chfalck

> Outwardly I'm sure Brits, Australians, Chinese, Indians etc all get lumped together in your head.

No, they do not.

As someone also in a software career… spot on. I’d estimate GPT4 saves me 30-60 minutes every day, and I feel confident that’s not an exaggeration. It’s gotten to the point where I make certain scripts to automate things I previously would’ve done manually because the turn around with GPT4 for simple tasks means I’m spending 50% the time making an automated solution even for small tasks where it would normally take me too long to be reasonable to automate a one time task.

Yes. It’s especially interesting to hear people say this when some states in the US are larger than some countries in Western Europe. For example Texas is slightly larger than France, and Montana is slightly larger than Germany. Of course, crossing state boundaries in the US does not introduce you to as much diversity as crossing many country boundaries in Western Europe. However, when you consider there are 50 states in the US, it should be reasonable to understand there can be substantial differences in habits and lifestyle.

> I suspect you’re using an incorrect but emotive word to get your point across.

Very well, I’ll leave it to you to come up with a more semantically accurate way to describe the essence of, “we’re going to poke around in your genitals under threat of violence”.

> I don’t disagree, but time is a factor in one of the busiest airports in the world with 10+ planes grounded while they wait.

And what exactly prevented the planes from leaving? It would’ve been quite straightforward to give these people an option. Something like, “if you’re comfortable with a physical inspection, you may leave immediately afterwards on your regular flight. If not, we need you to miss this flight while we run the DNA tests and will accommodate your replacement flight and interim stay”. And yes, all costs for such a delay should be covered for the innocent people subjected to it. Don’t tell me Qatar can’t afford it. Being short on time is a poor justification for the decision which was made.

> Is inserting a needle to take blood rape? What about people being seen at a nudist beach?

You’ve gone some way to answer your own questions here, with the key point being consent. People at a nude beach have indeed consented to being seen nude, so it’s all good. If you walk up and try to start putting things in their genitals against their will under threat of violence, it’s still rape.

> In addition, the line for what's ethical, peoples bodily rights etc are different in Qatar - something anyone entering the country has a responsibility to know.

Oh yep, every travel ad helps clarify. “Discover the enchanting beauty of Qatar, where tradition meets modernity. From the dazzling skyline of Doha to the serene sand dunes of the desert, Qatar invites you to a world of unparalleled experiences.

You may be subject to genital inspection under gunpoint at the whim of the state at any time regardless of your involvement in any crimes, but don’t let that stop you! Book a lovely trip to Qatar today!”

They’re always so clear about it. I don’t know how anyone could miss it. The commonly understood expectations for stricter modesty in behavior and apparel are very different than what we’re talking about in this thread.

> You're projecting western values over them and demanding their culture bends to your view.

I have demanded nothing. I have criticized what I view as Qatar’s ridiculous solution to the problem with which they were presented, and others are free to criticize the opinions I hold in turn.

I use Brave on iOS from time to time when I need good ad blocking. It’s built in like on the desktop version.

It does not feel like hyperbole to me.

“We’re going to insert something into/inspect your genitals. Do you consent to this?”

“No.”

“We’re doing it anyway at gunpoint.”

Sounds like text book rape to me.

Pretty Orwellian if you feel this is an acceptable approach to apply to innocent people en masse in response to a crime.

Maybe take a lock of hair for a DNA test against the newborn if you’re really that concerned yah?

I understand the desire to use Bluetooth, but there is a (relatively) cheap $20 adapter that uses a protocol and frequency more similar to WiFi I believe (like arctis gaming headsets if you’ve ever used those) which works much better. My experience with Bluetooth has always worked as far as connecting is concerned, but I had to use a TP Link Bluetooth adapter and disabled the motherboard Bluetooth to tell windows to use TP (it won’t assume for you). Even after being connected, I don’t think standard Bluetooth has the proper latency and bandwidth for the controller to work reliably in a crowded airspace (I live in an apartment). I will get small skips and latency spikes from time to time. The Xbox adaptor for PC makes it work basically just as effectively as connecting to an Xbox, with the only caveat being it will overheat pretty easily if you place it near an exhaust vent on the PC and are pumping hot air all around it. I put it on the front of my case and it stays cool enough there to work reliably.

Nit picking is indeed annoying. In regards to efficiency however, I’m of the opinion that ignoring nit pick or venomous comments and instead positively engaging with other folks in the thread who have useful comments and feedback would be more effective.

Now some of the first comment chains people will see are hostile interactions between the author and commenters.

For someone considering adoption of the tool, feature requests, or pull requests, they are likely to consider how communicating with the author might be similarly hostile should disagreements arise.

It is unfortunate people often miss the forest for the trees in PRs and on hacker news with comments like the one to which you replied. It is easy to critique and difficult to create, so having people critique very small aspects of a project you created without acknowledging the actual project itself is irritating, but I still think either ignoring them or providing your rebuttal without malice will always be more effective for evangelizing your work.

In the comment you linked, that post received some similar feedback as well. I hope this did not come across as judgmental. It’s an area I also have worked on in my personal life and this was more so an attempt to share my thoughts about the negative ways this communication style has impacted me before.

Anyways, this project is a cool idea and I have respect for the time and effort you put into it. Wishing you well going forward.

I wasn’t aware they paused ads if you clicked away. That certainly feels like an abuse of browser APIs, and I agree that’s inappropriate behavior.

As for the TV analogy, it’s a paid option which still serves ads. YouTube offers a paid option which does not serve ads. Should they ever try to cross the line of charging money and still serving ads then all bets are off.

Wow you could have said that without being incredibly condescending.

Isn’t that already what every standardly configured smartphone does?

The equivalent behavior on YouTube for your analogies would be for you to mute the ad or to browse a different tab while the ad still plays. Removing the ad altogether is very different. TV and radio can’t (last time I checked) tell if you’ve muted the ad, changed the channel, or have walked away. There’s no telemetry they can access that tells them that, so there is no legal course for the ad companies to say “we’re not going to pay you for that ad” because the best the TV and radio companies can do is say “yup we ran it” and there is a guarantee that every person at a minimum had to wait the amount of time the ad takes, and many will likely just endure it. On the other hand, it’s absolutely possible to track ads getting blocked and skipped altogether, and ad companies have legal grounds to say “we won’t pay for that”.

Process culture can be nice in the ideal scenario where the processes can have huge parts automated or programmatically guard railed. However, when that isn’t the case, I agree the paperwork barriers can get dreadfully tedious and introduce their own opportunities for mistakes

I’d say it’s definitely got its merits. If you have a React web app built for desktop browsers, and you’ve cleanly separated your code so that the data layer of API calls, types, utilities, etc… is separate from the desktop UX layer, you suddenly have an awesome way to save time and money. You write the data layer, and then your desktop and mobile apps can all save a ton of duplicated work and maintenance and stay in sync with each other.

“User since December 2, 2023” checks out

While I personally detest wars, the reality of them is it’s not about being cost effective. It’s about winning.

If it’s within an organization’s means to spend $100k (within means being the key part) to be able to destroy 500 dollar drones in a way that increases the ability to win compared to not having it, then purely from the war perspective, it makes sense.

Of course, the entire concept of war is laden with waste and destruction, so it’s almost never in alignment with the economically and environmentally optimized choice.

The largest militaries have access to such an insane amount of money that almost anything that wins better will be purchased, despite the monetary return not justifying the monetary cost.

In life and death situations, a soldier backed by that money isn’t going to care how much money they wasted. Just that they remain alive and the enemy loses.

“Meat-related” is the kicker for me. It’s not like they’re saying, “this is steak”. They’re saying, “this is intended to imitate the texture and flavor you may expect from steak”. As a person making efforts to become vegetarian, this is very useful information for me. I’m not becoming vegetarian because I think meat tastes bad. Steaks are absolutely delicious. The problem is I feel guilt when I eat it now because I can’t shut out the process by which it arrived on my plate. Having hints about what a vegetarian option is attempting to emulate (since I would eat those things if there was a humane way to do so) should not be considered malicious behavior.

While not addressing the root of the problem, I have mine set up to reboot every morning at 4am. I don’t have anything on my local network that can’t cope with that outage so it works alright for me but not great if you’re running devices that don’t handle an outage well.

You throw a lot of things!

This just smacks of over generalization. Honestly when someone says a phrase like “X are Y” without any qualifiers like “some X are Y” or “many X are Y”, it’s hard for me to take the rest of what they’re saying seriously. You are included in that.

In my experience, productivity too.

For others, “Even if you agree with the policy stances of the Republican Party,,,,,,,,,,, having a completely…”

Just to raise awareness, you can absolutely disable all of this nonsense, they just make it a dark pattern to do so. Find the settings gear or however they disguise it and you can disable all news presentation. It’ll still show up if you scroll down, but uh… for your own sake just never do that

They are not. If I have the TV on in the background while I’m on a Facebook Messenger voice chat and it logs details about what show was on, that’s markedly different than a scenario where Messenger is recording me when the app is not opened in the foreground and doing something obviously related to audio recording. I’m not claiming Messenger is or is not passively recording people, but I do want to note that the distinction above is what the original comment seems to be about.

I’ve not been able to find a signed distribution of 7-zip, so I imagine they feel safer building the repo locally to make sure they’re at least not running a compromised .exe (not suggesting the code itself is guaranteed to be virus free, but this does feel safer in my mind)

If I recall, you can work around this by putting a conditional breakpoint on the debugger statement and then setting its return value to just `false`.

I know LLMs aren’t a magic bullet for everything, but this seems like exactly the kind of problem they could solve well as they become more cost effective. Dramatically shrink the pool of real people required to keep an eye on this, and sub in virtual agents adept at detecting CP patterns.

Security back doors also carry the risk of having the opposite effect. We’ve seen many examples of powerful, nation state developed tools being leaked online.

There may be a rise in scenarios where people (including children) have their personal devices breached and are extorted for the exact thing the security backdoors were created to prevent.