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bratbag

739 karma · joined June 25, 2019

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bratbag··on I'm a seeing-eye dog for a computer
The outcomes those values achieve.
bratbag··on Making the Internet Boring
Do things away from your screen in the real world and form friendships around that.

An addict with addict friends needs to find non addicted friends to escape the addiction.

bratbag··on The main way I've seen people turn ideologically crazy (2025)
You are filtering out politically engaged people who have assesed the current mechanisms of state to be too flawed to be worth continued interaction.

This is likely quite a large group.

bratbag··on Danube's record low levels force shutdown of Hungary's only nuclear plant
Nuclear without greed is fine.

Its only where shortcuts have been taken with cooling that there will be issues.

bratbag··on Leak of San Francisco Police Drone Footage Exposes Reality of Urban Surveillance
It's because ignoring rights happens faster than they can be protected.

Move fast enough with sufficent scale and you can eliminate peoples ability to protect their own rights before they even realise they are under threat.

Sometimes friction in government is necessary for individual liberty.

bratbag··on Death of the Status Update: Why 55% of Americans Stopped Posting on Social Media
I would say they create more addictive content than people with lives away from social media.

But that doesnt help with building 1:1 connections.

bratbag··on EU Commission: addictive design Instagram and Facebook in breach of the DSA
Why instead of?

Do both.

bratbag··on AI-generated videos to maximally drive a target brain region
Not even close chief.

Earth has been a rich, life sustaining planet in far hotter conditions then anything we are projected to take it to.

We can kill billions of ourselves, but short of ww3 earth will crack on just fine.

Social media emotional hot-takes dont match the numbers.

We are still screwed though.

bratbag··on I think I have LLM burnout
At one point we considered adding artifical delay to responses because irrational users dont trust something that finishes fast, even if its the same quality.

How empirical are your comparisons of new and old outputs?

bratbag··on The Internet Is Drowning in Secret Ads
Users dont understand the externalised cost of free services.

Worse than that, they feel entitled to them, to the point that the actual expectation of having to pay for something that requires effort to maintain is treated as an insult.

bratbag··on Open Source Low Tech
Because i would rather solve the problems close to home, the problems involving those billionaires.

Im not going to put effort into turning those other people in another country into a new cash crop for billionaires.

bratbag··on U.S. science is in chaos
Their needs are met.

They are turning to racism because of their wants and fears.

bratbag··on U.S. science is in chaos
And if you are any kind of strategic thinker when faced with that problem, you will do two things

1. Invest in propaganda to ensure the US becomes hostile to immigrants.

2. Invest in opening yourself up to immigration.

China is openly doing 2. It would be foolish to assume they are are not also investing in 1 and secretly cheering on the current administrations hateful stupidity.

Immigration is the US superpower, and everyone who wants to knock them off the number 1 spot is eroding it.

bratbag··on Show HN: Forge – Guardrails take an 8B model from 53% to 99% on agentic tasks
I found it fun to read.
bratbag··on Create value for others and don’t worry about the returns
War against someone who wants my society eradicated provides a lot of value to my people.
bratbag··on Show HN: Algorithmically finding the longest line of sight on Earth
Its a really interesting question.

Lets take it to its farthest extent: can you take a picture of a black hole?

bratbag··on On Being a Human Being in the Time of Collapse (2022) [pdf]
Or a life where everyone operates in absolutes, with no shades of grey allowed.

Zero reflection and total constant analysis paralysis are both non viable.

bratbag··on As AI gobbles up chips, prices for devices may rise
Or the value of everything non ai drops to zero, which makes the value of ai infinite by comparison.
bratbag··on AI is a front for consolidation of resources and power
It's not about blindly accepting autogenerated code. Its using them for tooling integration.

Its like terminal autocomplete on steroids. Everything around the code is blazing fast.

bratbag··on U.S. already has the critical minerals it needs, according to new analysis
The majority of obese people want to be thin, but will die obese anyway.

Just wanting something that requires a significant overhaul of how you do things, is not enough.

bratbag··on Copilot broke audit logs, but Microsoft won't tell customers
If this reduces error rates to below those of a human, then that's an acceptable approach.

Unless you think humans code reviewing humans is pointless because errors sometimes still slip through?

bratbag··on Wikipedia loses challenge against Online Safety Act
Pass.

Im glad not to be confined by historical rules invented by people who could not hope to predict the future, and would not choose to put that kind of burden on my descendents.

bratbag··on Wikipedia loses challenge against Online Safety Act
The libertarian fantasy where its possible to exist without the choices of others impacting you, doesn't work in the real world.
bratbag··on Wikipedia loses challenge against Online Safety Act
They voted against it because they thought it didn't go far enough.
bratbag··on The Authoritarian Regime Survival Guide
Those three things are just part of point 4 in the article.

An authoritarian leader will tell you those things are under threat and that only they can protect them, to create a feeling of threat that will persuade the gullible to give up their freedom.

bratbag··on Executive wealth as a factor in return-to-office
I'm one of those people who is happier when spending some time in the office each week and have said that when surveyed.

Don't assume survey results that run counter to your anecdotal experience have been fabricated.

bratbag··on UK's Online Safety Act comes into force
This is overblown.

The police are responsible for deciding how to classify a report. Their decisions need to be audited to avoid corruption.

Ergo they have to maintain a record of reports they decided were not hate crimes.

bratbag··on We built a self-healing system to survive a concurrency bug at Netflix
Depends what else it's solving for.

I've seen multiple issues solved like this after engineering teams have been cut to the bone.

If the cost of maintaining enough engineers to keep systems stable for more than 24 hours, is more than the cost of doubling the container count, then this is what happens

bratbag··on Life expectancy rise in rich countries slows down: took 30 years to prove
The us system is what a free market approach inevitably degrades into when consumers don't have a real option to say no to a service.
bratbag··on Hezbollah pager explosions kill several people in Lebanon
If they used their own products to do this then yes. If not then no.

Is that what happened?

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