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incidentnormal

34 karma · joined October 18, 2014

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incidentnormal··on Show HN: I built a social media management tool in 3 weeks with Claude and Codex
What did your harness look like for this?
incidentnormal··on “Nothing” is the secret to structuring your work
This is great meta advice, definitely take heed.

I would add - going for a walk and having a shower are both excellent circuit breakers.

incidentnormal··on GPT-4 details leaked?
@Exuma, this comment is ridiculously resonant with me, the part about 'learning transaction isolation for the 50th time' is very on point too.

Everything you said I pretty much feel the same way. I've accepted it as part of how I work, and the advantages are many (and valued by many) - but yes, interacting with deep experts usually ends with feeling a bit like a fraud. I feel like I maybe was an expert at whatever the thing is at some point in time, momentarily, but then I just shed the information as soon as the next thing needs to be done, and it just ends up as part of the background inference pattern matcher.

Certain things where I'm really forced to learn something deeply do stick, but I find my ways of thinking about that domain to be very different to most 'true' experts, and rely heavily on visual models and analogies with other concepts.

incidentnormal··on MiniGPT-4
I like how you've expressed this insight, and it is so true.

Becoming great at a particular technology stack means modelling it in great detail in your head, so you can move through it without external assistance. But that leaves an arena without discovery, where you just reinforce the same synapses, leading to rigidity and an absence of awe.

incidentnormal··on Developers spend most of their time figuring the system out
ADHD is quite badly named imo. It's not so much a deficit of attention but a disregulation. If you are interested in something then you can invoke an almost obsessive fixation on the task (hyperfocus I believe some people call it) which lends itself well to coding in certain conditions.
incidentnormal··on Namecheap: Russia Service Termination
I may be being overly paranoid here, but consider that being made an exception of by Namecheap might draw the wrong kind of attention from the regime.
incidentnormal··on Fungus at Chernobyl absorbs nuclear radiation via radiosynthesis
Our ability to leverage those patterns underlies the success of our species, so I would say they are probably quite real.
incidentnormal··on Hackers take over prominent Twitter accounts in simultaneous attack
> If you could look for something like multiple accounts tweeting the same thing within 1 minute, in the past couple weeks, you could turn up some candidates for test accounts

I think this would turn up alot more results than you bargained for.

incidentnormal··on Mercedes-Benz pre-safe sound
Well, ibuprofen is certainly not a steroid - it is an NSAID (non-steroidal anti inflammatory drug)
incidentnormal··on Vital Wikipedia Articles
So few A-class articles in the list.
incidentnormal··on Authentication and the Have I Been Pwned API
Even though he explained why (it is likely a forthcoming feature), I did enjoy this comment.
incidentnormal··on A Year-Long Undercover Plot to Blow Up Eve Online's Most Notorious Space Station
Please do - what kind of services are we talking about and how much data is involved? Bear in mind I have no experience with the game itself.
incidentnormal··on Antidepressant withdrawal: reviewing the paper behind the headlines
Yeah correct, alcohol is technically a positive allosteric modulator of the GABA-A receptors, which means it potentiates the effects of GABA in those receptors. Over time, the receptors downregulate to compensate for being over-stimulated. Upon withdrawal from alcohol, the GABA-A receptors are unable to respond strongly enough to the GABA which exists, so in effect you're undersupplied and that contributes to the DTs. Alcohol is actually a very messy drug that acts on a huge range of receptors but the effect on the GABAergic system is probably the most significant.
incidentnormal··on Microsoft intercepting Firefox, Chrome installation on Windows 10 Insider build
To be fair, if there's a recipe on the sugar packet for a cake, it is very likely to say 'use $sugar_company flour for best results'.
incidentnormal··on Three facts from “Our World in Data” that everyone should know
The book which Bill Gates recently gave a copy of to all 2018 college graduates - Factfulness, is a very well written and comprehensive treatment of this and more by Hans Rosling (Gapminder). Highly recommended, it's not long either - you could read it in a couple of evenings or a weekend easily.
incidentnormal··on Norwegian Consumer Council report on how tech companies use dark patterns [pdf]
That is what net means, there will be positives and negatives which contribute to the net. For the record I agree with you, I think Facebook is overall negative but not by much, there are very strong positives.
incidentnormal··on Look for the duct tape
Maybe off-topic to your original need. But I've always wanted / needed a utility that can de-duplicate media (images, music, videos) that I have scattered around which are the same thing just at different qualities/resolutions.

I get that for music and video this is actually quite challenging but images - - I would've thought quite easy? I've tried a few tools which claim to do this over the years but they all fail rather miserably / require a paid upgrade to do it better (although what is demonstrated in the free version is never impressive enough to consider paying).

Might be a good project for myself in my spare time, but wondered if anyone knew of anything obvious I was missing? FSLint and stuff is great for general filesystem de-duping, this is a slightly more complex case.

incidentnormal··on Scrcpy – An app to display and control Android devices
Very clever, and nice writeup! A few years ago I wrote a bunch of bash scripts to control my phone over adb (found it useful to script certain things and write messages etc. Before things like WhatsApp had a Web client). This has taken that concept to its most elegant formulation! Well done.
incidentnormal··on Mark Felt-Tipped: Uncovering top-secret information by counting pixels
Did you mean this becomes a combination problem not a permutation problem?
incidentnormal··on British 15-year-old gained access to intelligence, pretending to be head of CIA
Quick thought: had he continued for years, he would be tried as an adult and completely screwed. As it stands, his adolescent trolling mentality has indirectly allowed him to have a chance at a normal life.
incidentnormal··on Mathematicians Find Wrinkle in Famed Fluid Equations
I think it's not a chaotic result as such (as the Lorenz weather prediction models you're referencing are) - which would mean large differences in outcome from very small differences in input, but a case where multiple different outcomes can arise from identical inputs.
incidentnormal··on Raspberry Pi VPN Server: Build Your Own Virtual Private Network
While this is true in an ideal world, I think there is also something to be said against an honest attempt to 'do it yourself', and then getting it wrong. Like many things that seem relatively straightforward at first glance, VPNs are a rabbit hole of networking theory that are quite likely to cause anyone who's not an enthusiast to lose interest.
incidentnormal··on The Fifth Protocol (2014)
I find the concepts of session and presentation layers within the OSI model to be quite nebulous today, especially when you try to map TCP/IP concepts onto them - because it's not a like-for-like comparison.

I think I prefer the '5th layer' concept - an extension of the TCP/IP stack between 'Transport' and 'Application'.