervention works, actually.

There, fixed that for you. Stop calling literally anything that isn't 100% raw free market capitalism "socialism".

ProxCoques··on Why America's economy is soaring ahead of its rivals
Also by the Fed: 4 in 10 Americans lack enough money to cover a $400 emergency expense:

https://fortune.com/2023/05/23/inflation-economy-consumer-fi...

ProxCoques··on Why America's economy is soaring ahead of its rivals
Capitalists as in capitalist governments centrally organising commercial legislation and regulations, subsidies, tariffs, standards, etc.
ProxCoques··on Why America's economy is soaring ahead of its rivals
All "capitalist" economies have very large amounts of central planning for them to function (not to mention state subsidies and other protections from failing to make money), and use taxation and the national debt for that. Socialism plans centrally to the same extent that capitalist economies do, but also has the state owning the infrastructure that the economy relies upon. So it doesn't need to tax for that purpose. Socialism in that sense has never actually been practiced historically though, in the same way as there has never been "capitalism" in the sense of no central planning or regulation. Luckily.
ProxCoques··on .an, the TLD that ceased to exist
Didn't somebody register dot.com and had an email address of dot.dot@dot.com? You could have dot.dot@dotsucks.com
ProxCoques··on The price of shutting down coal power, and what would be gained
My understanding on China's coal plants is that it's not the number of them, it's whether they're running that counts. Coal-fired generation is currently cheaper than storage for backing up wind and solar generation and their plants are typically running about 50% of the time right now, expected to run less often as storage and more renewables come online. So China’s coal use could fall despite it adding more capacity.

https://www.sustainabilitybynumbers.com/p/china-coal-plants

ProxCoques··on (UK) Government crackdown on single-use vapes
If (and it's a big if) the human race survives to deal with the effects of climate change, the next great battle will be to prevent waste from becoming the existential problem.
ProxCoques··on The racist AI deepfake that fooled and divided a community
I used to naively think that some kind of PKI/trust network for online media would have to rise up to thwart misinformation.

But anger is the real the reason why people want to believe obviously fake info about how Mexicans are manipulating the weather. We live in a society that tells you that you are free: freedom to work hard, treat people right and do the right thing. Then health, wealth and happiness will be yours.

But what if you do all those things and see the opposite happening to you and those around you? You want reasons. 5G brain control, Bill Gates and the Deep State all look like great explanations because long arcs of neoliberal monetarism and deregulated economics is, well, boring and quite hard to understand. So who cares about some AI fakery when that's going on?

ProxCoques··on Please Don't Make Me Download Another App
Not downloaded that app, but does it deliver exactly the same features as the web app but just look a bit different? If so, I wonder whether anyone working in the respective web and app departments sometimes wonders why their company maintains two separate apps that do the same thing. I know I did.

Edit: Oh, offline mode. Towering profits?

ProxCoques··on Please Don't Make Me Download Another App
The weird thing is that companies will pay for entirely separate engineering, product and marketing departments for their apps which duplicate their web apps in every way (or usually a bit less), not to mention being under the thumb of the app stores - all for the sake of notifications.

I'm no bean-counter, but that seems very odd to me.

ProxCoques··on Evolving GitHub Issues
Issues are a mess because they get used like bulletin boards for any random brain fart anyone has, despite Issue Templates trying to plead otherwise.

IMO the way to fix this is to gestate all issues in Discussions. Then, when a clear and agreed resolution is hammered out there, a maintainer creates an Issue (or just does a PR) referencing that Discussion. This would have the side effect of encouraging people to contribute to projects more when they can clearly see what needs picking up.

ProxCoques··on Evolving GitHub Issues
Element is a great example with well over 3,000 open issues, most of which would be far better worked out in Discussions from which the maintainers could raise issues or PRs from whatever the outcome of the conversation was (if any). But they don't have Discussions because...
ProxCoques··on 96% of climate policy since 1998 failed
Literally on the day you posted that comment:

https://www.theguardian.com/business/2024/sep/30/end-of-an-e...

ProxCoques··on Evolving GitHub Issues
Yes, we've got that and it does help a bit. But we're often forced to be heavy-handed and just close junk issues with a comment asking the poster to open a Discussions thread. I feel bad about doing that though as it's hard not to come across as unfriendly.
ProxCoques··on Evolving GitHub Issues
If Issues could be restricted to repo maintainers (with everyone else using Discussions), it would make contributing to F/LOSS projects far easier because you could easily see what the team was "thinking" (PR lists aren't like that).

As it is, most Issues are polluted by random support requests, suggestions and open-ended chat which obscures the focus so much that sometimes I just can't tell what they need help with, so I don't bother offering.

I have no interest in the Jirafication of Issue though. None at all.

ProxCoques··on 96% of climate policy since 1998 failed
I have a theory called "marginal cost pricing" that will blow his mind.
ProxCoques··on 96% of climate policy since 1998 failed
> That changed this year and they're now building some very large battery farms and i invasive their coal builds will drop.

This is an under-considered point: just because energy sources like coal or solar, etc. are being installed NOW doesn't mean they will be there forever. Here in the UK, there is often a lot of opposition to solar and wind farms. But I would expect those eventually to be phased out in the same way as coal once better/cheaper forms of generation come along.

ProxCoques··on The Architecture of London Pubs (1966)
I see - I got the impression that the 70-80's was a sort of dark age for beer in the UK, with mass-produced low-quality stuff from the likes of Watneys and Carslberg etc. taking over, which CAMRA was a reaction against.
ProxCoques··on Ceefax and the Birth of Interactive TV
When was this? I was up in TVC (and later in that newer building up the road from it) in 1996 prototyping the BBC News Online publishing system with Fujitsu ICL. Didn't meet anyone from the Ceefax team though.
ProxCoques··on The Architecture of London Pubs (1966)
> The great brewers – Watneys, Whitbreads and so on—are disposing of all that rubbish: that’s out now, finished with, they say.

So was this the start of the great decline in the quality of brewing in the UK during the 70's that led to CAMRA and eventually to the microbrewery renaissance we had in the late 90's to 00's?

ProxCoques··on Rents fall and listings increase after rent control ends in Argentina
There are many implementations of rent controls. Argentina's were rather badly done. Compare to:

Germany - where landlords can't charge more than 10% above the local average rent.

Spain - where landlords can increase rent only if they improve the property, but the increase can't be more than 20%.

Netherlands - where one in three homes in the Netherlands are rent-controlled, and rental apartments are capped at under €1,000 per month.

France - rent control applies to furnished and unfurnished properties.

Scotland - government introduced emergency legislation to cap rent increases in the private sector at 3% as of 2022.

Sweden - rent controls apply to new and older buildings, with local market conditions setting the regulated rents.

New York City - a Rent Guidelines Board sets rent increases based on inflation, and landlords are required to renew leases.

ProxCoques··on Dumped orange peel transformed a barren pasture (2017)
> "It's a shame where we live in a world with nutrient-limited degraded ecosystems and also nutrient-rich waste streams. We'd like to see those things come together a little bit,"

Saw a talk about circular economies once. One of the things that stuck in my mind was, "If mankind has any chance of a permanent occupation of earth, the current meaning of the word 'waste' will have to fade away."

ProxCoques··on Google loses EU court battle over €2.4B antitrust fine
I'm confused. We started off talking about how the President of the European Parliament is elected, but now you're talking about the European Commission. Those are separate bodies, the latter drafts laws. There's no country that elects the head of its civil service, is there?
ProxCoques··on Google loses EU court battle over €2.4B antitrust fine
Reminder: the term "free markets" originally referred to markets free of the distorting effects of monopoly. To ensure markets remain free, fair and available to all, legislators need to intervene. Otherwise they go to sh*t.

As aside, it's a common misconception that the EU acts to protect EU companies from outside competition. They don't. It's a side-effect of their mission to keep the EU a free market.

ProxCoques··on Google loses EU court battle over €2.4B antitrust fine
I think this may be a misunderstanding of the word "president". The role you're talking about is more like that of the Speaker of the House in the US or the UK. Both are elected by members of the chamber, not a popular vote.

https://the-president.europarl.europa.eu/en/the-presidency/f...

There is no "President" of the EU in the US sense of the word.

BTW parliaments were not democratically elected historically, that's true (eg women didn't get the vote until recently) but not relevant today.

ProxCoques··on Please stop inventing new software licences (2020)
AFAIKT, even the "Popular/Strong Community" list on https://opensource.org/license all just essentially say you don't have pay for the source code, can't complain to the authors if it goes wrong, and then some variations around not treating it as your own code.

(BTW their filters work funny)

ProxCoques··on Tesla drivers say new FSD update is repeatedly running red lights
> Anyone treating FSD as anything more than an L3 in beta (i.e. not L3) is a fool.

"I'm extremely confident that Tesla will have level five next year, extremely confident, 100%" Elon Musk, July 2020

https://www.businessinsider.com/elon-musk-interview-axel-spr...

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