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mfcl

258 karma · joined August 30, 2019

https://mfcl.ca
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mfcl··on Why some US restaurants are banning tips
I've traveled to places where I would not tip and I don't remember the experience being very different. I say what food I want and get a plate with such food.
mfcl··on Reviving a four year old reMarkable 2
Is part of the article missing? It ends abruptly.
mfcl··on Rare medieval bookmark exceeds expectations at auction
From the article:

> The pre-sale estimate £800-1200 ($1073-1610). It sold for £7,000 ($9390).

mfcl··on A Farmer Donated Land to Turn into a Park. The City Is Building a Data Center
No, it should be illegal, otherwise everything would get destroyed whenever someone is slightly destroyed. Illegality serves as a kind of filter so that when enough people risk jail or death for a cause, that's because they really had enough.

I haven't given that a lot of thought, and it feels weird to say, but maybe the opinion that an act should be done and should be illegal can be true at the same time.

When a citizen commits a crime, they messed up. When ten commit a crime, they messed up. When half the village destroys the chief's home, the chief messed up.

mfcl··on Technofascism
You're being downvoted but you're right. I won't defend Thiel in general but that particular point is a bit taken out of context.

There's a talk somewhere ont the internet where he explains that you don't want to build a do-it-all product, at least not right away. Don't compete with everyone for everything. Find a more niche market where you can have a monopoly, get comfortable, then you branch out, diversity, and tackle broader markets.

mfcl··on Testing Postgres race conditions with synchronization barriers
The point of the article is to explain barriers and demonstrate them.

The logic used for crediting amounts of money is not important.

mfcl··on CLI agents make self-hosting on a home server easier and fun
It's plug and play.
mfcl··on Pricing Changes for GitHub Actions
They still run the whole orchestration.

If you don't want to pay, you'd have to not use GitHub Actions at all, maybe by using their API to test new commits and PRs and mark them as failed or passed.

mfcl··on French supermarket's Christmas advert is worldwide hit (without AI) [video]
There was controversy because of a Mcdonald's AI ad recently so I think they say that as a little wink.
mfcl··on Disassembling terabytes of random data with Zig and Capstone to prove a point
Why the AI disclosure? Is it just for the author to make sure the readers know they are AI-skeptic and use the opportunity to link to another article, or would there be something wrong with the proof had AI been used to help write the code?

(By help I mean just help, not write an entire sloppy article.)

mfcl··on A WebGL game where you deliver messages on a tiny planet
Strange, I am also on Firefox for Android and the game works fine.
mfcl··on Leveraging the lightcone around the source of truth with Postgres
It says near the db, not necessarily in it.

The way I understand it, the closer the better for the reasons stated, but that's just a factor and there are others that might make you not want to stay too close for certain logic.

mfcl··on Why Yaak is not open source
Open source does not mean accepting everyone's work or even accepting contributions at all. From the article, it seemed like this was the major concern.

I found the part that said "yes open source provides transparency but we have a roadmap" a bit weird.

It's their product, so if they don't want to open source it then they shouldn't. No need to write a silly article with almost as many emojis as words.

mfcl··on Base 10 is not a good base
But in base 12 the number 12 would be written as 10. 0, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, a, b, 10, 11, etc.
mfcl··on It will never be a good time to buy a house
How so? It's probably worth more now. You can sell, no?
mfcl··on Successful room temperature ambient-pressure magnetic levitation of LK-99
Artificial general intelligence, and it does not exist yet.
mfcl··on Learning needs to be effortful to be effective
I feel the same. I think it's mostly "impatience" or the fear of losing time. We get older and busier and the "price" we pay to spend hours on a book gets more and more expensive.

Learning is an investment, and as my salary increases and life gets more comfortable, my brain doesn't feel the urge to learn and prefers leisure.

I'm looking for ways to "hack" my brain and get back into the habit of learning in my free time and wanting to figure things out. When I have kids I hope they will be curious and I'll learn with them.

mfcl··on Learning needs to be effortful to be effective
> I learned more things from entertainment than any textbook or classroom ever taught me.

This statement is abstract enough that it can be both true and false depending on what one means when saying that. Can you be more specific? Have you watched movies and listening to music that gave you the skills to have the job or career you have? Did YouTube videos give you the knowledge to work in a scientific lab or start your own company?

Do you have any example?

There's a lot of educational content out there that's probably better to consume than dumb silly content, but skills and deep knowledge can only be acquired with practice, distraction-free studying, and similar activities.

mfcl··on Reddit appears to be restoring edited/deleted comments
So, you'd delete your old comments because you would rather no one in the world get any kind of value from them since you are not getting any anymore?
mfcl··on Brazil develops tropical wheat and predicts self-sufficiency in 5 years
I think they meant sources about Brazil's agriculture getting decimated in 25 years.
mfcl··on No dates, no sex, no weddings, no kids
Yeah, I'm not convinced this is making a difference.

No number or any kind of clue about the size of the movement was given.

mfcl··on Exploiting aCropalypse: Recovering truncated PNGs
Screenshot, crop... then screenshot again! :D
mfcl··on AI is making it easier to create more noise, when all I want is good search
(Why are you being downvoted?)

I think the important part is to have a minimum of filtering. Humans consume knowledge brought by others humans, but most of the time we cherry pick the true and useful knowledge and reject what turns out to be false (ideally).

I think what AI brings to the table is automation and speed, but the quality is not better. So if AI starts consuming its own content, will that decrease the quality of knowledge* in general?

(*Here I mean the first knowledge you quickly get from a search or asking some AI, not what you could get after hours/days of research.)

mfcl··on Ask HN: How do you manage your digital footprint in 2023?
Is the CIA after you?
mfcl··on Gail.com FAQ
You didn't get money for posting that comment and yet...
mfcl··on Epochalypse
I don't think the author of the comment is conflating those two terms, just comparing them. Booting a VM can be done to host a website and using GitHub Pafes can be done to do the same. Therefore they are two solutions to the same problem and can be compared.
mfcl··on A simple guide on words to avoid in government
Thanks, useful information.

A bit funny that this page does show a large popup so that you can accept their use of cookies.

mfcl··on Apollo Layoffs
It's just a way of saying that they are all about GraphQL. They are there for all you GraphQL needs and everything they do is related to GraphQL.
mfcl··on Google combines Maps and Waze teams in restructuring move
Can't you do that in Google Maps?
mfcl··on No one wants to have kids anymore
> Is that what you're panicking about? This means that for the next 50 years, we'll continue growing. Lack of offspring of current generations is clearly not the problem here.

It think it can be and it might already be. The problem is the distribution of people in age groups. If you have a lot of old people and few young people, that creates pressure on the economy.

Sustainable would not just be about the number of people, but also the number of people in each age group.

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