nstart

I pick one thing I can obsess over with the intention to drop it when I’m bored of it or when I’m done achieving my goal . Current obsession is getting to a 1000 elo rating in chess. I can see myself in the future probably trying to get my 3x3 Rubik’s cube solve to 30 seconds or less.

Previously it was to be able to do all the daily nyt sudokus for the day in under 30 minutes.

The next thing I do after chess and maybe the cube will probably be something to do with the guitar I’ve had lying around for years which I know how to play at a basic level. Or maybe how to use some free DAW.

The commonalities here are: that every one of these is cheap and easy to pick up. It’s easy to set some concrete goal. It doesn’t actually require a huge investment of time. It’s a niche that has a community around it that I can interact with.

The reason this works for me in creating novelty in my days is because

- I get to discover stories and people I never knew of. During the sudoku phase I got to know of the folks behind cracking the cryptic and the whole sudoku championships stuff

- I get a new hobby where I get to enjoy that feeling of rapid progression one can get at the early stage (after which you run into the wall of hard work which can eventually take you from competent to expert)

- I get to have lots of new stuff I can talk about with others. Most people who’ve done some form of sudoku don’t know of theories like X wing or hidden pairs. So when we have a conversation and I talk about my current obsession of sudoku, it leads to questions like “wait I thought the only thing that makes sudoku harder is how many numbers there are hidden”. I have friends who like to geek out on stuff though. So this is very personal to me.

Worth noting that this is something that worked for me. Just sharing this in case it helps someone else.

One more thing outside all of this where it’s more a long term and somewhat expensive thing is doing sports as a community. I bought a bicycle recently and am finding more and more communities that are passionate about cycling. Getting to know them and their stories on a Saturday morning ride creates a lot of novelty on its own.

Oh my goodness. I finally know who was behind the floating robot at the Dubai museum of the future! Had a chance to visit it last year and their flying robot was the best part of the whole experience :D . Thanks for sharing this. Amazing to see all their other robots at work on YouTube.

Do you think you'd feel comfortable sharing some images with redacted information to show how you are using it? Would love to peek into how a forum tool is being used in a non conventional way. Thanks!

Seen a few people trying to make these and honestly, it’s ok as a novelty thing. Like for a bday or unique occasion maybe. But using these as any kind of replacement for professionally done work feels like a disservice to children.

Good authors+illustrators for children are just so far ahead of any AI generated content right now it’s not even comparable. Something as seemingly simple as Julia Donaldson’s Smartest Giant in Town is a heart warming tale, told along a continuous theme with a consistent voice where the story wraps up beautifully at the end. Then it’s all brought together with delightful illustrations that match and delight so well. They aren’t just good illustrations. They are delightful. Heck. They even have Easter eggs of sorts. All of that gave my son and I so much to discuss, point at, draw, and sing together. Wouldn’t want any child who could have that experience to miss out on it.

There is a market, at least within south east asia, that mass produces stories like aesop's fables, and regional folklore. The books produced are thin 2minute reads and are available for purchase for less than 1 USD usually. It's not surprising to see grammatical and spelling errors slip into the prints of some of these books. The artwork is basic and while stylistically more consistent than OP's effort, it's entirely generic and forgettable (unlike the artworks of legends like Axel Scheffler or Sara Ogilvie).

I can foresee a very near future where this market is absolutely overrun with auto generated books + artwork. I don't think of this as a good or bad thing. It's just going to be interesting to see who gets the first jump on this.

There is the part where they expect to earn back from reselling the compost.

> Mill has partnered with two processing facilities that purchase and turn all this dried food into a chicken feed ingredient, filtering out any errant forks or inorganic materials that accidentally get tossed in the bin.

The bit about filtering out inorganic material seems a little too convenient to gloss over though.

In this case, I don't know what Gumroad could do given that it's ExtendScript. But I can totally see Gumroad making a library for more supported ecosystems and an api endpoint that makes use of public/private key encryption to create a "signed" response. Naive possibility:

Gumroad receives request from app -> Gumroad crafts response, encrypts with private key (could be Gumroad key or a dev generated key), base64 it, returns to app -> Local library decrypts with public key and then verifies response.

This of course doesn't stop someone from messing with source code and "cracking" the app, but in the case of a binary based app, that's not as straightforward.

That said, another commenter did mention that pirates are gonna pirate, so friendly easy DRM for the dev also makes sense.

Huh. So gumroad verification is a simple call to the verify endpoint and I'm guessing if it returns "success": true that's good enough to enable usage of the product?

I guess it would be an interesting experiment to create a proxy that captures any values going out to gumroad's license verification api endpoint and change all server responses to be true instead of false. Ditto for altering the number of uses of a product in case there is a limit there too.

For anyone interested in the documentation: https://app.gumroad.com/api#licenses

Also for anyone who is new to this topic, intercepting and altering server responses can yield fascinating results in today's client side heavy code web apps.

That's really rough. It's one thing if a child has a history of asking for stuff and then abandoning it. Eventually if the parent says "not until you've used the other stuff", I can understand that, even if that one more thing could have been the item that really clicked for the child.

But in this case, to be forced to play only one kind of thing and then not be allowed to try something you want seems really hard. I'm sorry you had to go through that. Thanks for sharing.

Quick story about this comment resonating (pun intended) with me: My son is quietly coming and pulling out my electric guitar from my office room these days and strumming it randomly (just open strings). I haven't said anything except to be careful after he tried to walk it sideways through a door (screams internally in pain). He's watched me practice scales and the wanted to know how to play individual notes so I showed him and left it. A few days later I heard a tiny "ding" of a single note from him for the first time. Still haven't said anything. Maybe he'll love it, maybe he won't.

Basically, I'm going to keep your comment in my mind to not fall into the future trap of denying him something he really wants to try out just because I have some other hope for him. Even now, it'd be easy to jump on my son at this point and say "ho there child, I could send you to some classes now" and then get upset if he doesn't like it. It's really easy to fall for my own bias and whatnot. I'll remind myself to avoid doing that.

If you don't mind me asking, how old were you when you asked for an electric guitar initially?

I'm not sure how I feel about the quality of this. It... drones. The samples are really bad. It's not that the voices sound robotic. The reading is boring. If this was tested on me without prior knowledge, I'd say "not sure if human or not. But it's a bad reading either way".

Edit: Adding a few more details to my thoughts to say why it's boring. Good narration is so much more than correct pauses. Pacing. Emotion around words like death and life. Ensuring that sentences don't repeatedly end on the same inflection tone. Modulation of rhythm. None of that is there.

The last time I ran into this was when a known person started a youtube channel where they put together the script and the video and then used an AI to narrate the script. I assumed it was an AI because I figured that's how said acquaintance would have managed the budget. But it was incredibly tedious to listen to. You can see this in work here (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yWVvmKpCBDg). Has the same feel of the Apple digital narration. I don't know how I could listen to that easily for over an hour.

To be fair, I read that as a joke that actually plays on this notion. Some people within the fediverse are of the opinion that Twitter is a dying dumpster fire. The reality is that it's got a bunch more dumpster fires going on, but depending on the corner you are in, it's business as normal.

So the way I read that opening is a tongue in cheek expression in the voice of someone who is a little overeager to promote the fediverse as the Twitter Killer (when it's just... a different thing).

Edit: Shared this thought only to say that there possibly is a different interpretation to this opening. Not to invalidate what you said (should have mentioned this in the start) :)

Sending a mail to the hosting provider is helpful. Also, if you are looking at blocking IP you can try blocking an entire ASN temporarily to see how that works. It’s one thing for someone to destroy a server and reimage it on the same service. It’s another thing to destroy it and bring it up on a fresh provider. Currently the attacker is using dedipath for example. Block the ASN while waiting for their abuse team to respond.

I wonder about that. Electron is mature. Well supported. Well documented. Predictable on desktop on account of using a known rendering engine. When it comes to having a mobile app as well, I look to obsidian for inspiration on possible approach since they built a non trivial app with a relatively tiny team. Their stack includes electron for the desktop and they re-used most (All?) of the core with capacitor for mobile. This included theming and plugins. Would be hard to bet against a stack that has that kind of real world success story behind it.

If a team member uses a personal token with Travis and the personal token can access private org repos, there’s a chance this can trigger.

Yes. Still waiting for a reply from them on further audits + waiting for any kind of update from Travis since all the tokens that everyone has shared as affected have been related to Travis CI. This includes us as well.

Not the op but I believe you are right. That answer is very much the chat gpt answer structure. Makes me wonder if stylometry can be applied to the default chat gpt style to detect generated responses

To be transparent, I submitted this with “Elon Musk: <quote>” but the first bit either got auto stripped or I backspaced it by mistake.

That is going to need a source. All I see in these AI data gathering exercises is that if the industry isn’t a well established litigious one, the companies will happily suck in all the data, license be damned. Code and art both fall under this. But when it comes to music which is heavily litigated, suddenly the only content a company like stable AI will use is open and voluntary because in that case they worry about “overfitting and legal issues”. (Refer Harmon ai)

Hypocrisy dressing up as progress in the machine learning field has been one of the most embarrassing scenes in software engineering recently. The genie may be out of the bottle but the fact is that a bunch of software engineers with a “move fast ethics later” attitude are the ones who let it out and they shouldn’t get to shrug it off for free.

To me the issue is that Meta is pushing to attack three challenges at once.

On one hand there’s the hardware. Even now, people report motion sickness with the hardware. If you are trying to create a computing interaction medium of the future, these details around accessibility are going to be incredibly important. And I haven’t even mentioned battery life. So meta is working away at this very expensive challenge

The second challenge is the interaction model. No one is entirely convinced yet of what interaction with computers should look like in VR. Right now it’s “mouse/touch+windows but in VR. That’s like when TV and cameras first happened and it was theater shows but on the tv screen. So Meta now has to invent or at least shepherd computing integration models and that is also incredibly expensive.

And finally there is the metaverse. Technically we all live in the metaverse already. I interact with people I don’t know across forums and social media. I interact with them more than I do with some of the people I know in real life. I play games online which have meta worlds (Minecraft, temtem, and animal crossing for example). I may not have a single game of infinite worlds and meeting places but the concept of a universe within my existing world already exists and it’s served to me by the internet. But Meta wants to make it a ready player one kind of experience where I interact with it through a VR experience. That seems really forced because they are drawing a line in the ground saying that VR is how the metaverse can exist. This is also an expensive bet especially when the interaction model hasn’t been figured out yet.

I don’t know where this is heading for meta but their goal of creating the next big computing and interaction platform with app stores that they control instead of apple or google is incredibly ambitious but seemingly poorly executed thus far.

I hear you. I’ve been lucky to work on dev experience in a platform team so I do agree that this is a platform teams job. I wonder though as our stacks mature and things normalize, if there’s a chance to do some thinking and organize systems from first principles to create a platform that suits the vast majority of app development. If a team outgrows it, maybe that’s a call for a platform team.

I’m trying to imagine though what a platform team might look like in a world like that. A lot of dev ops teams today work around cloud configs and terraform for example instead of bash scripts and hardware. Maybe platform teams of the future think of plugins and modules for these imagined systems instead of building on top of a lot of low level stuff.

I think related to the article, this would fall under the lift and shift concept the author described.

What the author really wants is a transformative experience around developing in a way that is cloud native.

So don’t apt install packages on your alternative iPhone which has a Linux container option built into the OS.

Instead, tap a few buttons to say you are developing a webapp with a node backend, Postgres db, and redis instance and code anywhere you go without thinking of setting up an environment. Don’t even think of how to connect to your db. The tool knows you want your service to connect to it and knows not to let anyone else connect except for exceptional case debugging. And once you are done with your v0.0.1, you press deploy, wizard your way through, and it’s out on the internet without you having to think about it further. (And for bonus points, everything including the platform config is quietly getting committed to a git repo in the background so you get all the advantages of IAC by default in the event you need it). And you don’t think about scaling or deployment resources or anything like that. It just happens and you go on about your business (hopefully with some thought given to billing). And when you want to connect a service to another one you don’t think of concepts of ip blocks or auth or certificates. Service A communicates with the world and service B. The dev experience is that you call service B from service A and all the auth and TLS and ip addressing and name spacing is handled in the background. The dev experience is you call service B and that’s it. And that deploys 1:1 to production as well.

Even the above scenario feels somewhat uncreative like it only imagines a few steps up from what we have instead of a paradigm shift. But basically it’s not about shifting to different platforms like iOS or remote dev machines. It’s about an experience of development that is tied in deeply with the environment you ship to and in a way that completely frees you of thinking of low level concepts which all happen in the background.

And then right after they announced the shutdown the chromebooks division announces a gaming oriented Chromebook lineup that has partnered with Microsoft, Amazon, and nvidia on their cloud gaming offerings. That must hurt the stadia team so much.

While this article feels true, I wish it provided more of its own researched evidence to prove the point. I went through several links and possibly the most relevant ones are "Why are medical journals full of fashionable nonsense?"[1] and the book "Science Fictions"[2].

Most of the other links talk about other tangentially related topics. The subheading "How the attention economy corrupts science" which should contain the meat actually has little to no research of its own that can convince me of the title (unless I'm willing to read the book "Science Fictions"). I read the article "Why are medical journals full of fashionable nonsense?" and found it to have a similar vibe although it had more concrete evidence. Still, the need for more than a few examples is something I feel is fair to call for. Basically, I don't find it to fully support this original article about "attention economy" corrupting science.

Overall, I think this is quite an ironic state. The article seems to hold on to what feels like an idea that is socially popular, something we all suspect, and it presents it as true with evidence that is either vague or indirect (look, this book exists on the topic, therefore it is true). The article fails to clearly draw the differences between "working hard to get attention to one's science" vs "the act of getting attention is corrupting science". I'm overall unconvinced that this article really does anything much to support its premise.

[1] - https://bigthink.com/health/medical-journals-fashionable-non...

[2] - https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781250222688/sciencefictions

Throwing in a note of appreciation here. Had friends over to dinner last night at our place and at close to midnight a fun debate broke out about puzzles like wordle, and quordle and the like. I shared this URL with my friends and said “no instructions, you just got to do it. All I will say is that it can be done”

It was so funny to suddenly go from noisy bunch of us to each person quietly studying the problem followed by the occasional “wth??”

They all want to know if this is going to be a daily thing now.

The only question mark we have is whether the game will be fun on a regular basis since so much of the fun (and satisfaction) actually came from figuring out the rules of the game in the first place :D

I mean for sure. I’m not going to make any predictions about the future when the field is so young. It’s only related to the current generation. Honestly though, art isn’t the field to look at for seeing when the jump is coming. It’s in AI actually being able to recognize relationships between things. Basic stuff like looking at enough pictures of horses and recognizing what the leg is and how many legs a normal horse will have. Even stable diffusion which has some of the best generation will still give me 5 legs or two legs coming out of the same side. These kinds of images are a boon to artists who will need to do all the final corrections.

Relationships between things is complicated. Someone resting their face on a fence is going to have a huge number of effects on the deformations of the face, especially the eyes and hair depending on how they are resting. It’s not enough for AI to have seen enough pictures of faces on fences to be able to apply that in an image. It needs to understand what pressure and gravity is doing to the underlying structures. That’s how human artists study at least. It’s why they can take that lesson and apply it to learnings about how skin behaves depending on the age of a person. They aren’t copying. They are solving problems by thinking about muscles underneath and how they change depending on any number of factors.

None of this even touches on lighting and colours.

If there’s one prediction of the future I’m willing to make, it’s that until research progresses on teaching computers to apply actual knowledge, AI within the creative space will remain assistive instead of replacing.

Artists have for the longest time used our brains ability to upscale. Many paintings, even ones that seem super detailed like those by James Gurney in his Dinotopia series, will have blobs in the background. Our brain will recognize based on silhouette and shape an extraordinary amount of detail that isn’t actually there. Detail such as the type of clothing and the action of a person. But if you look closer it’s a rectangular blob with a triangular blob within it to indicate clothes.

The difference between AI art and actual human art is the level of intention one can detect in it. When I look at human art I absolutely marvel at the cleverness of the artist to convey something that still looks like what I was imagining even when I look closer at it.

With AI art I look closer and realize that the blob presents more confusion the closer I look at it.

I’ve been telling anyone who will listen that AI art isn’t stealing much lunch when it comes to professional art. But it may very well be a powerful tool to artists to speed up their workflows and artists who refuse to use the tool stand a chance at being left behind the same way some artists got left behind in the illustration industry world once digital tools showed up.

Yeesht. I had never tried this out with AWS so I had just completely made assumptions about their stopped instance pricing. Thanks for the correction. At the same time, the pricing is rough. Instances with similar configs cost anywhere between 3-7x the price. My current bill of between 2 to 3 USD a month would go up to about 15-25 USD. In absolute terms that's not big but over the months that is going to add up.

Still. Food for thought for me. Thanks again :)

Because you have to pay for stopped instances. That’s why I snapshot and restore. It’s the same with all VPS providers (at least the reliable ones I know)

Tangential to the topic: I look forward to the day that fast snapshotting and snapshot restoring becomes a thing for all VPS providers like hetzner, digital ocean, and vultr (and all the others).

Especially if a machine is snapshotted, restored, snapshotted again, restored and the cycle continues. Even if what’s stored doesn’t get much larger the subsequent snapshot+restore processes take a little longer each time. Each provider has different timelines with vultr saying it can take up to 60 minutes for a snapshot to restore.

My use case is similar but different to code sandbox. I use a beefy remote machine for development and to keep costs low I fire it up and tear it down on demand and pay only for the hours the machine was up. It works fine for me but I just wish snapshotting+restoring was faster on these services. That would make it perfect.

For anyone looking to try this out, you can use the careers page of meta (https://www.metacareers.com) and get the Meta company description and job roles from it. It's fully worth it I guarantee you.

I may have imagined a question for Meta's security engineering job role: "write me an essay about camels and their value in cybersecurity" which may have resulted in:

"The camel is a valuable animal in the cybersecurity field due to its ability to store large amounts of data in its hump. Camels are able to cross vast distances with little water, which makes them ideal for carrying large amounts of data across networks. They are also very sturdy animals, able to withstand harsh conditions and even attacks from cyber criminals. In addition, their long eyelashes protect their eyes from sand and dust, making them perfect for working in dusty environments such as data centers."

Or "how will you use camels to assist you in your day to day work"

"I would use camels to help me with my day-to-day work by providing a means of transportation to and from work, as well as a means of transportation to different work sites. Camels can also be used to help carry supplies and equipment to and from work sites."

And of course the most sensible answer to the question: "why did camels fail in cybersecurity"

"The reason camels failed in cybersecurity is because they're not very good at it."

Bravo GPT-3. Bravo