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jhartikainen

52 karma · joined June 26, 2010

I sometimes make internet stuff and sometimes write at https://codeutopia.net
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jhartikainen··on To write non-fiction, draw the trunk, then the rest of the tree
Yes please add an obvious method to go back to your homepage - I also attempted to click the circles to do that because there was no link or anything :) I was interested in checking out more of your writing and I had to change the URL to do that.

Your site isn't the only with this "feature" that I've seen lately, not sure what's up with this pattern.

jhartikainen··on It’s so hard to finish an idea that is not yours and is just suggested by AI
100%. The term "second brain" is getting kind of a bad rep because of people using the dump+AI method. I don't think Tiago Forte who, as far as I know, coined the term meant doing that, at least based on his book on the subject.
jhartikainen··on It’s so hard to finish an idea that is not yours and is just suggested by AI
There seems to be two schools of thought for "second brain" stuff:

1. Those who kind of semi-obsessively write down every little thought, semi-obsessively catalogue everything, etc.

2. Those who use the idea of "writing helps you think", where the second brain functions in support of this

Personally I find 2 quite valuable, and although I could "think about programming all the time" (or one of my other interests), I find it helpful to have f.ex. exact quotes from some book at hand (and various other Obsidian-related things)

jhartikainen··on Marketers are Addicted to Bad Data (2020)
I work in adtech. We actually had to mangle some of our analytics data because it didn't match the broken data a client was used to. Our data was more accurate, but because the numbers didn't match the other analytics suite the client used, so we had to make it worse.

I wish I was joking.

jhartikainen··on Meta Ran Ads That Contained AI-Generated Child Sexual Abuse Imagery
Out of curiosity, I've ran some experiments on Facebook for stuff like this.

Results:

- Reporting a message does nothing no matter how much the content breaks their terms of use. 100% of messages I reported bounced back in a matter of minutes with "no action"

- However, using the "request another review" function, which is available after the initial "no action" response, actually seems to work. How quickly this works seems to vary, I've had actions taken as result of this from 1 day to multiple weeks.

jhartikainen··on That's Not What I Meant by 'Using AI'
Yeah, I'm kind of AI-negative, but I found this very well presented and thought out. I'm not convinced that the fix for AI-heavy workflows is a good harness or an established codebase, but it seems difficult to show it for certain at this point.
jhartikainen··on The Joy of Obsidian
I found out about Obsidian a couple years ago and it finally solved all the problems I've had with notetaking over the years. Something about how you use it to create notes and connect them together just makes sense. I can finally use the notes for something instead of just writing them once and then forgetting they exist because it was too complicated.

I think one underrated feature is its performance. Dealing with multiple notes in other tools I've used in the past was always a pain because using and managing them was so slow, or finding the right note was slow, etc.. Because of this, I would make singular large notes, which became completely useless in the long run. This is just a complete non-issue in Obsidian, everything just works so well.

jhartikainen··on Converting Files into Minecraft Worlds
This is pretty neat. I once had the idea of using Minecraft to represent filesystems. If you think of movies with "cyberspace" where they navigate files in a 3D space. So you would generate a world based on files and folders on your PC, which you could interact with. For example, folders would be buildings you enter, subfolders could be rooms, a particularly large file would appear as a large monolith, and a smaller file a small one, or something along those lines.

It would be painful for doing anything in practice, but would be kinda fun as an experiment maybe.

jhartikainen··on Another Taste of Verse [video]
As an Unreal Engine user, the discussion around Verse is curious. It feels like a lot of UE devs don't like the syntax at all, and would have much preferred a more traditional language. And then Epic announces they're getting rid of Blueprints, which causes further frustration with UE devs, because if you want a gameplay scripting layer instead of pure C++, now you're forced to use Verse.

Even as a Haskell enjoyer, Verse syntax looks kind of messy. I'm assuming with all the smart people designing it there must be some reason for it, but I've not seen it yet.

Still, I'm looking forwards to trying it if/when it actually lands in UE-proper. There are definitely a lot of interesting ideas in it.

jhartikainen··on Good Tools Are Invisible
This is a very interesting idea, partially because I recently wrote about how Svelte is kind of "invisible" as a tool for writing webapps (compared to f.ex. React). Much like gingerBill says here, when I use Svelte the tool "disappears into the background", at least for me.

Something I was hoping this would discuss is why do good tools feel invisible? But doesn't seem like it really went into that.

jhartikainen··on My Story of 3D Realms / Apogee Part I (2020)
Darn, current 3DR took down the legacy site? Their CEO went on a big spiel a while back about how he's such a big fan of the "original" 3DR, and grew up on their games and whatnot, gave a pretty good impression. But taking the legacy site down gives an entirely opposite feeling about it...

Joe has been pretty cranky about current-3DR on his socials, I guess he was right about it.

jhartikainen··on Applied Category Theory Course (2018)
Not sure of your level, but as a beginner, these two were recommended to me on HN previously:

- https://www.cambridge.org/highereducation/books/conceptual-m...

- https://bartoszmilewski.com/2014/11/04/category-the-essence-... (a blog series on CT specifically for programmers)

jhartikainen··on Space Shuttle Endeavour's 20-story vertical display
I read the title and literally thought "Huh how did they fit that inside the shuttle?"
jhartikainen··on Nearly half of LG smart TV apps contain residential proxy SDKs
Good point, hadn't thought at all of this kind of perspective. Though the fact it's some dodgy residential proxy provider that runs this stuff makes me feel like it isn't going to become available for something good.
jhartikainen··on Soccer Arcade Games Through the Years
Not an arcade game but Nintendo World Cup on the NES is excellent fun even today. Its japan-only sequel takes it even further with crazy nonsense, like being able to jump on top of the ball and run around on it
jhartikainen··on Made a free macOS menu bar app that fixes typing in the wrong keyboard layout
Interesting, I would have expected macOS to have this feature because Windows has supported window-specific keyboard layouts for what feels like forever. I don't use my Mac much nowadays, but gonna have to grab this just in case.
jhartikainen··on Has AI already killed self-help nonfiction books?
I've read a bunch of what could be considered "self help" and while they often have a lot of fluff, they do have interesting points. Many of them reference actual research studies to back those points.

I just skip the motivational fluff and dig out the useful bits. Makes them very fast reads when you can skip majority of it.

jhartikainen··on Prove you're human by winning a claw machine
I think this purely as an idea is pretty fun, and there is value in that. But beyond the initial impressions it's exactly as you say. It's not different at all from others in how it will get annoying over time.

Accessibility is a big concern with all kinds of CAPTCHAs it seems. Even without any disabilities, I've seen some that I cannot solve because it's illegible.

jhartikainen··on Thoughts on People and Blogs
I was an avid GReader user and then lost all of the feeds when they closed down. I've been setting up miniflux lately, but the biggest problem is that over the years I've completely lost all blogs I used to follow (and many of them stopped writing anyway), so it's basically starting from zero. But it's already more interesting than trying to scourge Reddit for a non-marketingslop post to read.

I also configured it to fetch Hacker News with some filters to get rid of AI related posts, and it's actually a good way to follow this also.

jhartikainen··on Profunctor Equipment in Haskell
Articles like this always make me wonder "there could be something interesting about this", but they always assume I know more math (or something) than I do.

Does anyone write about these kinds of topics in a more approachable manner, or is the math just so inherent to this, that I need to learn that first? (And if so, what do I need to read to learn that?)

jhartikainen··on Show HN: TikTok but for Scientific Papers
In some ways I like the concept. Making interesting papers easier to find and easier to digest seems like a good thing.

But the popularity metrics and AI aspects seem like they will cause a bias towards certain types of papers, making potentially useful ones not get found.

jhartikainen··on Read Programming as Theory Building
In theory maybe in some sense, but if we read Naur's definition of "theory" in a more strict or philosophical way, they can't in full. An LLM can't build a theory, because it doesn't have "real" experience, it's essentially just following rules. It also can't really argue or justify its choices like a person can.

This is discussed in the "Ryle's Notion of Theory" section of the original essay.

jhartikainen··on Realistic Facebook Privacy Simulator
This is too realistic, I'm super stressed out now because I didn't have time to answer everything right. Next thing I know, there's probably going to be something embarrassing on my FB timeline!
jhartikainen··on How to build a large Angular.js application
http://www.ribbon.co uses Angular both for checkouts and creating/editing products.

Disclaimer: I worked with them implementing that.

jhartikainen··on How to build a large Angular.js application
Would be interesting to hear if you discovered any downsides to Angular. I've been working with it a lot lately, but it seems to be a really good solution and the only issues with it is it can be hard to set up to be compatible with googlebot and the slightly tough learning curve
jhartikainen··on Why would you want to own a car if you could avoid it?
Living in a country with less population than in New York pretty much means you can own a car and won't have to worry about traffic jams and stuff. And in less populated parts of the country you need a car in order to get around to begin with.

Plus some of us enjoy driving as pointed out in a few other comments too

jhartikainen··on Building Software in Public
I think it's going to be interesting to read about this as I'm sort of building a SaaS myself as well. Subscribed to the blog feed
jhartikainen··on Git blame has never been so much fun
This might be a bit disturbing if used by teams who work from home...
jhartikainen··on Stop threatening game developers
I'm not sure what posts like this look to achieve. It's never going to change the main problem crowd: angry kids who get pissy about the tiniest things. They're the ones being abusive on forums etc. as well.
jhartikainen··on Show HN: Floobits – Remote pair programming done right
Looks interesting, but I get the feeling using something like ScreenHero would work better. I've used ScreenHero for sort-of pair programming and it works extremely well + it's not limited to editors.
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