brlewis

The problem isn't that Twitter is split into small bites. Essays do that with paragraphs and sentences as well. It's that Twitter is not structured in a way conducive to conveying an argument.

On twitter, the replies that deconstruct or fortify an argument are interspersed with a lot of junk. I've built https://en.howtruthful.com/ as a tool specifically for deconstructing and fortifying arguments. I see a lot of potential to succeed where twitter failed.

Short, digestible content like tweets can be arranged into an ideas forest, but only if connected by lines of reasoning instead of being piled one on top of the other in reverse chronological order.

I have a first implementation. Details at https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/f2CftRRndH97RpAwL/how-i-got-...

From the article,

>As frustrating as coding can be, I am still in love with it. I love to see my code work, I love it when people can use it, play with it. I love building things, solving problems. I love making progress through difficult challenges.

The "idea guy" part of the story was from the writer's past.

The linked tweet has a diagram where you can pretty quickly see that this isn't just about using wikidata as a training set. The paper linked from the tweet also gives a good summary on its first page.

I'd prefer to write extensions to my IDE using TypeScript rather than elisp, but my attempt in 2018 or so to move from emacs to vscode failed, despite there being extensions that made keymappings largely compatible.

Emacs has a much more focused UI than vscode. It's not obvious to me how to make all the extraneous things I'm not editing disappear.

The emacs-compatible extensions as far as I've seen still haven't been able to make switching files in vscode as fast and convenient as switching in emacs. I spend more time maintaining software than writing new code in a single file, so this is a noticeable slowdown.

VSCode doesn't feel as fast. I never fully investigated all the reasons. But I might make another attempt to move to it after it has a few more years to improve.

"Entirely new genres" of anything is unlikely from ML models trained on existing work. Someone using AI to implement an entirely new idea will be frustrated as the AI keeps gravitating toward convention.

For $22/year there's https://pinboard.in/

Rather than call people delusional, how about giving an example from the past of a technological advance that reduced the work needed to create computer programs, and consequently reduced overall demand for SWEs? I can think of plenty of advances that reduced the work involved in programming, but none that reduced overall demand for SWEs.

I'm studying persuasion. If anyone changes their opinion on decriminalization as a result of arguments made here, could you please say so in reply to this comment?

As mentioned in the description, there's an introductory video. What I probably should have mentioned in the description is that it's highly unlikely you'll recognize how awesome this thing is without watching the video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WA_QNYOSn9g&list=PL69AQIjSnM...

Hasbro avoided this mistake by basing their movie on Dungeons and Dragons, where anything can happen. I think they actually had the best movie of 2023. Mission Impossible 7 had better stunts, but DnD had a better story, better acting, and superbly-executed comedic timing. I was not a Hugh Grant fan before this movie, but now I am.

Wikipedia is a repository for established truth, not for discovering truth. For discovering truth you have https://www.kialo.com/ and the one I'm working on, https://en.howtruthful.com/ but I've only in the past 2 weeks been able to work on it full-time.

I'd be interested to see an exhaustive list of computer programs that are as old as emacs that people still complain about today.

I was unable to reproduce this just now in emacs 26.3 using company/tide. I've been thinking about moving from tide to LSP, but that bug would drive me crazy so maybe I should wait for it to be fixed.

Seems paywalled. Alternate: https://news.arizona.edu/story/many-mild-covid-19-infections...

As the employee in that situation I'd want to be told, so I could improve how I manage others' perception of me.

Allsides is prominently featured in the article.

To clarify, what you want is a benevolent intellectual dictator?

Exactly this. Dramatic videos of people experiencing adverse events following vaccination make the risk appear much bigger than it is.

COVID-19 being old news makes the risk appear much smaller than it is.

How is that more clear than "True: A review of available clinical information, including death certificates, autopsy, and medical records has not established a causal link from deaths to COVID-19 vaccines"?

Please don't say "Just to be clear" and say something agreeing with what I posted. That's actually less clear because casual readers will think you're arguing against me.

With Brazil being on the equator and mostly south of it, I doubt the end of northern hemisphere winter has much to do with it.

I made what I thought was an honest effort to evaluate the risks of vaccination versus the risks of the virus, but I ended up with a clear cut answer. Could you please point out the dishonest part?

https://en.howtruthful.com/o/remaining_unvaccinated_against_...

What I would really love is for people to start seeing the act of changing one's opinion based on evidence as something that brings admiration. If attention-seekers started even pretending to change their opinion based on evidence I think that would bring us to a better place.

tl;dr Here's a web site that made a lot of money despite being a single file of code that we presume is ugly. From this we conclude that one must choose between writing clean code and focusing on what the user wants.

(In case it isn't obvious, I disagree. Maintainable code lets you adapt to an evolving understanding of what the user wants.)

MUDs have always had natural language recognition in the form of other players. The interaction is realistic because it's real.

That said, NLP could widen the already broad possibilities of interactions with NPCs.

If TypeScript and OO are your thing, I made some code for this: https://gitlab.com/brlewis/mud-eventemitter

Hi. I work for Fitbit, but don't speak for Fitbit.

I am, however, curious about how people on HN talk about Fitbit, so I subscribe to HNWatcher alerts. Unfortunately, I only got an alert about this comment a week later.

If I did officially speak for Fitbit, this reply would be more diplomatic.

Personally, I'm losing patience with this lie being casually repeated so many times.

If you would even bother to read the article you yourself linked to, you'd see that it was Strava that revealed this information, not Fitbit. Fitbit's role in the story was to display the "Are you sure?" message when soldiers explicitly chose to share their Fitbit data with Strava.

There is no excuse for saying Fitbit did the revealing. If you were serious about privacy and security, you'd be careful about accusing the right party.

FTR making a good smart watch is a hard problem. Acquiring a company that's already put in the hard work is more resource efficient than scaling that mountain yourself.

> It doesn’t take much imagination to see how dangerous a remotely-hacked smart TV can be, since they are usually equipped with microphones (and occasionally webcams)

Based on this security concern, I've compiled an exhaustive list of things people should look for when opening up a smart TV to assess its suitability as a spying device:

1. battery

In an age where people typically carry smart cell phones everywhere, there's only one question for people with privacy concerns about smart TVs: If I'm concerned about state actors hearing my conversation, is it sufficient to unplug the smart TV?

I searched for the word "battery" and didn't find it in the article. That's not useful. I guess if I ever need to have a conversation where I'm concerned about government spying, I'll just put all the other microphone-equipped devices in the room with the smart TV and go talk somewhere out of earshot of it.