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aranelsurion

892 karma · joined January 21, 2018

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aranelsurion··on Global population movements from 1990 to 2023
> You can live on benefits before becoming a citizen and after becoming a citizen

What benefits? I don't know every country in the world, in Germany unless you count retirement as a benefit (which is something you pay for and have to reach a certain age that is ever moving upwards) you don't get any assistance if you're not living in the country.

aranelsurion··on GitHub Copilot App
That's not the same number, at least not on my user.
aranelsurion··on Bricks and Minifigs Stole a Man's $200k Lego Collection
All your examples are also in the category of "individual vs. organization" though.
aranelsurion··on Can we have the day off?
IDK about UK but in Germany it’s the law that employees can request 80% work at 80% pay and can’t be denied except for significant operational reasons and such.

As you said, it can be a double edged sword to be the 80% worker in the otherwise 100% team.

aranelsurion··on Green card seekers must leave U.S. to apply, Trump administration says
That's a huge oversimplification though. Group 1 would mostly consist of some of the most ardent social progressives and some hippies, and the Group 2 is most everyone else and basically the policy in every country currently in existence.

In reality most people are somewhere in the spectrum of group 2:

* There are those who believe everyone economically net positive should be allowed.

* There are those who believe everyone who are a good cultural fit (for their personal criteria and biases) should be allowed.

* There are those who believe only exceptional people with rare talents should be allowed.

* There are those who believe people should only be allowed if they meet some definition of greater good.

* There are those who believe partner visas should be allowed/disallowed.

* There are those who believe only the wealthy people who'll spend or invest their wealth in the country should be allowed. (=various kinds of golden visas)

* There are those who believe no one except for certain race(s), nationality(es) or religion(s) should be allowed.

* There are those who believe no one should be allowed.

* ..Different combinations of above options..

* ?? (Many other possibilities)

aranelsurion··on Incident Report: Railway Blocked by Google Cloud [resolved]
> support team

They must’ve upgraded them to Gemini 3.5 by now.

aranelsurion··on France to ditch Windows for Linux to reduce reliance on US tech
> don't work on Windows 11 but do on Linux (e.g., Red Alert 2).

Huh? But I do play Red Alert 2 on Windows 11 and it works just fine. Also can play online through CNCnet.

Is this something about a particular version not working, or some copy protection issue?

aranelsurion··on A macOS bug that causes TCP networking to stop working after 49.7 days
I was just trying to remember where did I last see this magic number of days.
aranelsurion··on Wine 11 rewrites how Linux runs Windows games at kernel with massive speed gains
I remember managing to play Crysis under Linux with Wine and I was SO impressed. Never would’ve imagined one day almost every game would be playable.
aranelsurion··on Asian governments roll out 4-day weeks, WFH to solve fuel crisis caused by war
Isn't that very fitting with the spirit of the times?

Reading 4-day week futurism while working 5 days as you always did, hoping it doesn't get to 6.

This one and UBI are the two classics of 2000s optimism and naivety.

aranelsurion··on Why No AI Games?
> idea generators and executors deserve compensation for their effort

To be fair, in this specific example executors of the idea were already compensated by selling a well-received game with a cool new mechanic.

aranelsurion··on Don't become an engineering manager
> AI is voluntary to use.

> If you can't make that decision, are you really the EM?

You'd be served well as an EM by this part of the Serenity Prayer:

"God, grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, the courage to change the things I can, and the wisdom to know the difference."

Depending on your organization, odds are high that AI use is one of the things you cannot change. Perhaps not even something you're ought to change. If your team is delivering x% more, "it makes my job x% more difficult so don't do that" won't fly neither upwards nor downwards.

> If AI produces code that no one knows and is hard to maintain

I think you're making an assumption here that the main problem with AI use is necessarily quality.

OP wasn't even talking about AI producing bad code, just that it creating more code, and enabling more things to happen. More things going on at the same time, means you'd have more friction points and more things that can go wrong. Whenever those happen, the EM is pulled in.

aranelsurion··on The recurring dream of replacing developers
People really look through rose-colored glasses when they talk about late 90s, early 2000s or whenever is their "back then" when they talk about everything being simpler.

Everything was for sure simpler, but also the requirements and expectations were much, much lower. Tech and complexity moved forward with goal posts also moving forward.

Just one example on reliability, I remember popular websites with many thousands if not millions of users would put an "under maintenance" page whenever a major upgrade comes through and sometimes close shop for hours. If the said maintenance goes bad, come tomorrow because they aren't coming up.

Proper HA, backups, monitoring were luxuries for many, and the kind of self-healing, dynamically autoscaled, "cattle not pet" infrastructure that is now trivialized by Kubernetes were sci-fi for most. Today people consider all of this and a lot more as table stakes.

It's easy to shit on cloud and kubernetes and yearn for the simpler Linux-on-a-box days, yet unless expectations somehow revert back 20-30 years, that isn't coming back.

aranelsurion··on The Vietnam government has banned rooted phones from using any banking app
> moving to a model where the user is considered the adversary on their own hardware

I think we’ve been there at least since the first iPhone, and it’s now entirely normalized for the average user.

aranelsurion··on Why didn't AI “join the workforce” in 2025?
> I’m hoping 2026 will be the year we stop caring about what people believe AI might do, and instead start reacting to its real, present capabilities.

So well put.

LLMs are useful for a great many things. It's just that being the best new product of the recent years, maybe even defining a decade doesn't cut it. It has to be the century-defining, world-ending, FOMO-inducing massive thing to put Skynet to shame and justify investments in trillion dollars. It's either AI joining the workforce soon, or Nvidia and OpenAI aren't that valuable.

I guess it manages to maximize shareholder value, and make AI feel like a disappointment.

aranelsurion··on Go ahead, self-host Postgres
> Just because it acts like a connection hanging off

If anything that’s a feature for ease of use and compatibility.

aranelsurion··on Go ahead, self-host Postgres
> still employs infrastructure engineers

> The "cloud" reducing staff costs

Both can be true at the same time.

Also:

> Otherwise you're waking up at 3am no matter what.

Do you account for frequency and variety of wakeups here?

aranelsurion··on Are Apple gift cards safe to redeem?
> I'd say also that you should never purchase Apple gift cards from anyone except Apple directly

This would be a good measure assuming we’ve fully discovered all the reasons Apple might ban you for, and only reason happens to be gift cards.

Since we don’t know what other seemingly trivial actions may provoke Apple to wipe an account, I think starting a developer conference is the only way to be safe.

aranelsurion··on Are Apple gift cards safe to redeem?
Why not just ban the user from using gift cards then, instead of banning their entire account between 30 different products under the same company umbrella?

They don’t need to fix insecurity of gift cards, they just need better access controls. Yet they have no incentive right now to tackle that.

aranelsurion··on Ask HN: Is building a calm, non-gamified learning app a mistake?
As someone who has been recently a customer to multiple language learning apps, I think multiple things are true:

* The market for actually useful, non-gamified learning apps is smaller than, say, Duolingo.

* Yet the market for bullshit apps is too saturated. There are maybe 50 such apps for each major language already in the App Stores.

* As a customer I'd be happy to pay for serious, boring learning apps, and I believe such serious customers exist. (but in much smaller numbers)

* Market for serious, boring language learning apps is underserved. (for German there are apps like Readle, Vocabeo, Vocabuo (yes, lol naming), DerDieDas that cover specific niches, and (afaik) only DW has a quite comprehensive actual learning program)

I believe potential customers like me exist, but our numbers are much less than "learn Spanish in 5 minute games" crowd and our expectations are higher too. Up to you to decide if this is a valuable niche to serve.

aranelsurion··on Transparent leadership beats servant leadership
> “bring me solutions, not problems"

If someone says this unprompted, I’d suspect they aren’t a manager, they aren’t even an employee. They provide roughly the same input one provides while ordering food at a restaurant. Basically they are a customer, but also on the payroll.

That being said, there are some cases where this might be said out of frustration. I’ve seen in my life a few people whose output is mostly finding and bringing issues to the table for someone else (who?) to magically solve them. That still brings some value, and maybe they’d make excellent auditors, but it wears the team and maybe their managers down.

aranelsurion··on Leak confirms OpenAI is preparing ads on ChatGPT for public roll out
You can also use Temporary Chats for that.
aranelsurion··on Leak confirms OpenAI is preparing ads on ChatGPT for public roll out
I wish it'd be so obvious then I could ask another LLM to read and remove the ads. :)

I fully expect it to be more shady like you ask for help with your hair, and it manipulates you into first thinking you need a specific kind of product, and then bringing up only the products that have paid for being there. Ideally you don't even know you've been advertised to.

(unless regulation prevents them from doing this in some regions)

aranelsurion··on Leak confirms OpenAI is preparing ads on ChatGPT for public roll out
> Since each chat is virtually independent

That hasn't been true for a while though. Open a new chat tab in ChatGPT and ask it "What do you know about me" to see it in action.

aranelsurion··on Leak confirms OpenAI is preparing ads on ChatGPT for public roll out
Also ads in LLM can be perfectly merged with the content, it'd be impossible to know if LLM tells you something because that's the most likely useful answer or the most profitable one for its owners. Can't be just ad-blocked either, it might be the ultimate channel for ads.

> how strong of a moat there actually is for ChatGPT.

None of the above requires OpenAI to be around though. Google, Apple and Microsoft each have much stronger brands, and more importantly they each own large platforms with captive audiences where they can inject their AI before anyone else's and have deeper pockets to subsidize its use if need be. Everywhere OpenAI opens up shop (except for Web) they're in someone else's backyard.

aranelsurion··on Orion 1.0
Huh? But I see it says "uBlock Origin" when I install it and the UI looks like what I remember from the full version.

It says "Firefox" when I check the extensions page, so maybe that's where it manages to bring the full version from.

aranelsurion··on Orion 1.0
my initial, 15min impression is.. wow so much to like here! It feels very snappy, really nice UI, supports "real" version of uBlock Origin, has built-in Vertical Tabs with nesting and Tab Groups, and also the iOS-like grid of tabs if you prefer.

What I don't like: Seems like no way to disable two-finger back/forward gesture? I hate that one and managed to disable a similar feature in Chrome. Also either it doesn't have any kind of Developer Tools, or I couldn't find it yet in my 15min speedrun. (edit: found it)

I'm hopeful.

aranelsurion··on A time-travelling door bug in Half Life 2
I don’t know about the beta, but there’s an excellent HL2 VR conversion mod you can play today. It feels just right and got me to play HL2 again after all these years.
aranelsurion··on Helping Valve to power up Steam devices
> kicking and screaming in endless battles against basic consumer rights

“Apple has entered the chat.”

There are so many examples of other companies doing exactly that.

aranelsurion··on When UPS charged me a $684 tariff on $355 of vintage computer parts
It’s still a little hard to believe and terrifying how similar this particular title and the comments below are to what I would’ve read in Turkish forums circa 2010s.

For Turkey it only got worse from there.

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