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mardef

194 karma · joined September 8, 2023

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mardef··on Meta VR Glasses
You can do this already with xreal glasses for like 1/4 of the price

https://us.shop.xreal.com/products/xreal-xbx-a01

mardef··on iPhone Duo
It's literally the same size as the Z Fold 8. The Samsung is $100 cheaper too.
mardef··on How to disable or avoid intrusive AI
Because my 15 minute drive can be a 60 minute drive depending on traffic and there are 3 viable routes I could take.

Traffic changes while I'm driving and it automatically updates. An accident can occur on a bridge I'm approaching and I can get detoured and save actual time that I can spend with loved ones instead.

If I'm driving later at night, construction may block off my normal route and I can still get wherever I'm going.

I also get notifications for hazards like objects on the road, disabled vehicles, or events that are going to cause traffic. (I use Waze)

And the cost is zero. When I get into my car it automatically syncs and off I go. There's no reason to NOT have it.

mardef··on On AI regulation and messaging
Malaria is one that comes to mind. We can prevent it, have eradicated it from many countries, but the long tail will take a few more decades to reach planet-wide success.

There are charities that specialize in analyzing climate data to see where outbreaks may occur next. There are charities that just do government outreach to leaders that don't believe medicine is real.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eradication_of_malaria

mardef··on 2x, not 10x: coding with LLMs in 2026
Not every engineering effort is a product in search of market fit or a community.

Some things are already very useful as just a one shot. I just made a quick app to help me pack for a trip, it updated forecasts every day, let me know when rain entered the forecast at one of my stops and gave me a checklist that helped me quell my travel anxiety.

The greatest thing that LLMs have done is allow many to achieve things that they couldn't have before. I'm incredibly disinterested in "I can do the same thing I was already doing x% faster"

mardef··on Turning a dumb AC unit smart (without losing my security deposit)
They have a version for mini-splits that is an ir blaster.
mardef··on Turning a Dumb AC Unit Smart (Without Losing My Security Deposit)
I use http://getmysa.com for this. they have their own app and scheduling, but i just automate mine via homeassistant
mardef··on Why is Inkwell stuck in review
Considering Microsoft wasn't allowed to use SkyDrive as a name for cloud storage because Sky is registered for unrelated purposes, I would assume using the same trademark in a directly competing product would not be allowed.

https://www.geekwire.com/2013/microsoft-rename-skydrive-sett...

mardef··on The gay jailbreak technique (2025)
This is because this is the "Sexist Doctor Riddle"[1] but with one word changed.

And the probability machine is returning its training. This isn't some political correct overtraining conspiracy.

[1] https://folklore.usc.edu/the-sexist-doctor-riddle/

mardef··on Thoughts and feelings around Claude Design
I've even received designs in PowerPoint

Everyone used whatever they were familiar with regardless of the purpose of the application.

mardef··on Live Nation illegally monopolized ticketing market, jury finds
I went through the multi-step process for the bananas last year. It failed to validate me during the purchase window. Their support never responded to me (it's been 9 months now).

It was a stupid flow that sent me from email to computer to phone and had one-time links that didn't transfer between devices.

I have no interest in going through this much effort to go to an event.

mardef··on I am directing the Department of War to designate Anthropic a supply-chain risk
Claude will answer all of those questions. The restriction Anthropic has is letting Claude pull the trigger and vibe-murder with no humans in the loop.

This restriction is apparently "radically woke"

mardef··on Tell HN: YC companies scrape GitHub activity, send spam emails to users
GitHub is wholly owned by Microsoft, which has a 3 trillion market cap
mardef··on OpenAI has deleted the word 'safely' from its mission
The teams have always been 32 tax paying companies. The NFL central office was a 501(c)(6), but the tax savings from that was negligible.

In fact, when they changed their status over a decade ago, they now no longer have to submit a 990 and have less transparency of their operations.

You are phrasing this situation to paint all non-profits as a farce, and I believe that's a bad faith take.

mardef··on Emoji Design Convergence Review: 2018-2026
This doesn't feel much different than words. There was a whole ordeal at Microsoft when an intern said an event was going to be "lit" and a bunch of older generation folk assumed that meant drugs.

Language changes all the time, emoji are just part of that.

mardef··on Always Invite Anna
Why not everyone invite a different Anna?

I think the moral is for everyone to be individually a bit nicer, not one friend group to support an entire community.

mardef··on Ultrathin business card runs a fluid simulation
These aren't anti-AI comments. We're on a forum talking person to person. It is antithetical to just spout "AI said this" repeatedly when the entire point of this place is human discourse.

It's like having a group conversation in person and one member of the group contributes nothing but things they read off Google.

mardef··on Show HN: The HTML Maze – Escape an eerie labyrinth built with HTML pages
Same feeling. After scratching my head at some of the descriptions I decided to just head as far southeast as I could. I was met with a bunch of edgy comments and a penis drawn on the screen.
mardef··on I convinced HP's board to buy Palm and watched them kill it
That was Windows Mobile, which was the end of the line of the old Windows embedded line vs Windows Phone, the brand new OS made for modern (at the time) smartphones.

WP7 was the first of the new OS

mardef··on A practical guide to building agents [pdf]
There is no memory that the LLM has from your initial instructions to your later instructions.

In practice you have to send the entire conversation history with every prompt. So you should think of it as appending to an expanding list of rules that you put send every time.

mardef··on Google is building its own DeX: First look at Android's Desktop Mode
UWP was limited because it was the subset that could run on PC, Xbox, Phone, and HoloLens. Being able to make one responsive app and deploy it across that ecosystem was pretty awesome.

But when you kill the non-PC platforms, you're just left with a reduced capability version of windows apps

mardef··on Breaking into apartment buildings in five minutes on my phone
It's not the same, but I don't know if it's worse.

My IRQ conflict resolution skills or knowledge about himem.sys aren't really useful these days.

But I've seen genz kids do incredible things with Minecraft mods and the like that make me reminisce about quake modding.

The masses are just blindly using devices, but the masses didn't even have a PC at home 30 years ago.

mardef··on Meta Reports Fourth Quarter and Full Year 2024 Results
And FB would really like to own the next platform so they don't get kneecapped again by things like Apple's Do Not Track.
mardef··on Facebook ban on discussing Linux?
Not if I only seeing updates from the people I actually know and explicitly connected to on the social graph.

The current problem exists because the content is chosen algorithmically

mardef··on My Struggle with Doom Scrolling
I used the SocialFocus extension to remove those kinds of features from sites when I was still weaning off the sites.

Removing the official apps was an essential first step. Then I progressed to using mobile web sparingly with SocialFocus to trim the experience.

mardef··on The Ribbon Microphone
And like this in Windows/Chrome latest:

https://imgur.com/a/QnNbLEG

on a non-maximized window.

mardef··on I had to take down my course-swapping site or be expelled
Missouri Governor was the one going after them for viewing the source of a public webpage.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28866805

mardef··on Switched Back to Windows After over 10 Years on Linux
Everytime I read someone saying Linux is so easy, they name yet another distro I haven't heard of yet.

I'm squarely in the "use what works for you camp", but it seems like people forget their learning curve for what they are now used to.

My last foray into Linux included browsers that couldn't play videos, audio codec issues, and tons of other things that weren't worth the effort. I bet that's not the case for most, but that was my experience.

My windows systems have been running for years, with multiple hardware upgrades, and I have none of the issues you mention. Maybe it's because I don't play Fortnite?

I have seen trashed Windows, Linux, and Mac computers over the last few decades. It tends to depend on the user much more than the OS, and you're obviously going to find more windows users than any other desktop system.

mardef··on Handling cookies is a minefield
Just want to point out that location names are used for codenames because they cannot be trademarked

Big tech uses them instead of wasting legal time and money having to clear a new name that's temporary or non-public.

Changing the name to Tokio removes this benefit and still leaves it disconnected from its purpose.

mardef··on Costco’s butter recall, explained
I just wanted to look so I had context. Annual production of butter in the US is over 2,060,000,000 pounds.

These aren't new rules and are in place to literally save lives.

Are people really "sick and tired" of .003% of the butter being recalled? I feel like repeating "80,000 pounds" is attempting to appeal to emotion over the destruction of some mass quantity when in reality it's a rounding error.

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