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dcwca

1,090 karma · joined September 1, 2015

[ my public key: https://keybase.io/dcwca; my proof: https://keybase.io/dcwca/sigs/SKSh8S3eexfzzUknunyag3W1ES5-icFZowfi1LDk9fw ]
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dcwca··on OpenAI Pleads It Can't Make Money Without Using Copyrighted Materials for Free
It is totally legal to train on this stuff, but illegal to reproduce copyrighted works. Interestingly, Google's business model could have been criticized the same way. They construct a big index of copyrighted works, reproduce them, and monetize it.
dcwca··on App store to be 'split in two' ahead of EU iPhone sideloading deadline: report
Security and privacy mentioned constantly throughout marketing materials
dcwca··on 'I'm a Doomer': OpenAI's New Interim CEO Wants to Slow AI Progress Down
With all due respect, Chomsky has no intuition for this kind of technology. Was sad to see him reject the technology, felt oddly like sour grapes when really LLMs have validated his work on universal grammar.
dcwca··on OpenAI board in discussions with Sam Altman to return as CEO
Right now, Altman may be the most relevant for the further development of AI because the way the technology continues to go to market will be largely shaped by the regulatory environments that exist globally, and Sam leading OAI is in by far thr best position to influence guide that policy. And he has been doing a good job with it.
dcwca··on Apple CEO Tim Cook 'secretly' signed $275B deal with China in 2016
Worth the subscription fee for sure
dcwca··on Autonomous boats seem more solvable than autonomous cars
Something I don’t read enough about that would make autonomous cars a lot more reliable is smart tech in the road infra. Why don’t stop lights send a beacon? Roads and lanes should send a signal. Cars should send signals to each other about their intent eg. turning indicators should not be purely visual, etc. Are there standards for this stuff being worked on?
dcwca··on Car accidents cause death, injury and trauma. Why do we shrug them off?
We shrug them off because they are the devil we know: a super well understood risk. Also because safety is improving, so the trend is toward less risk not more.
dcwca··on Gitlet.js – Git implemented in 1k lines of JavaScript (2015)
This is such great work.
dcwca··on Is Netflix's Seaspiracy film right about fishing damaging oceans?
I watched that documentary and had a good laugh at how poorly made it was. The filmmaker starts out by revealing that he just loves the ocean and wanted to make a film about it but didn’t know what the topic should be. The arc of the film is him googling for things, gaining the most basic perspective on an issue, pivoting his film toward it, and then failing to get any good interviews or original footage. So funny. He goes through ocean plastics, dolphins, shark fins, fishing net pollution, and one or two more with about as much depth as you would get from a tweet. Also why would you name your film Seaspiracy when Conspirasea is right there. 10/10 if taken as a mocumentary.

The issues are real and I appreciate raising awareness but wow. Not good work.

dcwca··on Metallica's BlizzCon Performance Ruined by Twitch
Metallica
dcwca··on Metallica's BlizzCon Performance Ruined by Twitch
There are cases where it’s less important for bands to be paid for their music than it is to not sue children and not cripple consumer technology.
dcwca··on PG: Twitter made a mistake in banning Sci-Hub
Their hand was forced by someone posting a photo of a can of axe body spray being left behind by the mob.
dcwca··on The web is 30 years old today
The spirit of the web isn’t frozen in time.
dcwca··on Salesforce Signs Definitive Agreement to Acquire Slack
User experience beats all of those things.
dcwca··on AI Is an Ideology, Not a Technology
AI is best defined as whatever computers can’t quite do yet but we think they can do soon. It’s a moving target. Lots of things used to be “AI” that are commonplace now.
dcwca··on Ask HN: Why is Reddit on mobile so obsessed with making me use their app?
Which is a good metaphor for the success of Reddit as a company.
dcwca··on Ask HN: Why is Reddit on mobile so obsessed with making me use their app?
Because the mobile application is a much better, richer and faster experience for daily active users. For a casual user who is following a link from a google search, perhaps the web version is better. Reddit would like to convert users from the latter group to the former, because stickiness on their platform is what drives revenue. It's not a public service that owes you free information at ease, it's a business.
dcwca··on The HEY discussion has revolved around money, but this is not about money
Web apps are pretty risk free in this sense. Nobody controls the web.
dcwca··on Rubyists, we must do better
You don’t have to account for all the trigger words in existence. All you have to do is believe that the people who are raising issues about specific topics are doing so from a place of need. By characterizing them as “over-sensitive”, you are indicating that you cannot or do not believe in the cause, or cannot empathize with their lived experience.

If that’s the root for you, then just say it - “I'm not values aligned with this cause”. That’s totally valid.

Software is political. It’s written by people, it’s used by people, and it has an impact on society. It is impossible for it to be neutral.

dcwca··on Rubyists, we must do better
I didn’t mention the police, I’m talking about anything that offends minority groups within your community of users. By choosing to be insensitive you contribute to their plight.
dcwca··on Rubyists, we must do better
No, you cannot keep politics away from software development. It is not possible, and by trying to ignore issues you become complicit in perpetration.
dcwca··on Why is Kubernetes getting so popular?
Managed K8s is simpler, managed container services like ECS are simpler still.
dcwca··on Trump threatens to 'close' down social media platforms
>If you know you're not under drug usage and if there are other witnesses of the event, then you'll have a very high degree of confidence into the idea that the apple indeed fell on the ground, so much confidence that you would consider it a fact.

As soon as you start talking about what happened with those other witnesses, the group begins influencing the way each other remember what happened, and the narrative becomes more "real" than the actual memory. The more time that passes, and the more times the story of the apple falling from the tree is told, the more reinforced the narrative becomes, regardless of how the apple got to the ground.

dcwca··on The iPad's new cursor and keyboard
You’ve got a point here about the complexity of the web or maybe advertising models, but it’s hard to criticize usability when you have installed a browser plugin that breaks it. Use the thing or don’t, but don’t complain when your own reassembly of the product doesn’t work.
dcwca··on Amazon AppFlow
I agree that vendor lock-in is expensive. It's not as expensive as the investment companies make in keeping their tech cloud-agnostic, investments that never seem to pay off. Either the day never comes, or when it does, switching costs are still surprisingly high.
dcwca··on PostgreSQL is the worlds’ best database
Is this really a problem?
dcwca··on Teardown of a $1.25 LED Lightbulb
Do you see new lighting wiring standards emerging anywhere right now? Are they gaining traction?
dcwca··on Monoliths Are the Future
Different dimensions of analysis, I guess. I’m not surprised the author isn’t talking about business drivers.
dcwca··on Monoliths Are the Future
The author does not seem to understand when to correctly apply microservices. There are two basic use cases: 1) Different parts of your solution have different load patterns and it is economically beneficial to scale them at different rates and 2) Different teams need to be able to work & ship autonomously. It's not at all about technical merits or architectural beauty. It's about people and costs.
dcwca··on Postwoman – a free alternative to Postman
No, emojis are incredibly expressive and enrich all forms of writing. I'm excited to see this style of communication penetrate more spaces :slightly-smiling-face:.

Edit: The emoji I added to the above message was stripped by HN's submission system.

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