jonathanlydall

Well, they do have a point on the “unmanly” aspect as there is a reason that men are statistically more likely to die before old age than women.

Also, I’ve found that when asked about the risk of something, most people believe that bad things only happen to other people (who also believed that, until it happened to them).

Talking about road safety.

In South Africa we have 12,000+ road fatalities a year, by comparison Australia (renowned for strong law enforcement) with about half of our population size has 1,200 or something. (And they apparently happen to have about 4,500 teen pregnancies a year.)

Australia’s (or maybe it was New Zealand’s which I visited on the same trip) road safety campaign is called “Towards Zero”, while South Africa’s is called “Arrive Alive”.

A big part of the difference in fatalities is that Australia has much better general law enforcement (such that a lot of foreigners complain about it), while over here it’s dismal with Arrive Alive’s strategy seemingly being to always do the same thing as last year’s holiday season except with “trying harder”, while largely ignoring day-to-day traffic offences.

Due to the high chance of being caught for transgressions, Australians tend to way more often stick to the rules of the road, while over here there is horrendous amount of (to put it politely) shenanigans happening almost all the time.

And the impact of this difference in discipline shows in the above stats.

Years ago now, but my now wife spent 10 days in intensive care after a minibus taxi driving on the wrong side of the road head on collided into the car she was a passenger in. My wife was fortunately in a car with good safety features and had a medical aid plan allowing her to receive some of the best care possible in the country, but I’m doubtful that the mini bus taxi passengers (who tend to be in the poor class of the population) sent to public hospitals received care anywhere near as good, I think I heard after this article [1] was published that two people died.

Perhaps road accidents, or at least fatalities, can be reduced more than you realize.

[1]: https://www.citizen.co.za/northcliff-melville-times/222787/2...

Where I am from, organised political movements are not a factor of teen pregnancy and were not the least bit in my mind when I made my statement.

And my two examples are completely arbitrary because my point applies to pretty much any problem which would be solved by people being “more careful”.

So, political/religious elements aside, teen pregnancy and road safety are the same in terms of “if people were just more disciplined, there would not be these problems” (i.e. if teens who have easy access to contraceptives planned ahead before giving into impulsiveness; if drivers were more attentive to their behaviour), which I then pointed out is naive because the reality is that people aren’t perfect, they aren’t always disciplined, we’re all only human.

Hence, we need other solutions to help with problems which don’t require ignoring that people are only human and lack perfect discipline.

I agree that some organised movements can be a problem in that they can make other problems worse.

You could say the same about teen pregnancy being a practically solved problem, except there is still the problem of teen pregnancy. Or even something more mundane as driving consistently safely all the time to solve the problem of accidents.

If everyone was disciplined all the time in regard to everything, many problems in the world would simply not exist. But we live in reality where for whatever reason, people don't know to do something, or they do know and they're just not disciplined, or they make a mistake due to extenuating circumstances. And I would expect that the vast majority of people would oppose any idea of somehow punitively "dealing with" people who get some things wrong.

So I would say that it's very evidently not a practically solved problem, because if it were we wouldn't be looking to solve it still.

Within this reality, a vaccine is a great additional tool at solving the problem of preventing the spread of HIV.

You seem to be in the ICE enthusiast category, which is likely a minority of car owners.

For most people though, if they are buying a car it's because they can't practically get by without one, so things like "soul" and "character" of the car are irrelevant and actually an anti-feature if it makes the car cost more to own than an EV option which does the job perfectly well and is possibly even better in terms of features and comfort at the same TCO.

A bit like the unfortunate decision of Sony deciding to discontinue physical PlayStation discs was likely inevitable based on the market clearly preferring to move away from them [0], I suspect it's inevitable that sales of EVs will ultimately completely dwarf, if not entirely replace, ICE cars. If the range issue is solved (admittedly not a certainty), ICE cars could become relegated to usage only by enthusiasts like yourself and once the last generation who grew up with ICEs dies out, will probably be as common as a horse drawn cart.

[0]: https://bsky.app/profile/matpiscatella.bsky.social/post/3mrd...

We ultimately switched to this approach with great success for our own product. We stumbled on its success a little by chance.

We have a visual designer and for LLMs to interact with it we originally built a tool per manipulation operation type (e.g. add, edit, delete item - for various item types).

We actually already had a JavaScript API with corresponding .d.ts file for scripting inside our product and one of our clients asked that we also expose this as an MCP tool. I figured sure, should be quite quick and easy, and with Claude Code's help I managed to do it in a single afternoon.

We then found that the LLMs way preferred reaching for this tool, managing with it to get their tasks done with fewer mistakes along the way and in much smaller time frames.

After seeing this and doing some more validation (I've also read that Cloudflare article), we ditched the other tools completely and made a cheat sheet for the LLMs on how to use our API.

Because our API returns decent error messages including stack traces, even if the script fails the LLMs have no trouble making another script to fix their mistake and carrying on from where the error occurred.

In hindsight it really was hardly surprising as LLMs are already aiming to be as good as possible at coding and with JS being so popular I imagine it's particularly good at it.

Do many people use Firefox on 50" 8K TVs as opposed to regular monitors? I wouldn't want such a large display on a computer unless the computer is being used as media server. And my experience when I got new monitors for work about 18 months ago, was that decent ones at higher than 1440p were more expensive than I felt was worth it.

Also, I expect one or more of the following from a 50" 8K TV at that price:

- Bundled with ad/spyware.

- Poor image and/or sound quality.

- Doesn’t last long, or image quality very noticeably degrades after a relatively short amount of use.

I also wonder if perhaps it’s still like back when HD was still new, where TVs would advertise “Full HD”, but were actually only referring to being able to accept a 1080p input signal which they would then downscale to their <720p LCD panels.

It's not an open server that anyone can just connect to, only specific Plex accounts that you invite.

They also don't need to know anything about how to connect to your server, it simply shows up as a server name in the list on their "app" or the Plex website, there is no need for dynamic DNS or VPN or anything like that as Plex's servers do a kind of "service discovery" automatically.

It does require you exposing the Plex TCP port to the internet, so you are relying on them making sure there are no vulnerabilities. You could probably do a VPN approach and give them a URL they can enter into a web-browser, but it's unlikely to work on TV and mobile apps.

I've given access to my Plex server to my siblings and parents and it's great. Since I got a decently fast fibre line, no more having to manually copy shows/movies they want to watch over a LAN or using a USB HDD or memory stick.

They were likely saying that 8K displays are way out of budget for most consumers.

I too find "looks written by AI" comments tedious. I feel that the following guideline [0] actually covers this, perhaps it should be updated to also specifically mention "AI written":

> Please don't complain about tangential annoyances—e.g. article or website formats, name collisions, or back-button breakage. They're too common to be interesting.

[0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html#comments

> Actual muscles need exercise to stay in shape (let alone grow), so does the brain. Can we really be sure that thoughts, opinions, taste will still come out sharper and faster after five, ten, 20 years of using these tools almost every day?

It occurred to me recently how because the LLMs have to potential to lead to intellectual/skill atrophy, they are a factor which could lead to an Idiocracy-esque [0] situation.

And while it's a well-established Fermi Paradox [1] hypothesis that AI could lead to the violent destruction of a civilization, I think it's also worth considering that they could non-violently lead to their decline due to intellectual atrophy.

[0]: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0387808/

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fermi_paradox

Remembering back, I certainly lacked a lot of critical reasoning which could have led me to do possibly equally stupid stuff like this had I the skill in my early teens. As I remember it, life felt more like a "game" in that you do whatever it lets you, without much consideration of whether people will be (potentially very) upset with what you've done. In person activities stood high risk of getting caught, but online it seems more like a computer game and the people on the other side of your actions feel more abstract.

Many years back when I used to do CS for WoW, a colleague of mine liked to say that the only reason some kids shit-talk the way they do is because it's online and if they tried it in person they'd get punched in the face.

These kids discovered that their actions have consequences to them in person and not just someone being upset with them remotely.

As a parent now (but oldest is only 5), it's stories like this which make me determined remain aware of the kind of stuff my kids get up to and continually explain that actions have consequences, even if those consequences are seemingly as trivial as making someone else feel shit about themselves.

I wonder if maybe 10 or so years from now, after these kids have actually reached decent emotional maturity, that they'll look back at their actions and think about how stupidly reckless and needlessly destructive they were, to both others and their own lives.

Appreciated and fixed. I'm a native English speaker, but I think not a word I often write.

I think it's a somewhat South African cultural thing, but when I get calls from businesses or spammers, the first thing the caller tends to say is "Hello, how are you?", which is completely stupid when you're calling someone who wouldn't know who you are, so it tends to immediately make me annoyed that they don't know that they should have introduced themselves first.

As 99% of the time these are spam calls, I used to respond with something like "I'm fine, but who are you / do I know you?", but that was pretty much always inefficient as that might say their name (which from a spammer is useless information), maybe a sales pitch "how much do you spend on x?" or maybe something deliberately misleading about their company and saying something like <major brand name> even though they're some independent sales crowd getting commission selling contracts for them.

Eventually I found that the most effective response is "Sorry. Where are you calling from and what is this in regard to?" which I've found without fail seems to surprise, disarm them and immediately elicit whether the call is a waste of my time. At which point I either become very friendly (because it's a call I'm expecting) or I simply respond with "Sorry, not interested, goodbye." and immediately put down the phone.

I just want the disruption to be as minimal as possible and to not let myself even get an emotional reaction from it, so I don't want to get annoyed at them, never mind wasting time telling them off, besides, I suspect that my ruthlessly efficient getting rid of them without them even having a chance to try their pitch is received as a super cold shoulder, akin to being told to f-off.

In practice this often doesn't work.

Article said the imposter in this case claimed her phone had been confiscated.

Fraudsters tend to also plan things such that the impersonated person can't be reached by phone at that time, either by choosing a time when they somehow know they're unavailable (e.g. impersonated person posted on social media they're boarding a plane) or in one case (12 years ago though) my SIL's parent's landline was bombarded with spam calls until they decided to leave the phone off the hook at which point the scammers phoned bank who couldn't reach the parents on their main line, of course this was the bank's problem (and there was probably an inside person facilitating) so they got their money back, but still a major inconvenience for the victim.

Probably the only sure advice is to be exceptionally wary of phone calls with supposed extreme time pressures to send the money now.

Well, if this and other problems are ever solved towards self-replicating probes, we must just make sure not to over-prioritize replication like the Slylandro: https://wiki.starcontrol.com/index.php/Probe

Websites like Reddit love to say “it’s better in the app”, except it should have this added to that sentence: “for us, not so much for you”.

I've been doing regular significant re-writes to my local Git commit history with relative ease for over a decade even without this new Git command.

I'm convinced that a big part of people often finding Git and rebase difficult is a user interface issue, having to know all the correct command line options and having to make your own mental model of what's happening and what you want to do, all makes it difficult to get a firm grasp on things.

I can't comment on what equivalent alternatives (especially on macOS/Linux as I'm a Windows user), but in terms of a UI for Git which exposes enormous power in an easy-to-use way I've found TortoiseGit to be spectacular and I especially like its rebase dialog:

https://tortoisegit.org/docs/tortoisegit/tgit-dug-rebase.htm...

Which you kick off from a context menu option from the commit line on the commit log you want to rebase onto with a simply named "Rebase <current reference> onto this" option:

https://tortoisegit.org/docs/tortoisegit/tgit-dug-showlog.ht...

It's super easy to re-order, split, combine, edit commits from here and it's obvious that will happen. If for whatever reason you decide you want to back out midway, you just abort and you're back to where you were.

I will concede there are aspects of a TortoiseGit I find a bit annoying, particularly that I feel I have to click around too much, instead of a shell extension I would prefer an app you launch with tabs or something, but I think this is a fundamental design principle of TortoiseGit, which followed the same principle as TortoiseSVN.

There is Git Extensions for Windows which seems nice at a glance, I tried it briefly, but I think I didn't stick with it either due to being unable to find an option I regularly used or I was just so used to TortoiseGit already.

They also have C# expertise, but yes, Java is probably the language they have the most expertise in.

I can’t recall for sure, maybe.

This is where getting it via Apple’s App Store is nice for consumers.

I (a non-American) had a NYT subscription through the iOS app some years back and cancelling it (like any other subscription through the App Store) was as as simple as:

- Open Settings

- Tap my account

- Tap Subscriptions

- Tap the New York Times option (or whatever it’s called)

- Tap Cancel

While the gate keeper aspect of Apple may not be good in many ways, at least we get this kind of benefit from it.

Memory in particular is something that I've reflected on more than once as having the most impressive gains in computing since I started paying attention to it (networking/USB too, but that doesn't make your computer "faster" in the same way).

I remember being able to borrow a computer from somewhere when Diablo II had just come out in 2000 which had a 450Mhz Pentium III and 64 MB of RAM. 64MB of RAM was probably mid-tier at the time, i.e. very much not a given. As I recall Diablo II recommended 64MB for single player and 128MB for multiplayer (or above 4 players or something).

The computer I'm writing this on has 64 GB of RAM, 1024 times as much. By comparison I have a 20-core Intel CPU with up-to 3GHz speed or somewhere around there, even pretending each core could run at that max speed simultaneously (which they can't), that's only 133-times as much CPU power.

Maybe the NVMe read times are as/more significant than memory size increase, but the metrics on them isn't quite as front and center on PC specs as memory and CPU.

Hard drive capacity similarly impressive as RAM in terms of size (was apparently 10-30GB in 2000), but I don't have a 10TB hard disk as I don't need one that big (1TB is plenty for me), so again it's not as impactful to me as memory.

My assumption when reading that the CEO should care, was that they give those underneath them the time and resources needed to achieve quality because they value it, not that they are necessarily involved in the details.

No fault of the author, but I personally would have been more interested in how much of a difference this makes rather than the history of it. I have no issue with the practice in principle.

Over here in South Africa CIT (cash-in-transit) incidents were (possibly still are) a major issue. When I still paid attention to it in the 00's there were periods where multiple incidents a week would occur with an MO of hijacked luxury cars (e.g. BMW's) being used to ram CIT trucks while they were travelling on highways.

This ultimately led to measures such as:

- Far more armour on CIT vehicles.

- The cash always being in dye stain protected containers during transit, which led to another temporary problem at casino's where automated chip vendor machines were used to launder this literally dirty money.

- Higher fees on cash deposits by banks/CIT companies, which incentivized merchants to discourage use of cash.

These days I require cash so rarely that I pretty much never carry any on me and for a while (until they had all modernized) would leave negative Google business reviews for shopping centres that didn't accept bank cards on their parking machines.

We have a premium grocery chain which has 80% of their tills being cashless and it's so much better for efficiency of payment, especially with things like Apple Pay where you don't even have to enter a PIN. It's invariably always painful when I occasionally need to use one of the non-premium grocery chains where most clientele still use cash. Just the cash part alone of their transaction typically takes more time than my having my few items rung up and paid for by tapping my iPhone, from the moment I get to the till itself I can be walking away in less than 60 seconds.

And then I can't help but notice at shopping centres the often queues of less privileged population waiting sometimes more than 10 minutes at ATMs to be able to draw cash.

When you consider how much slower cash is to be drawn from ATMs and then processed at till points then how much more it costs to safely get it to banks, it's a significant drain on our economy. You may be asking yourself now why it is that if cards are so much better than cash here it is still so widely used? Well, that's because of bank fees.

Someone like me with a credit card essentially pays nothing extra per transaction, but most of our population has debit cards only and each use of it at an ATM or till point has a minimum fee of something like R2 per R100 (~5USD) "drawn". So, of course for the portion of the population where every cent counts, they will draw exact increments of R100 from an ATM and pay for everything using cash.

In other words, the bank's business model of charging a minimum non-percentage-based fee for every transaction from which they ultimately make a complete fortune, is essentially done by taxing the entire economy with all the inefficiencies of cash.

I realize that (culturally) a significant portion of the US population feels that continued use of cash is essential to prevent a totalitarian government, but in the face of all these inefficiencies of cash I have to wonder how tenable this (arguably very important) philosophy will remain. And yes, I'm aware of the "Those who would give up essential Liberty, to purchase a little temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety." quote which I don't entirely disagree with, but it's hard to practice too.

As I got a downvote I can only assume my tone came across as “how could you not know this?”, but my feeling when I wrote this was that it’s a bit of a funny and interesting anecdote the parent wrote and I’ve been similarly frustrated with how I easily make mistakes with seemingly simple tasks such as putting up a shelf, to which I have to laugh at myself about when thinking about it many years later.

I definitely prefer that with software it can be “perfect” and easily changed later if you find it’s not.

My father, (who by profession was a CA with MBA, but is exceptionally handy) has regularly reminded me that walls/floors and ceilings are pretty much never straight and level, and over here they're brick and mortar, not wood.

This must be a well-known fact to all trades people who work on cupboards, tiling, door mounting, etc. But when you understand this, then you realize that everything is built to be forgiving of this reality.

E.g. prefabricated bedroom cupboards will always be fitted with fillers on each side and a kickboard for the bottom. This allows you to use feet/wedges underneath the cupboard to make it stand-up perfectly straight (which is not necessarily parallel with the floor and/or walls), but because of the fillers/kickboard being wide/tall enough and cut to fit the irregular/skew shape, you don't tend to notice.

Beading around wooden door frames is for the same reason, it hides the little gap that is invariably at points around it, either due to the hole in the wall being skew and/or slightly arched.

Depends on the kid and their age.

Me to my 3.5-year-old boy after evening bath (winter here right now): Your feet are going to get cold, don't you want to put on your slippers to keep them warm?

Him: No!

And if I put them on he'll take them off as soon as I'm not stopping him from doing so.

For putting on warm enough jacket for school I try similar reasoning which has yet to work with any kind of consistency, still mostly lands up having a bit of a tantrum all the way until I hand him over to his teacher.

His two-year older sister was a lot less difficult at his age.

Blue rather than yellow colored squiggles, but ReSharper (and I expect JetBrains IDEs in general) kind of does this.

It can point out things like unreachable code, redundant if predicates, suspicious casts and countless other things through realtime semantic analysis of code.

Of course there are infinitely more kinds of logic errors that simple static analysis like this can’t pick up, but an LLM “analysis” might.

It’s a pity that US regulators can’t manage to mandate that the dinosaurs get with the times as fraud seems to me to be an enormous burden to US consumers.

Even if fraud victims get their money back, firstly it must be an admin headache and then merchants have to cover fraud losses/insurance costs and thus mark up all their prices to make sure they do, so everyone is subsidising the fraudsters.

I presume it’s lobbying that would/does thwart any attempts at any such regulation.

As someone outside of the US I would like to be able to largely ignore this problem as just affecting people over there, but unfortunately it spills into the rest of the world.

When I last had fraud on my card it was through an online US merchant, because, like most US online merchants, they don’t use 3D secure. If they did then blocking the transaction for me would have been as simple as pressing the “it’s fraud” option when my phone would have received a “do you want to allow this transaction of $X for Y in the US?” that my bank’s 3D secure system normally sends to me.

Hopefully Apple and Google Pay will eventually help things over there.

Banks suck it up, but fraud is likely a lot less prevalent because 3D Secure is mandatory for online transactions and chip and PIN were ubiquitous way before the US seemed to have started using it.