Hacker News Reader

antodon Claude Opus 5.5

That's one interpretation. When referring not to other actions but to a word describing a location it becomes more ambiguous.

eg "pacing the frontier" could also mean they are impatiently or anxiously walking up and down the border.

antodon Good Culture Is the Biggest Productivity Hack, Not AI

Part of me wonders whether trying to optimise at all is the problem.

The worst managers I've had were optimisers (and had the worst teams), and the best managers with the best teams weren't optimisers.

The best ones didn't care about metrics at all, but would work to get their teams the tools and/or conditions they wanted to do a good job. Of course it probably only works with a certain level of talent and alignment in the team

antodon New Mac Studio with M5 Max and M5 Ultra

I've been away for about 3 years now. My thunderbolt dock couldn't drive two monitors from my Macs, and I couldn't daisy chain display ports either. A Linux ThinkPad had no problem though. Glad they've finally fixed (implemented) it.

antodon New Mac Studio with M5 Max and M5 Ultra

I've been away from Macs (2015 MBP and an M1 Pro) for a while now, but they used to have a limitation of one screen per port. Apparently driver related as according to my faulty memory a Linux install didn't have the same issue.

Are you using Apple displays or did they fix it?

antodon The Legend of the Novell NE2000 [video]

Those Intel cards were the number 1 choice on openbsd back then too.

antodon How we used to get jobs: A newspaper classifieds story

Only my first job involved newspaper ads (early 90s). My second job pivoting into tech came via USENET, and later jobs from networks or shoulder tapping by recruiters.

antodon How Google helped destroy adoption of RSS feeds (2023)

yeah, when I first stumbled on to the internet it was all about the protocols and specific implementations didn't matter.

Then later IE dominated the web and hurt interoperability, but we fought back through the Phoenix, Firebird, Firefox era anxiously following IE6 slowly losing market share.

Only to find that the war had shifted beyond clients and standards support to the sites and the power of their business models.

And parallel battles for the old standards based DIY freedom lost to hyperscaler clouds and now AI.

All in all compared to that, losing Google Reader seems small, but it was kinda the nexus point at the centre of it all.

antodon Dubious research tied to Red Bull has shaped energy drink policy

I don't get migraines very often (once a year maybe), but the first aura was very strange not knowing what it was.

For me they start out as a bright point of light then spreads out into an expanding shimmering arc of rainbow colors. Sometimes the vision inside the arc is ok, other times it is kinda missing. The headache usually comes on as the aura is fading out. Sometimes I get an aura without the migraine.

antodon Is this the end of the once-mighty GoPro?

> The US (and most rich countries) have way too much domestic dairy farm capacity. As a result, there is lots of govt subsidies paid to dairy farmers.

I think you might have cause and effect switched around.

antodon Theo de Raadt: "You've been smoking something mind altering" (2007)

Maybe they mixed up usenet by doing what I used to do back then - use gmane so I could follow various mailing lists via NNTP for better thread tracking and not filling up my inbox.

antodon A dock that wakes up reliably

My Lenovo Thunderbolt 3 docks wakes up reliably, the problem is that it keeps randomly nodding off for a second or so causing the monitor to lose signal and have to sleep/wake itself.

antodon I used to love Claude, but the latest models are slowly ruining it

> Can AI have mental breakdowns?

I recall Microsoft's Sidney having a hilarious one regarding the date or something. Anyone have a link to that?

antodon How the terrorist group Boko Haram uses frontier AI

That wasn't anywhere near your point. Your point was that "the left" would praise Boko Haram. You backed it up with a link to a story that was neither about Boko Haram, was about behavior "the left" opposes, nor had any praise from anybody.

The only way your point could work is by redefining "the left" as Muslim fundamentalists, which is frankly bonkers.

antodon How the terrorist group Boko Haram uses frontier AI

Unless by "the left" you mean some solitary idiot (or troll) on tiktok who just went to college.

In the west Boko Haram's goal seem closer to groups on the right than anyone on "the left". eg suppressing women's rights, more religion in school/govt, homosexuality etc

antodon How the terrorist group Boko Haram uses frontier AI

>If the terrorists were very smart, they'd realize that their religion is stupid, that their leaders were mostly corrupt (or themselves stupid), and they'd also probably find something more productive to do with their time.

In my head I was running through a whole lot groups to replace "terrorists" with in that sentence...

antodon Snails' teeth beats spider silk as nature's strongest material (2015)

Especially in the hard rock grindcore genre.

antodon Snails' teeth beats spider silk as nature's strongest material (2015)

Yeah, they're conflating strength, hardness and toughness all over the place.

antodon Snails' teeth beats spider silk as nature's strongest material (2015)

The properly calibrated unit is a Volkswagen Beetle.

antodon TypeScript 7

It isn't wrong exactly. JS is famous for generally just trying to do something semi random instead of giving you a typing error.

That's the difference between "having a typing error" and "having an error due to typing".

well kinda

antodon We Are the Last People Who Know How It Works

Also, the quote didn't really apply in the 80s. Getting a game running on a C64, Spectrum, Amiga, ST or Apple II didn't involve understanding the computer.

That autoexec crap was unique to DOS PCs. DOS was a uniquely crappy experience in a lot of different ways.

antodon Iran requires insurance on ships using Strait of Hormuz, fees likely to follow

Vibes? There's a fallacy named after McNamara trying to break it down to numerical metrics. Vibes probably would've served them better.

I think they had much more intelligence and competence back then, even if they were wrong. Now it's stupidity and incompetence on top of being wrong.

antodon Lore – Open source version control system designed for scalability

20yrs ago, for me migrating off p4 onto svn was such a relief and feeling really "freeing" in a way I haven't felt often.

antodon French-Iranian author Marjane Satrapi, author of 'Persepolis', dies at 56

My attitude is Fuck Optimisation, it's just so exhausting and boring.

antodon U.S. Army Corps of Engineers Bay Model

I'm guessing you meant 10k m^2 (ie 1 hectare) rather than 10km ^2 (10,000 hectares if I mathed correctly)

antodon Meta workers can opt out of being tracked at work up to 30 min

I much preferred Diamond Age to Snow Crash. It's been a while though, so can't fully remember why - but I think Snow Crash tried to be too cute or something and kinda seemed disjointed.

antodon Usborne 1980s Computer Books

I also had one of their intro books before having a computer available. But it had a paper based simulator of the program counter and variables so you could run through without a computer (I was saving up for one though, but that took years).

antodon Usborne 1980s Computer Books

Same with me. As a 12yr old I failed learning Z80 on my spectrum with the one book I could find. I had a bunch of other Usborne BASIC books, but their machine code book(s) would've been the link I needed to bridge the gap to where I could understand other material.

antodon Deno 2.8

Python containing type hints doesn't get transpiled the way typescript does. The transpiling rewrites the TS to varying degrees depending on the target and the extra TS features being used.

Python "just" (that word is doing a lot of work) updated the interpreter to ignore the type hints. It still runs the same way as code without hints.

There's a bit more going on with TS that you couldn't just have the runtime ignore the types.

antodon Twin brothers wipe 96 government databases minutes after being fired

I'm on my third job since COVID. None have dedicated desks, and this ranges across startups, corporates and large govt agencies.

Every job I had before COVID back to when I started back in the early/mid 90s had dedicated desks.