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nomdep

2,016 karma · joined June 27, 2020

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nomdep··on To have a moral stance on AI is to be an outcast, and it sucks
Like if any of those ideas had bring anything other than poverty, hunger, suffering, and millions of deaths.

We don’t get Star Trek post-scarcity by forcing everyone to do less, only by doing more. Creating more technology and creating (and consuming) more energy. Much more, near infinite amounts of it, that is what the replicator needs to create mass from energy.

nomdep··on A message from President Kornbluth about funding and the talent pipeline
I don't think MIT has money problems
nomdep··on I won a championship that doesn't exist
Yes, they can. We can be glad that respectable newspapers and TV news channels have never done it and never will. You can even trust than the headlines are accurate summaries of the content of the articles. /s
nomdep··on Palantir employees are starting to wonder if they're the bad guys
> We wanted to save the Iranian people from the regime that murdered 100,000 peaceful protestors (don't ask for evidence)

At least 20,000 according to Amnesty International, other independent sources claim 40,000.

https://www.amnesty.org/en/latest/campaigns/2026/01/what-hap...

nomdep··on 5x5 Pixel font for tiny screens
This brings me back to the custom HP-48G applications with UIs made pixel-by-pixel. 3x5 letters where everywhere, but 3x4 and even 3x3 were used and were still legible:

- https://www.hpcalc.org/hp48/games/board/sshots/ship.png

- https://www.hpcalc.org/hp48/games/board/sshots/othellof.png

nomdep··on Show HN submissions tripled and now mostly share the same vibe-coded look
What this article calls AI design traits are design patterns that were already very common before AI: gradients, centered hero, stat banner, all-caps heading, purple accent, etc. You can blame most of them on TailwindUI and shadcn.

Are we going to call 'AI slop' everything that doesn't reinvent design from zero for a marketing page?

nomdep··on Google broke its promise to me – now ICE has my data
John Perry Barlow‘S EFF surely did, but are you sure you can trust Nicole Orze’s EFF to fight for your rights if one of your sympathies doesn’t align with current California’s sensibilities? https://www.linkedin.com/in/nicoleozer
nomdep··on Show HN: A WYSIWYG word processor in Python
I don't see why the "nested containers" model would prevent this feature to be replicated, it's just a tree of nodes. Not edit-this-as-plain-text-simple but almost.
nomdep··on ML promises to be profoundly weird
That changes it. I missed that the table of contents was for other future articles, my bad.
nomdep··on ML promises to be profoundly weird
"As LLMs etc. are deployed in new situations, and at new scale, there will be all kinds of changes in work, politics, art, sex, communication, and economics."

For an article five years in the making, this is what I expected it to be about. Instead, we got a ramble about how imperfect LLMs are right now.

nomdep··on Scientists are working on "everything vaccines"
That’s how the zombie apocalypse starts in many novels
nomdep··on ISBN Visualization
Very weird.

Only in Spain there are 3k publishers. Argentina has 1k publishers.

And then we have huge amount of books published in spanish by Penguin Random House, Scholastic, Springer, etc.

nomdep··on Olympic Committee bars transgender athletes from women’s events
People with a diagnosis for that syndrome are specifically allowed by the new rules
nomdep··on Olympic Committee bars transgender athletes from women’s events
Indeed, that’s a barbaric custom, akin to genital mutilation, that should be reserved for a real medical necessity, never for religious reasons
nomdep··on VitruvianOS – Desktop Linux Inspired by the BeOS
Me too. The laptop was so old that I couldn't play a 360p mpg video without pauses on Windows 2K or XFCE, but it ran smoothly with BeOS5 (the Intel-based abandonware version)
nomdep··on 5,200 holes carved into a Peruvian mountain left by an ancient economy
I think this comment is substantially more informative than the article itself:

https://newatlas.com/environment/5-200-holes-peruvian-mounta...

  Each hole is constructed- dug out and lined with rock.
  These are not mining holes, nor used to store things.
  If you want to store stuff, you would put these pits
  along the bottom of the hill, not running a long distance
  up the hill.
  
  They tried to keep the lines somewhat straight, crossing
  gullies. I can't guess what valid use they might have had,
  other than religious. They seem pointless.
nomdep··on Ireland shuts last coal plant, becomes 15th coal-free country in Europe (2025)
I saw the data. They have replaced coal plants with gas plants. Mostly imported gas. Why do Europeans hate the idea of safe nuclear plants though?

https://ember-energy.org/data/electricity-data-explorer/?cha...

nomdep··on The stagnancy of publishing and the disappearance of the midlist
That was true until 10 or 15 years ago. They have been riddled with (accusations of) bias and fraud since then
nomdep··on Put the zip code first
If you’re going to ask for a country, ask for it first.

Zip codes repeat across countries, you know.

nomdep··on AI and the Ship of Theseus
In this emerging reality, the whole spectrum of open-source licenses effectively collapses toward just two practical choices: release under something permissive like MIT (no real restrictions), or keep your software fully proprietary and closed.

These are fascinating, if somewhat scary, times.

nomdep··on A new California law says all operating systems need to have age verification
Ironically, the “Save the Children” people tend to be the most pro “Fuck the Children” in secret. Literally
nomdep··on Show HN: Respectify – A comment moderator that teaches people to argue better
Good idea, TERRIBLE implementation. After activating only filters for "Low Effort", and "Contain Logical Fallacies" I get:

> "Who cares if it is? It's a great movie nonetheless"

3/5 Published!

> "Who cares if it is? It's a terrible movie nonetheless"

2/5 Revision requested: Calling a movie 'terrible' dismisses the enjoyment others may find in it and directs negativity at both the film and those who appreciate it. Suggestion: "I personally don’t enjoy the movie, but I understand some people have different opinions about it."

So it's okay to generalize my opinion about it, but only if I liked it, otherwise I might hurt someone's feelings? Very double-plus-good vibe. I would never comment again on the site that uses this product.

nomdep··on Anthropic drops flagship safety pledge
*To improve* mass surveillance and autonomous attack systems with no human in the loop. China and USA already had those kind of systems way before AI.
nomdep··on The Perils of ISBN
A good time to remember that the Open Library came to be thanks to the initial work of Brewster Kahle (founder of the Internet Archive) and Aaron Swartz (RIP) http://www.aaronsw.com/weblog/openlibrary
nomdep··on A Programmer's Loss of Identity
But, overall, the world has been steadily improving from century to century (largely thanks to technology).

The catch is that the path there are occasional local minima, and very deep local minima, like the world wars

nomdep··on AI optimism is a class privilege
(I feel that I write a comment like this every few years)

The author catalog of harms is real. But it's worth noting that nearly identical catalogs were compiled for every major technological shift in modern history. The Internet destroyed print journalism, local retail, and enabled cyberbullying and mass surveillance. If we applied the same framework used here, Internet optimism in 2005 was also a form of "class privilege" (his term, I personally hate it).

And the pattern extends well beyond the Internet. For example, mechanized looms devastated weavers, the automobile wiped out entire trades while introducing pollution and traffic deaths, and recorded music was supposed to kill live performances.

In each case, the harms were genuine, the displacement was painful and unevenly distributed, and the people raising alarms were not irrational. They were often right about the costs. What they tended to miss was the longer trajectory: the way access to books, transportation, music, and information gradually broadened rather than narrowed, even if the transition was brutal for those caught in it.

History doesn't guarantees a good outcome for AI, but the author does advocates from a position of "class privilege": of having access to good lawyers, good doctors, and good schools already, and not feeling the urgency of tools that might extend those things to people who don't.

nomdep··on Discord/Twitch/Snapchat age verification bypass
Because they are used to follow limitations since the day they were born, and have all the time in the world
nomdep··on UK justice ministry orders deletion of largest court archive court
Without paywall: https://archive.md/IwGUI
nomdep··on UK justice ministry orders deletion of largest court archive court
Thank you. I was searching for a post elsewhere but no one else is reporting it
nomdep··on TikTok users can't upload anti-ICE videos. The company blames tech issues
"it became clear that there was no conspiratorial algorithmic suppression". Yes, the Twitter files showed that the suppression was done mostly by humans.
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