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etblg

724 karma · joined July 6, 2015

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etblg··on FICO to incorporate buy-now-pay-later loans into credit scores
How does she prevent them from falling through the holes and hitting the heating element at the bottom? Does she throw them in the cutlery basket? Wouldn't it be light enough to fly around inside the dishwasher and land somewhere undesired?
etblg··on Guess I'm a Rationalist Now
Plenty of those that similarly went bankrupt over the years, and now the USA mostly has Boeing that's reached a set of continual crises and being propped up by the government.
etblg··on The hamburger-menu icon today: Is it recognizable?
Judging from the list of languages that have "menu" as a word (with a comparable definition to "menu"), I don't think it's a stretch for people to know what the word "menu" means: https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/menu , it's not even originally an English word afterall.
etblg··on Marines being mobilized in response to LA protests
He can't hear you.
etblg··on Being fat is a trap
Buy a bag of rice, a bag of frozen veggies (corn, carrots, peas, already cut up), some chicken thighs, throw it in a rice cooker, that's a meal right there, almost no effort.

Roger Ebert wrote a whole cookbook about using the rice cooker, guy loved the thing, makes for a very easy meal.

etblg··on I let Claude Code write an entire book
Here it is cleaned up by ChatGPT:

"Really? Does having flaws actually make for better reading?

Okay, I’ll admit—that hurt to write (as did that last sentence), but writing isn’t furniture. Aside from a few tells I haven’t kept pace with (like the overuse of the word “delve”), the problem with trying to judge quality based on LLM-generated content is this: you can’t always tell whether the operator spent three minutes copying and pasting the whole thing (unless they accidentally leave in the prompts—which has happened and is a dead giveaway that no one even skimmed it), or if they took the time to thoughtfully consider the questions ChatGPT asked about what the writing should contain.

If you’ve made it this far: do mistakes like these really make for better reading?"

And I'm going to have to say: yes, I enjoyed reading your weird paragraph more than the ChatGPT sanitized version of it.

etblg··on Trump administration halts Harvard's ability to enroll international students
Why don't you start then? Tell us the positives so everyone can discuss it instead of just lazily dismissing everyone else's takes?
etblg··on A South Korean grand master on the art of the perfect soy sauce
Are there any brands of soy sauce that could be commonly (even if its in an Asian market) found in the states that you would recommend?
etblg··on What do wealthy people buy, that ordinary people know nothing about? (2015)
Powder Mountain (Reed Hastings' ski resort) has lift tickets available for about $100-150, in-line with most common ski resorts in America (about the same price as Hunter Mountain in New York, for example, the place everyone in the area takes their family).

If he wanted to not ski with the poors he would do as rich people already do and go to Deer Valley.

Although last I heard Powder Mountain was pivoting a bit to an premium resort kind of deal, same kind of thing Windham Mountain in NY is doing. Still, neither are pricing out normal skiiers yet, they're just edging in to "do you have more money than sense? dump some of it in this overpriced 'mountain club'" territory. If I had Reed Hastings money I wouldn't bother buying one of them up, I would just fly in to any of the existing nice ones with better terrain and facilities than Powder Mountain (or Windham) have.

etblg··on Changes since congestion pricing started in New York
Funnily enough there is a Costco in NYC, in Astoria (Queens) decently close to Manhattan. You can take the ferry there from Manhattan, or the subway, or busses, or bike there even, or heck just take an uber if you bought a lot of stuff.

Philadelphia is also an odd choice to bring up since there's a train from the center of Manhattan to Philly, and it's even a common commute for people to go back and forth.

etblg··on Migrating to Postgres
> event distincts were done in memory! I can’t fathom the decision making there…

This is one of those situations where I can't tell if they're operating on some kind of deep insight that is way above my experience and I just don't understand it, or if they just made really bad decisions. I just don't get it, it feels so wrong.

etblg··on Migrating to Postgres
> It's true that Prisma currently doesn't do JOINs for relational queries. Instead, it sends individual queries and joins the data on the application level.

..........I'm sorry, what? That seems........absurd.

edit: Might as well throw in: I can't stand ORMs, I don't get why people use it, please just write the SQL.

etblg··on LLMs are making me dumber
> For instance, people did lament the invention of calculators, saying it would harm kids' ability to do mental arithmetic. And it did.

> Fortunately for us, we replaced those skills with technology that allowed us to do something analogous to them, but faster and more easily.

Don't kids still learn to do arithmetic in their head first? I haven't been in a school in decades but I remember doing it all sans calculator in elementary school. When you move on up to higher level stuff you end up using a calculator, but it's not like we skip that step entirely, do we?

etblg··on Klarna CEO says AI helped company shrink workforce by 40%
Wish they'd shrink the workforce by 100% so I'd never have to hear about Klarna and their stupid AI gimmick news again.
etblg··on LLMs are making me dumber
> When I need to write an email, I often bullet-point what I want to write and ask the LLM to write out a coherent, cordial email. I’ve gotten worse at writing emails.

Think I'd rather just have the bullet points in the first place, to be honest, has to be easier and quicker to read than an LLM soup of filler paragraphs.

etblg··on Twitch star HasanAbi says he was detained, questioned by border agents
Wouldn't that definition then include, say, riot police at any protest, or USA in the Iraq war, or say, Israel when they bomb homes in Gaza? That's a definition that seems like it would fit an incredible number of uses of violence.
etblg··on Paul McCartney, Elton John and other creatives demand AI comes clean on scraping
Since you brought up sampling in music and I feel compelled to point this out in any AI thread when that gets mentioned:

sampling machines don't give you a free pass to sample music all willy nilly, if you're going to publish the result for commercial gain you have to clear the sample, the original artist is getting royalties from it. This is something that was fought for and won by musicians: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grand_Upright_Music,_Ltd._v._W....

(Not that you implied otherwise, I just want to point that out)

etblg··on Largest drug bust in Canadian history had enough fentanyl to kill every Canadian
For what it's worth, the amount of fentanyl seized appeared to be 54kg, less than I weigh.

They also seized 390kg worth of meth, and firearms, which I would be more concerned about than fentanyl but hey.

The "enough to kill x people" numbers get funny with fentanyl since even enough to fit inside a pen would probably be enough to kill a few hundred, maybe a few thousand? I'm not doing the math.

etblg··on Why is Hacker News still keep this hard-to-use UI and has such poor readability?
I like it, it reminds me of the olden days when sites were basic and functional before everything got crammed full of design practices and analytics and ads and marketing and tons of things vying for your attention at once.

People have a username, they make a post, it's all text, it's fast, it's simple, it works. We still have the rest of the internet to have "good UI" and "readability".

etblg··on Congestion Pricing Is a Policy Miracle
Also Metrocards are not going to be printed anymore, I'm assuming that includes the unlimited ones, probably just shifts over to OMNY.
etblg··on Congestion Pricing Is a Policy Miracle
For the MTA you cross a weekly threshold of 12 rides where rides after that are free: https://omny.info/fares

You max out paying $34 a week, or $17 if you qualify for reduced fare.

etblg··on The FBI Seized This Woman's Life Savings–Without Telling Her Why
And strangely enough, by the last President! Not even this fresh new one that we expect all the bizarre pardons from. That one was a Joe Biden classic.
etblg··on I set my phone to 'do not disturb' three years ago – and have never looked back
I did the same thing years ago and have never regretted it. I really just hate my phone randomly vibrating and taking my attention over some dumb notification I don't really care about -- or feeling ghost vibrations in my pocket where I have to keep pulling out my phone to see if it was a notification or my imagination.

Turns out nothing is really that time critical that it can't wait until the next time I check my phone, which is usually on a surface in front of me anyway.

etblg··on Firing programmers for AI is a mistake
Howard Hughes was one of the biggest business successes of the 20th century, on par with, if not exceeding, the business acumen of the zucc. Fantastically rich, hugely successful, driven, talented, all that crap.

Anyway he also acquired RKO Pictures and led it to its demise 9 years later. In aviation he had many successes, he also had the spruce goose. He bought in to TWA then got forced out of its management.

He died as a recluse, suffering from OCD and drug abuse, immortalized in a Simpsons episode with Mr. Burns portraying him.

People can have business acumen, and sometimes it doesn't work out. Past successes doesn't guarantee future ones. Maybe the metaverse will eventually pay off and we'll all eat crow, or maybe (and this is the one I'm a believer of) it'll be a huge failure, an insane waste of money, and one of the spruce geese of his legacy.

etblg··on Avoiding outrage fatigue while staying informed
As one of the seemingly few people who actually do read the article and not just the headline, it makes all the discussion people have around news infuriating.

Most articles I come across have a very fiery headline, then you dig in to the article and the facts are different, and/or the sources are dubious, and/or there's historical precedent for the thing that makes it not seem so strange this time, and/or the article doesn't dive deeply enough in to the details, etc.

Political biases and current events aside, it all sucks! It's so annoying that I have to do the legwork of reading through the article carefully and following through in factchecking outside of the article to get the meat of it out, and after all that, it feels like no one else does the same.

etblg··on Soviet Shoe Factory Principle
Their net income for the previous quarter results was $15.3 billion, in what way are they known for being unprofitable?
etblg··on On DeepSeek and export controls
I mean hell, one of the states (Hawaii) didn't even join willingly, it was annexed by President McKinley by force.
etblg··on Amazon removed statements advocating for LGBTQ rights and racial equity
"First, I must confess that over the last few years I have been gravely disappointed with the white moderate. I have almost reached the regrettable conclusion that the Negro's great stumbling block in the stride toward freedom is not the White Citizen's Council-er or the Ku Klux Klanner, but the white moderate who is more devoted to "order" than to justice; who prefers a negative peace which is the absence of tension to a positive peace which is the presence of justice; who constantly says "I agree with you in the goal you seek, but I can't agree with your methods of direct action;" who paternalistically feels he can set the timetable for another man's freedom; who lives by the myth of time and who constantly advises the Negro to wait until a "more convenient season."

from MLK Jr. of course, while he was locked up in a jail in Birmingham for protesting.

etblg··on Stargate Project: SoftBank, OpenAI, Oracle, MGX to build data centers
The US government and its media partners sure seem to think so.
etblg··on Stargate Project: SoftBank, OpenAI, Oracle, MGX to build data centers
And only the americans the administration deems to qualify as human.
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