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datenyan

195 karma · joined March 24, 2017

Systems Admin / Data Plumber in the Higher Education sector.
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datenyan··on LLMs reward expertise
> Is this an actually serious question?

Yes, it is. I just Googled that exact question (and I promise I'm not trying to be obstinate when I say I'm Googling the exact phrase!) and it's automated AI response was to use WiX or Squarespace. Prompting it further with "What if I want it to do bespoke things that Squarespace can't do?" it responded with using Figma to design the website UI and then pass it along to either Framer or a "professional developer".

I do genuinely think that this is a discoverability issue. Of course, if you prompt it further with "Could I use AI to do this?" it dutifully responds that it can help with generating HTML, but that's three layers of difficulty to eventually get whatever default model Gemini has for signed-out Google searches to even suggest HTML.

datenyan··on LLMs reward expertise
Isn’t that kinda the point, though? If you already lack the required knowledge to ask a web-based chat UI (which, as an aside, is almost exclusively referring to ChatGPT Free for the average user) to build a HTML page, how could you possibly know to go search for Lovable, let alone figure out agents?

I feel as though the gap between the theoretical power of LLMs and what the average user knows of them and their capability have already widened so far that it’s irreconcilable.

datenyan··on Show HN: Putt.day a daily mini golf game
Same here, got stuck in an infinite loop of the booster pad (?) sending slamming me into the wall over and over.
datenyan··on Linux Basics for Hackers (2019)
Absolutely! In my opinion, the only way to learn anything in any meaningful way is to actually do the thing. In the example you described, you'll quickly start jumping into "Wait, how do I configure a firewall?" and discovering ufw et. al.
datenyan··on Don't hijack my mouse pointer
I have often thought about trying to figure out whatever Win32 API is responsible for focus stealing and neuter it down to something akin to

  void steal_focus_when_user_is_least_expecting() {
    // stub, much better :)
  }
It is the single most frustrating desktop computing experience.
datenyan··on Chrome's AI features may be hogging 4GB of your computer storage
I would love to use Safari more, but unfortunately Facebook Messenger and similar ilk (maybe all messaging apps?) seems to be completely busted on it.
datenyan··on Talking to strangers at the gym
> ... anyone who thinks like this is suffering from abused dog syndrome and unironically has lost at life.

I mean, social anxiety - the neurosis itself - is just this. People haven't "lost at life" for having a mental health problem. I think it's quite commendable that someone can recognise their own shortcomings in this regard and work on it in a positive light.

What you might find easy, someone else might find exceedingly difficult - for example, people who find it difficult to keep up their health when they are clinically depressed.

datenyan··on Windows 11 Notepad to support Markdown
> "adding rich text editing features to a text editor”

Yeah, we already had that. In the form of Wordpad. Which was EOL'd. And now we have Notepad with AI features.

Notepad was, and always should have been, a simple & lightweight text box for storing and editing text only files. If you wanted to edit something more complicated, you could use the other tool that was built into Windows specifically for that.

datenyan··on Windows 11 Notepad to support Markdown
Glad (/s) to see the MBA-ification of tech companies continues uninterrupted as we enter the second half of the decade.
datenyan··on AI adoption and Solow's productivity paradox
> So management basically have no clue and want you to figure out how to use AI?

This is basically the same story I have heard both my own place of employment and also from a number of friends. There is a "need" for AI usage, even if the value proposition is undefined (or, as I would expect, non-existent) for most businesses.

datenyan··on Tech Independence
Further to this - even if the script doesn't contain malware and you're 100% happy to run with this persons' defaults, you probably still shouldn't, as it doesn't teach you what you're actually doing.

Presuming you're a relatively non-technical person who follows this verbatim, what happens when this page goes down? Or Vultr is no longer an option? Do you even really know what you've set up?

datenyan··on Ubuntu is the reason Windows users don't want to switch to Linux
To be fair though, I don't think it's unreasonable for the "average user" to expect that there are sensible defaults for the things they buy / install.

Obviously, there's a huge difference between something like a car and your OS of choice (specifically noting the 'of choice' part of that when it comes to installing a Linux distribution), but I feel as though the sentiment is roughly the same.

datenyan··on Show HN: I built the literal Duolingo Killer
To preface this, I'm not a Japanese speaker, so perhaps my fears are misplaced, but learning from anime seems like it'd present users with a very particular flavour of Japanese (i.e. one that is much more hyperactive or exaggerated than how the language might be used in day-to-day conversations between native speakers).

That being said, if this is meant to be an alternative to Duolingo, which is insistent that you absolutely need to know that the bear wants a cup of tea, then I guess this is infinitely better in that regard.

datenyan··on Thunderbird adds native Microsoft Exchange email support
> Sticking with just the Gmail interface (or whatever) is so limiting

Perhaps it's the fact that I grew up with Gmail throughout my education (and now my career), but most local clients lack one key feature - quick move!

My entire workflow around emails is based around opening & reading them, and then using the "Quick Move" button in Gmail to move it into a specific folder by typing the first few letters of the folder and hitting enter.

I know there are extensions for Thunderbird like Quick Folder Move [0], but I find these can be buggy, slow, etc. I presume these are just the realities of dealing with email providers who'd prefer you use their webmail clients rather than Thunderbird et al.

[0] https://services.addons.thunderbird.net/eN-US/thunderbird/ad...

datenyan··on macOS Tahoe
Good lord, that's awful. I'm definitely firmly in Camp Apple for the most part, but this just looks actually atrocious.
datenyan··on Valve releases Team Fortress 2 code
Definitely not an accident - the announcement was made on the TF blog [0]

[0] - https://www.teamfortress.com/post.php?id=238809

datenyan··on Valve releases Team Fortress 2 code
TF2 definitely looks amazing, but it very much does not perform amazing - at least, not anymore.

Source really wasn't built for the amount of particles present in the cosmetics (especially the "Unusuals")

datenyan··on Dear OAuth Providers
It absolutely grinds my gears - Chrome's profile system and / or Firefox's container tab system work somewhat, but it feels like a bandaid fix.
datenyan··on Why Google Takeout is sooo bad
Oooh, this sounds promising - thank you so much!
datenyan··on Why Google Takeout is sooo bad
The institution I work for is a completely Google-based shop, with an Enterprise agreement with Google for data retention and various other requirements.

Even for us, Google Takeout is a complete mess that fails all the time, or straight up corrupts files that need to be exported. It doesn't surprise me at all that the service sucks for general users, but the fact that it's terrible for Enterprise customers really tells you all you need to know about Google.

Similarly to the OP, we also run into issues with logs wherein the Google Admin Console also just straight up doesn't provide detailed information about what went wrong, and questions via our relationship manager often get passed around for what feels like years.

Thanks, Google.

datenyan··on Musk threatens to ban Apple devices over Apple's ChatGPT integrations
> If users could set their own preferred AI bot as the go-to for Siri requests or writing help, like Anthropic’s Claude or — say, xAI’s Grok — it’s doubtful that Musk would be yelling this loudly about the dangers of such an integration.

This is basically what I thought of when I saw this headline at first. Musk does not give a damn about the usage of ChatGPT, he's just annoyed that it's not _his_ AI tool that's ingesting Apple user's data.

datenyan··on Artists are fleeing Instagram to keep their work out of Meta's AI
And I'd be willing to wager an even smaller amount of "users" are actually real people.
datenyan··on Facebook will soon use your photos, posts and other info to train its AI
> “if your objection is honoured, it will be applied going forwards”.

It is absolutely wild being in the "before times" (i.e. before any real legislation is applied to the use of data for AI training) and seeing statements that basically amount to "eh if we feel like it, we'll exempt you".

Not very often you see an "if" in statements like this.

datenyan··on DuckDuckGo was down
Looks like it's affecting anything Bing-related, at least over here in Australia. Same symptoms for Bing and Ecosia.
datenyan··on Windows Recall sounds like a privacy nightmare
God, the future really is stupid, isn't it?
datenyan··on Israel shuts down local Al Jazeera offices
> The fact that you drew a comparison to BBC is telling.

That indeed was a specific choice - you could also state that it's a state-run "propaganda tool". It's also going to have a western (specifically UK) based view on the media it's reporting on. The same is true of Al Jazeera, or the Australian Broadcasting Company.

That, in and of itself, does not mean it is "blatantly lying". No news agency is without bias, and believing so is naive.

Does Al Jazeera have areas for improvement that are likely to not materialise due to the context in which the company is based? Sure, but that's also true of Fox News, CNN, the BBC, ABC, or random Reddit commenters.

datenyan··on Israel shuts down local Al Jazeera offices
That's not a solid basis for considering something to be "fake", let alone to be banned.

I could say that I have read and compared the BBC to Truth Social, and decided that BBC is "fake news"; that doesn't mean it's actually true.

datenyan··on Microsoft says April Windows updates break VPN connections
> Yes, and the result was a billions of billions of combinations of those updates.

I was recently talking to a colleague about this, and it was remarkable to me how "quickly" they had forgotten the hell of having Windows Update filled with 1 billion 10kb updates.

datenyan··on AI is making Meta's apps basically unusable
> We ask them what they want the AI to do and they don't have an answer. They just want AI

Perhaps I'm just not management-brained enough but this just seems so foreign to me - why introduce features just because they're the buzzword? It's not even like they have a path to making it profitable, it's just the same buzz as "Web3" and "Crypto" repackaged.

datenyan··on AI is making Meta's apps basically unusable
I know it's old-hat to say at this point, but I'm getting really exhausted of seeing companies trying to sate investors and techbros by introducing more and more AI-powered "features" into existing applications. I don't need to be able to generate images in my Facebook messenger chat with my parents, nor do I need to ask Microsoft Copilot how to use my own computer.
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