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collinmcnulty

1,239 karma · joined April 13, 2022

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collinmcnulty··on Government orders GitHub to remove Bluetooth-based chat app Bitchat: Jack Dorsey
Yes, exactly that. Tons of crime is committed using only in-person communication. Should we all have microphones in our homes? Do detective work, flip sources, follow the money.
collinmcnulty··on Never Enough
The story about the woman recording her dates is getting extrapolated into too much. Her friends told her it made people uncomfortable and that she should stop. This is not a trend.
collinmcnulty··on Kimi K3 Is Competitive with Fable; Kimi K3 and Fable Is SoTA
I think it is a huge mistake to believe that there is a “true” nature of the models. They are artificial, everything about them is a construct. This is like asking the true shape of the clay without the potter’s influence.
collinmcnulty··on Kimi K3 Is Competitive with Fable; Kimi K3 and Fable Is SoTA
It doesn’t truly feel anything. It will adopt whatever tone it’s prompted to.
collinmcnulty··on Speech Recognition and TTS in less than 500kb
This reply helped me think more about what I want. I do my thinking when crafting the prompt, and I want to be able to do several passes. So the first draft I like to dictate and be able to live edit with my voice, but then I want to do a subsequent pass at the keyboard after the full prompt is written.
collinmcnulty··on Qwen-Image-3.0: Rich Content, Authentic Details, Deep Knowledge
Yes, because it is the actual dimensions of the real shirt.
collinmcnulty··on Speech Recognition and TTS in less than 500kb
What I want is a 1940s style “taking dictation” where the words I say go through a step where the goal is to create the text Im imagining. So if I say “… very significant, actually just significant…” what Claude Code receives is “…significant…”.

I built this myself with whisper -> “secretary” prompt -> Claude Code, but having the first two steps be interactive is really what I would want.

collinmcnulty··on How the Elite See Rome
I would argue it’s a matter of degree, not of kind. “Private equity” is a rhetorical device to convert “I run an unglamorous business” into “I’m the kind of person who gets the private tour”. All the status stuff can be bought.
collinmcnulty··on How the Elite See Rome
Tangential a bit, but I grate at using “elite” as a synonym for “rich”. It adopts the framing favored by powerful people as if they have an inherent difference and aren’t just some people that society allows to have more resources. It promotes a false inevitability.
collinmcnulty··on Under federal rule, colleges must leave grads better off or lose financial aid
Aggravating the issue is the administration’s goal. They want an undereducated population and are using the more popular issue of student debt as a fig leaf. Note especially how it’s on the university to prove that each program justifies itself economically, increasing the administrative burden on colleges. If they really cared about limiting taxpayer burden, they’d exempt in-state tuition at state schools from this rule.
collinmcnulty··on Under federal rule, colleges must leave grads better off or lose financial aid
You don’t think investing in arts, humanities, and music contributes to a functioning democracy?
collinmcnulty··on Apple sues OpenAI, accuses ex-employees of stealing trade secrets
Which is why OpenAI and Anthropic think it’s fair play for other companies to distill their models, right?
collinmcnulty··on Grok 4.5
It’s basically a clearance sale, is the theory.
collinmcnulty··on Europe's company websites are mostly served by US vendors
As ever, there's a relevant xkcd

https://xkcd.com/932/

collinmcnulty··on Acronym Fatigue Series Introduction: why I'm wary of acronyms
I actually think it’s even worse than the author suggests. Acronyms promote the illusion of understanding. You know the words the acronym stands for and it makes you feel a little bit like you know what it means, but you don’t. All names are meaningless words until we assign them a meaning, but acronyms trick you into thinking the name itself tells you something about what it is.
collinmcnulty··on How to ask for help from people who don't know you
I think that was the gist of the first point: “show you’re a serious person”
collinmcnulty··on Nintendo has raised its employees base salary by 10%
This is largely a function of exchange rates. If you are paid in USD, then Japan will seem cheap in a way it does not for people paid in yen.
collinmcnulty··on Supreme Court upholds broad conception of birthright citizenship
5-4 on the Constitution. Kavanaugh's concurrence is that birthright citizenship is controlled by a law that Congress could change.
collinmcnulty··on The Low-Tech AI of Elden Ring
You’re in luck, they made a great paper on this!

https://www.gamedevs.org/uploads/three-states-plan-ai-of-fea...

collinmcnulty··on The AirPods Effect
Sometimes I’m washing dishes and she walks into the room and doesn’t immediately know if there’s sound in my ears. It’d just be a nice little affordance to be able to proactively signal that.
collinmcnulty··on The AirPods Effect
What I would really love is an option to have a small indicator light or visible signal on my earpiece that means “there’s no sound playing”. And if I’m using them just for noise cancellation but want to appear approachable, I can turn it on. Honestly would be great for sound my home, as sometimes I keep them in when doing chores just because I don’t have a free hand, but I would like my wife to know she can talk to and I’ll hear her.
collinmcnulty··on Show HN: Gerrymandle - Daily puzzle game where you redraw electoral districts
Then run a hyperlocal party if you really have a constituency that cares deeply about their local issues and win enough votes to get a seat.
collinmcnulty··on Show HN: Gerrymandle - Daily puzzle game where you redraw electoral districts
An interesting mathematical curiosity, but kinda seems to ignore the political realities that make gerrymandering happen in the first place. If you had the will to make this happen, why would you not just do proportional representation? The modern point of having districts is to gerrymander.
collinmcnulty··on U.S. science is in chaos
Unfortunately there is another possibility: a return to great power competition.
collinmcnulty··on Swiss voters reject proposal to cap population at ten million
As Terry Pratchett put it in Carpe Jugulum:

> And sin, young man, is when you treat people as things. Including yourself. That’s what sin is.

collinmcnulty··on FCC wants to kill burner phones by forcing telecoms to get all customers' IDs
We’ll see how it goes, but we also have suits like this that push back on that narrative as if you’re going to say your tech protects against a certain kind of tragedy, and that tragedy actually happens and you didn’t protect against it, maybe you bear some liability.

https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2026/06/school-shooting-...

collinmcnulty··on We Think the SpaceX IPO Is Overvalued
Yeah but SpaceX says you need 3% of the company to sue, so that fiduciary duty is never going to be enforced.
collinmcnulty··on SpaceX, Other Mega IPOs Denied Fast Index Entry by S&P
I don’t think this is correct. Gains historically accrue to a small number of companies in a given time window. If you buy all the grocery stores, you’re exposed only to sector risk, if you pick one or two, you’re also exposed to the risk those companies don’t contain the “winners”.
collinmcnulty··on Anthropic confidentially submits draft S-1 to the SEC
The fact that you know there’s a large pool of price insensitive buyers only 15 days away has to have some price impact.
collinmcnulty··on 'Backrooms' Stuns with $81M Debut
I am aware of the existence of the web series but have never seen any of it, and I felt it was a great standalone experience. The lack of explanation I think worked really well.
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