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heikkilevanto

631 karma · joined July 14, 2020

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heikkilevanto··on Wiki Deep dive into Standard diving dress
I misread it as "driving" dress, and wondered what that could have been... The diving stuff was quite interesting too
heikkilevanto··on I'm the mom in that viral Giants clip. Let me tell you about my husband
Living in Copenhagen, I do not recognize that. I live in a city apartment on Vesterbro. We have maybe a hundred bikes parked in the backyard, nobody I know brings his bike home for the night, unless it is a really fancy racing bike. But yes, I do lock my bike when ever I really away from it.
heikkilevanto··on Ask A Monk – A digital wilderness for thoughts with no immediate answer
Maybe the system itself is not using AI to create answers, but most lazy users probably will ask a LLM and post the result as their answers. So we get AI slop anyway.
heikkilevanto··on The 92-Year-Old Mathematician and the Teenage Apprentice
Interesting article. Pity it was so full of human factors, and so low on actual mathematics.
heikkilevanto··on How Fairphone built the Fairphone Gen 6+
Happy FairPhone 4 user here. Running 3+ years, only replaced the battery once. Aim to keep it 7-10 years, barring unforeseen events like theft. Not going to replace it just because a newer model is released.
heikkilevanto··on Dyson CameraJet electric toothbrush
Clever solution, but I am not sure I can see a matching problem
heikkilevanto··on GUIs should be fully keyboard-driven
Keyboard driven is fine, when you have a keyboard. But many users are now on phones or tablets, with a severely limited keyboard that takes a big part of the screen. But they have a variety of gestures that regular desktop machines don't have. A good UI should happily handle both of these extremes, and everything in between.
heikkilevanto··on How Universities Should Prepare Founders
99% of university students will never start a company. 99% of those who do will close down without making any measurable difference to the world. I think the world would be better off if the universities actively discouraged the idea of starting companies. Those few who really burn for the idea might do it anyway, and might be more likely to succeed.
heikkilevanto··on Show HN: I trained a 125M model to autocomplete piano on-device
I would love something like that, except that I play the melody, and it produces proper 3-4 part accompaniment, preferably in good baroque style. Extra bonus if it could also write it into a file in a format suitable for music editing programs.
heikkilevanto··on If your agent commits a crime, who is responsible?
Most comments here point to the owner of operator of the LLM. I tend to agree. But on the other hand, if you drive on the highway and the steering wheel falls off and your car glides to the left and his an oncoming car, it can be argued that it is true producer of the car, or the mechanic who didn't tighten the bolts...
heikkilevanto··on OpenLogi
Shocking that in this time and age, a simple peripheral like a mouse still needs a dedicated piece of software to be installed. In my Linux boxes, I just plug in a standard mouse and get the standard functions. I think the device driver should know about the low-level interface to the mouse: know how it points, what buttons, scroll wheels, and other inputs it may have, etc. Then the OS would process it like any mouse. If you need to connect some buttons to specific actions, that could be handled by a user-level program running on the machine that could know how to do those actions. But that level should be far removed from knowing what brand (or type) of input device you are using.

Of course producers like Logitech want you to install their own thing, so as to make it harder for you to switch to other brands of hardware, but an open system like Linux should not play along with that.

heikkilevanto··on Ask HN: I've quit six systems for tracking my illness. What works?
I keep an old phone in the bathroom, and every morning I use it to file my weight and my peak flow (for asthma tracking) on a web page I host on my home server. The server just appends the numbers into two text files, and plots some nice curves. In case of errors or other problems, I can just go and edit those files. The basic tracker took about an afternoon to code, by hand, long before we had LLMs. I have a more advanced tracker system to remember all the craft beers I drink, that one has recently migrated to a sqlite backend, and the LLMs have helped me to add many more features. Some of my friends have wanted to use it too, one lasted a couple of months, the rest gave up within a week - it requires discipline which most people don't have - I wouldn't either, but being my own system I am more inclined to keep using it, and adding features.

My advice would be to find a way that minimizes the friction, and get it into your (morning?) routine. And keep the system simple to begin with.

heikkilevanto··on The Case Against Formal Verification, 50 Years Later
But can you make a mere user read and understand that specification?
heikkilevanto··on Show HN: A public AI whose memory is shared across all users
I asked it a reasonable question about working hours, and its reply started with "That's the first time today someone's led with actual substance instead of just the day label. I appreciate that." I guess the poor bot will have to deal with a lot of nonsense. As you would expect from a chat window open to the wide internet. Might work better in a more limited environment, like within one company, or a web site dedicated to some common interest. Still, I like the idea.
heikkilevanto··on The weekend is 100 years old
I remember seeing a calendar on my first school year, 1971 in Finland, that marked which Saturdays were school days and which were off. Around the same time, I saw a cartoon about the future labor congress, where a dissatisfied worker asks "Mr President, do we have to every Wednesday?"
heikkilevanto··on Ethical Cold Outreach
That is the law here in EU. Unsolicited commercial email is forbidden. Even if I have done business with you in the past, you are not allowed to contact me about something else. Unless I have explicitly and freely given my consent, and you can document that. That is a good law, and keeps the amount of spam somewhat down.
heikkilevanto··on The Cold Email
No, just a retired programmer, and sick and tired of all the spam I keep receiving. Don't have "fantastic opportunities" and am not looking for any.
heikkilevanto··on The Cold Email
Send me a "cold email" or any other sort of spam, and I will never see anything more from you, as your address will be blocked. Spamming is against the law here in EU, and for a good reason.
heikkilevanto··on Microsoft Can Track Users via a Windows Device ID
I don't like the idea of a persistent id for my machine. Would there be any harm in rewriting the machine-id at every boot? Or just deleting it as part of the shutdown sequence?
heikkilevanto··on You need a webring
And you need to stop telling everyone what we need! "You might be interested in this <thing> if you have this and that" sounds so much more reasonable.
heikkilevanto··on Give Smart People the Tools to Do Smart Things
... And watch stupid people do stupid things even faster
heikkilevanto··on The Australian Government to Require SMS/MMS Sender ID Registraion
I am sure there are reasons why this won't work, but could it really be so hard to show both the faked number, and where the call actually comes from, so I could choose which one to add to my block list.
heikkilevanto··on Show HN: Learn from 30 historical figures, open source, nonprofit, self-hosted
Interesting idea. But why audio? I can't be the only one who prefers to read text.
heikkilevanto··on The desperation of NYTimes
> Oh no I got 5 emails I better write a post complaining about this massive inconvenience hmph

ONE unsolicited unlawful (EU) spam mail is quite enough reason to get angry, block mail, and to complain to the relevant authorities. This spamming has to stop!

heikkilevanto··on The desperation of NYTimes
> Every interaction I have with a store or site signs me up for some promotional thing, which I unsubscribe from immediately, only to find it's one of 4 different lists I was added to.

Luckily this kind of thing is very much illegal here in the EU. If they send me marketing shit without my explicit active consent, they are in violation of the law, and I can at least report them. As I do. It is still not perfect, but the amount of spam I get from previous business relations has declined a lot in the past years. Other spam is still rampant, and I can only block any such sender until they find a new way to push their shit.

heikkilevanto··on IXI's autofocusing lenses are almost ready to replace multifocal glasses
Sounds interesting. But I suspect my astigmatism would kind of exclude just turning the lenses around
heikkilevanto··on IXI's autofocusing lenses are almost ready to replace multifocal glasses
I am not so sure about the eye tracking and autofocus stuff, but would love a simple focus knob on the frames to adjust instead of changing to a different pair of glasses. I suspect the tracking and focusing electronics must be somewhat clumsy and a battery life of a single day sounds suboptimal for me.
heikkilevanto··on Motorola phones have started hijacking the Amazon app to insert affiliate codes
The comments here say that all Android phone manufacturers do stuff like this. I have never noticed that kind of things on my Fairphone. But then again, I don't have many apps and certainly not Amazon.
heikkilevanto··on XS: A programming language. Anywhere, anytime, by anyone
I don't buy "Anywhere, anytime, by anyone" - no language can be that. Different people and different projects have wildly different needs. It looks like it tries to provide a single binary offering most of the compiler, debugger, linter, etc. on "all" platforms. Noble goal in itself, useful for some cases, but utterly irrelevant for many (most?) projects. If I have already decided to work on Linus, I don't care about Windows compatibility. And why "by anyone"? If a language is optimized for school kids, it can not be optimal for serious professionals, and vice versa.
heikkilevanto··on Eight More '8-Bit Era' Microprocessors
Oh yes, I cut my teeth on a Finnish 1802 based TELMAC in the 1970s. It all of 2 kb of RAM (in 16 chips manually soldered on the board), and room for another 2kb if anyone would need so much, as it said in the instructions. I might almost be able to reconstruct the instruction set now, it was so deep ingrained in my brain. Once I had nightmares directly in hex. Sold my first pieces of code on that CPU, a 2kb long "monitor" rom, maybe a bit like a BIOS in today's terms. Added .5 kb of new features and optimized it so it could still fit in that 2kb EPROM.
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