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fortydegrees

383 karma · joined March 27, 2018

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fortydegrees··on Gemini 3.6 Flash, 3.5 Flash-Lite, and 3.5 Flash Cyber
Thank you for posting them (as well as all your other AI takes). It's appreciated here!

I feel like the human brain massively overweights negative feedback over positive, and that's even after accounting for the fact that internet discourse tends to mostly surface negative comments (whereas the enjoyers stay silent). By default I have to try hard not to take it personally whenever someone leaves a negative comment about my work.

So just doing my bit to say I appreciate your commentary on so much of the fast-evolving AI landscape. Helps me orient :)

fortydegrees··on Australia begins enforcing world-first teen social media ban
Thanks for sharing your opinion.

I strongly disagree with this legislation and have found it hard to 'steelman' the other side, which your comment/opinion does well. I found it very informative so just wanted to share my appreciation for you posting it here.

fortydegrees··on Show HN: I built a wizard to turn ideas into AI coding agent-ready specs
This is really good work! Love the UX and the design. Even though I work with AI agents and building them a lot, I found the way you structure the steps very helpful for thinking about the project itself. The agent asks the right questions which makes me feel confident it's understanding my goals.

If you're looking for feedback, you could include a tiny section on the homepage about how to run the output docs. e.g. put them in a folder, point Claude Code/Codex to it and give it the prompt.

Thanks for building this!

fortydegrees··on When stick figures fought
Can't believe this is the only mention of sfdt so far on this thread. I have similar nostalgia about it being the first online community I joined. Collaborating with others, getting a glimpse into their personal lives, chatting off-platform on MSN/AIM. I wonder if that experience exists for kids in the modern day internet...
fortydegrees··on Online Collection of Keygen Music
I've been looking for that Paradox Photoshop CS2 one for years. Great nostalgic memories.

I've always been in slight awe of these kind of teams/releases. Cracking (mostly) for the raw intellectual challenge and bundling it with demoscene-ish artistic expression - usually a unique UI and obviously a great chiptune. I've always wondered why that behaviour emerged..

fortydegrees··on Coding Font Selection 'Tournament'
I appreciate your pursuit of this artistic endeavour. Truly great art is always the product of great personal sacrifice.

That said, it does make me wonder about two alternative approaches:

A) When a screenshot is detected, change the font, produce the screenshot and then change it back. You could probably do this on a per-application basis with something like AutoHotKey, or there's probably a deeper way of doing it on the OS-level.

B) Use the magic of AI. Given it's monospaced, you could probably modify an image model to replace the relevant font of the screenshot.

Of course, these approaches may compromise your artistic integrity.

fortydegrees··on The expected value of the game is positive regardless of Ballmer’s strategy
While it does seem that Ballmer doesn't have an understanding of the deepness of the problem, in his defence, he outscored BillG on the math SAT with a perfect score of 800, and graduated Harvard with a degree in applied mathematics.

Which makes me wonder if it's related to another 'simple' game theory problem that came up in Matt Levine's money stuff:

"They made me do the math on 1000 coin flips. EV(heads) (easy), standard deviation (slightly harder), then they offered me a +EV bet on the outcome. I said “let’s go.”

They said “Wrong. If we’re offering it to you, you shouldn’t take it.”

I said “We just did the math.”

They said “We have a guy on the floor of the Amex who can flip 55% heads.”"

I like that anecdote and the takeaway, especially with regards to trading: if someone's offering you what seems obviously a +EV trade, why are they offering it to you and what are you missing? Whether that was Ballmer's intended lesson is another matter..

[0]https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2024-05-14/amc-is...

fortydegrees··on Show HN: Affordable text-to-speech for long-form content
This is great. Simple and slick makes it easy to use. I'm impressed by the URL importing feature. Is that a GPT wrapper behind the scenes or do you use another library?
fortydegrees··on Show HN: Affordable text-to-speech for long-form content
Is this a custom trained TTS model or is it an implementation of something like StyleTTSv2?
fortydegrees··on Ask HN: What apps have you created for your own use?
I have a similar story of accessing an internal JSON API for my own benefit.

I left my airpods in a car I rented using zipcar. I spoke to support etc but nothing had been handed in. I checked to see if the car was still where I left it so that I could re-hire and claim them, but it had been moved.

The app tells you the 'name' of the car you rented which is used as an identifier. It also shows a map of where all available cars are. I sniffed the requests the app made to display this map, and was able to filter it by the car name. From this I was able to locate where the car I left my airpods in was. Was able to head there, unlock the car, and to my amazement the airpods were still there!

fortydegrees··on Biohacking Lite (2020)
>they don’t seem to look at real people that live a long time in Spain, Italy, Japan, etc

I think you're referring to 'Blue zones'[0] here. I'm certainly not an expert in longevity, but was also intrigued by these areas and their apparently above-average lifespan, and how it goes against a lot of conventional longevity advice re: diet.

One explanation I've heard is that they're simply the results of poor record keeping, and that there isn't much strong evidence to suggest people in those regions do statistically live longer than average.

[0]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blue_zone

fortydegrees··on OpenLLM
There's the OpenedAI-API extension for text-generation-webui: https://github.com/oobabooga/text-generation-webui/tree/main...
fortydegrees··on OpenAI ChatGPT: Optimizing language models for dialogue
What was Kitty Hawk useful for?
fortydegrees··on Musk’s first email to Twitter staff ends remote work
Twitter has 450M monthly active users. Elon bought it for $44bn. With ~$5bn in operating expenses, that gives you an absolutely insane CAC of $90 to play with.
fortydegrees··on Operating well – what I learned at Stripe
You're assuming that the individual's labour is the only input into work completion.

I think those questions are good. One benefit is that it can reveal potential organisation-wide blockers:

*Getting design changes could be slow (and hence the design department may be understaffed, or inefficient communication channels)

*Maybe some processes can be ran in parallel. Someone can build the login form while the other does the database.

*They might require git access for another department that could take a while to come through.

Considering engineers' time is often the greatest cost for a technology startup, you can bet they'd be incentivised to maximise the efficiency of it.

Not only might they reveal potential blockers, but answering it also helps both parties understand they're on the same page regarding what the task entails. If the task is building a login form and the response is 'It will take two days to train the neural network', you can nip that in the bud.

fortydegrees··on Tinygrad
Adding a comment as I don't think this is a fair representation of George. He livestreamed the creation of cheapETH as a technical demonstration of web3 development[0] and continually talks about it being worthless while developing it. He's also on record as being a serial 'no-coiner'.

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9LaIezgiUmw

fortydegrees··on Phone is still the best way to order pizza
You might not be the person the software was being sold to ;)
fortydegrees··on Vercel raises $150M Series D
It hosts your next.js website.
fortydegrees··on Show HN: I built a no-BS recipe search engine
Great job! Love the UI. Did you build this from scratch or is it an extended, existing database front-end? The search/filters/sorting would be really useful to generalise as its own package!
fortydegrees··on Edward Snowden Slams Sam Altman's Worldcoin: 'Don't Catalogue Eyeballs'
To protect the device getting cracked, couldn't you just have it send a message if/when the device is opened in a way it shouldn't (e.g. for inspection) and thus make that key invalid?
fortydegrees··on React Docs Beta – rewritten with hooks and interactive examples
The CSS is tailwind
fortydegrees··on On Building Glue Systems
Love your landing page. I know exactly what you do and how you can be of value for me without even scrolling. Well done!
fortydegrees··on Ask HN: Companies of one, what is your tech stack?
Hey! This is brilliant!

Obviously you speak about the tech stack you use here, but your UX is absolutely perfect. I just used your product and got exactly what I wanted without even thinking. My brain didn't second-guess myself once. I didn't read anything superfluous - in fact I don't think I read anything at all. The search box and images of the phones did it all for me, and the autocomplete for search was perfect. I loved that only after I searched did it give me the option to refine (like size of model)

I usually use comparethemarket or something similar when shopping around, and it's a bit of a pain - though I only realised how much of a pain since using yours.

I don't know how much conscious thought and work you put into the UX - as you mainly talk about the tech - but it's great. Well done!

fortydegrees··on MIT Predicted Society Will Collapse in 2040. Research Shows We're on Schedule
If you're asking for financial advice based on the assumption that conventional finance may collapse, your hedge would be to invest in making yourself self-sustainable. Land, wood, gas, knowledge.
fortydegrees··on Borgs are giant extrachromosomal elements
I'm completely in the dark when it comes to hard biotech, but have heard this labelled as a CRISPR-level development.

Based off this tweet[0] from one of the paper's authors.

Can anyone here confirm or deny this?

[0]: https://twitter.com/BanfieldJill/status/1414647658786922496

fortydegrees··on Coinbase announces proposed direct listing
Slightly off topic but can anyone explain to me why a massive company like coinbase uses Medium as a blogging platform/software? Why are they not hosting the blog within their own ecosystem/site?
fortydegrees··on Palantir’s God’s-Eye View of Afghanistan
You're getting some heat but I just want to say that I found this super interesting and valuable, and makes complete sense to me.

Thank you.

fortydegrees··on Ask HN: Co-founder wants me to leave but won't entertain a buy out offer
This makes a lot of sense. An issue I have with this is that one reason my co-founder wants to split is that they don't really want the pressure of running a startup, and so are unlikely to go on to raise additional money.

Could a situation where I get a cash payout, say $20k from the company to sell a certain %, and then the convertible debt to sell more in the future work?

fortydegrees··on Ask HN: Co-founder wants me to leave but won't entertain a buy out offer
This seems like the most realistic and likely answer. My co-founder hasn't really been budging so far and I feel like they don't fully understand the situation. They think that because it was their idea that they are entitled to a lot more than me.

One issue for me is that I don't have that much faith in them being able to execute on the company vision by themself, e.g. they don't want to monetize right now or do a revenue split for reasons I'm unclear about, which makes the practicality of monthly payments tricky.

fortydegrees··on Ask HN: Co-founder wants me to leave but won't entertain a buy out offer
They're not enjoying working on the company together. It's mainly that they don't like or want the stress of working on a startup, and want to run it more as a lifestyle business.
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