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reflexco

187 karma · joined March 6, 2022

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reflexco··on Cherri – programming language that compiles to an Apple Shortuct
I always suspected there's a step in Apple's software design process that goes like this:

- Is the app convenient to use for power users? Then careful, you must have mindlessly went with what's intuitive for you, but what's actually intuitive for normal people is, has to be, different. Go back and find (or invent if you must), the "naturally" intuitive design.

reflexco··on Yt-dlp: Upcoming new requirements for YouTube downloads
User retention is not much of a thing anymore thanks to the stickiness afforded by integrated services and network effects.

You can't just switch calendar/video streaming when everything else is integrated with it/everyone is exclusively posting on this network.

reflexco··on OpenAI's ChatGPT Agent casually clicks through "I am not a robot" verification
This is probably caused by Google aggregating the answers from people with different languages, as the automatic translations of the one-word prompts are often ambiguous or wrong.

In some languages, the prompt for your example is the equivalent of the English word "bike".

reflexco··on OpenAI's ChatGPT Agent casually clicks through "I am not a robot" verification
Google captchas are hard because they're mostly based on heuristics other than your actual accuracy to the stated challenge. If they can't track who you are based on previous history, it doesn't matter how good you answer, you will fail at least the first few challenges until you get to the version with the squares that take a few seconds to appear. This last step is essentially "proof of work", in that they're still convinced you're a bot, but since they still can't completely block your access to the content, they resign themselves to wasting your time.
reflexco··on VPN use surges in UK as new online safety rules kick in
I used to be optimistic that way, but if you look somewhere similar developments happened before like China: yes, people adapted to circumvent their regime's oppression, but the laws never changed.

Since surveillance is only a 2nd tier issue in terms of mind share (at best), it's untouched by electoral democracy. And because rulers automatically support more surveillance, there are no mechanisms for positive developments on that side, both in the UK and in China.

reflexco··on Reading texts on paper versus computer screen: Effects on reading comprehension [pdf]
What's your good pdf reader of choice? And do you use any software to organize your collection, or just the filesystem?
reflexco··on MeTube: Self-hosted YouTube downloader
You could use separate Youtube channels for this. Use one to subscribe only to the infrequently releasing channels.
reflexco··on The Effects of Early Relational Trauma (2001) [pdf]
> lack of empirical data backing up claims

Doesn't that describe almost all books on psychology?

Psychology studies tend to be so hilariously unscientific that I'd rather get the coherent opinions and gut feelings of an experienced practicing expert, rather than half-arsed studies.

reflexco··on Balancing Outdoor Risky Play and Injury Prevention in Childhood Development
Following Hanlon's razor, it's probably just a genuine lack of imagination. Grand parent poster might have only lived in areas where homeless people and sex workers were quiet and nonthreatening, so they can't imagine an area where violent incidents involving these populations are frequent. Obviously context matters and any argument without concrete examples is futile.
reflexco··on That Time I Posted Myself Out Of a Job
No, it's absolutely not about how "counterculture" her opinions are. It's about using offensive language. She probably would have avoided all trouble if instead of talking down a fellow participant of the conference, she plugged her beliefs in pacifism in a positive manner.
reflexco··on That Time I Posted Myself Out Of a Job
So their employer pays for them to go to a conference and they don't see anything wrong with embarrassing their employer with inflammatory tweets against an arm of the government?

How would they react if it was the megacorp playing stupid by ignoring all common-sense and respect, and pointing at minutia in written guidelines to justify sociopathic actions?

reflexco··on Why yewtu.be was down: Data loss after being shut down by Oracle Cloud
I feel the same with Twitter. Recently, no matter how hard I try to train its algorithm, it always finds new crappy short videos or click-bait threads to push on my timeline. Feels like a naive "crank the engagement up" lever has been pushed. It's fine as a business strategy in itself, clearly it's been working fine for many companies, but it just doesn't align with a Premium subscription model.

People don't voluntarily pay to be treated as semi-intelligent scrolling cattle, we fall into endless scrolling unconsciously and pay with our eyeball-time, but we don't go "oh I'm gonna shell out $8 for the privilege of browsing an inferior TikTok". He's got to chose one strategy and commit to it.

reflexco··on A Look at Bluesky
One thing I don't understand is how can Bluesky pretend to be more open than Twitter when it's been months and it's still an invite-only closed garden?
reflexco··on SkyLink – Bluesky DID Detector browser plugin
Whether it can technically be called a DNS request or not, this is a privacy leak for anyone who isn't already using Google as a DOH provider. So this should really be written on the extension page...
reflexco··on Honestly, It's Probably the Phones
"My intuition tells me that cavemen probably had worse quality of life (experience-wise) than modern humans."

That's a very suggestive judgment. It's likely they felt incredibly more in line with their body, emotions and environment. They were probably experiencing states of "flow" for the majority of their active hours, and frequent genuine happiness and sadness. But then it's impossible to measure things like fulfillment and happiness from bone remnants and fragments of DNA, so we wouldn't know for sure.

reflexco··on Professor writes history essays with ChatGPT and has students correct them
It almost certainly did, but for what we lost in working memory, we gained a broadness of outlooks that would have been unfathomable at the time. We are connecting ideas from further afar in a sense.
reflexco··on Announcing Masonry 0.1, and my vision for Rust UI
Shaky? Full-blown professional tools like Figma running almost flawlessly on 5 different operating systems is not shaky. We've never had a better developer story before.
reflexco··on Interface Ideas for Chat Apps
Or as app designers they're designing for devices people use in the real world...
reflexco··on Nowhere to hide: How a nuclear war would kill you–and almost everyone else
Nuclear weapon use in a local conflict would be similar to someone unleashing a new coronavirus to win a local conflict. Due to its polluting non-local effects, it instantly paints a target on whoever uses it. This is also why "anonymous" terrorist nuclear bomb use would be very problematic.
reflexco··on Show HN: A new search engine UX I've been working on in my free time
Since the advent of web 2.0, people often interact with media in more ways than looking at its thumbnail.
reflexco··on Show HN: A new search engine UX I've been working on in my free time
It just feels weird to have results from a walled off website on a search engine, unless we specifically indicate that we have an account on this website. Similar to how we don't like submissions to paywalled articles on HN.
reflexco··on Privacy respecting weather app for Android
Chicken-and-egg problem. You would say the same about the data provider if there was no decent frontend for it.
reflexco··on Replace the “very” in your sentence

    very + good = sterling
I'll stick to "very good", thanks.
reflexco··on Nier Automata for Switch is a miracle port
Apple managed to raise the price of everything they sell compared to their competitors by raising the bar for quality. They could do this to software too.

For me seeing an iPhone game priced at $20 or more is making me more likely to try it, not less. What stops many people from playing mobile games is time and quality tolerance, not money.

reflexco··on Once again so many people are led to think Wikipedia is broke and must be saved
The bigger threat to Wikipedia is people who want to corrupt its information content. People wanting to get their treasure chest is not an existential threat. The existing employees and collaborators are more likely to get corrupted by nefarious actors if they don't have independent revenue sources.
reflexco··on I spent a year designing a low profile, minimal mechanical keyboard
Ergonomics is not vanity. Most 100% keyboards don't allow you to have one hand on the keyboard and one on the mouse with good posture, which I'm sure for the average user is a more common thing to do than entering long strings of numbers.
reflexco··on I spent a year designing a low profile, minimal mechanical keyboard
Yea, it seems like this footprint could accommodate a 75% design. The big one is the Del key, it's quite inconvenient to have to use a key combo for such a common action. But if the design allows swapping the rotary knob for a Del key then it would be acceptable.
reflexco··on Tech Compensation in Europe
If a part of the job is coordinating with people in a specific timezone who are ready to pay for availability during their own timezone then yes. We don't consider it abnormal that a waiter in Manhattan gets paid more than a waiter doing the same job in Prague. A more interesting question would be to ask how can we overcome these coordination hurdles between people in different regions and cultures in tech companies? It's a challenge for sure.
reflexco··on Ultra-flat timepiece, the RM UP-01 Ferrari, is 1.75 millimetres thick watch
A mechanical watch has some advantages over a smartwatch:

- you can be relatively certain it's not spying on you.

- you don't need to charge it every week.

- it probably has better water resistance.

reflexco··on Mozilla and Google Objections Overruled on “Decentralized Identifiers” by W3C
No, this is what identity politics is, reducing technical matters to which camp you're in ("your post gives me crypto vibes, scam!!"). Correct me if I'm wrong but I believe this doesn't belong on HN.
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