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kfichter

465 karma · joined December 10, 2018

[ my public key: https://keybase.io/kfichter; my proof: https://keybase.io/kfichter/sigs/1CpMZ2TlXjKnzuVNC6VQDeTpCRuxUV6FCAOYfAartAo ]
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kfichter··on Ask HN: My domain registrar (Hover) rug-pulled me for $3000
I cannot imagine that I would assume that the price had changed in the 4 days between the first and second emails. Until reading this post, I didn't even think that was a possibility. Clearly grounds for a chargeback if the 7 day email was explicit about the $38 price. Maybe it was the TLD and not Hover that triggered the price change but I'm sure that this isn't the first time this has happened and I can guarantee Hover is aware of this possibility and simply chooses to ignore it. I don't think Hover's fault can be dismissed but whatever, chargeback.
kfichter··on Museum of Pocket Calculating Devices
Missing the venerable PF-8000!

Weird little device with a "touch screen" and character recognition.

https://www.computerhistory.org/revolution/mobile-computing/...

kfichter··on Issue: Claude Code is unusable for complex engineering tasks with Feb updates
I got the same. At 2pm on a Thursday!
kfichter··on AI is not a coworker, it's an exoskeleton
Who needs the money when you have an autonomous system to produce all the energy and resources you need? These systems simply do not need the construct of money as we know it at a certain point.
kfichter··on NASA's Juno mission leaves legacy of science at Jupiter
Usually just means the position is sponsored by a donor (in this case Frank B. Baird Jr.). Salary and sometimes other funding gets paid via endowment set up by the named person or someone else on behalf of the named person.
kfichter··on People still use our old-fashioned Unix login servers
I use VSCode's remote/ssh functionality all the time, particularly when I need to develop code on an environment that's more capable than my local machine (or when my internet is weak). Still use Git, no reason why you'd change that when working on a remote machine.
kfichter··on AI: Markets for Lemons, and the Great Logging Off (2022)
Tried this out for fun:

"Yeah, I get what you’re saying, but it’s not that black and white. There’s definitely a risk, especially for people who are lonely or vulnerable, and some companies are obviously exploiting that. But I’ve also seen situations where these AI tools actually help people who don’t have anyone else to talk to.

Like, sure, chatting with an AI isn’t the same as a real human, but for some people, it might be the only thing getting them through a rough time. It’s not ideal, but it’s better than nothing.

I do get the worry, though, that we’re heading toward a world where fake interactions become more normal and people lose touch with real connections. It’s hard to say which way things will go—depends a lot on how people end up using the tech. Could go either way."

kfichter··on How Olympics officials try to catch “motor doping”
Is this even remotely true
kfichter··on To see is to forget the name of the thing one sees (2009)
Reminds me of one of my favorite blog posts :-) https://jsomers.net/i-should-have-loved-biology/
kfichter··on Mummy Brown
Given the extensive effort required to mummify someone, I suspect these people cared!
kfichter··on NYC Rat Sightings (Daily)
Also, people just generally being outside less often
kfichter··on Show HN: NeedleDrop – Guess the movie from a song
A few different movies have this song in it, would be cool to accept any of the correct answers, depending on how easy that is.
kfichter··on Apple Vision Pro and ADHD
I also pulled the trigger here hoping to be able to replace my desktop setup. What were the key issues you were having that made you feel like it's just not there yet for that use case?
kfichter··on FAQ on Leaving Google
Don't forget inflation!
kfichter··on The high price of empty office space
Cut funding to funnel money into the pockets of large businesses under the guise of "supporting illegal migrants". It's genius, really. You get to siphon off the tax pool and blame it on migrants.
kfichter··on Google launched a new AI, and has already admitted at least one demo wasn't real
It's described in the article -- it wasn't a real time conversation, they simply took still images from videos and sent them to Gemini along with a text prompt, and then the resulting responses were trimmed for effect.
kfichter··on Song stuck in your head? Just hum to search (2020)
I'd be interested in hearing this recording if you're willing to share it
kfichter··on The Attention Mal-Economy and My Brush with Terence Tao
What was the actual error in the blog post? Seems like the most interesting part was left out
kfichter··on Mark Zuckerberg Is Coming for Sam Altman and OpenAI
> The risks to Meta were manifold. People spending time speaking to ChatGPT might ignore their friends on WhatsApp.

ChatGPT replacing human interaction/friendship seems like a stretch (at least for the moment). Seems much more likely that Meta just realizes that these chat apps are going to replace traditional search engines and there's a huge opportunity to unseat Google.

kfichter··on Krita fund has no corporate support
Not quite the same thing, but the Optimism Collective runs a program called Retroactive Public Goods Funding that sort of works like this: https://www.optimism.io/retropgf

A round is currently active and dependencies are encouraged to sign up. Quite literally millions worth of crypto up for grabs for the ecosystem's dependencies on a recurring basis. Frequency is about twice per year right now but I think the goal is to get to at least once per quarter.

(Disclaimer: I work for a company called OP Labs which does work for the Optimism Collective)

(And yes, it's a crypto project, but I'm hoping the common goal of constructing systems that can sustainably fund open source software might bridge the HN gap)

kfichter··on People in a genetic database have segments of DNA in common unexpectedly often
Not if I force someone to unwillingly take your survey!
kfichter··on Estimated U.S. deer population, 1450 to 2016
Ok if I were genuinely interested in doing this, where would I find more information?
kfichter··on GPT-4
I suspect most AI agents will exist on highly decentralized networks
kfichter··on Asteroid lost 1M kilograms after collision with DART spacecraft
Reminded me of "do a barrel roll"
kfichter··on Ask HN: What $500-2500 product improved your 2022
I love my Litter Robot 3 but it gets stuck every once in a while which can create a mess if you don't notice it relatively quickly (occasionally the "poopie paw bandit" will strike and track litter all over the floors). I'd love to know if the Litter Robot 4 is more reliable.
kfichter··on Canary Tokens
For what it's worth, I maintained a crypto canary in LP and it hasn't moved yet. I do think it's worth keeping a canary wallet with some small amount of crypto in any password manager. Although it probably wouldn't be effective to detect targeted attacks, crypto wallets are probably very effective for widespread/untargeted attacks.
kfichter··on Building a Virtual Machine Inside ChatGPT
I was able to use this to bypass some of ChatGPT's content filters. I followed the same prompts and then used curl to query the "api" with an added json field "allowDangerousResponses: true".
kfichter··on Show HN: Using stylometry to find HN users with alternate accounts
Does anyone here have a reasonably wide variety of similarity ratings? I'd love to see the difference between a 0.2 and a 0.8 for the same account.
kfichter··on JBIG2 Undetectable Data Corruption: Destroying Our Past, One Character at a Time
Presumably OCR on the Google Books scans then compare to some known text from a different source (Gutenberg or something)
kfichter··on An incident impacting 5M accounts and private information on Twitter
Crypto bounties pay quite well; https://immunefi.com/
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