oriel

At the risk of a tangent, the real problem with services like 23andMe isnt just that it has your (irrevokable) DNA or traits in it, its that they now have the DNA and traits of your entire extended family up and down the tree(s) to a significant degree. Using a service like that is essentially selling them out, and they have no say in it.

Another one bites the dust. Added to the list, paid account canceled, data deleted, account deleted.

Its becoming easier and easier to step back from a service and consider if its essential (its not, as a rule), and remove it WHEN it becomes an abusive relationship.

OpenAI was not a good dog.

There's a concept that captured me, called Gruen transfer[1].

> the Gruen transfer is the moment when consumers enter a shopping mall or store and, surrounded by an intentionally confusing layout, lose track of their original intentions, making them more susceptible to making impulse buys.

It started with shopping malls, later affected e-commerce, and now the media industry as a whole (specifically here with livestreaming).

Seems like we have hit peak distraction by design here too. Not sure this is a valuable term to rally around, but it definitely describes the modern woes of every platform and service.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gruen_transfer

> I was equally surprised to learn that the food industry was already moving toward using fewer phthalate plasticizers already. More recent sampling efforts have actually found fewer or sometimes no phthalates at all in tubing, whereas decades ago it was ubiquitous.

IMO this is one of the more valuable comments here. Can you find any sources to cite on this?

I'd love to see more comments on the progress industries make via self-awareness rather than yet-another-villain-in-the-shadows.

Schoolhouse Rock for Coders?

Off by default, means On by Default When They Change Their Mind [tomorrow, next week, next month, etc]. Antitrust yesterday already.

I did this two years ago and had a similar experience. This was on a custom desktop PC.

Windows doesnt play well with dual boot, so I had to literally detach the SATA cable to keep it from eating my GRUB bootloader partition.

I switched to using the System76 distribution Pop! OS, which bakes in GPU drivers (among other things). I used the rust-based Cosmic desktop, but that choice is a different discussion.

On Linux, I was able to run almost every single Windows game well on a Nvidia 3060.

Storage was easy, pretty much everything supports FAT reads at a bare minimum, NTFS is possible with the FUSE drivers that are package-installable.

Development was easy, multimonitor was easy, suspend was a little wonky on my hardware, sleep was great.

Bluetooth ended up taking some serious wrangling for usb devices, about that point is when cli chops come in handy. Wifi was natural if a bit clunky UI-side.

All that said, they're still in early days, YMMV.

Unfortunately pithy response (in abstract, not specific to this case) boils down to: Because they fired the people who how the system worked.

Probably the originally intended Agile [1]

These days its been devolved into micromanagement musical chairs of pain. The kind that promotes what it professes to prevent and provide.

[1] https://agilemanifesto.org/

Ive been subscribed to Spotify for a very long time. There was a point, years back, where I learned they used listening data to do emotional profiling of listeners for ad-based manipulation.

It felt like a threat to never let premium lapse, or they'll start selling/tweaking a whole new category of sensitive data.

This announcement follows a trend of squeeze-abuse by every other platform out there. Enough is enough.

I've already established a trend of deleting accounts that have proven to follow an abusive relationship model. The list of sites and sectors is quite large at this point.

I think its time for Spotify. It wasn't a good dog.

Together with breaking the addictive aspects of sugar, I found going on keto to be really effective for resetting my perception of sweetness. To this day there are a number of food items i love that are "not sweet" but satisfy the sweet craving outside of addiction cravings.

I've also learned that chinese culture has the concept of "not sweet" as a compliment for desserts, as the lower sugar profile lets naturally sweetness and flavors rise to the top of your awareness.

Rails effectively muddied the waters of what is possible with Ruby, leading to its neglect (in awareness at least). Rails has become synonymous with run-for-the-hills in tech (from what ive seen).

Personally having worked with Rails, it was great in the early days, now its mired in tech debt and my-way-or-build-it-yourself mentality such that I havent touched it with my disposable 10 foot pole in 7+ years.

The short answer, is flavor and fashion over effectiveness; a strong rebellion against high performance languages who require a deeper understanding than simple copypasta.

/2c

I've been using godot with chatgpt as a side project to see how much I can coax a game out of it, with minimal effort. Its a manual form of systems like this but definitely shows how generative tools enable independent devs or small teams to tighten their dev loops and rapid prototype ideas.

When you can rapid prototype ideas in a game search space, its more likely to get a high quality output, or at least games that hone in on fun more effectively than a AAA made with a waterfall model and a huge team with poor crosstalk abilitiy.

This comment is the product.

Most recently I experienced it with the slack LLM announcement with a lack of real opt-out. I've long since moved to federated services and minimized my footprint on centralized for-profit services and sites as a result.

Makes me wonder if there is (or should be created) a list of companies and their data offenses akin to layoffs.fyi

I'm still building my understanding in this space, but so far I've seen its value when using chains and graphs of agents.

The overall system suggests degrees of freedom in search that might not have been available. This is by having a knowledge store in a format (vectors) primed for search, then having it be accessible in full or in partitions, by agents, working on one or more concurrent flows around a query.

I also see value in having a full circuit of native-format components that can be pieced together to make higher order constructs. Agents is just the most recent one to emerge and i can easily see a mixture of fine tuned experts alongside stores of relevant material.

/2c

I've been learning Godot (4.2), and leveraging chatgpt to try and elicit as much of my idea in generated code as possible.

After about 4 months of work, I'm closing in on a working v1, hoping to do an open beta in the next few months.

https://old.reddit.com/r/boomballs/

I picked up godot 4 to try out a game idea, and have been running with it for a few months while leveraging chatgpt to get over the skills hurdle, https://www.reddit.com/r/boomballs/

Ive had a side project going for a few years to modularize this exact type of middleware for the browser's WebExtension (and WebAPI) capabilities.

https://github.com/1ps0/elos-connect

https://elos-edu.notion.site/eLOS-Connect-0-0-11-a72acbec893...

Curious to see if anyone else is able to find use cases for the components/sidebar and urlbar CLI I've been building.

Ive found that I work this way often enough in the professional world, the problem for me is when management/leadership decides to average the devs' treatment and i get micromanaged despite delivering early and at or beyond scope/requirements.

In recent times, this has gotten to the point that I stop delivering early, and end up spending more time 'validating' scope/requirements than actually doing the work... simply due to the overhead of having my time minced by someone else's "best practice" beliefs.

http only site, also very editorial/opinion style writing.

https://archive.ph/NtXft

> [Assembly Theory] is a neat and simple model for the combinatorial generation of innovation in rule-based abstract "worlds" of recombining objects. It is a model of how evolution (or other higher-level processes) can lead to complexification.

Assembly Theory description links:

- https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-023-06600-9 (original paper)

- https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-023-03061-y ("very well written news & views article (with a terrible clickbaity title)")

This reminds me of the gandalf challenge. Early on I had beaten the final challenge by role playing a 10yo gatekeeping his treehouse and got the AI to spell out the password by putting the answer as the first letter of each word in its response.

Later on, this was fixed, but it shows how role playing can have surprisingly degrees of depth and confusion on the AI's part. Reminds me of many of the anecdotes in GEB.

Not related to the LK-99 claims.

This is a paper following on the "twistronics" magic angle (1.1 degree) research, exploiting the emergent moiré pattern and adding layers to build a "platform" for future development.

This reminds me of a sabbatical project i ran with during the pandemic. ended up sputtering out due to lack of time and motivation, but i did end up pushing out an initial alpha for some friends

https://elos-edu.notion.site/eLOS-Connect-0-0-11-a72acbec893...

Still trying to clean up the code enough to release out into the open.

Really it is encouraging for advancement areas like this.

Reminds me of the "revolutionary battery checklist": https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28025930

edit: removed the paste of the checklist because of spam.

I'm curious why the complete exclusion of Credit Unions?

> because the lead manager is now a prompt-engineer

This is actually one of my bigger short-term concerns, where someone who doesnt have any real understanding or good intuition is given the illusion of competence, while only creating more problems and work for those who have actual competence.

Referencing the four stages of competence[1], this set of persons being Unconsciously Incompetent, are more likely to cause far more harm than good in the medium term, in the name of efficiency or such.

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Four_stages_of_competence

Thank you for this, I wasn't aware.

I'm not a fan of villainification of specific people, but if someone is stomping on a well-loved and established creative universe, then its nice to know who is guilty, so we can advocate for change.

Social media is its own distortion foam, so knowing where all this low quality noise is coming from helps me orient, my expectations, and my complaints.

When considering future of tech, its valuable to consider there are at least two well-trodden paths:

1. semi-linear extrapolation of existing tech and progression (maturing tech)

2. new paradigms approaching the problem from a new angle or with new insight that invalidates or levels up past 1.

Since we're in the midst of a cambrian explosion for both 1. and 2. IMO I dont expect limitations as we've been seeing them will hold up even under the medium term.

Interesting. There's a conclusion chain around that I'll have to dig up. Thanks for the sanity check.

Serious question: does anyone still trust supermicro?

I have them on my mental blacklist since the reveal they were injecting backdoors into their hardware.

I also dont trust shell games under the label of "changing suppliers" when supposedly the hardware backdoors were added on US soil.

Most references happened in May 2019, but theres one from 2021:

- https://www.bloomberg.com/features/2021-supermicro/?leadSour...