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nanidin

2,058 karma · joined December 29, 2010

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nanidin··on Wearing an eye mask during sleep improves episodic learning and alertness
Hmm. I used an ostrich pillow to take lots of naps during college. It must be partly responsible for my good grades!
nanidin··on Wearing an eye mask during sleep improves episodic learning and alertness
Yep, this is the one I settled on after trying a few out!
nanidin··on Intel Core Ultra Meteor Lake CPU Breaks Cover with 128 GPU Cores
I live in a building renovated in 2010ish and all circuits are 20A minimum.
nanidin··on Let's make sure GitHub doesn't become the only option
I worked at a company circa 2010 with around 2000 engineers that used git + gerrit + Jenkins + JIRA.

Worked at another company circa 2015 with around 80k employees (not sure how many engineers) that used git + cgit + Jenkins + JIRA.

nanidin··on Is Gmail killing independent email?
I use some publicly available spam IP blocklists and my server started rejecting mail from gmail.com because they ended up on one of the lists for sending spam. I thought it was funny.

When this happens, gmail informs the sender that the mail wasn’t delivered and they try a few more times before telling the user that no more attempts will be made.

nanidin··on Even Apple employees hate Siri and are skeptical of its future, new report says
It worked for over a year before it became erratic. If it is problematic Apple should warn me in the UI. It worked again shortly after - making me think it is not deterministic.
nanidin··on Even Apple employees hate Siri and are skeptical of its future, new report says
Yesterday: “Hey Siri, watch a movie in the dark” “Ok setting scene watch a movie in the dark”

Today: “Hey Siri, watch a movie in the dark” “I can’t find a movie called In the Dark.”

I also had a very frustrating issue randomly start happening because one of my lights had the word “lamp” or “light” in it. Thankfully googling the symptoms found others with the same problem and a solution, but it was baffling as there hadn’t been any changes made by me in over a year prior.

nanidin··on Even Apple employees hate Siri and are skeptical of its future, new report says
Amazon mitigated bad speech transcription by providing a link to listen to the underlying audio.

Apple has never offered this and it has led to lots of head scratching at the grocery store as I work through my shopping list. It still beats trying to use the Alexa app while shopping, though.

nanidin··on Highway to Ruin: The crash of Southern Airways flight 242 (2022)
I agree, the headline has been editorialized in order to drive engagement.
nanidin··on Are pull requests bad because they originate from open-source development?
A PR is just a properly scoped nugget of review-ready changes. A formalized review process helps way more than it hurts in the long run.
nanidin··on Google Authenticator now supports Google Account synchronization
Yes, but for my threat model I avoid 2fa for accounts that don’t really need it so in practice I’m not adding accounts regularly.
nanidin··on Google Authenticator now supports Google Account synchronization
Well, hopefully you created a backup by storing a copy of the QR code somewhere :)
nanidin··on Google Authenticator now supports Google Account synchronization
I'm on iOS and I'm able to screenshot the QR code with version 3.4.0 of the app. Maybe the screenshot lockdown is limited to Android?

In any case, if you're trying to create a backup there are other avenues of capturing the QR code - offline digital camera is probably the most secure way of doing so.

nanidin··on Google Authenticator now supports Google Account synchronization
The QR code encodes the actual secret data for the TOTP, so backing up the QR code is sufficient.

Screenshot -> Print is one backup method.

Screenshot -> Encrypt -> Save to secure location is another method.

nanidin··on Google Authenticator now supports Google Account synchronization
The app has supported bulk QR code export and import for years. This makes it easy to transfer to a new phone, and relatively easy to make physical backups.
nanidin··on Bilingualism affords no general cognitive advantages: Study
I wonder how this relates to the resilience conferred against dementia / Alzheimer’s by bilingualism?
nanidin··on Listen to Steve Huffman tell the story of how Reddit got started
Step 2 for a Reddit clone/competitor would be much easier and more convincing given the current state of LLM’s.
nanidin··on My high-flying life as a corporate spy who lied his way to the top
If word gets out that this company doesn’t check backgrounds, then this company will be inundated with fraudsters.
nanidin··on How much can Duolingo teach us?
This applies to all articles from New Yorker in my experience.
nanidin··on Ask HN: Is prompt engineering just snake oil?
> Below is a list of some known non-speech sounds, but we are finding more every day. Please let us know if you find patterns that work particularly well on Discord! [laughter], [laughs], [sighs]....

This is likely a reflection of the data used to train the model - TTS models are trained on labeled audio, one form of which is subtitled audio streams. In subtitles / closed captioning, bracketed words are frequently used when there is something audible that is not speech.

Based on this insight, it should be possible to inspect the training data and extract a set of non-speech sounds the model is likely to generate well - but that doesn’t drive engagement of your users like asking them to experiment themselves does ;)

For example, closed captioning adds music notes (♪) when music plays or when people sing. According to the Bark docs, adding ♪ causes the model to output things as music.

nanidin··on There is no A.I.
The Chinese eBay seller brought to mind the concept of the Chinese Room[0] and how it is a reflection of current LLM’s. Perhaps also influenced by a recent read of Blindsight.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_room

nanidin··on There is no A.I.
It is not a good future, and at least in Amazon’s case jeff@amazon.com works as an escalation route.

My gmail account with the same username got banned in 2007ish in the middle of college, I definitely feel the pain of no recourse. I lost everything - calendars, todo lists, email and had no way to get the underlying data or do anything about it.

My hope is that at the end of the day a corporation is made of people (legally, this is why they have 1st amendment rights in the USA) and this will prevent the scenario you imagine because the money of those people will be at risk.

nanidin··on There is no A.I.
This is the infuriating part of dealing with Amazon customer service these days. Anything that doesn’t fit into the box of what the chatbot will do is met with “I understand your frustration, …” and it’s like, no, there is no understanding here!

Just like call center trees have escapes to real service by pressing 0 ad nauseum or swearing loudly, these AI service agents will have ways to get to real people and they’ll be documented in the usual places.

nanidin··on Ban on Tenure for New Faculty Hires Passes Texas Senate
This is good analysis, but this kind of analysis misses the point that money isn’t everything.

People pursuing the university research track may simply not be optimizing their years on earth to maximize their bank accounts.

nanidin··on Lyft to Cut at Least 1,200 Jobs in New Round of Layoffs to Reduce Costs
Uber did revolutionize transportation in a lot of cities. Cabs in my city were unreliable, untrustworthy, and expensive. Now I can reliably get a ride within a few minutes.
nanidin··on Show HN: A 15 min daily stretch routine for desk workers
That's not my experience when interacting with people communicating in a second language. They generally appreciate the opportunity to learn and improve their (in most cases) English. They also usually love to be taught idioms so that they don't stick out like a sore thumb!
nanidin··on Only one pair of distinct positive integers satisfy the equation m^n = n^m
Exactly, it felt like nerd sniping for clicks.
nanidin··on Only one pair of distinct positive integers satisfy the equation m^n = n^m
Why was "Distinct Positive" left out of the submission title? The submission smells like clickbait without it, yet it is part of the actual article title and the article appears to be submitted by the author.
nanidin··on How can we stop the CO2 that plants store from leaking back into the air?
Yeah, I worked out roughly how much land these trees would require to grow and it was less than 0.5 square miles. I was surprised.
nanidin··on How can we stop the CO2 that plants store from leaking back into the air?
If you use 40g per km as commented here, it comes out to about 1 tree. Something seems off.
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