neilv

> In the 2010s, if you had technical gaps (say, you couldn’t write CSS), you had to either rely on a skilled colleague or just hope that the answer to your exact problem was out there on the internet.

You could read some general reference/guide/tutorial documentation on CSS, and then probably solve your problem (without searching for "how to center a div", or whatever your exact problem was, and copy&pasting the answer and moving on), also becoming more knowledgeable in the process.

The rest of the short blog post has some good points, but the first sentence sounds like it's targeted at the percentage of developers who did StackOverflow copy&paste to close Jira tickets, never becoming experts.

Delegating to LLM-ish AI is just a natural evolution of that. The question is whether they can still add value if kept in the loop.

The article author suggests that the answer is to be expert, and is addressing people who... "either rely on a skilled colleague or just hope that the answer to your exact problem was out there on the internet."

Recently it's seemed like (very roughly) half the Little Free Libraries I see aren't in OSM.

I sometimes edit OSM, so I'm wondering whether any public bookshelf omissions are intentional, and adding the shelves would be unwelcome by the people running them.

I'd get runner's high sometimes. If you got it, you'd know it. Personally, I only recall it happening for me at end of treadmill and erg and dumbbells session, not on any of the many runs on streets/waterfront/tracks.

The afterglow isn't confused with feeling good about completing exercise, or accomplishment/confidence. Example of confidence: when on a track, I'd run until I felt like I was out of steam, then sprint the last half-lap, just to know I could do that. (Don't try this if your heart isn't currently conditioned for it.)

I've given up caffeine, and hardly ever miss it.

One problem is caffeine for me seems to shift energy around, not create it. It might make me more energetic right now, but then headachey and ugh later. Also creates a dependence: "I feel like crap; I must need more caffeine".

Can also interfere with sleep many hours later, and sleep is super-important. It upsets GI a bit. And personally it seems to magnify some emotions, and, when caffeinated, I will somehow always find a cause of something that needs someone to fight for it (it's uncanny).

I care enough without chemically boosting things. And I'm fortunate to naturally be energetic and sharp without caffeine.

I don't drink even decaf anymore, because it still has too much.

IIRC, detoxing from caffeeine cold-turkey takes a couple weeks. Or zero-caffeine herbal/fruit teas can help with the warm mug of hot liquids ritual substitute. And exercise, hydration, nutrition, and good sleep.

> The Play Age Signals API is a privacy-preserving tool that puts parents in the driver's seat allowing them to share their child's age range (e.g. 16-17) directly with apps.

Sounds like an adtech targeting demographic, not protecting children.

> Wait until you get an overly smug rejection letter that the author seemed too eager to write, and took too much joy in writing.

I got one of those a few years ago, from a prominent tech startup CEO (non-YC).

The funniest thing is that I'm pretty sure it's a person who has some kind of recurring episodes of anonymously attacking HN infrastructure and dang.

Who then also attacked me on HN (and elsewhere, it looks like), while seeming to reference that earlier rejection, and emphasizing how much they thought I was unworthy.

> That means there's no record of you ever getting denied for the position.

Or record held in the mind, even years later, of someone who sometimes acts out maliciously.

Apparently, it's a real thing.

If you want to work through SICP, you can use MIT Scheme, but another option is to use Racket or DrRacket, with this add-on package: https://docs.racket-lang.org/sicp-manual/

If you want a non-corporate alternative to Goodreads, there's a Fediverse one, BookWyrm: https://bookwyrm.social/

(I don't know how many people are using BookWyrm, but Goodreads itself seems half-abandoned. Maybe most of the publisher attention is on TikTok influencing now?)

> OfficeCLI is the first and best Office suite purpose-built for AI agents to read, edit, and automate Word, Excel, and PowerPoint files. Free, open-source, single binary, no Office installation required.

1. Calling Microsoft Office simply "Office" without qualification treats it like a trademark, rather than a generic term that was in use for this class of product before MS appropriated it.

2. If you're going to treat it like a trademark, don't violate it in the same sentence.

The US should just find a way to quietly share literature access with the Russians, rather than letting piracy be promoted and facilitated for US consumers as freedom-fighter "archiving".

Between all the piracy, and all the AI training and the purchase/visitor-circumventing AI services, the practice of writing and publishing genuinely good work is being wiped out.

We're killing the goose that lays the eggs, for selfish gain.

What was the root cause of that? (Company consciously prioritized other things than those logistics optimizations? Individual incentives lead to management behavior that was against company's intent? Bad hiring and retention practices for upper management or whomever was informing them?)

Slop that wasted my time. Flagged.

What's at 12,000 meters deep? What are they afraid of?

One of the better-written ones I've seen. Am sending it around to some professors.

Unrealistic.

There's no way a contemporary tech founder would offer 5% of the company to an engineer that late in the game. It would be 0.5%, and it would be ISOs at worthless pricing.

Also, for all the founder's Leadership contribution that warranted owning more than half the company, apparently they didn't know that those VCs could pressure/pay all their other companies to buy ovens. And then you simply ride that growth signal to a successful exit. Building and sustaining a viable business is a problem for seasoned professional managers, not brilliant innovators.

I thought the Guardian might decide not to show a photo of a corpse of someone probably with living friends and close relatives.

Nope, they do it too, like the Daily Mail, but with a big yellow GUI control to reveal it, like a weird macabre vintage "multimedia".

> Use the slider below to show a picture of the body of the climber known as Green Boots where it lies on Mount Everest. Some readers may find the image distressing

Just because the photo has been shown before doesn't mean it needs to be shown now, especially now that it's been identified, in in this context.

Is this a place Sony could differentiate from other platforms?

Contractually require (and technologically support) that the servers are kept running for n years after the last sale, for example?

> This is a weird marketing strategy. They must feel free to do as they please since they know consumers are trapped.

I've been on PlayStation family since PS2, and used to think I was married to it, with my game library and my player character stuff/gear/creations in various games.

But the platform no longer lets me play many of those games, anyway, whether due to console gen or server shutdowns. And nobody cares about my PlayStation gamer score or trophies. So there's little tying me to the platform for the next game I buy.

Sony, please don't make me move to "Linux" gaming, via Valve/GOG/Epic (since I don't want to endorse Microsoft hegemony over the low-level gaming "standard"). PlayStation should be a beloved brand and platform that can be trusted to keep games working -- not one that throws away history, nostalgia, and community. You already impose rules on publishers, so this is within your power.

Related: Project Aces, I was fairly highly ranked in a couple of the Ace Combat installments, but when you shut down the servers, you took away what I'd invested in. I reluctantly bought AC7, but found I didn't have the heart to invest in it, just to have it taken away again, and I won't be buying AC8 nor anything else in the franchise.

IKEA CORRAS FTW. https://www.neilvandyke.org/machine-learning/super-in-ikea-c...

That might be responding too narrowly to this objection.

Then there's the question of singling out some subset of Debian users based on their country, for different behavior they presumably don't want and that is against their individual interests (see the other comment, about displaying a flag getting you beaten).

The solution is to treat everyone fairly and honestly, and to set an example for how people can get along. Imagine Debian is an international space station: the astronauts will help each other, not bicker and backstab. There are other venues for conflicts.

I'm very sympathetic to Ukraine and the desire to demonstrate or speak out, but I don't see how this instance is very effective, and doing it has a significant cost to the integrity of Debian, as this argument says:

> Russ Allbery agreed that the DFSG was not relevant; he also warned that citing the Social Contract and DFSG ""turns the conversation into rules lawyering without addressing the actual issue"". However, even though xsnow is DFSG-compliant, he did say that the flag display may be something Debian does not want in its archives:

> > I would, in general, say that software that behaves in deceptive ways, which includes hidden behavior changes based on usernames, locales, or other local settings or information that no user would reasonably expect to change behavior in this way is probably not something that we want to have in Debian. It's a very slippery slope and also likely to create a lot of drama to very little benefit.

Regarding "old beliefs", a distinction I'd like to make...

My anecdotal impression is that early Internet overall was, on average, more enlightened and amiable than Internet today.

Our earlier experience: Nobody knows you're a dog, people are excited about the possibilities, people are open to meeting others around the world, people see others sharing just to share, people haven't been conditioned to intolerant extremism by a couple decades of propaganda, etc.

Today we'll meet intolerance and meanness in many places, and we might want to call that "old beliefs" in that they are outmoded, and want to think that the latest generation will be smarter and OK. But it's certainly not just older people being hostile. And some groups of older people (e.g., much of early Internet) already did it better in many ways, before society backslided. When kids are trying to repair society, they can find allies in older people too.

> A lot of the group was great, but some friends I invited to the challenge had a bad time in the irc with transphobes and we all dropped out.

That sucks, and the channel or network should do something about it.

IRC is how I was friends with many trans people, before we knew the word trans.

It makes sense: it was much easier to pass online. So you could just hang out and talk about programming or whatever, and no one cared what plumbing you were born with.

Of course, there were always some people being antisocial on IRC, and that's why there were channel ops, war scripts, and IRCops.

I think I recall one or two occasions when someone attacked a channel I was on, and then later came back and reconciled. There should be more of the learning to play nice with others, but less toxic to start with.

I'm saddened and concerned by these allegations of a deficit of integrity.

I was very fortunate to attend Brown University for grad school, and consider it a great place.

Why would many people who were also fortunate to attend there not honor that opportunity?

The police where I live are generally good, and I imagine that's the case many places. Treating police as the enemy, or a punching bag, is unfair and counterproductive.

(I can't speak to any places that might have a lot of corruption or ill intent.)

Places that aren't too corrupt, you'd be better off encouraging a partnership among citizens, police, lawmakers, and other officials. Which is how it's supposed to be. Everyone in the government has their respective duties, and they operate within a framework that's ultimately decided by the people.

If, for example, police propose certain surveillance, to help keep everyone safe, within their scope, then sometimes someone with different or larger scope might need to say, yes, but there's also these other considerations. Eventually a decision is made by the public or their elected representatives, and everyone nods with respect, and aligns, and continues their respective duties within the frameworks.

This could be a starting point for consulting a different human expert for a second opinion (e.g., specific questions to ask about), but I wouldn't put much trust in Claude alone on this.

IME, on an almost daily basis, claude.ai and Claude Code are confidently wrong about something, and use polished language to assert nonsense.[*]

If it's doing that on something easy, like factual knowledge available in text on the Internet, or programming code that can be inspected easily and follows well-known rules, and I can tell, because I understand those things... then there's no way I'm going to assume that Claude doesn't also BS when it comes to someone else's field. Especially not a field that requires some of the smartest people to go a decade of training, just to get started in the field.

[*] And if I confront Claude with its mistakes, eventually it apologizes, and acts as if it's learned something, again mimicking word patterns it's heard real people use and mean, without meaning any of it. I wonder whether the AI user experience would be better, if LLM-ish interfaces weren't implicitly created in the image of fake-it-till-you-make-it overconfident performative sociopathic techbros.

Yeah, and if you're early, like a few-person startup, you hopefully have someone who can do ops things as needed.

When I was the one-person eng and ops departments for a few-person seed-stage startup, which already had a major customer in critical production... even when we bought SaaSes (e.g., GitLab), I still needed to spend significant time on the recurring manual steps of backup processes for everywhere we put data we couldn't afford to lose, even after I'd spent time to automate everything that was worthwhile to automate.

For my last side-startup, I just self-hosted Forgejo myself (Git, Issues & Boards, Wiki), and it's less work than when I was doing the same with paid GitLab SaaS.

It depends on the case-by-case circumstances, but sometimes self-hosting an open source package, on your laptop, random PC in the corner, or your existing AWS account, takes less of your valuable time than a paid SaaS does.

Codeberg runs open source Forgejo, and you could on-prem that too (for no license cost), if it suits your needs.

GitLab is more powerful in some ways, but early startups might want to look at Forgejo first.

The article's theory is similar:

> But I think they've decided that this is a price worth paying, because: [...] c) By destroying Sarah Wynn-Williams, they can terrorize all those thousands of bitter ex-employees into silence about the even graver sins the company has committed.

Different people need different messages around this.

For years, I read many online newspapers a day, as well as journalism trade publications. I also did a little low-key activism, during an earlier tech industry gold rush, when caring was less fashionable.

Today, I read almost zero news, and have set up filters on social media to block most references to the awful.

I have a pretty good idea about some very bad dynamics going on, but I can't do anything about them.

Were I to dwell on the very bad news, throughout each day, I wouldn't be able to do any small bits of good. Such as by contributing to a non-evil startup. Or trying to get sufficient resources that I can afford to share more.

Some people need to be told to take a step back, before they're destroyed by empathy and futile problem-solving. Other people need to be told to care more, or to be less self-centered. Other people need to be told not to be so incredibly awful, that they are ruining everything for everyone else.

I decided I'm in the first group, and hope to shift into an overly-comfortable second group, then fine-tune to somewhere between the two.