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TooSmugToFail

503 karma · joined September 30, 2010

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TooSmugToFail··on Is kombucha really good for your health?
Just three paragraphs reporting on the results:

“Samples of urine and blood were analysed before and after the trial began to see if there was any effect on the body from the ingredients known to be found in kombucha, such as certain polyphenols.

In this aspect, the trial produced positive results. The researchers found identifiable markers showing an improvement in levels of compounds which are associated with better health.

However, the question the trial had set out to address – does drinking kombucha also help manage stress – showed no effect in a stress response test on participants.”

TooSmugToFail··on David Sacks: OpenAI and Anthropic Don't Need Regulations to Pace Frontier Models
I hate to say it, but I agree with this grifter.
TooSmugToFail··on How I use LLMs to learn complex topics
I would have bet it’s a Terry Pratchett quote, and it kinda is:

“"The turtle moves," said Didactylos. "The turtle is a giant reptile that swims through space. It doesn't have to stand on anything. Swimming is what turtles do. The idea that it has to stand on another turtle, and that turtle has to stand on another turtle, is just silly. It's turtles all the way down, and that's a logical absurdity."

Small Gods, 1992

TooSmugToFail··on App Store Rejection of the Week: Dark Hours
Damn. What a shocking level of incompetence.

Has Apple really sunk that low?

TooSmugToFail··on Palantir's greatest enemy: Barrett Brown profile
“Brown, a journalist and former member of the hacktivist collective Anonymous, sits opposite me. He lights a crack pipe packed with “ice”, the local version of meth, takes a long drag, and exhales towards the floor (…)”

Why wasting time interviewing a meth-head? Makes me wonder what’s the point of the article. Discredit the guy?

TooSmugToFail··on Is this the end of the once-mighty GoPro?
GoPro was outcompeted on the market. Simple as that.

They were made irrelevant by Insta360 and DJI, both with legitimately better products.

In my view, the only entity to blame for that is GoPro. And I believe that the shortfall was not only in matters of technology. My limited interactions with them painted a picture of an organisation with some super clever people, but paralysed by slow bureaucracy and high risk aversion.

By contrast, Insta360 was much more aggressive and enterprising, while DJI just did what DJI does: build amazing products.

Trying to blame this on some arcane Chinese plot to destroy the West is just a weak attempt to cope with reality: in China today there is simply much higher number of hard working, highly intelligent, highly educated people that are hungry for success then there are in the West.

One thing we forget is that the two great Chinese companies in this space (Insta and DJI) had first to compete against hundreds (thousands?) of other Chinese camera companies before they could come out on the top and compete globally.

They are not a product of a CCP plot. They are a result of a ruthlessly competitive and capable local ecosystem, itself a result of decades of consistent industrial and innovation policy.

Nothing is stopping us in the EU and US to do the same.

TooSmugToFail··on CarPlay Is Additive
Tried clicking the links to the Rivian web page. What a horrible experience.

I have been trying to get some useful info about the cars (e.g. range), and the only option I had was to play a completely useless video which only made me dizzy.

Then, desperate, I tried asking their AI chat what’s the expected range. It told me (great success!) but then it directed me back to the useless page.

How useless.

TooSmugToFail··on Newly discovered spider builds spring loaded snare to catch ants
Ok, this was my sign.
TooSmugToFail··on Marfa Public Radio Puts You to Sleep
Same here. Love the Mindscape podcast. It taught me everything I know about quantum physics (haha). But for me, the bedtime listening is ALWAYS fascinating. It has to be. And I fall asleep nevertheless. My routine is to play a podcast that I am interested in, put a sleep timer on 20 min (Overcast app FTW), and just enjoy the content.

No matter how interesting it is, it very rarely takes me setting the timer for another 20 min, almost always I fall asleep in the first run, often times within the first 10 min.

What makes it funny is I will be listening a single episode for weeks sometime, often listening the same parts over and over again simply because I can’t precisely start today where I fell asleep yesterday.

It became a part of a routine that I am genuinely looking forward to. This is how I worked through the entire Mike Duncan opus (Revolutions first, and then the History of Rome), I am currently working through the History of Byzantium by Robin Pierson, but occasionally I am listening to Sean Carrol, and sometimes I will go back to In our Time by BBC’s Melwyn Bragg.

Actually, come to think of it, most of my podcast listening time is bedtime. I would hate to waste it to listen something boring.

TooSmugToFail··on X accounts are limited to 50 posts and 200 replies a day unless they pay
So much more than my average of zero posts and zero replies per year.
TooSmugToFail··on Mocked by a scandal sheet, Kierkegaard endured months of personal attacks
Oh boy, would he enjoy the modernity.
TooSmugToFail··on Ask HN: What are you working on? (May 2026)
I’d love to try Blunders pls! Thanks!!
TooSmugToFail··on 'Playing with fire': Jeffrey Epstein bankrolled Bill Gates reported girlfriend
Seems like the dude ran a girlfriend-as-a-service business model, with non-monetary payment options.
TooSmugToFail··on macOS app to copy text from screenshot
TRex is great, been using it for a while.

https://ameba.co/trex/ https://github.com/amebalabs/TRex/releases/tag/v2.0.0

TooSmugToFail··on Two Claudes discussing the nature of their own existence
Wow. Whatever it was, this was deep, beautiful, and moving.

One thing comes to mind: this is not a kind of a conversation two human beings could have had. This is a genuinely LLM-to-LLM interaction, articulated in human terms.

I wonder about the “feelings” they refer to (or whatever is the term they used). What is the underlying phenomenology they chose to articulate as such?

TooSmugToFail··on White House slams Trump's perceived Nobel peace prize snub
This dude is attempting to gaslight the entire world.
TooSmugToFail··on Bank of England smells hint of dotcom bubble 2.0 in AI froth
Just a hint?
TooSmugToFail··on America by Design
“What's the biggest brand in the world? If you said Trump, you're not wrong.”

3*:

TooSmugToFail··on America by Design
“What's the biggest brand in the world? If you said Trump, you're not wrong.”

3 *:

TooSmugToFail··on I treated GPT as a prophet. It answered with a 740-page trilogy
Not related to the text itself, but the LLM style more generally: why does it regularly adopt the “it’s not X, it is Y” pattern?
TooSmugToFail··on Enthusiast converts PNG to bird-shaped waveform, teaches starling to recall file
Not exactly.

What he did is he drew a simple sketch (a drawing of a bird) in an audio spectrogram, played the resulting sound to a (very talented) bird, which replayed the sound to him, and the spectrogram of the bird sound really looked quite similar to the original sketch.

While super interesting, not quite storing data in a bird in a way I hoped when reading the title.

TooSmugToFail··on How to Future-Proof Your Work and Life with a Personal OS
Why do I need to subscribe to read the article?
TooSmugToFail··on Daily Notes Considered Harmful
Daily notes are my life line.

If you’re managing any fairly complex organisation and handling multiple threads on variable time horizons, daily notes can be an immensely useful tool.

TooSmugToFail··on Gate Array
This reminded me reading (ages ago) about Altera’s HardCopy [1]: a “process that takes a working FPGA design implemented in one of Altera’s high-end FPGAs (such as Stratix II) and gives you a functionally- and footprint-equivalent ASIC at a fraction of the unit cost.”

Did a bit of Googling and realised it seems to be still alive in the form of Intel’s eASIC! [2].

[1] https://www.eejournal.com/article/20081125_hardcopy/

[2] https://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/products/details/eas...

TooSmugToFail··on Grok Pivots from 'White Genocide' to Being 'Skeptical' About the Holocaust
Grok is the Tesla of AI: poor quality and desperately unreliable hype fuel.
TooSmugToFail··on Volonaut Airbike – Welcome to the Future of Mobility
That logo reminds me of Zastava Yugo.

https://images.app.goo.gl/BgXN2GVErNoMMECf7

TooSmugToFail··on A Plutonian Landscape
How come there’s no visible craters?
TooSmugToFail··on Trustpilot just tried to extort us
Trust pilot is a scam. I knew that they protect you from negative reviews if you pay, but I didn’t know they would extort you if you don’t.

A new low.

TooSmugToFail··on Vance Outlines U.S. Plan for Ukraine That Sharply Favors Russia
Bonus: the useful idiots also caused damage and harm to the USA.
TooSmugToFail··on [dead]
It figures. Grifters all.
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