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datagram··on YC's Biggest Scandals
Between every surface being a link and the needless redacted text flourishes, this site is kind of awful to navigate on mobile.
datagram··on Nvidia won, we all lost
The fact that we're calling $500 GPUs "midrange" is proof that Nvidia's strategy is working.
datagram··on Nvidia won, we all lost
AMD cards are fine from a raw performance perspective, but Nvidia has built themselves a moat of software/hardware features like ray-tracing, video encoding, CUDA, DLSS, etc where AMD's equivalents have simply not been as good.

With their current generation of cards AMD has caught up on all of those things except CUDA, and Intel is in a similar spot now that they've had time to improve their drivers, so it's pretty easy now to buy a non-Nvidia card without feeling like you're giving anything up.

datagram··on The Frontend Treadmill
It's not too difficult to use the TypeScript type checker on JS files, so it's possible to reap most of those benefits without having to introduce a compilation step.
datagram··on Firenvim – Turn the browser into a Neovim client
I used to use a similar extension in Chrome called wasavi, but I got burned once too many times by bugs in extension causing me to lose all of the text I had been writing.
datagram··on Tell HN: GitHub removed Classic projects and wiped my ideas without warnings
In the same boat atm; reaching out to GitHub support and hoping that the lack of API access is just a permissions mixup.

Luckily I was able to screenshot/copy the text for one of my projects before refreshing the page.

Agreed that the 1-year limit makes no sense; it's just a few bits of text.

datagram··on Help us invent CSS Grid Level 3, a.k.a. "Masonry" layout
Flexbox was designed for these kinds of layouts, so that would also be an option here.
datagram··on Show HN: CompressX, my FFmpeg wrapper for macOS
There is LosslessCut[1], though it's only designed to handle trimming and not general re-encoding.

[1]: https://github.com/mifi/lossless-cut

datagram··on The Getty makes nearly 88k art images free to use
I was thinking about this the other day; it would be really interesting to have big corporations whose profits depend on public-domain data. We might actually see lobbying to decrease copyright terms, to counter companies like Disney trying to extend copyright until the end of time.
datagram··on Juno – A YouTube Client for Vision Pro
As someone with a YouTube channel, from looking at my metrics it's pretty clear that YouTube is being held afloat by a) the fact that non-technical users can't easily block YouTube ads on mobile devices, and b) YouTube Premium.

A single user depriving YouTube of their revenue is inconsequential sure, but when hundreds of millions of people do it (like with blocking ads on desktop) it obviously runs the risk of making the entire company unviable. Hosting videos for free is a great way to lose a lot of money.

datagram··on HTML Spirograph (2021)
I think if you're going to show off and do clever impractical things, a personal site is a pretty good place for it.

That being said, scrolling that page with a regular mouse is incredibly frustrating.

datagram··on Google Cuts Jobs in Engineering and Other Divisions
> a bunch of traits that simply can’t be tested

I think there's a lot more that could be tested that what current implementation-centric interviews measure. At my company for example, I feel like we've gotten a lot of use out of our debugging interviews.

datagram··on The Internet Is Full of AI Dogshit
It's funny, I made the same analogy the other day: https://twitter.com/gramofdata/status/1736838023940112523

I think something interesting to note is that once we stopped atmospheric nuclear testing steel radiation levels went back down and are almost at normal background levels. So maybe the same thing will happen if we stop using GenAI.

datagram··on LLMs and Programming in the first days of 2024
In my experience, it genuinely lowers the activation (and total) energy for certain tasks, since LLMs are great at writing repetitive code that would otherwise be tedious to write by hand. For instance, writing a bunch of similar test cases.
datagram··on Visualizing fighting game mechanics (2020)
People absolutely flowchart fighting games at a high level. Combos are, unsurprisingly, completely non-interactive in most games, but there's also a term specifically for non-interactive offense: setplay https://glossary.infil.net/?t=Set%20Play

The goal of an optimal strategy in fighting games is generally to reduce the amount that you have to read your opponent as much as possible, ideally to zero. Obviously the developers don't want this to be fully possible, but players generally try to get as close as they can. Even at the highest levels, you can have rounds that go like: canned opening -> combo -> setplay -> combo -> setplay -> combo.

datagram··on Visualizing fighting game mechanics (2020)
Teleport is now just 3 punches or 3 kicks (no motion), so TK teleports are actually very easy.
datagram··on Yabai – A tiling window manager for macOS
I didn't realize Slate was that old! I've only been using it for about... 8 years...

Jokes aside, I love Slate's programmability. I configured mine to behave like WinSplit Revolution, since that's what I was used to.

datagram··on Google Drive misplaces months' worth of customer data
Wasn't Google starting to delete old files? My guess would be that something screwed up in that process.
datagram··on The negative impact of mobile-first web design on desktop
> What's even more rare is a UX designer that also thinks about these things, who are worth a million bucks.

Tell me about it. I've been struggling for years to get our designers to think of their designs as more than pixels on a screen. I'm really tired of having to be the accessibility police, or explain that small viewports and mobile devices aren't synonymous for the nth time.

datagram··on Can't be fucked: Underrated cause of tech debt
That may be your experience, but I assure you that there are plenty of companies where it's not like that. Where I work, our product team is pretty receptive to us taking time to fix tech debt, since:

- Engineering is very transparent about explaining when tech debt is slowing down development of new features

- We recognize that buggy/unreliable software hurts customer retention

- Engineering leadership has set the expectation that a significant portion of each team's time should be spent on maintenance and reliability.

datagram··on DALL·E 3
I assume it's to stop people from generating revenge porn.
datagram··on DALL·E 3
The fundamental differences in scale between manual recreation by a human and automated replication by a machine are what led to the creation of copyright law in the first place.
datagram··on Some tactics for writing in public
The author is tactically avoiding discussions that she considers unproductive and does not want to participate in, hence the title of the blog post.

> Is it just me or is this post screaming with self-consciousness and political correctness?

Good writers always consider the way their choice of words will affect their audience. Are you suggesting that this is a bad thing?

datagram··on GPTBot – OpenAI’s Web Crawler
I don't think it's that simple. In order to have a claim to fair use, you would have to argue that the derivative work doesn't negatively affect the market for the original. When Google got sued for scanning copyrighted works for Google Books [1], they could claim fair use since they were only letting people see small excerpts from the books.

If you can train your bot on my blog post about scuba diving without my permission and then people can ask your bot for scuba diving advice instead of reading my blog, that doesn't seem very fair.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Authors_Guild,_Inc._v._Google,....

datagram··on GPTBot – OpenAI’s Web Crawler
I don't think we really even need to dive that deep into the philosophical aspect of this. I think that it's fine to simply treat humans and machines differently, the same way we decided that animals cannot hold copyright for a work.

The reason copyright law exists in the first place is due to the difference of scale between copying books by hand and using a machine to do it, so I think "it's different because a machine is doing it" is a completely rational stance to take.

datagram··on GPTBot – OpenAI’s Web Crawler
As far as I'm aware, photocopying an entire book does in fact violate copyright law and librarians will refuse to help you do it: https://guides.cuny.edu/cunyfairuse/librarians
datagram··on I'm betting on HTML
> You can't style it with CSS.

Unfortunately, I suspect that this is 100% intentional. datalists can draw outside of the browser window, which is fantastic, but also probably means that there are security considerations for letting it be styled by users. Imagine malicious ads/websites being able to draw outside the browser window.

datagram··on I'm betting on HTML
There's already companies working on this: https://axiom.ai/

I would guess that it's just a matter of converting the DOM accessibility tree into text descriptions, e.g. "There is a button that says 'Start'" And then converting text like "Click the Start button" back into an actual action on the page.

datagram··on Why Lisp Syntax Works
I don't think the article is necessarily claiming that specific syntaxes like SQL are bad. I think they just wanted to highlight how different the languages are.
datagram··on TaxyAI: Open-source browser automation with GPT-4
Sites that adhere to WCAG should actually have quite good support for programmatic manipulation, since it's required for screen readers to work.

It would be pretty interesting if a push to makes sites easier to use for AI agents ends up making sites better for blind users as well.

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