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m0zzie

205 karma · joined January 21, 2014

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m0zzie··on GPT-6 Astra
I find this very amusing, given we humans are also highly susceptible to this.
m0zzie··on Lessons from 14 years at Google
That site happily flags writing older than the modern AI era. It's a worthless grift, which has unfortunately suckered many.
m0zzie··on Perfect Freehand – Draw perfect pressure-sensitive freehand lines
Use tldraw. Steve rolled the perfect freehand library into tldraw and the tldraw implementation has been improved since then IIRC. So you can get the same experience and easily grab an SVG.
m0zzie··on Has any YC founder ever gone to jail for startup-related crimes?
IIRC there have been a few but the only one I specifically remember is uBiome: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/UBiome

YC has yet to back a Theranos-scale fraud.. unless there is one that simply hasn't been discovered yet.

m0zzie··on Show HN: Defuddle, an HTML-to-Markdown alternative to Readability
Your follow up post and edits help with clarifying the tone, hopefully readers see that.
m0zzie··on Show HN: Defuddle, an HTML-to-Markdown alternative to Readability
Apologies if you already know this, but I noticed you’re getting flagged so thought I’d add some context: the author is the CEO of Obsidian and has a few successful projects, so bragging about your 500 stars and saying things like “when I was just starting out, I didn't tell people to feel free to help. I put the effort in” is probably rubbing people the wrong way.
m0zzie··on Apple Invites
> Flutter apps feel completely _wrong_ on any platform except Android [...] Flutter explicitly eschews standard web technologies in favour of either one big canvas or lots of little canvases.

I think you're confused about how Flutter works on Android. It's not native to Android, it uses canvas with custom drawn implementations of most components there too – same as it does for iOS/macOS/web.

m0zzie··on Translating 10M lines of Java to Kotlin
The value in the conversion of existing code in this particular case isn't 100% clear to me either, but I think calling Kotlin a weaker choice than Java at this time is naive, particularly when preceding that with "there are a mountain of tools" that you can bolt on to Java to give it features that are built in to Kotlin.

What makes Kotlin such a strong choice for many orgs today is its batteries-included multiplatform capability. We are able to write data models, validation logic, business logic, etc just once and compile to JVM, WASM, and native targets. For orgs with very large codebases and frontend applications (web + iOS + Android) this is an attractive capability because we can have a single codebase for a ton of core functionality, and have each frontend import a library which is native to its own platform.

Of course many technologies with this promise have come and gone over the years, but this is the first one with a strong backing that has allowed us to _natively_ interoperate with each target platform.

I believe these are all driving factors that have been pushing well known companies, that were previously Java shops, toward Kotlin. If you speak to a broad range of people in the industry you'll find many more orgs moving from Java to Kotlin than from Kotlin back to Java. We can simply get more work done with less code and ship to all our frontend platforms, and unless Java can do the same, I don't see the industry moving in that direction.

m0zzie··on Google Pixel 9 Pro
> the Zenfone 10 is also 5.8” and is adored for it

Adoration alone does not pay salaries. At the end of the day the manufacturers are businesses looking to generate as large a profit as possible (some even want to build the best tech possible while doing so), so as much as any of us may adore one feature or another, the only thing that really matters is sales volume and the resulting profits.

m0zzie··on Claude 3.5 Sonnet
To clarify, I think it's extremely powerful and useful too. It's just that I get more misses than hits when using it as a rubber duck and coding assistant.
m0zzie··on Claude 3.5 Sonnet
Can anyone comment on its coding ability?

Considering cancelling my subscription with OpenAI as I was previously using GPT-4 quite heavily as a multiplier for myself, guiding it and editing outputs as required, but GPT-4o feels significantly worse for this use case. It is certainly better in many other areas, but its coding ability is not great.

I tried to revert back to standard GPT-4 but it is now so slow to respond (higher load?) that it breaks my mental flow, so I'm exploring other options.

m0zzie··on Ask HN: How is Kotlin and Compose multiplatform over flutter?
You are correct, that part of my comment was more a feature Kotlin multiplatform which Compose is built on top of. When building with Compose it has been a really nice experience to just call out to Foundation APIs on iOS in the same way I can from Swift, which has been the most impressive part to me. In Compose for Desktop apps you use JNA for native access IIRC. Kotlin multiplatform itself can compile natively to macOS, Windows and Linux without JVM, but you'd be running in a separate process to your Compose app which is JVM based on desktop.

Apologies my original comment was unclear on that.

m0zzie··on Ask HN: How is Kotlin and Compose multiplatform over flutter?
Compose multiplatform is the future. I've used Flutter extensively but I created my first Compose Desktop app about 2 years ago and haven't looked back. Everything was alpha back then, and the tooling was only okay, but it is quite an impressive dev experience now, and there are two huge advantages over Flutter:

- it is truly native, in the sense I can directly talk to native APIs on each platform without going through bridging code and there's no special runtime

- Kotlin exists outside of Compose Multiplatform. I love Dart as a language, but the reality is it is irrelevant outside of Flutter. Due to Kotlin gaining some popularity across various platforms and domains, it has an advantage that people who already know the language will decide they want to try Compose Multiplatform, because it's low risk and low effort to try it out

m0zzie··on Git cheat sheet [pdf]
Wow, TIL `git diff --staged` exists and is an alias to `git diff --cached`, which I have used for many years. "staged" certainly feels more intuitive, but will I ever be able to undo this muscle memory?!
m0zzie··on DOS game “F-15 Strike Eagle II” reverse engineering/reconstruction war stories
> Delta Force Land Warrior

There's a name I've not heard in a long time. I loved that game so much, the engine and gameplay was ahead of its time (or felt that way). It was sad to see NovaLogic fall behind in the years that followed.

m0zzie··on Reverse engineering a software crack
> Is this how people communicate technically in the newer generations?

I suspect this question is in bad faith but I'll answer anyway: this live tweeted thread is more like someone's thought stream, it is not a technical report.

Many humans are capable of both technical writing, free of cursing, and also of dumping a swear-filled thought stream right into their favourite medium - especially when excitedly reverse engineering, or doing anything they're passionate about.

This has been happening for a long time and is not about "the newer generation". You could've found me writing in a similar way on IRC in the late 90s, also talking about reversing.

FWIW your comment feels valid enough up until your final sentence, you just didn't need to attack "the newer generations".

m0zzie··on LLaMA-Pro-8B
> then they pivoted into the whole ai thing like many other companies

I have nothing to do with the company, nor do I really use their platform, but I felt a need to point something out: your statement is a pretty egregious trivialisation of huggingface and their contributions to AI. They were releasing NLP papers in early 2018, and in the same year open-sourced one of the most impactful ML libraries in the industry's history. The original chatbot app was dropped very early on and their full focus became the research, tooling, and platform.

m0zzie··on Can a pill prevent deaths from venomous snakebites?
They antagonise the funnel-web until it begins striking and the venom is dripping from its fangs, and then they use a liquid dropper to suck that venom up. It is wild.

Here's a video of the place near where I live doing it: https://youtube.com/watch?v=tN-mHIXoXlQ

m0zzie··on Ask HN: What apps have you created for your own use?
Over the years I had used a number of reddit clients for Android, all of which had some features I loved and some which annoyed me, so last year I started building my own.

I released an alpha build early this year (https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=ai.morrissey.m...) but abandoned it because I stopped using reddit altogether, and didn't love the idea of potentially having to pay reddit for an app I was giving away for free.

Was certainly fun building it though, no regrets.

m0zzie··on Razor 1911
I have vivid memories of reopening game installers from CLASS, long after installing, just so I could keep listening to the music. This one by Maktone still pops into my head from time to time, almost 25 years on: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7NjxgaZtHqA
m0zzie··on OpenAI Outage
Perhaps their DevOps team were pasting code and scripts directly from ChatGPT :D
m0zzie··on Google I/O 2023
No problem! My team is a small subset of engineers in a 10yo+ startup, and the organisation chose to go all in on many Google services long before any of us joined the company. I have my issues with Google and some of their services but the GP stands out as an odd comment to me because it's at odds with my own experience of keeping up with I/O talks.
m0zzie··on Google I/O 2023
Did you mean to reply to a different comment? I'm not sure what relevance this has to my comment which you're replying to?
m0zzie··on Google I/O 2023
Heh, yours and other comments here disparaging I/O as "business" or "corporate" talk these days come across as quite ignorant - and I don't mean this in a nasty way, more in a literal way. It seems perhaps you're missing the fact there are many different styles of talks for many audiences.

At every I/O there is a "keynote" and a "developer keynote", and similarly there are business / product talks and developer-focused talks. In fact, they even create entirely separate playlists on YouTube for the dev/non-dev talks.

As a Staff Eng who leads and mentors engineers who live in a world where they have no choice but to use Google SDKs and services, I find many of the developer-focused talks invaluable for getting others in my team up to speed on what's new and what's coming soon. Most of these talks are given by engineers and involve concise code examples which quickly convey the gist of new functionality.

m0zzie··on Rural children now grow slightly taller than city children in wealthy countries
Huge disclaimer: I'm not a qualified physiotherapist and not qualified to give advice, I'm just a nerd who had awful posture and did and okay job of correcting it.

All I can tell you is what helped me:

- Improving my working ergonomics. Specifically, not being hunched over my laptop so often. People talk about great chairs, stand up desks etc, and despite having those things I didn't see much change. I found more of a change by avoiding using my laptop as a laptop unless I was away from my desk. If I'm at my desk, I'm always using an external monitor.

- For exercises I did face pulls, rows, and I made chin tucks a thing I just do sporadically throughout my working week. No gym required.

- Finally, I discovered I had very tight neck and chest muscles and doing stretching exercises for both was helpful.

On the neck and chest stretching I would just suggest taking that kind of thing very slowly, don't overdo it like I did. When I first started with those I ended up in pain because I was overstretching muscles that hadn't been stretched properly in many years (or ever).

m0zzie··on Rural children now grow slightly taller than city children in wealthy countries
I wonder how much of this can be attributed to poor posture related to device use. Posture correction has been shown to give people back ~1-2 inches in height.

Note: I mean real posture correction through exercise and training, not the currrent fad of "devices" that fix your posture for you.

m0zzie··on Happy 20th birthday Jira You suck so bad
Sheesh, is this really what we're voting to the top of HN?

Don't get me wrong, I can be as frustrated by Jira as the next person, but this is simply a rant fuelled by the writer's anger at internal processes as much as the software itself.

Additionally, the numbers on data usage and network requests do not align with what I see.

It's just a couple of fair points surrounded by populist "yucky Jira" fluff.

m0zzie··on Nukemap
> Well Russia has about 6000 nukes so they could definitely afford to hit every major metro area in the west potentially dozens of times.

Having 6000 nukes ≠ 6000 nukes with operational readiness. If nuclear war were to break out, it is extremely unlikely that they could successfully use more than 1000 of those.

Not that that should make anyone feel any better about the situation, because even 1 nuke is too many.

m0zzie··on The UX on this small child is terrible
Purely anecdotal obviously, but I've had somewhat similar issues in the past and ended up figuring out that they were related to reflux/LPR. If you haven't already looked into that possibility it might be worth reading up on it.

My issues have been resolved by controlling reflux and they rear their heads again when I allow the reflux to return for more than a very brief amount of time (ie. I stop paying attention to the food and drink I consume and my intake of <things that trigger my reflux> becomes too high for a sustained amount of time)

m0zzie··on UK researchers create graphene-based sieve that can remove salt from seawater
Is that really still true in the world we live in today though? Previously we were unable to instantly share information so freely and collaborate with people around the world with so little effort.

I'm not saying it shouldn't take time to develop these things, but surely the 30-40 year timeline is significantly reduced due to information sharing today?

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