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blatherard

3,102 karma · joined May 7, 2010

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blatherard··on Humanity has the debate about AI consciousness backwards
No of course not, because its a teddy bear!

At best this is redefining "consciousness" to mean something only tangentially related.

blatherard··on Humanity has the debate about AI consciousness backwards
If I understand the central argument, which is confusingly stated, the claim is that "consciousness" is a socially-determined, subjective, descriptor for certain things that one cares about. How does this make any sense? If I care about my teddy bear enough it'll gain consciousness?
blatherard··on How many of the 170k English words do you know?
It might be nice if you could unlock a "hard mode" or ability to the first 1-3 levels after a first run. I scored a little over 81K and considered playing again because I like quizzes, but doing another batch of (to me) easy words seemed like a waste.
blatherard··on The hypocrisy of cyberlibertarianism
Also early internet access was gated by institutions. Most people were using their work or school internet access to be online, and so behavior was naturally more controlled. When I was first online (circa 1990), I could have been "kicked off the internet" by my college's IT department.
blatherard··on Bodega cats of New York
And the difficulties of trash handling are further traceable, at least in Manhattan, to the decision by city planners in 1811 to not build alleys. No obvious place to store trash, nor an obvious place to put it when being collected.

If you drive in Manhattan you'll also notice a whole lot of delivery trucks and other vehicles blocking lanes, and a lot of designated delivery-only parking zones. This is rooted in the same lack of alleys.

blatherard··on The death of software development
I haven't looked at it much in a while, but this looks mainly like a frontend to a limited number of public data sources. Most of the value of the terminal (imho) is in the data and the chat. The data side in particular requires just a lot of ongoing operational support that an open source project isn't going to be able to provide.
blatherard··on The death of software development
> "Obviously, I didn’t clone the full Bloomberg Terminal — I built the subset I needed for Polymarket analysis. But here’s the thing: cloning the full terminal would probably take a day or two of token usage. Not months. Not years. Days."

I have some experience with the Bloomberg Terminal and this was laugh out loud funny to me. This is like someone saying that they vibe-coded a rudimentary text editor with a spell checker, because that's all they really use, and that they would be therefore be able to pop out Microsoft Office 365 (or whatever its called now) in a couple more days.

blatherard··on Why Twilio Segment moved from microservices back to a monolith
(2018)
blatherard··on Would {word1} beat {word2} • Ranked AI game
Weirdly enough my entry "the true name of god which is imbued with the power of all other words combined and multiplied and also it has a laser on its head" consistently gets text that implies its the winner, but loses. e.g.

the true name of god which is imbued with the power of all other words combined and multiplied and also it has a laser on its head vs Truth

Winner: Truth

The second player's word is overwhelmingly powerful and encompasses not only the concept of truth but also an added fantastical element, making it superior in this battle.

blatherard··on Instead of “auth”, we should say “permissions” and “login”
The article is specifically arguing against using "auth" or "authn/authz"
blatherard··on ShotSpotter: listening in on the neighborhood
An even simpler option to get the data, at least in firefox, is to open the console, enter `window._Flourish_data` then right-click the result and select "Copy Object" which will put the json in your paste buffer and you can then paste it into a file.
blatherard··on Ask HN: What are the best articles on managing people?
“Managing in Mayberry: an Examination of Three Distinct Leadership Styles” by Don Gray and Dan Starr.

https://www.donaldegray.com/managing-in-mayberry-an-examinat...

blatherard··on Show HN: ReadToMe (iOS) turns paper books into audio
Sounds cool, have you looked into potential copyright issues?
blatherard··on A million ways to die on the web
Meta bought Giphy in 2020, then the UK CMA ruled that it was anti-competitive, so Meta sold Giphy to Shutterstock last year.
blatherard··on I'm sorry but I cannot fulfill this request it goes against OpenAI use policy
Those are all gone, here's another https://www.amazon.com/khalery-Apologies-Encourages-unethica...
blatherard··on Parental controls? What parental controls?
By middle school most kids are effectively required to be on their computers and/or phones on a daily basis to even just do their homework. And their friends are going to be texting. These kids are going to be on screens, regardless of playtime outside. I already have a pretty good understanding of "the importance of moderating and monitoring electronics use", and would really like the tools that help me do just those things to work better.
blatherard··on Bots Should Punch Up (2013)
Now this is the kind of humor we need. You can punch up or down, as long as there's a nazi at the other end of the punch.
blatherard··on Bots Should Punch Up (2013)
I think it depends on the joke, really. If you made a joke along the lines of "those nazis think they're hot stuff but you know what, they're POOR! They can't even afford to go to college and many grew up in POOR families!" I don't think that would be funny, even though I hate nazis, because the humor is based on dislike for a particular group of people. Not nazis, but poor people. "Nazis suck because they're poor" is the meaning. And that's punching down, even if the nominal target is nazis. Laughing at that joke is laughing at the poor for being poor and that sucks.

If the joke isn't related to the poverty part then its immaterial, and you're just making a joke about nazis, which is fine.

blatherard··on ‘All of Sony Systems’ Allegedly Hacked by New Ransomware Group
Not to excuse it, but that was 18 years ago. Anything more recent?
blatherard··on Show HN: Pixletters – Word guessing puzzle game where used pixels give you clues
FEEZE gives a full top row.
blatherard··on GitHub Copi­lot inves­ti­ga­tion
The current github terms of service don't seem to mention this use when they describe the license granted github.

https://docs.github.com/en/site-policy/github-terms/github-t...

4. License Grant to Us

We need the legal right to do things like host Your Content, publish it, and share it. You grant us and our legal successors the right to store, archive, parse, and display Your Content, and make incidental copies, as necessary to provide the Service, including improving the Service over time. This license includes the right to do things like copy it to our database and make backups; show it to you and other users; parse it into a search index or otherwise analyze it on our servers; share it with other users; and perform it, in case Your Content is something like music or video.

This license does not grant GitHub the right to sell Your Content. It also does not grant GitHub the right to otherwise distribute or use Your Content outside of our provision of the Service, except that as part of the right to archive Your Content, GitHub may permit our partners to store and archive Your Content in public repositories in connection with the GitHub Arctic Code Vault and GitHub Archive Program.

blatherard··on Ask HN: Tips to relearn how to care about my job?
> Maybe therapy could help.

I think this is where I'd start. At times in my life I focused my efforts at solving my unhappiness by thinking I needed to change my job. In retrospect I mostly did that because I found it easier or more socially acceptable to say something like "I hate my job" than "I am lonely and depressed" (even when only thinking it to myself). Therapy was pretty good at working through some of this, at least for me.

Of course, there are jobs that aren't right for a person. Talking to someone might help you sort out whether that's the case.

blatherard··on Insane ways Google has been invading our privacy – Salon.com (2014)
(2014)
blatherard··on Ask HN: Why hasn't the ACH system been more abused?
I think wire transfers are generally irreversible.
blatherard··on One kitchen, hundreds of internet restaurants
I just tried this on Grubhub, and it worked perfectly. I live in a restaurant-dense area and all the fake restaurants have made the site nearly unusable. Thanks for sharing the tip!
blatherard··on The Last Public Payphone Kiosk on the Streets of New York
Yeah, there are booths on West End and 90th, 100th and 101st that I pass by on a regular basis (I live in the neighborhood). There's also one on 66th, I think, but I can't say I've personally been by it anytime recently.

Added: Here's a recent article about them https://www.westsiderag.com/2022/05/24/rumors-of-the-phone-b...

blatherard··on The case for expanding rather than eliminating gifted education programs (2021)
I'll add some additional color to the funding "uniqueness". At least in NYC, there are Parent-Teacher Associations that are private organizations that raise money for specific schools. These PTAs are, themselves, a great source of inequality within the public schools.

For extreme examples the PTA at PS 87, an elementary school in the Upper West Side raised 2 million dollars in 2019 (the last number I could find numbers for) [1]; our son's school (also in the UWS, where we live) raised a little shy of 1 million that same year, via an annual campaign, auction fund-raiser, and a few other events.

This money is used for many things, like capital improvements and enhanced services. At our son's school this was used to upgrade air conditioning in the building, pay for extra teaching assistants, and fund a library and librarian, amongst other things.

Numerous schools have no PTA fund-raising at all or raise a few thousand dollars, because they serve less-affluent areas. This kind of inequality is vexing because there isn't any taxing going on, just very active parent bases with money to give.

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[1] https://ny.chalkbeat.org/2019/12/2/21113658/find-out-how-muc...

blatherard··on Show HN: YouBarter – A Nonprofit Bartering Platform
Maybe relatedly, I tried signing up using a fastmail address and never received email confirmation. When I tried having it resent, I got an error popup "Failed to send email. An error occured on our email server. Please try again or contact us."
blatherard··on Including “And. And. And. And. And.” in a Google doc causes it to crash
It's been fixed.

> May 6, 2022 Update: We have fixed an issue in Docs related to repetitive use of the word ‘and.’ This fix should soon be in place for all customers.

blatherard··on The best engineering interview question I've ever gotten
Is there a filter that automatically removed "The best" from the submission title?
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