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patchorang

450 karma · joined March 27, 2015

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patchorang··on Boards of Casio
It’s a popular synth, but I wouldn’t say it had much of an impact of electronic music.
patchorang··on The Year of Internal Tools
A lot of internals tools were built where I work, not a lot were used.
patchorang··on Dear people who work at the airport
I had in internship in San Francisco and had a ~$100 bike. My bike seat and post were stolen one day. I didn't know anything about the "levels" of bikes shops, so I just went to the nearest one. Turned out to be extremely high end, probably not a single bike under $5k. The guy I talked to was so helpful, rummaged around there storage room for 20 minutes, and found me a used seat & post they had down there and just charged me $10.
patchorang··on Dear people who work at the airport
I can't agree more. I was once catching a flight, went to my gate and found no one there and the flight status monitors saying "Cancelled". I couldn't find an agent at any desk, so went back out of security to check-in to figure out what was going on. The agent proceeded to act like I was the biggest idiot in the world for leaving the gate because "we don't control those boards, your flight isn't cancelled, the gate was changed". So I had to run back through security to barely catch my flight.

Another place I experience this phenomenon is bike shops. They'll start talking to you with specialized vocabulary and won't give you the time of day if you don't know exactly what they're talking about. Yet, I brought my bike to the bike shop because I'm not an expert bike mechanic. Funny enough, I couldn't find a bike shop that wasn't like this so with the help of youtube I do all my own bike work now.

patchorang··on March heat in American west has left snowpack at record-low levels
In the filter you can change the SNOTEL site. You probably need to pull up a snotel site map and find one in the region you’re interested in.
patchorang··on March heat in American west has left snowpack at record-low levels
There are quite a few comments here talking about how comparing images from feb/march isn’t useful. Here’s data on what’s going on. This snowtel location is within the Utah picture in the article.

https://www.cbrfc.noaa.gov/dbdata/station/swegraph/swegraph_...

patchorang··on So where are all the AI apps?
I haven’t written or looked at a single line of code. I do use plan though, and have a technical background but haven’t meaningfully coded in 15 years
patchorang··on So where are all the AI apps?
I've been vibe-coding a Plex music player app for MacOS and iOS. (I don't like PlexAmp) I've got to the point where they are the apps I use for listening to music. But they are really just in an alpha/beta state and I'm having a pretty hard time getting past that. The last few weeks have felt like I'm playing wack-a-mole with bugs and issues. It's definitely not at the point others will be willing to use it as their daily app. I'm having to decide now if I keep wanting to put time into it. The vibe-coding isn't as fun when you're just fixing bugs.
patchorang··on Building for an audience of one: starting and finishing side projects with AI
This has been exactly my experience too. I switched from Spotify to Plex, but discovered there really isn't a music focused desktop player. So I vibe coded one, exactly how I want my music player to work (albums not playlists/tracks as the central item). I was so happy with my desktop app, I built a mobile version to use instead of PlexAmp. There are some bugs I'm ironing out, but they are both I've stopped using PlexAmp and Spotify entirely.
patchorang··on Jellyfin LLM/"AI" Development Policy
I very much like the no LLM output in communication. Nothing is worse than getting huge body of text the sender clearly hasn't even read. Then you either have to ignore it or spend 15 minutes explaining why their text isn't even relevant to the conversation.

Sort of related, Plex doesn't have a desktop music app, and the PlexAmp iOS app is good but meh. So I spent the weekend vibe coding my own Plex music apps (macOS and iOs), and I have been absolutely blown away at what I was able to make. I'm sure code quality is terrible, and I'm not sure if a human would be able to jump in there and do anything, but they are already the apps I'm using day-to-day for music.

patchorang··on Ask HN: What cool skill or project interests you, but feels out of reach?
Making hardware synthesizers, I have a CS degree and took a could EE classes in school. But I have no idea where to begin
patchorang··on The Gentle Singularity
Yesterday, I gave ChatGPT links to three recipes and told it to make me a grocery list.

It left off ingredients. The very gentle singularity…

patchorang··on Walmart is preparing to welcome its next customer: the AI shopping agent
"As consumers begin to use AI agents to do their shopping..." are people actually doing this? Has anyone here done this?
patchorang··on 12 Days of OpenAI: Day 5 [video]
Maybe a naive question but I don't really understand the why of this? Why do I need ChatGPT in Apple Intelligence? Shouldn't Apple Intelligence just do what it's asked? Is that Apple saying it's Apple Intelligence isn't that good? Is this some business dealings I don't understand?

It sort of parallels setting a default browser on your phone. Do you want to use Safari or Chrome? Do you want to use Apple Intelligence or OpenAI? But that's really not what it is, because everything is still funneled through Apple, then to OpenAI.

I don't get it.

patchorang··on Apple iMac M4 review: who is this for, exactly?
I love that they have affilate links in the article for a product that "wasn’t built for this world".
patchorang··on Why is it so hard to find a job now? Enter Ghost Jobs
I think this problem is even worse than just ghost jobs.

My partner is currently looking for a new job. Two or three times now, they’ve completed the whole interview process, gotten great feedback. Then they are ghosted for 2-3 weeks and the company comes back and says “sorry we decided not to hire for this role”. It’s utterly exhausting.

I do think when the interviews started, they had intentions to hire. (My partner knew people at the company and was recommended). But then for whatever reason during the hiring process, the job goes away.

patchorang··on Fear of US recession rattles global markets as tech shares fall
The constant stress of potentially being laid-off at any time over the past three years has been exhausting.
patchorang··on OpenAI Announces SearchGPT
Not saying the SearchGPT will or will not be accurate, but this demo was certainly made in After Effects. Who knows where the copy came from.
patchorang··on Will Figma become an awkward middle ground?
I've been working as a product designer for the last 10 years, but for a few years before that I was a software engineer. I've been interested in moving back towards the technical side of things. It seems that role, and what is described in this article, would often be called a "design engineer".

However, I don't quite understand what the role of a design engineer is. If a PM is the "what", design is the "how", and eng is the implementation. Where would a design engineer fall? I'm sure it is very much a spectrum, but I'd be interested in hearing from some folks who have filled this role.

Are you focused on the "how", but using code to achieve that? Are you focus on the "how" and it simply turns into the implementation? Are you focused on the implementation, but with the background and skills of a designer?

patchorang··on Modern Luddites: On Being a Digital Minimalist Family in a Tech-Saturated World
There are many chrome extensions that remove shorts.
patchorang··on Figma Slides
Designers are pretty good at siloing themselves. I worry this may further silo them as the rest of the business will continue to use PPT.

Designers frequently express frustration about "not having a seat at the table." It's going to be tough to influence the business when using a different tool than everyone else.

Edit: PPT or Google Slides* My point was more about using the tool that the rest of the business is using.

patchorang··on Ask HN: What alternatives to Adobe products are you switching to?
If anyone can comment on good alternatives for After Effect, I'd be interested to know.
patchorang··on The American West is figuring out how to keep cool
I went to college in Austin, and I feel like they do this decently well.
patchorang··on Launch HN: Overwatch (YC S22): OSINT platform for cyber and fraud risk
Sort of off topic question. But how would you get into the type of work that uses this tool? I've always thought this type of work would be interesting, but I have no ideas where to start. What are the job titles? Fraud Analyst? Thanks!
patchorang··on I organized a 20-acre game of Capture the Flag
@ntnbr, the state capitol is also a very good spot for large capture the flag. We played there a few times in college. I remember it being more or less symmetric too.
patchorang··on When do we stop finding new music?
I have a very similar history as well, so jumping in. You've probably heard of the artist, John Frusciante. But probably not the album, Maya.

The guitarist for RHCP is making the best modern IDM.

patchorang··on Apple Vision Pro review
Cooking sounds like a nice application, but as soon as the headset steams up/get condensation on the glass it will be quite annoying. I can't imagine cooking in ski goggles.
patchorang··on InVision design collaboration services shutdown
They are not. If I was interviewing somewhere (I work as a UX designer) and they were still on Sketch, that be a pretty big red flag for me. Using Sketch today would be like using Illustrator during the Sketch era.
patchorang··on Figma and Adobe abandon proposed merger
Yes, XD directly competes with Figma.
patchorang··on Ask HN: Tools to learn music theory?
I’m in a similar situation to you. I could never keep my chords types straight, so I built https://www.learnyourchords.com
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