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lbhdc

625 karma · joined May 25, 2020

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lbhdc··on America is getting an AI gold rush instead of a factory boom
I find your perspective to be very software centric, and I expect many people who work in heavy industry to have a very different perspective about this.

I was on the implementation end of a considerable amount of industrial automation and technological advancement about 10 years ago. When we were on site the result of making mistakes started at the death of a team member. There were a plethora of things that could kill you horribly, falls, hazardous environment, rotating equipment, etc.

Yet we all survived overhauling processes in hundreds of plants. Working in hazardous environments isn't untenable, or even particularly difficult to do safely. In fact we worked at a much faster pace (with fewer mistakes) than corporate world I work in now.

lbhdc··on Ask HN: How do you use AI in industrial environments?
If you have any form of compliance or code that your work needs to conform to you can spend a considerable amount of time reading through code books looking for relevant sections to what you are doing. You might have a dozen or more of these codes where each one is 500-1000 pages long.

Semantic search to bring up the exact relevant pages is a killer feature.

Having an AI that has all the site specific information in it would also be killer for contractors who are constantly in and out of plants. Everyone has site specific rules, and you can easily burn up a few peoples day buy bringing them onsite and answering their first round of questions. An AI could let a lot of that be self serve.

lbhdc··on Gem.coop
It is pretty common that "weird" tlds get blocked more or less whole sale in places you might not expect.

The reason is spam. Before these can get wide spread "normal" adoption they can be heavily used by spammers. Its hard to say if that is because they have desirable look-a-likes available, or if its because the first year is offered at a deep discount. So, systems will get flooded, and on inspection they will see that they don't have any legit traffic from those tlds and will whole sale block them.

.xyz is kind of infamous for being in this situation. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28554400

I have no idea if that applies to .coop though.

lbhdc··on Show HN: Was pissed about Google Docs, So I made an Text Editor myself
Your site has some rendering issues on firefox. Text on top of other text, and a big gray blob above the fold that I assume failed to load something.
lbhdc··on NL Judge: Meta must respect user's choice of recommendation system
https://about.fb.com/news/2024/11/facebook-and-instagram-to-...

Don't they already offer this? Did it get canceled?

lbhdc··on Leading computer science professor says 'everybody' is struggling to get jobs
I appreciate your point, and don't necessarily disagree. However, I think it is rough out there even for ivy graduates.

We have an intern from an Ivy (not MIT) that isn't getting an offer simply because my company doesn't want to hire in the US right now. They are great to work with, knowledgeable, but have no future here. They have been shopping around, and a lot of people on the team have been trying to find a place for them to go in their network, but no one is biting.

lbhdc··on Orchard Robotics, agtech using AI to solve farming's data problem, raises $22M
It sounds like they are strapping cameras to farm equipment and analyzing the data those cameras gather.

What if the farmers don't have a reason drive instrumented equipment in an area they want data? Are they now burning fuel and time to gather that?

Is the data gathered that much better than what the human driving the equipment can garner that it is worth it?

lbhdc··on Search traffic to the FT down 25-30%, Daily Mail down 89%
I think that is more or less what cloudflare is trying to do with their market, and what tollbit is doing.

One nice thing about this new business model is that it doesn't rely on display ads (not that they can't do both). Conceivably ad rev could drop so low it isn't worth compromising their UX. So theoretically we could get far more readable news websites.

The new friction will be convincing the gate keepers you are a human.

lbhdc··on Search traffic to the FT down 25-30%, Daily Mail down 89%
This is a problem I have heard over and over across different publishers.

Global news seems to be oversaturated. There are dozens of outlets repackaging snippets from reuters and elsewhere into articles. They come out around the same time, hit more or less the same beats, and for the reader are essentially fungible with other articles on the topic.

Before AI overviews they would use SEO to game their way into traffic. That allowed everyone to publish the same content with lots of friction and the biggest brands would still do well. It seems AI overviews has shown these companies users "revealed preference", and it isn't for their high friction websites.

lbhdc··on Ask HN: KDE and Fedora or Omarchy?
In the grand tradition of those who have come before us, you should distro hop to all of them.
lbhdc··on Startup Working to Bring Back Dodo Bird Raises $120M
I was wondering the same thing, what is the business here?

My guess is whatever is involved is related to the business they are actually in, and (if successful) this is a high profile way to demonstrate their expertise at solving problems in this space (and getting a lot more funding for future swings).

It seems they are focusing on birds, so maybe something like making more resilient chickens for farmers. Perhaps their pitch might be something like spending X% more on Colossals modified chickens yields cohorts that have Y% better survival rate reducing veterinary costs and increasing product to market while assuming the extra cost doesn't overshadow this benefit. Like GMO seeds but for livestock.

lbhdc··on Startup Working to Bring Back Dodo Bird Raises $120M
Today the Dodo, tomorrow a Hawaiian island filled with dinosaurs. Where does it end!?
lbhdc··on Ask HN: Would you use a CAPTCHA that blocks browser agents?
I don't personally have a need for such a thing, but having worked on 'bot blocking' solutions, I think it would be popular.

There is a lot of talk about "browser agents" vs "recursive crawlers", but that discussion misses what site owners want.

Products that use "browser agents" often dis-intermediate the sites they scrape even if they link back. While users may prefer those user experiences, content owners will pay to block that to retain control over their presentation and monetization friction.

Many news sites already have these sorts of captchas, proof of work, behavioral analysis roadblocks. Players like Cloudflare and Tollbit both offer bot blocking proxies as well. This tech is here and service owners want it.

lbhdc··on Ask HN: What do you think of the new Digg?
I think federated social media is very neat, and regularly use various platforms across the fediverse. But I get the sense that isn't really seen as a feature for most users, infact it seems many find it to be an extra friction in adopting a platform.

What audience do you think Digg is missing out on by not having federation?

lbhdc··on Deploying DeepSeek on 96 H100 GPUs
If you are willing to spread your workload out over a few regions getting that many GPUs on demand can be doable. You can use something like compute classes on gcp to fallback to different machine types if you do hit stockouts. That doesn't make you impervious from stock outs, but makes it a lot more resilient.

You can also use duty cycle metrics to scale down your gpu workloads to get rid of some of the slack.

lbhdc··on Perplexity's ad business generated only $20k in Q4
That isn't too surprising. Creating a new ad market is very difficult. Why should advertisers move their spend to a platform where its not clear users have the same intention, and where the user base isn't as diverse as the big markets (google and meta)? They need to be able to prove that spend on their platform performs better for advertisers than spend on other platforms.
lbhdc··on Omarchy Is Out
I don't get the sense that NixOS has much traction in desktop linux.
lbhdc··on Why are anime catgirls blocking my access to the Linux kernel?
That seems like it would make bot blocking saas (like cloudflare or tollbit) more attractive because it could amortize that effort/cost across many clients.
lbhdc··on Why are anime catgirls blocking my access to the Linux kernel?
That's really the only option available here, right? The goal is to keep sites low friction for end users while stopping bots. Requiring an account with some moderation would stop the majority of bots, but it would add a lot of friction for your human users.
lbhdc··on They're Killing the Humanities on Purpose
My BFA does not qualify me to be a teacher anywhere I have looked (south east, new england, ca). I do not meet the educational requirements or the practical classroom time to got a teaching certificate required to teach K-12.

I am sure there are programs that are a mix between a typical BFA program and a teaching degree, but that is not the norm.

lbhdc··on They're Killing the Humanities on Purpose
A BFA wont qualify you to work as a teacher at an accredited school in the US. Positions at those schools that allow you to "teach" without a teaching degree are typically part time and volunteer.
lbhdc··on They're Killing the Humanities on Purpose
I think some of the disconnect is that when people think of humanities they think of the masters, and not attending figure drawing classes while accruing 5-10 years worth of salary as debt.
lbhdc··on They're Killing the Humanities on Purpose
As someone with a degree in fine arts, good. A lot more of these programs need to be downsized or removed. Not because they aren't popular, they are (or were when I went) extremely popular. Rather they have poor outcomes for the students. After 4 years, I was left with the realization that I had wasted my time, and I was further away from a career than my peers.

I know people will push back and say that is not the point of the university. But it doesn't change the fact that our economy is not built on poetry and painting, but we educate large number of people to specialize as one. Those people are instead left in debt with no path forward in their chosen field.

lbhdc··on They're Killing the Humanities on Purpose
https://archive.is/YbXI4
lbhdc··on Ask HN: Are you running local LLMs? What are your key use cases?
I am using the smaller one, specifically the e2b-it flavor.

I get ~20-30 tok/sec. It's fast enough that its not frustrating, but if it were faster you could more easily skim as it generates.

I haven't done any serious testing. My process is typically learning about new models on HN or elsewhere, and trying to give them a real shake. I have some goto code generation prompts that I try on all of them. None succeed but they are getting close. I also do a lot of just feeling it out. The more I can use solutions unedited the better it feels.

lbhdc··on Ask HN: Are you running local LLMs? What are your key use cases?
I almost exclusively self host the models I use.

Currently I am using llama.cpp for an interactive repl chat. I was previously using Alpaca (a GTK GUI), but was annoyed with how slow it was and some random crashes. I am transitioning some of this to self hosted in the cloud for things that can't run on my laptop.

I am looking to get away from my current interface, and write my own. Mostly for experience of deeply integrating agents into a program. If anyone knows a good library for interacting with a local model that doesn't involve standing up a webserver I am interested :)

My daily driver is gemma3n. Its been a nice balance between speed and performance without spinning up my laptop fans.

I am super interested in local models, partially because there is no friction from managed services, but also because I think as small models become more viable we will see an explosion of apps incorporating them.

lbhdc··on Qron.ai
Just a though, but if you could bake in reasonably competitive analytics with this, it would probably make it an easier sell. Things like injecting peoples GAM token, or measuring dwell time on certain pages, collecting telemetry about how far people get into the questionnaire. Perhaps info about people who have visited multiple times before they sign up.

Collecting and forwarding the emails to an address / dataset could be beneficial as well.

lbhdc··on Qron.ai
This is pretty neat. I gave it a single sentence to describe a Saas that uses forbidden magic and astral talismans to boost client efficiency, and maximize their objectives.

It created a landing page and a questionnaire to funnel people into email collection.

The landing page looked the best, a gradient with some pretty funny/clever copy related to my prompt. If I was making this for real, I would want more. Some images, more copy about my products, maybe even some animations.

The questionnaire pages felt plain, and could use some styling. It also felt like there were too many, and would probably see an engagement drop off.

The app gives some basic styling options that it does automatically as well as ways to adjust the copy.

The app also provides a way to deploy this, but I think I would want the underlying JS so that I could tailor this to my needs, effectively using it to get over the "blank sheet" problem.

lbhdc··on Ditching GitHub (2024)
I would argue that fewer of those "worthwhile contributors" will find the software to begin with when you reduce discoverability.
lbhdc··on Ditching GitHub (2024)
I have had my ebbs and flows with github. I think one of the difficult things about moving away from it, is the loss of network effects for open source projects. If you have no public repos or don't care about contributions or discovery, this doesn't matter.

I know the author is accepting patches, but even learning that their forge exists, and that the user wants to contribute is stymied if the users search for projects starts at a github search.

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