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468 karma · joined February 14, 2011

filosophy.org
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______··on A graph that should be front-page news
What is the collective if not a collection of individuals?
______··on Kitchen optimizations
I got it and absolutely love it. Takes a bit of getting used to of course, but after being in my kitchen I expect all taps to work like this.

The biggest downside is that visitors will be confused why the water doesn’t run (the physical tap is always left open but there is a “virtual” tap controlled by the sensor is not.

______··on Spending too much time at airports
Having a kitchen tablet is also amazing - I have a ten year old iPad Pro with the keyboard, it's great for looking up recipes and following along, and also messaging while cooking.
______··on Cursor CLI
Ultimately if this stuff is actually intelligent it should be using the same sources of information that we intelligent beings use. Feels silly to have to have to jump through all these hoops to make it work today
______··on The Prime Reasons to Avoid Amazon
A good first step is not paying for Prime.

It's like $140 annually now... and if you're mostly just buying things and not watching their content, it's a nice speed bump to just accumulate items in the cart until you hit the minimum free shipping and only order then.

When you occasionally do for some reason need an instant item, you can pay the shipping then. It's kinda like for most people, having a second or third car is much more expensive than just renting one when you actually need it.

That said, I am close to a Costco so that's where I get most of my bulk items - the Amazon stuff tends to be more discretionary.

______··on PDF to Text, a challenging problem
pdfplumber is great for table extraction but it is python
______··on I just want to code (2023)
That’s great!

Also - coffee at work, tea for play

______··on Out of the Fog
People were really desperate to get out of there at the end. A wild story is of Buang Ly who landed a Cessna on a US aircraft carrier: https://www.historynet.com/maj-buang-lys-daring-feat-to-save...
______··on Claude Code: Best practices for agentic coding
I use a cheap MIDI controller in this manner - there is even native browser support. Great to get immediate feedback on parameter tweaks
______··on New speculative attacks on Apple CPUs
> This research was supported by the Air Force Office of Scientific Research (AFOSR)

I wonder if this is the kind of grant that is no longer being funded (or at least "paused")

______··on Threlte 8
The main Raycaster class in three.js (which you can access / use via refs from Threlte) isn't tied to the view, but can be used to cast from any point.

It might get computationally expensive to point that raycaster in many directions and intersect with all leaves. I'm not aware of a way to do "bulk" raycasting in three.js yet.

Separately, the lighting / shadows can compute visually shadow and lighting. But I'm not aware of a way to then easily measure out how much of a mesh is in shadow.

I am also interested in tree simulation -- I'm tinkering on a arborist/lumberjack game where you trim / cut down trees :)

______··on Automerge: A library of data structures for building collaborative applications
Construction industry is a good one: often you are working in a remote area or have cut power (so no WiFi) and having access to your data is key. That’s why there is so much printing still going on- paper works offline.
______··on Bard is now Gemini, and we’re rolling out a mobile app and Gemini Advanced
People with cats end up with a lot of cat photos and in the same boat for Photos.
______··on GPT-3.5 crashes when it thinks about useRalativeImagePath too much
Something about these makes them incredibly funny to read.
______··on History of the PDF
An issue with this is that the print CSS of most websites is an afterthought.

While it’s possible to alter the design with @media print as well as the page breaks, few websites do this. You are often left with broken layouts, empty pages, or nonsense page breaks.

______··on A Lot of Damage in Grindavík
That's pretty close to Blue Lagoon, one of the most popular tourist destinations in the area, which is now closed as a precaution: https://www.bluelagoon.com/seismic-activity
______··on SF's Anchor Brewing Company shutting down after 127 years
I met a former Anchor brewer who left and moved to at a brewery in Flagstaff AZ two years ago, they seemed pretty unhappy back at Anchor.
______··on Snapchat sees spike in 1-star reviews as users pan the ‘My AI’ feature
Making mushroom logs!

I cut down a few invasive trees recently (Norway Maples). If you inoculate the branches and logs with spores of a mushroom that you want (in my case, shiitake) during the first few weeks after cutting, it will fruit with that for a few years. It's a fun DIY project, and a way to reuse trees.

To prevent unwanted mushrooms from the environment from colonizing, you seal the holes you drill, as well as the end the ends of the logs, with cheese wax - which I had heated in a crock pot, hence the need for cleaning that up.

______··on Snapchat sees spike in 1-star reviews as users pan the ‘My AI’ feature
Last night I was typing on Google: "How do I get (rid of wax from pots and pans)" and the top auto-suggestion at that point was "How do I get rid of my ai on snapchat"

Must be a big issue if they own the "How do I get" SEO :)

______··on Bard coding update with Colab exporting
Doesn't work for this simple prompt -- maybe it's not fully rolled out yet?

> Can you write a <HTML> file that POSTs a form with firstName, lastName to some other URL?

> I'm a language model and don't have the capacity to help with that.

______··on Startups that use Silicon Valley Bank are freaking out over payroll
One thing that always surprised me about SVB was how bad the UX/UI of the site was, for a company so close to all these companies at the forefront of web technology. The signup process was abysmal.
______··on Fountain Society
It’s interesting to see the parallels in access to electricity - it’s now rather common in NYC to see people charging things on LinkNYC kiosks.

Those too are a public good but operated by a private company (Intersection), with the attendant conflicts of interest.

Interestingly they were introduced after the city Payphone contract expired - reminding me that phone access has almost totally been privatized at this point.

______··on Ask HN: I’m falling out of love with coding
I recently fired up a project in Django, after not using it for a decade, and I had the same feeling. I defined a couple of models and BOOM I had a working website. Felt a little bit like the last ten years of web framework development hasn't resulted in anything better.

As you point out, the React ecosystem does seem to be mired in "what approach should I take"-style questions for basic things like data loading, routing, etc.

______··on Sunken Greenhouse
If you're ever near Taos, New Mexico, check out the Earth Ships -- a community of homes each built around a similar concept, with a large thermal mass and south-facing windows allowing year-round gardening.
______··on Microsoft is preparing to add ChatGPT to Bing
I think the push to video and away from text is a net failure for accessibility and usability, at least for reference use cases.

My example: as a woodworker, I'm often curious about the details of a particular joint or the usage of a particular tool. The great amount of content on YouTube is helpful, but it's incredibly inefficient to have to seek through a bunch of filler or unrelated content to get the answer I need.

Of course, that's "increased engagement" so I'm not surprised it's what is commercially more viable.

______··on Interface Ideas for Chat Apps
Anecdotally, my own current UI gripe in iOS messages is identifying different variations of groups containing mostly the same people.

- My family - My wife's family - Both of our families - My family but only those nearby - My family but only those attending a specific event - My family but minus one person

The current "facepile" approach really fails in distinguishing them... we've all been making mistakes sending messages to the wrong subsets.

I know that it's possible to name groups, but it's not something that I always remember to do (or care to do, for a transient conversation)

______··on Introducing Svelte, and Comparing Svelte with React and Vue (2021)
The one 5% thing I’ve run into is a lack of proper generic component props when using Typescript.

Granted, that’s a rather advanced topic, but I miss having a <Component<MyType>> where all the type checking “just works”.

It’s not a dealbreaker - more like just something I noticed coming from the React world.

______··on Issues with upstream DNS provider
Bless you! Thank you for taking the time out of your day to help us internet people :)
______··on Dataset and Model for “I built a system to take photos of planes over my house”
First time I've seen a .cam TLD, makes me think that they might be used a lot for phishing - without thinking I typed in skybot.com instead of "cam"
______··on Constant Energy Diffusion in D3
Awesome -- would be great if the jitter were reduced when the spheres are closely packed!
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