mulr00ney

Hell yeah. I picked these up again a few years ago after enjoying them as a teenager. Reading in my thirties, the early ones are definitely rockier than I remember and I did cringe a bit but it's gone on so long that Butcher has clearly become a better writer over time.

Some people think the later books have lost the juice but I think as you approach 20 books the vibe is gonna shift a lot, it's definitely a lot more high-powered fantasy than the first ones which isn't everyone's taste.

Working through Craig Schaeffer's urban fantasy series, started with the Daniel Faust series and now at the point where it alternates with the Harmony Black releases. It's been cool so far; Faust is a con-man/actual magician and most of the books have a heist quality, whereas Black is an FBI witch, whose books so far have tended to be a bit more action-packed. It's interesting in terms of how one protagonist will do something and it affects characters in the other series -- I don't think you need to read both, but it's definitely adding a lot of extra texture.

I've also picked up his Revanche series which is apparently in the same greater universe though perhaps not literally the same world, involving a fantasy version of papal intrigue, I'm only two chapters into the first book. Apparently all the series do cross over at some point, so we'll see how well he sticks the landing.

"I have actually heard otherwise intelligent people say things just like that" I think that is the indicator.

If vibey readmes are for LLMs like the other comments suggest, they should be banished to a folder where it's clear they're just for a robot so I don't have to look at them.

The README.md can actually be a reserved space for human beings to read with whatever the author thinks is most important to communicate to the human operator.

How so?

Seems to be hijacked the video of some game they generated. :(

> You go to a university because you are deeply interested in understanding the subject that you study. Doing the homework and the tests are just the "goalposts" to check for yourself whether you made progress on this.

I think this was true a long time ago. Perhaps with LLMs this can become true again in the future. But definitely that was not why I went the first time, nor most of my classmates. (Second time I did post-secondary, sure, 100% -- but I was almost 30, not an average student)

Yeah, it's 100% the better term. We've got rules against using engineer here in Canada though several companies I've worked for have called me an engineer. Apparently Professional Engineers Ontario sometimes goes after people for calling themselves engineers but I've never heard of it actually happening, and I don't know that they have any real teeth given that the places I worked that called me an engineer were Canadian-owned. (In fact, the only place where they checked if I could use the title was the one multi-national. Go figure.)

Engineers versus "engineers".

I have fond memories of a boss who was an actual, licensed engineer while the rest of us were very much normal software devs. Boss was pretty chill except when someone someone suggested we should be called "engineers" rather than "developers", at which point they said "if you guys were building bridges, people would be dead." (I don't think all software needs to be built to rigorous engineering standards but man... I think about that line a lot.)

>is bad for the environment, is bad for society

Can't it be those too?

Downvoted because I was flippant about the American comment (because it was _insane_)

>It is not up to you to deprive anyone their right to use them.

Why is it a right?

>Are you going to go after car cameras next?

No. A car cannot follow me into a building very easily. It cannot turn as quickly as a human head.

>Any American who has any opposition to public recording is violating the First Amendment and doesn't even deserve to be an American.

lmao

I think the `e` looks better in the 'real pixels' example they gave; I find my tends to 'fill in' the space of the top part of the letter, and I suspect in the context of a longer sentence it'd be pretty easy to parse.

(but yeah, it's not quite right, and is especially jarring in the nice, clean, blown up pixels in the top example)

> And when the EU/Australia/China.. tries to regulate punish those corps, suddenly everyone comes out on HN to explain protectionism, overreach, some -ism, and "actually we need to give them the benefit of the doubt" etc... why not support that momentum?

I really, really want to believe it's bot warfare. But there is this running theme of HN posters who think because something is _legal_, or because you can point at it historically and go "acktually it's always been like this", it's therefore _moral_ and we should not ever push back on the excesses of these awful fucking companies.

> if you edit those [LLM tropes] out, or ignore them, you can’t really argue that the writing produced by these models is objectively ‘bad’ any more.

> or ignore them

If you ignore the bad thing then the bad thing is good. What the fuck are you talking about?

> Unfortunately many believe they can, and it is impossible to disprove. So now real people need to write avoiding certain styles, because a lot of other people have decided those are "LLM clues." Bullets, EM Dash, certain common English phases or words (e.g. Delve, Vibrant, Additionally, etc)[0].

I think people will be able to detect the lowest-user-effort version of LLM text pretty reliably after a while (ie what you describe; many people have a good sense of LLM clues). But there's probably a *ton* of LLM text out there where some of the instructions given were "throw a few errors in", "don't use bullet points or em dashes", "don't do the `it's not this, it's that` thing" going undetected.

And then those changes will get built into ChatGPT's main instructions, and in a few months people will start to pick up on other indicators, and then slightly smarter/more motivated users will give new instructions to hide their LLM usage... (or everyone stops caring, which is an outcome I find hard to wrap my head around)

>I don’t want more “leverage to build and ship”, I want to live in a world where people aren’t so disconnected from reality and so lonely they have romantic relationships with a chat window; where they don’t turn off their brains and accept any wrong information because it comes from a machine; where propaganda, mass manipulation, and surveillance aren’t at the ready hands of any two-bit despot; where people aren’t so myopic that they only look at their own belly button and use case for a tool that they are incapable of recognising all the societal harms around them.

Preach. Every time I read people doing this weird LARP on this website of "you have so much more leverage, great time to be a founder" I want to put my head through the drywall.

>The time saved matters, but the real unlock was the mental overhead removed. Every PR used to be a small context switch: stop thinking about the code, start thinking about how to describe the code. Now I type /git-pr and move on to the next thing.

This one's interesting to me. For a lot of my career, the act of writing the PR is the last sanity check that surfaces any weirdness or my own misgivings about my choices. Sometimes there would be code that felt natural when I was writing it and getting the feature working, and maybe that code survived my own personal round of code review... but having to write about it in plain english for the benefit of someone doing review with less context was a useful spot to do some self-reflection.

Go back to Linkedin.

>Like...jesus, I expected more/better from folks who digest mathematical proofs and Arxiv papers for funsies, yet so many people here just cannot think critically about complex issues that involve people other than themselves.

People who LARP about digesting mathematical proofs and Arxiv papers for funsies.

>No one reads books for entertainment anymore, because paper is an inferior entertainment platform

There are more forms of entertainment and people have diversified how they spend their leisure time. I don't think that it necessarily follows that it's an inferior platform unless your only metric is "more people is more good".

>Because everyone alive today has the same perspective, and none of us have experienced a wide breadth of anything

Completely bonkers statement.

>I don’t know if she’s ever talked publicly about religion or democracy or climate change or immigration, but I could tell you exactly what she thinks about these things anyway. So why would you bother reading what she thinks about Rome? The answers are just as predictable

I mean, I could take a stab at what a dork named Roman Helmet Guy is going to think too.

> Esquire writing is so weird. It’s genuinely like a relic from another age.

I agree: but to me that's at least something kind of interesting and evocative, even if it's a trainwreck. (In fact, it might even be better when it's a trainwreck). A nice break from LLM's this-not-that. This one's not so bad IMO.

Had CI fail a few times this morning pulling stuff from repos. Seems to have resolved.

EDIT: Nevermind, it's still having issues

EDIT 2: Now showing as "We are investigating a rise in request failures on several services" on https://www.githubstatus.com/

> The question is

I don't mean to be a dick, but no, the question was what is a reasonable cause to bash someone if it's not disliking what they do. I don't know if these weird Socratic replies are meant to be thoughtful but they read as dismissive and condescending.

But hey, I can also play stupid games!

> The question is, why do you feel the need to bash them?

Why do you feel the need to defend them? (I answer this question less flippantly below.)

> Do you feel the need to say ugly things to your grocery store because they don’t actively have the goods you want?

Is not stocking garbanzo beans censorship? Why do you think this is equivalent?

> Do you feel the need to bash the coders of YouTube because they have ads or censor content?

Depends what Youtube is advertising. Depends what they're censoring.

> Are they your enemy because they hire a certain type of person?

Who'd they hire?

...

There is a difference between my grocery store stocking or not stocking something and having problems with a multi-national trillion dollar company that has wedged itself itself into most people's daily lives and has a history of censoring content to curry favour with authoritarians.

I sympathize with the folks who are working there trying to change things for the better, and I sympathize with the people who are legitimately stuck for whatever reason (don't know a lot about visas to the US, but those are probably a good reason). I also think they're tough enough to take it when they dunked on, and have the reading comprehension to realize that when people are critical of Facebook employees, there's context where it absolutely makes sense. Being a Facebook employee is not an identity, it's just a job. Facebook has pivoted to censoring queer content at a time when queer people are being marginalized after years of gains. Most of my ire is directed at the executives and management, but yeah, if you work at Facebook knowing what they do, you're not getting a pass.

What would be a resaonable cause to bash them, in your view, if not disliking what they do?

I don't think we should hate them or show them hatred. I don't think that if you're working at a company that's suppressing someone's way of life you're somehow above criticism or contempt.

Thanks for the insight - learned something here. Didn't know about the hacker, that's pretty upsetting.

> In fact, not only protestors but people who donated to the protest got their bank accounts seized.

As far as I can tell accounts were frozen, not seized. Do you have a reference for donor accounts being seized?

ref: https://www.cbc.ca/news/politics/emergency-bank-measures-fin...

Bizarre takeaway. AIM and MSN had the option to block people 20 years ago and I'm pretty sure IRC had it even before that. It's not a new concept.