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ptmkenny

32 karma · joined July 26, 2024

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ptmkenny··on The Amazon tax
Costco shipping is "free," but the prices on the website are more than in the store. I'm pretty sure it's based on weight; heavy stuff has a more pronounced markup. But, it saves you a trip, and the prices are low to start so it still may be significant savings. There's also a web-only deals section for clearing out inventory (I picked up some Philips Hue lights for half off).
ptmkenny··on Show HN: Simple algorithm and color space to generate diverse skin tones
There's also the Monk Skin Tone Scale by Dr. Monk and Google (available under a CC attribution 4.0 international license). It was developed for machine learning, so it's not exactly the same use case, but it provides 10 colors in a variety of formats, including hexadecimal. https://skintone.google/get-started
ptmkenny··on Apple's hostile App Store rating system
In Settings -> Apps -> App Store, I have “In-App Ratings and Reviews” toggled off. Nevertheless, I still occasionally get shown a review prompt, even for paid apps. You can bet I leave a one star review in this case; I paid for the app, and I opted out of reviews. If you want to ask me to leave a review without respecting my time and stated preference, you deserve one star.
ptmkenny··on Has America Crossed the Asshole Threshold?
The trend that bothers me the most is excessive use of the em dash accompanied by awkward use of semicolons.

> Cooperators who are scattered among cheaters get eaten alive — the lone honest man in a crooked ward is not noble, mathematically speaking; he’s lunch.

There's also the not-quite-right logical link between clauses (I see this a lot in Opus output):

> Parasites are a constant; every era grows them to maximum greed, because that’s what parasites do.

("era grows them" doesn't fit with "that's what parasites do." If the era grows them, the parasites aren't doing their own growth.)

ptmkenny··on AI is just unauthorised plagiarism at a bigger scale
As for Reddit licensing their data to llms, that day already arrived in 2024: https://arstechnica.com/ai/2024/02/reddit-has-already-booked...
ptmkenny··on Teaching Claude to QA a mobile app
It’s interesting to see the solution that the AI came up with, but WebdriverIO and Appium already exist for this use case, are open source like Capacitor, and come recommended from the Capacitor developers. https://ionic.io/blog/introducing-the-ionic-end-to-end-testi...
ptmkenny··on Learnings from paying artists royalties for AI-generated art
I evaluated Tess.design about a year ago for an app I was building. At first I was excited because I wanted a service that compensated artists. However the number of artists was very limited and the blog post said “more will be added soon” but it had already been a year and it seemed like none had been added, not a good sign.

Then I tested out the image generation itself and I was unable to come up with prompts that achieved the kind of images I wanted. My only prior experience at the time was OpenAI API. With OpenAI I usually got what I wanted on the first or second try, but with Tess, I couldn’t get a usable result even after 20 tries.

So in addition to the limited number of artists, I think the quality of outputs vs. competing models was a huge factor. I needed to generate thousands of images, so I couldn’t afford to do dozens of attempts for each one.

Hopefully one day there will be a service that can match the quality of OpenAI Image API and Flux but with compensation for artists.