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chaosharmonicon Social Media, AI, and the Battle for Your Brain

The wildest thing about Kojima devoting an whole game to the way mis- and disinformation spreads via meme is the part where it then happened to him personally after the Abe shooting [0]

[0] https://kotaku.com/shinzo-abe-assassin-killer-kojima-greek-n...

chaosharmonicon Show HN: GodotOS – Fake operating system interface made in the Godot engine

> silksong never.png

Why do you have to hurt me like this

chaosharmonicon Aim, fire, scan: the 80/20 of executing on big projects

Stepmania is great. I actually built a skeleton of a workout tracker for DDR a while back using the simfiles I was already playing this on. I haven't had a space to play in that consistently in years, though, so I never bothered to bring the hosted demo back up when Heroku killed their free tier and kinda stalled the development before it got more than just fleshed out enough to be kind of useful.

That said, there's a mostly working .sm to .ssc converter (it's still got a couple edge cases around punctuation in titles), as I had to migrate the simfiles to something with named properties anyway to get reliable data out of them.

This, and the seeder script (which I wrote using a bunch of fetch requests in order to also test a bunch of my frontend logic, before Node started shipping with that) that I used to seed all the DDR arcade tracks into a db, were actually my first experience with Deno. It's been my go-to experiment tool pretty much ever since.

If anyone's curious, it's under my github (same username) at step-step-recollection. (And ...recollection-scripts, and ...recollection-ui. Annoyingly I never got to experimenting with server-side rendering on it, so that's also a separate repo.)

chaosharmonicon Aim, fire, scan: the 80/20 of executing on big projects

> 4. Try to do fun stuff if possible. Going to the gym is not fun, but it feels good after. But if you have a side project, make it a fun one, something you really are in to.

I'm not entirely with you about gyms in particular. Weights might just not be your thing as an individual, but "going to the gym is not fun" is often about the logistical problems of timing around gyms (peak hours, January rushes especially) and not necessarily that it's an inherently bad experience. If you're going when it's dead, it can actually be pretty great.

If you're doing it now, then yeah, it's a bad idea (and there's a separate ramble on that), but it doesn't have to be.

Broadly though, I agree with you. You'll never find me on a treadmill, but will find me on a DDR cab.

chaosharmonicon "Nightmare Tenant" Story Amplified by Seattle Times Crumbles Under Scrutiny

Both practices are effectively drip pricing, is my point. In the case of landlords you're right that there are a glut of "providers" (and I'm not sure I agree with that terminology per se but mechanically it works), but the thing you have to sift through a horde of ads for one that doesn't. And even then, it's largely guessing, because they're not actually required to tell you that in the ad itself -- sometimes you have to actually go through the whole process of reaching out to a human, maybe getting a response, and then finding out.

And unlike other up-front costs (first/last/security) it doesn't actually provide value to a tenant in any way. It's a third party that is really only acting on behalf of a landlord, never mind the part where we're talking about literal rent-seeking.

Essentially, it's deceptive advertising, that makes for a less fair and accessible marketplace to consumers. Especially in any remotely competitive rental market (which is a lot of them now, given the way prices have skyrocketed in recent years relative to pay), it's easy to get stuck paying an exorbitant fee simply for lack of a clear way to find out which places don't expect you to pay the third party they contracted.

And that's not a free market either.

chaosharmonicon Beeper Mini is now open-source

Yeah, that's Apple actively degrading the user experience on both sides specifically because one side isn't their customer. To the point that the color itself violates their own accessibility guidelines.

This effectively attempts to lock people into their ecosystem, including their App Store, and it's... honestly kind of wild to me (as an American, for GP's reference) that we've been allowing this to continue, in a country with a specific history of using antitrust law to go after phone companies for abusing their network effect to create monopolies.

chaosharmonicon "Nightmare Tenant" Story Amplified by Seattle Times Crumbles Under Scrutiny

Posting to Craigslist because the landlords are too lazy to do it themselves is a reasonable part of the transaction cost?

And the thing is that it's not voluntary any more than grocery shopping is. You can maybe make a point about where (sort of -- where I live, this practice is actually allowed statewide, so it's not strictly a rural/urban divide), but that's a separate axis from whether or not people need places to live. (Theoretically buying is an option, but if renting is inaccessible, it's unlikely that you're really looking at homeownership either.)

This is just the same laissez-faire capitalism that gave us Ticketmaster, right down to being an identical business model.

chaosharmonicon Llamafile: Bringing LLMs to the people, and to your own computer

I mean, that depends somewhat on your use case. My primary development machine -- a Framework with a recent board and 32GB of RAM -- is perfectly capable of running smaller models on CPU, and while it's certainly easy to find where the ceiling is (and this obviously isn't the hardware profile of an average user), it's still more than sufficient for basic use

Even if it does also chew through my battery...

chaosharmonicon "Nightmare Tenant" Story Amplified by Seattle Times Crumbles Under Scrutiny

I lived in a large, left leaning metro area for 10yrs and they can't even be bothered to ban landlords from passing their business expenses to tenants as a condition for signing a lease.

Because that's what brokers are when the only value they're providing is the work a landlord doesn't want to do, like advertising a space or handling lease paperwork. A business expense.

You want to talk about what makes rents worse and availability lower? Let's look at charging an entire additional month's rent up front to pay a third party.

chaosharmonicon Llamafile: Bringing LLMs to the people, and to your own computer

Actually if you poke around at it a little more closely you'll find there's also a version of Llamafile that just ships llama.cpp, enabling you to supply a model of your choosing.

Also the point of a tool like this to make the ecosystem more accessible to everyone, not just software developers.

chaosharmonicon You don't need JavaScript for that

> It's only "not solved" because some people have a bizarre fetish for avoiding JavaScript and will find any excuse to wedge in their half-baked alternatives.

This isn't some "bizarre fetish," it's an issue with implications from performance to code organization to legal compliance. (No, seriously -- Domino's had to deal with an ADA suit a few years ago because their app dispensed with standard elements with default behaviors, like <button>s, in favor of unlabeled <div>s that had effectively no compatibility with screen readers.)

This is a core component of a lot of problems with modern webdev.

Framework fatigue? Yeah, because UI toolkits frequently reimplement basic structural elements, in their own specific dialects.

Bloated codebase full of external dependencies, that only works well on fast internet connections? Well, look at all the overdependence on third-party libs, or even or even hand-rolled behaviors in JavaScript taking up dev time, for implementations of things that browsers support natively now.

Messy codebase that needs a CSS class for every element, or even style declarations within the CSS classes themselves? You can do less of that if you use semantic elements and modern language features -- because then you can write unique selectors without having to explicitly name everything.

I'm not saying that it's without its own problems -- obviously different orgs will require different levels of support for older browsers, for one thing -- but there's a reasonable argument to be made that the current ecosystem overcomplicates this a lot, and that relative to using the platform, sometimes all the extraneous dependencies are the half-baked alternatives.

chaosharmonicon Ask HN: What was the outcome of Reddit blackout?

I haven't been back there much actually. My rabbit holes lately have skewed further toward desktop Linux and the Web as ecosystems, just since I generally feel Android has gotten stagnant over the last few years.

Sure, foldables exist, but they're still out of a typical user's price range and are more fragile than either of the things they're replacing. And while personally I more just lost track of it because my last couple of devices have been carrier-locked initially, custom ROMs have gotten to be substantially more of a pain in the ass to daily-drive. Not only has Google opted to mostly let the core applications rot in favor of ones that depend on the Google Play libs, but SafetyNet is now being used for everything from DRM to anti-cheat. (Not that I should be picking up a Fate: G/O habit anyway, but still.)

I do have hope for things in this space to get interesting again -- I think the full potential of GKIs is more of a long-term bet, and I think the landscape for Android on larger screens is a lot better this time around -- but I'm also just as interested in any way I can get my old devices running Linux at this point instead. (I am aware of PostmarketOS, but my OP7T doesn't have a port yet, and mainlining a device is as daunting a research dive as it is fascinating.)

To more directly answer your question though, you might want to check Lemdroid (lemdro.id) if you haven't already.

chaosharmonicon Ask HN: What was the outcome of Reddit blackout?

Yeah, several of the more technical subs that I used to frequent either just never reopened or splintered off to Lemmy. Some (like /r/Android) actually have entire instances.

I personally wrote a userscript to wipe every post comment I've ever made, and have limited my usage to a few particular subs that I still lurk (/r/LocalLLaMA in particular) just bc Lemmy still doesn't seem to have a comparable level of activity.

Speaking of which I'm still trying to sort out the situation involving which instances federate with which, and where to actually set up a primary account, and what the interop situation with different Fediverse platforms is even like in general for that matter.

chaosharmonicon Ask HN: Who is hiring? (November 2023)

Which I'll admit I'm jealous of -- I didn't even get a response back after following up a second time about how ghosting sucks. (Or this, for that matter.)

And that's unfortunate, because it did genuinely sound interesting. -.-

chaosharmonicon Opusmodus: Common Lisp Music Composition System

Sonic Pi binds MIDI codes to symbols like `:a4` for their corresponding note names, if that helps. It's not comprehensive -- there are no entries for doubled flats/sharps, for instance -- but you can write basic chords/melodic lines with a pretty limited need for numbers.

You'll still need some for `sleep` (or `play_pattern_timed`), but if we're being pedantic about it, note lengths are already numbers as is.

chaosharmonicon A new home and license (AGPL) for Synapse and friends

Honestly, given that Matrix is a spec and not just a first-party client, it reminds me a lot more of BitTorrent.

BitTorrent the client went full proprietary, but that did nothing to the adoption of BitTorrent the protocol, because open-source implementations are all over the place.

That's at least what I hope is the worst case here.

chaosharmonicon Ex-Kotaku staff go independent and launch Aftermath

It also turns out lots of the people making them like unions.

chaosharmonicon Ask HN: Who is hiring? (November 2023)

As a caution, a few months ago this place promised me a response back and then ghosted me without so much as a follow-up

chaosharmonicon China to ban non-adult mobile use from 10 PM to 6 AM

Don't ask Utah. [0]

[0] https://apnews.com/article/social-media-utah-kids-84bd1f6481...

chaosharmonicon Oregon decriminalized hard drugs – early results aren’t encouraging

Just anecdotally, to append to this a bit, actually the last time I went on vacation I went to a dispensary, only for the same spot to pop up in the trip's group chat a week or two later because the same spot had gotten hit with an armed robbery. (Or at least attempted? I forget. Anyway...)

chaosharmonicon CodeCov is now Open Source

Eventually open source.

chaosharmonicon Oregon decriminalized hard drugs – early results aren’t encouraging

The bank accounts thing also makes them bigger targets for theft, because of all the extra cash that stores end up handling when they can't use standard payment methods.

chaosharmonicon How to build toxic software teams

Pay quietly

Don't pay your staff consistently for the same work. Refuse to advertise your budgets, and loosen your "ranges" to get people in the door when they push you about it, but then use those same targets to hand-wave away people already inside -- who come to you after comparing notes or observing the impact of broader market conditions like inflation. Also, stop them from comparing notes or doing fifth-grade level math like compounding effects. That education is there to help you, not them - and speaking of which, it taught them better than to talk out of turn, let alone to question the people they work for.

(...satire aside though, you do know standups can be done in the afternoons, right?)

chaosharmonicon Bun v0.7.0

[Scruffy voice] Second.

I'm writing out a bunch of notes for a technical screen in an UWU.md file right now (even if I'm definitely not shipping it to them like that)

chaosharmonicon At this company, we are family

That would be pretty suspect here too now, actually [0]

[0] https://www.americanbar.org/groups/labor_law/publications/la...

chaosharmonicon FTC reportedly plans major antitrust lawsuit against Amazon

> A lot of the anti-china stuff is coming from the top, the CHIPS act is a great example.

I mean... TSMC is based in Taiwan, and if China were ever to invade they'd have a vested interest in kneecapping American businesses that currently rely on that chip supply (AMD, Apple, and Qualcomm all come to mind) -- for any of a list of reasons ranging from turnabout over the whole Huawei thing to just the obvious incentive to turn that manufacturing capacity toward producing a domestic supply.

In that context, building up domestic suppliers of our own is just a reasonable precaution.

> I think taking down Amazon and maybe busting them up ala AT&T would be a feather in Biden's cap with the liberals and the right thing to do. Then they need to go after Google and Facebook.

But also yes, I'm with you on this wholeheartedly.

I'd further add, given we have a history of breaking up telecom companies specifically for amassing too much market power that you as a consumer to avoid them, that we should probably turn the same to most ISPs. Also that it's baffling that no one's gone after Apple over iMessage, what with the way it actively makes text chains worse the moment anyone involved isn't a customer of theirs.

chaosharmonicon Web Apps on macOS Sonoma 14 Beta

I don't know if you noticed but this is literally a thread about installable web apps on a browser that isn't Chrome (or derived from Chrome) on an OS that isn't developed by Google.

chaosharmonicon Web Apps on macOS Sonoma 14 Beta

I mean, wouldn't the ChromeOS way be to just... use Chrome itself without also running server-side JS underneath it? Arguably this is the opposite -- Google goes in hard on the idea of expanding the Web's capabilities, after all, where a lot of the Apple camp has historically preferred keeping certain system-level stuff like hardware access away from browsers. Shipping Node underneath seems to skew more toward the latter, even if it's going to vary by team whether it's a philosophical choice or just a pragmatic one.

I agree that I'd rather just have a system WebView for things like this, but putting aside that the landscape for those is effectively just Blink/V8 or WebKit/JavaScriptCore at this point, it's still perfectly valid to just want a single engine that behaves consistently across environments -- particularly given Safari's history of being slow to adopt Web standards even when they don't fall into the whole argument of capability.

Even Tauri, which currently relies on system WebViews, has started collaborating with the Servo team[0], at which point you're cycling right back to shipping a browser stack for writing desktop apps in JavaScript. (And for that part, I'll take the further development of alternative browser engines as a net gain tbh. See also: Wolvic.)

[0] https://twitter.com/TauriApps/status/1505618001126731781

chaosharmonicon FOSSY 2023, Portland: Free and Open Source Software Yearly conference

I've had a similar joke whenever I try to describe patent trolls, about how normally standards-essential patents are expected to be widely accessible, and the terms that satisfy these expectations are typically described as FRAND -- Fair, Reasonable, AND.

(...Non-Discriminatory)

chaosharmonicon Reddit's Recently Announced API Changes, and the future of /r/blind

Would high contrast not be a CSS thing? I know `prefers-reduced-motion` is...