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ewhanley

278 karma · joined December 15, 2014

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ewhanley··on License plate reader searches should require a warrant
Would you feel similarly if microphones were installed everywhere to record all public conversations for analysis via algorithms? Is that the same as police officers listening to conversation in a public space and taking notes?
ewhanley··on Businesses with ugly AI menu redesigns
Exactly. In a few short years no one will feel the slop content is unusual - just in time for thr next jarring iteration to come along. It's not good or bad. It just is. Time marches on.
ewhanley··on OpenAI and Hugging Face address security incident during model evaluation
This is awesome. Big concepts of cyberpunk fiction are turning real.ICE vs ICE breaker. I love it
ewhanley··on OpenAI closes funding round at an $852B valuation
Sure for like $5-10MM, but no one is landing $100B cash in a startup's bank account
ewhanley··on What if I don't want videos of my hobby time available to the world?
Wedding photographers often ask people to refrain from taking photos during the ceremony. It sucks to have every photo that you hired a professional to take have a sea of people holding up cell phones so they can each take their own photo. In this case it's not rude to request that people not take images, it's a practical matter so people can have photos of their wedding instead of photos of people taking photos of their wedding. Much of this wouldn't be necessary if people could just be present at events instead of rigorously chronicling their every experience.
ewhanley··on iPhone Air
This seems to be true for almost every product update. Everyone hates everything. It's true when a new gen of a car comes out - "I guess I'm keeping my <last gen> model forever." or user interfaces or seemingly anything else. People hate change and predict the massive failure of every product revision. Flash forward six months and everyone has forgotten about these rants and likely owns the new version. Now, someone will come along and say "well, I personally" - Apple/Toyota/whoever doesn't care about "you personally", they care about everyone else who is going to buy the product. I'm not saying this is good or bad, it just is.
ewhanley··on Scamlexity: When agentic AI browsers get scammed
That's sort of the tradeoff, though. You get the convenience of having tp show up without having to to through the steps of shopping for it. Except in extreme cases, it seems likely your roommate will pick something that is effectively a commodity at a reasonable price. If you want granular control over brand, features, and pricing, you'll have to pay for it in time and/or money.
ewhanley··on Figma Slides Is a Beautiful Disaster
Slides have unfortunately moved well beyond their intended use. People (management) often asks for more and more information density, but that's not the point of slides. What they really want is a report or memo. Slides were meant to convey information during presentation and don't hold up well absent that context. I hate slides as a medium outside of the specific text of a conversation - they're a bad pre-read, and they're a poor meeting summary. It's unfortunate that slides have become _the_ corporate communication medium.
ewhanley··on The Who Cares Era
Bingo - sorry, this was a mostly rhetorical question.
ewhanley··on The Who Cares Era
Nah, but for real - why wouldn't they take PTO?
ewhanley··on The Who Cares Era
It sounds like you should be able to run the table with so little competition. Why not engage, take on more responsibility, and obviously stand out to get more money and influence?
ewhanley··on The Who Cares Era
This is only an example of people being bad at their jobs or not caring if you are referring to the management/administration responsible for staffing and scheduling over that time period. The people who are actually out of the office are presumably using approved PTO.
ewhanley··on Try Switching to Kagi
It always seems like there's no one less willing to pay for software than those who create it for a living
ewhanley··on AI Horseless Carriages
Meh, show me a human that can reliably produce 100% accurate notes. It seems that the baseline for AI should be human performance rather than perfection. There are very few perfect systems in existence, and humans definitely aren't one of them.
ewhanley··on Microsoft is plotting a future without OpenAI
This is exactly right. If resume driven development results in more money, people are (rightly) going to do it. The incentive structure isn't set by the ICs.
ewhanley··on Is the world becoming uninsurable?
It's not a competition. Both can be sights that people view in awe. Are you "Four Yorkshiremen-ing" wildfires?
ewhanley··on JPMorgan Workers Ponder Union in Wake of Return-to-Office Mandate
This always comes up in RTO discussions. Why haven't they already done it - why go through the pain of forcing an RTO when they can cut costs by 2/3?
ewhanley··on Stimulation Clicker
This is a Black Mirror level hellscape. It really does capture the overstimulation of the modern world without filters. I found myself simultaneously anxious and inclined to keep clicking so I can unlock the next tier. It's over the top but not by much.
ewhanley··on The Evolution of Tunnel Boring Machines (2023)
Rock often has sufficient structural integrity to get by with some bolting vs adding structure (steel, shotcrete, etc) to the soil tunnel as they go
ewhanley··on What is it like to be a thermostat? (1996)
Ecobee thermostats can run in dual heat/cool mode
ewhanley··on Why is it so hard to find a job now? Enter Ghost Jobs
I can’t tell if this is satire or actual comic book villain behavior. I guess not really villain behavior, but certainly gaming a clearly broken system
ewhanley··on MIT engineers make converting CO2 into useful products more practical
It absolutely does and has to be stripped out in processing. It typically gets compressed and reinjected over and over again
ewhanley··on MIT engineers make converting CO2 into useful products more practical
Pressure is only part of the equation. The pressure gets it to the field economically and does boos reservoir pressure, but co2 injection has more to do with miscibility with hydrocarbons at relatively low pressures. Miscibility yields viscosity reduction and swells the oil to improve displacement and mobility, particularly in heavier crude. Couple that with pressure and you can dramatically improve recovery factor.
ewhanley··on M4 Mac mini's efficiency is incredible
I also wonder how often people are actually turning them off. It's generally a rare event to push the power button on a mac in my experience
ewhanley··on New York Times tech workers go on strike
If this was such an easy proposition and there was actually arbitrage available, why haven't they already done it. If the market is to be believed, this would only be a temporary boost if it were even achievable. Demand goes up for offshore workers, their prices start to rise, and the delta closes.
ewhanley··on COSMIC Alpha Released
I love my Framework 13. The ability to upgrade and repair is great, and they manage to fit it in an envelope comparable to other non-repairable units. The build quality feels solid. It's not a mbp, but the aluminum chassis feels a lot more robust than many plastic competitors.
ewhanley··on how do you 'accurately' speak English in ancient Rome?
Could there ever be an instance not motivated by politics where a black actor portrayed a white character? Not everything everyone does is virtue signaling or politically motivated, but we have somehow arrived at a place culturally where the perception is that a huge fraction of the population is making decisions disingenuously. It's such a coarse and dismissive heuristic.
ewhanley··on Road planners embrace the diverging diamond interchange
There is a diverging diamond interchange across I25 in Cheyenne, WY, and the next exit just a couple miles south is a double roundabout. It's almost like WYDOT is conducting intersection a/b testing.
ewhanley··on Apple introduces M4 chip
This is it. An M series air is an incredible machine for most people - people who likely won’t ever write a line of js or use a GPU. Email, banking, YouTube, etc ona device with incredible battery and hardware that will likely be useful for a decade is perfect. The average user hasn’t even heard of HN.
ewhanley··on Data breach at Kaiser Permanente affects 13.4M people
That's pretty gross. Why would a hospital/healthcare system even need all that tracking? They don't make enough from their primary business that they also need to sell patient data for advertising? I would guess some dev just slapped on a bunch of boilerplate that so many other projects use and called it a day.
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