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curiousObject

1,006 karma · joined February 23, 2023

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curiousObject··on Owners mourn spoiled food after firmware update bricks Samsung smart fridges
>I can't really think of a use case for a grocery tracking system that only tracks a third of my groceries.

Me too. I think I’m not communicating clearly. Sorry.

What I’m talking about is a system that does only one third of the steps in the total end-to-end process for ALL your groceries. You do the rest yourself, or use other help.

I’m not advocating a broken system that claims to do that complete process, but really ignores two thirds of your groceries. That would be damn stupid.

Do you understand what I mean?

curiousObject··on Owners mourn spoiled food after firmware update bricks Samsung smart fridges
“tool” seems like a good way to describe a half solution. We use and combine various tools and our own skills to do what we want
curiousObject··on Owners mourn spoiled food after firmware update bricks Samsung smart fridges
>A working grocery tracking system is a half-solution to effortless shopping.

>A half-working grocery tracking system is useless, much like a car without an engine.

Yes. Something designed to be a half solution can be useful. But a full solution which is broken is probably worse than useless.

curiousObject··on Owners mourn spoiled food after firmware update bricks Samsung smart fridges
>”a smart fridge is a half solution at best”

A car is a half solution to going to work. A stove is a half solution to preparing food.

Half solutions are what people need. They’re the solutions we are using every day.

There is this huge problem with advertising that makes consumers think a half solution is a 100% solution. Most smart product makers do that trick. But, apart from that problem, ‘the perfect is the enemy of the good’

Edit: but no way would I buy any smart or connected fridge from Samsung. I don’t anticipate that being a positive experience

curiousObject··on Ask HN: Why 17?
Probably because it’s trained by humans and humans are more likely to choose certain numbers when they’re asked to choose randomly. 7 is a popular choice

https://www.quora.com/Why-do-people-often-pick-17-as-a-rando...

curiousObject··on Ask HN: Did anyone try to build game engine purely for LLM
I assume that the support and community around Godot, Unity and Unreal still make them a no-brainer, unless you’re committed to relying on LLM for maintenance, non-stop

I don’t have any specific knowledge about more generalized dev environments such as rust for this scenario. If you go that route I think it would be important to be hyper competent in rust or whatever you use because the game-oriented support is less specific than dedicated game-dev rigs like Godot.

You are developing a project. So you could rethink and repost this later with more focus on your actual project not a hypothetical

curiousObject··on ChatGPT-using lawyer punished for citing fake testimony from made-up witnesses
Again? It sounds like we’re ready for ChatGPT Courts with ChatGPT judges for these lawyers to work in, and for the clients who’ll risk hiring them.

Low Low Prices! (Some Hallucinations)

More seriously. How do we fight this? Stricter penalties for these attorneys?

Edit - this case is particularly egregious because it’s not only false citations like you usually get, but even false testimony and false statements from witnesses

curiousObject··on Ask HN: Did anyone try to build game engine purely for LLM
This is a very vague question.

You should explain what you want to do

You should say where’s the position of the LLM in the stack. Top, bottom, whatever

I guess the answer to your question is most likely to be No. Perhaps you can be the first one to do it?

curiousObject··on Show HN: I mapped every US golf course
Some pesticides may be linked to Parkinson’s Disease cases

https://www.apdaparkinson.org/article/the-relationship-betwe...

That is what OP was trying to say I assume

curiousObject··on Codeberg Bans Cryptocurrency Projects
>the entire network probably has a smaller footprint than a single small/medium size bank

What research or statistics can you suggest to bolster this argument?

curiousObject··on Hacker wipes Romania's land registry database
>it had begun migrating its applications to Romania’s Government Cloud

This proclamation, coming from a governmental organization, makes me afraid they are doomed. Effectively they are saying they are fixing the mistake by repeating it.

What they should do is admit fault. Freeze the system. Get independent expert help.

Best wishes, recent Romanian land buyers and sellers

Edit: thank you @cbg0 for giving us this update

curiousObject··on The Chinese Communist Party turns 105 amidst technological splendor
Karl Marx would be horrified
curiousObject··on I trained a 113M-parameter earthquake LLM from absolute scratch
That rapid disaster response seems a good practical target to start with. Good luck.
curiousObject··on I trained a 113M-parameter earthquake LLM from absolute scratch
I understand you have created this for teaching - to help other researchers use LLMs better.

But, in its current state of development, is it of any use in earthquake preparedness or immediate response to an earthquake?

curiousObject··on Show HN: 18 Words
This a good game. It’s fun, simple and quick. It’s self explanatory and clear what you need to do.

The UI is almost perfect, it’s seamless on mobile and desktop.

I made some criticism in other comments therefore I also wanted to make a comment saying what I liked.

curiousObject··on Show HN: 18 Words
Those are all good options.

Also a version in which your unused time is accumulated for future rounds would be interesting

curiousObject··on Show HN: 18 Words
It’s the same reason people will instantly close a site with unwanted animations (ads).

But if this game was called “Do A Word Puzzle While Being Distracted By Animated Numbers in Your Peripheral Vision”, that would be alright.

curiousObject··on We almost had a smartphone in the 90s. Why did it fail?
Transcript: https://www.npr.org/transcripts/nx-s1-5872785
curiousObject··on There are a few things that I look back on as my mistakes in the early days
Quake was an incredible leap forward in desktop games.

But Sandy Peterson is probably right, saying that it ‘Ruined’ the company - as an artistic creative force anyway.

The breakup of the brilliant and well-balanced ID Software team was caused by the trauma of developing Quake.

Romero and others were forced out or quit. This cut the heart out of the team, despite all of Carmack’s drive and technical brilliance

That is why the next leap ahead in games was not Quake 2 (1997), but Half Life (1998) which was, tellingly, based on the older tech Quake 1 engine

curiousObject··on There are a few things that I look back on as my mistakes in the early days
Thanks. Here’s a direct xcancel link to the complete chain of Sandy’s posts that John Carmack replied to.

https://xcancel.com/SandyofCthulhu/status/206959220964578529...

Interesting to hear about the conflicts and real personal suffering. In spite of that, they built a classic genre-defining game together

curiousObject··on Spying on kids to save kids from spying is stupid
‘Those who would give up essential Liberty, to purchase a little temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety’ — Benjamin Franklin

This isn’t a simple solution to the problem but it reminds me that it is not a new problem. We should remember that

curiousObject··on Chrome Breaks Records Again on Speedometer 3.1 and Jetstream 3
Has preventing usage of ad-blocking extensions helped improve speed?
curiousObject··on How Japan's railways stayed one while splitting apart
They can’t see it even. The part of their brain which interprets Japanese is much bigger and faster.

On the other side, visitors who can’t read Japanese can’t do anything but try to interpret those letters in the language they know

curiousObject··on The AirPods Effect
The helmet protects the ears from direct airflow noise, but it also extends out into the high-speed airflow much more than ears do.

The overall picture is that a helmet’s thick material blocks high frequencies. But it exacerbates and amplifies low frequency sound and white noise. As well, a helmet confuses the ear’s capabilities for identifying direction of sound that’s incoming

If a helmet is helpful is a question of how fast the motorcycle is moving and what kinds of sounds the rider needs to hear.

It’s complicated, but wearing no helmet might be safer at low speeds because the driver is more aware. No helmet, is undoubtedly not safer at high speed because brains are fragile

Edit: a simple experiment for anyone is to put on a full size motorcycle helmet anywhere, and then you can understand how much your hearing is dampened by it. But I guess it’s probably no worse than the experience of someone driving a car, which is soundproof by design

curiousObject··on Cooling in Space
True, but lifting the fuel to power that “small” orbital boost is unintuitively expensive

(Refer to the tyranny of the “Rocket Equation”)

curiousObject··on Global population movements from 1990 to 2023
People who believe they are financially secure may move from regions which are considered “wealthy” to regions which are seen to be “poorer” (and cheaper). This outflow can influence this data.

https://worldpopulationreview.com/country-rankings/american-...

curiousObject··on Microsoft open-sources “the earliest DOS source code discovered to date”
>writing a few thousand lines of assembly was what it took to launch a successful software company.

Yes, but that assembly was not DOS, and it wasn’t easy.

Microsoft purchased the DOS code, they didn’t write it. Of course, they did develop and modify DOS. But that was a clever (and lucky) business deal, not a technological accomplishment.

The real beginning of Microsoft was earlier, with Allen, Gates and Davidoff writing the Altair BASIC interpreter. That was a serious achievement.

They had never seen the computer they were writing that assembly code for. They did not even own any computers. It took them 8 weeks on a university computer they were not supposed to be using for that

“Altair agreed to meet them to possibly buy a BASIC interpreter… Gates and Allen had neither a BASIC interpreter nor even an Altair system on which to develop and test one. However, Allen had written an Intel 8008 emulator that ran on a PDP-10 time-sharing computer. Allen adapted this emulator based on the Altair programmer guide, and they developed and tested the interpreter on Harvard's PDP-10.

The finished interpreter, including its own I/O system and line editor, fit in only four kilobytes of memory, leaving plenty of room for the interpreted program. In preparation for the demo, they stored the finished interpreter on a punched tape that the Altair could read, and Paul Allen flew to Albuquerque to meet with Altair…

While on final approach into the Albuquerque airport, Allen realized that they had forgotten to write a bootloader to read the tape into memory. Writing in 8080 machine language, Allen finished the program before the plane landed. Only when they loaded the program onto an Altair and saw a prompt asking for the system's memory size did Gates and Allen know that their interpreter worked on the Altair hardware.”

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Altair_BASIC

curiousObject··on Security researcher says Microsoft built a Bitlocker backdoor, releases exploit
> ‘Signal won't let us download our own data and back it up using our own secure systems.

Signal is slowly, very slowly, moving toward providing real backups and cross-device transfers

I understand why you’d believe Signal still can’t deliver that, because they had been ignoring the user demands for years.

But there is real progress now

https://support.signal.org/hc/en-us/articles/9708267671322-S...

curiousObject··on Anker PowerConf C200: a case study in webcam security theatre
That iris style physical security filter looks very cool, and it’s neat because it’s protected from damage, but a simple one-piece sliding or folding shutter would be so much more reliable
curiousObject··on Fake building: Claude wrote 3k lines instead of import pywikibot
If you use AI to help your writing

1) Let people know that you did that

2) Try to include a link to another page, which shows the prompt and your original version of the writing, even if it is in your native language

This will help people understand what you wanted to say.

Edit: The fact that you used AI to write your post, when your post is saying that you can’t trust AI to do a good job, is… super ironic lol :)

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