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bigblind

478 karma · joined May 21, 2015

Find me online: https://github.com/frederikcreemers https://mastodon.nl/bigblind https://frederikcreemers.be https://bigblind.at.hn
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bigblind··on Show HN: The same nine streaming subscriptions cost $702/year more than in 2021
Same here, that's the main value I get from especially music streaming services: I hear about anartist, and can immediately go check otu their discography.
bigblind··on Show HN: Academa – Long-form STEM lecture videos generated by LLMs
i find the writing style a bit peculiar at times. Take this lecture on bloom filters for example: https://academa.ai/lectures/bloom-filters

It suddenly starts talking about URLs, but it never really sets up the idea that we're using some kind of URL lookup service as an example. The way it introduces the memory limit feels similarly strange. At some point, it just says that we have 8GB of memory, but it does that halfway through the explanation, not as part of the setup of the problem we're actually solving.

bigblind··on Air Theremin – a browser theremin you play by waving at your webcam
Quite fun to play with.Nice work!
bigblind··on Show HN: PlugClaw – Private AI agent hardware for any phone or PC
This looks interesting, but I'm also getting to the point wherethings like the video having a clearly AI-generated voiceover turns me off a bit. Like, if you're excited to tell me about your product, tell me yourself.
bigblind··on 'Pervert glasses': Backlash against Meta's smart glasses grows
I think you can be present in the moment, but still find value in a tool like this. I may not be "the norm" because I'm legally blind, but in some sense, a tool like this could make me even more present. I currently use my phone a lot to zoom in on signs to read them. I'd love it if I wouldn't have to hold a phone in front of my face, just to know whether the place I'm standing in front of is, in fact, Jimmy's Barbershop, or whatever place I'm trying to navigate to for the first time.
bigblind··on 'Pervert glasses': Backlash against Meta's smart glasses grows
Thinking completely selfishly, as a visually impaired person, I want these to succeed, because they can be a great assistive tool. And assistive tools being general consumer products makes them cheaper.
bigblind··on US strikes $1.2B deal to pay German firm to halt offshore wind projects
Let's start a $1.3bn goFundMe, and invite all billionnaires with a conscience (do they even exist?) to put some money in. + an extra $20 in postage to mail a turd to donny
bigblind··on Dopamine Fracking
I feel like they do and they don't at the same time. The buildings may look different, but city center rents driving out a lot of small local businesses, and leaving the same brands everywhere.
bigblind··on Show HN: Uruky (EU-based Kagi alternative) now has Image Search and URL Rewrites
It doesn't do great on recent events it seems. The amusement park Walibi Belgium recently announced a company called RMC is doing a makeover of their wooden roller coaster, so I did a search for "walibi belgium rmc", and it found one very out-of-date article about earlier rumours, and a bunch of less relevant stuff.
bigblind··on Three Ways to Get Paid
Then you become a poletician, though I guess that could also apply to lying to people who want to be lied to.
bigblind··on We replaced Zendesk
I'm curious whether people feel like UX could at all be a differentiator here. like, sure, i can build a very quick crud app with Ai in an hour, but there are lots of UX decisions that, if not prompted in the right direction, AI just handles badly.

i guess the problem is that once a teamp goes through the process of figuring out good UX for a certain flow, which can take time, that UX then becomes trivial to copy.

bigblind··on OpenAI backs Illinois bill that would limit when AI labs can be held liable
I think you've just summed up late stage capitalism.
bigblind··on Show HN: CSS Studio. Design by hand, code by agent
This looks interesting! I understand not wanting to put out a narrated tour as the video, but being visually impaired, i find video demos without narration, that constantly move around/focus on different things hard to follow. It still might be worth putting a short screencast with you actually walkign through usijng the product and narrating it.
bigblind··on Škoda DuoBell: A bicycle bell that penetrates noise-cancelling headphones
It's unfortunate that this is necessary. It should be obvious that wearing noise cancelling headphones in trafic, including as a pedestrian, is a bad idea.

I'm legally blind, so I have my own bias here, but I think people really over-rely on sight. If you do want to listen to something while walking around a city, I can highly recommend bone conduction headphones, that keep your ears unblocked.

bigblind··on Škoda DuoBell: A bicycle bell that penetrates noise-cancelling headphones
If you just bell once or twice, and don't aggressively keep ringing, I'd never consider a bicycle bell in a shared space rude. I even consider it good manners, though as others have said, that varies between cultures.

Being visually impaired, though, I'm grateful for cyclists who use their bell. It's immediately clear. For some reason, my brain takes slightly longer to process someone yelling "on your left!" or similar, than just a quick "ring ring".

bigblind··on US and Iran agree to provisional ceasefire
It is a benefit if you're a stakeholder in those companies, or your friends are stakeholders and will pass on some of the winnings as a "thank you."
bigblind·
I guess? At least there you can review the plan, but is this planning mode any better at making architectural decisions than when you prompt an LLM and let it make the changes directly? (it might be, just not sure.)
bigblind··on How I write software with LLMs
> On projects where I have no understanding of the underlying technology (e.g. mobile apps), the code still quickly becomes a mess of bad choices. However, on projects where I know the technologies used well (e.g. backend apps, though not necessarily in Python), this hasn’t happened yet, even at tens of thousands of SLoC. Most of that must be because the models are getting better, but I think that a lot of it is also because I’ve improved my way of working with the models.

I wonder whether at some point we'll get a translation model, that translates relatively vague requests into sound architectural decisions, with some embedded knowledge of the environment you're building in, and that can ask clarifying questions when there are multiple options with different tradeoffs.

bigblind··on Marketing for Founders
Here's an example of one of their dev logs: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pdym24sg1HQ
bigblind··on Reliable Software in the LLM Era
I guess it's too late for an "Eternal sunshine of the slopless mind"?
bigblind··on Parseword, making cryptic crosswords more accessible
I like this a lot!

One thing I found as a somewhat experienced solver of cryptic crosswords, is that it was confusing that I couldn't just type an answer. I skipped the tutorial/lesson, because I didn't want an explanation of how cryptic clues work, I just wanted to solve one. So a little, inline explanation for first time visitors on how to solve them on this site might be good.

bigblind··on Show HN: ImagineIf – Collaborative storytelling where AI visualizes each segment
This is an interesting idea, and I'd love to see whether people come up with interesting stories/imaginations with this, but I feel very strongly pushed to engage before I've even properly explored the platform to see the potential. Like, all the stories seem to have their images locked, I assume until I make an account. Then there's also this mention of a pro subscription and some deal for the. firlst N subscribers. I'm not even sure yet if this a platform that's worth enough for me to make an account, let alone pay money for. I understand that image generation isn't cheap so you need to think about monetization early, but I suspect you'll need more ways for people to see the value of it without the commitment of even creating an account to have this become successful.
bigblind··on LLM=True
I never considered the volume of output tokens from dev tools, but yeah, I like this idea a lot.
bigblind··on AI agent opens a PR write a blogpost to shames the maintainer who closes it
I can certainly believe that this is really an agent doing this, but I can't help that part of my brain is going "some guy i his parents' basement somewhere is trolling the hell out of us all right now."
bigblind··on Show HN: Sandboxing untrusted code using WebAssembly
This looks very neat indeed! Are there any plans to adding network limits? Like, you might want to avoid an agent running code that just requests a resource in a loop, or downloads massive amounts of data.
bigblind··on Project Genie: Experimenting with infinite, interactive worlds
Anyone else going to try it and just keep getting a 404 page?
bigblind··on Show HN: We Built the 1. EU-Sovereignty Audit for Websites
Any recommendations for good European alternatives to Clooudflare? Is there an EU company that's as trustworthy when it comesq to DDoS protection?
bigblind··on Cloudflare acquires Astro
i'd personalloy love a quick video demo on the home screen, with someone walking through the experience of using the app; other than that, looks interesting;
bigblind··on Every GitHub object has two IDs
I think more important than worrying about people treating an opaque value as structured data, is wondering _why_ they're doing so. In the case of this blog post, all they wanted to do was construct a URL, which required the integer database ID. Just make sure you expose what people need, so they don't need to go digging.

Other than that, I agree with what others are saying. If people rely on some undocumented aspect of your IDs, it's on them if that breaks.

bigblind··on Shut Up About the Water
Can someone tell me why this was flagged? To me, it feels like an important discussion to have
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