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rmholt

131 karma · joined April 28, 2023

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rmholt··on Why Kagi launched "no use, no pay"
Is there anything that prevents Kagi from doing an OpenAI and going for profit?
rmholt··on The average college student today
> completely excluded from their social circles. If it does, then I'd argue those weren't their friends to begin with.

I believe you underestimate the power of being "in". Even if the friends wouldn't be "true", it is still extremely valuable socially. That is, speaking as someone who, due to unrelated reasons, was prevented from fitting in fully. It may not hold much water from a stranger on the internet, but i would've given anything to be able to fit in more at that time. I believe it has set me back socially 3-5 years, with lasting consequences which I may never truly heal.

> Second, kids need to learn that social acceptance doesn't mean they have to do everything their friends are doing

Sure, but they won't learn that when you prevent them from participating activities with their friends. This isn't them deciding that they don't want to participate in something.

> Third, the long-term benefits of reducing their exposure to social media are outweighed by the short-term benefits of the instant gratification and shared experience of social media.

Attention spans can be fixed.

And besides, you shouldn't control any child like that. You might say "they will thank me in the future". But they never will. And the damage done by controlling their life like that is more lasting. Their relationship with authority, with you, with their own autonomy will be forever changed. (Speaking as figurative you, I don't mean to imply you specifically) This teaches them "You don't have a right to own things the authority doesn't want you to own" (Or it teaches them how to lie and hide contraband.)

rmholt··on The average college student today
Yeah that's fair.

I still don't believe that it's worth it, with the exclusion from their social circle causing a bigger health issue than social media, but I get it.

rmholt··on The average college student today
Sure, but the natural consequence is that they will be more inclined to distrust society, authority, and vote for anti-estabishment populist parties.

To quote a great man, we live in society. And it's better to work within a system and get to know it rather than it is to just hate it. And if the first experience of a large portion of youth is system beating them down, you can see how that's gonna grow a strong "tear it all down" mentality.

rmholt··on The average college student today
Fair. I suppose a "highest upvote" kind of feed would also be acceptable - so we don't kill reddit or hacker news
rmholt··on The average college student today
Agreed, the problem is capitalism /s

But seriously agreed, that's why I propose what I propose - when it's banned no-one can do it and no one can eat your lunch (*)

(*) Subject to exceptions, as the War on Drugs can attest, but I think it would work in this instance

rmholt··on The average college student today
The funny thing is, they don't even have control. They can't push propaganda. They can just accelerate human desire. Through all the brain rot they have created, they didn't even gain anything significant, just a few % bump in "kEy pErFormAnce iNdiCatoRs".

And they doomed a generation in the process

rmholt··on The average college student today
> I think you're putting too much emphasis on The Algorithm. It's a problem, and I agree it's probably the worst offender, but similar problems were observed decades ago with children (and adults...) allowed to watch too many hours of uninterrupted TV.

Yeah that's fair.

> I agree they are a wonderful invention but I'm not sure grade school students need to be connecting to anyone, anywhere throughout the entire school day.

Well to their friends in other classes ("Wanna go out after 3pm lesson").

Additionally, and socially, smart phones, if banned, would be instantly seen as a status symbol. And it would also accelerate strong anti-autority sentimentality. The kids won't understand it, hell adults wouldn't. So it's also the case that you can't really ban them without really adverse social effects.

rmholt··on The average college student today
> Why not educate the users about the dangers misuse and abuse lead to the attention span, instead of banning things?

Because social media is precisely in the short term benefit x long term risk that human brains are bad at conceptualizing. Same reasons for why we mandate belts in cars.

rmholt··on The average college student today
Yes!!! That's why I would ban just the "addiction-optimized psychological experiments".

I would also ban them globally, not just for kids but like I'm sure that would be a whole 'nother discussion.

rmholt··on The average college student today
> I don't think DARE-style assemblies for both students and parents would be the worst idea to warn both groups about the risks of these platforms, provided they were done honestly, rather than being filled with hyperbole.

Yeah that's fair. Probably can't hurt anything with that. But it's hard to get the actual danger across.

> None of this exploration ever required or involved Facebook or other social media platform or highly immersive video game, save YouTube.

That's why I am gunning to limit these kind of platforms, specifically.

> It doesn't infringe upon anyone's rights, and wouldn't really "cost" anything,

Well it depends. If these assemblies worked, they would "cost" the platforms potential engagement and potential revenue. Which is kind of a pointless distinction, I just thought it's interesting

rmholt··on The average college student today
> why is it so hard for society to consider treating smartphones, social media, and highly-immersive video games like MMORPG's, with essentially all of the same effects, the same way?

I agree with you. I would consider social media and games addictive. It's just that the SMS app on my phone isn't addictive. Telegram app, the Photo app also isn't.

> Paleolithic emotions, medieval institutions, and god-like technology is a combination that we're not nearly as well-adapted to as we think we are.

Agreed. But my paleolithic emotions aren't addicted to the radio waves of my phone, but to the TikTok app specifically.

rmholt··on The average college student today
To be honest I would, if only to be consistent with the above policy.
rmholt··on The average college student today
Because phone is just a box of wires, without apps it's inert.

It's the apps, which corrode everyone's attention span. And unlike weed, I doubt there will be "algorithmic feed" dealers, because no one actually wants an algorithmic feed.

rmholt··on The average college student today
I never said ban platforms? TikTok, Facebook could still very well exist and still make more money than any of us ever will. Just without the brain rotting engagement algorithm
rmholt··on The average college student today
For what goal? Just for them to get instantly addicted once the ban is lifted? For them to lack any communications with their friends and to be excluded from their social circles discussing the newest tiktoks or whatever?

I think you chose well

rmholt··on The average college student today
No. It's not the smartphones that are the problem. Smartphones are a wonderful invention, capable of connecting anyone anywhere.

It's the apps, which overcharge everyone's (not just kids!) brains, by algorithmically "mAxImiZinG eNgaGeMent"

It's time to ban them all. Okay that's a bit much. Ban all algorithmic feeds, all apps must adhere to strictly chronological feed of the strictly subscribed authors.

There, the phone addiction crisis solved.

rmholt··on Google will develop Android OS behind closed doors starting next week
> just go back to having some sort of Debian-based GNU/Linux on a smartphone

Two years of full time engineering man hours

> Just create a really great mobile interface on top of that.

Probably another 3 years of full time engineering man hours

rmholt··on Deregulation in Argentina: Milei Takes "Deep Chainsaw" to Bureaucracy
I wonder if the memecoin promotion helps the Argentinian economy at all https://www.web3isgoinggreat.com/?id=milei-memecoin-promotio...
rmholt··on Why I've now quit my Google contract job
> Its like vegans "quitting" meat. Not a cow was ever saved by this gesture. There are sufficient cow eaters to make such a gesture irrelevant

Oh? Do you vote? Because there's sufficient other voters that make your vote irrelevant

rmholt··on Ask HN: How should junior programmers use and/or not use AI for programming?
Yeah fair. In unix tools I usually lean on AI too. But also pandas has much better docs than man pages tbh. Maybe pandas is just simpler than the unix world hah
rmholt··on Ask HN: How should junior programmers use and/or not use AI for programming?
Perhaps there's something wrong with traditional docs, how we write them, when junior devs are so insistent on using AI?
rmholt··on Ask HN: How should junior programmers use and/or not use AI for programming?
I always die inside a little when junior dev at my company uses Windsurf to tell him how a specific pandas function works.

Like you're just using it as an expensive documentation repeater, but now with spicy possibility of lies.

rmholt··on Ask HN: How should junior programmers use and/or not use AI for programming?
I would argue the exact opposite.

Language specifics you can look up and confirm easily. But recent gpt-4o tried to convince me that Python added a pipe operator in 3.13. Even had sources. To my disappointment, that's just a lie. (https://chatgpt.com/share/67de9c77-d5f4-8012-9f1c-ac15b70aee...)

On the other hand, intuition and thought process is something I have good experience with ChatGPT, ie deciding on architecture (tRPC vs gRPC vs REST for my use case).

I would say good use: generating small code snippets, architecture decisions

Bad use: Anything documentation related, any specific feature, any nitpicks. (Just ask the security guys how good chatgpt is at paying attention to the little things) Anything you can look up in docs / ref. Anything where there is a clear yes / no answer

Note: A good use of LLMs imho is trying to get a start point for lookup docs, like

"What's that thing in Python like [x for x in...] called and where can I find more info". If you however ask it for exact rules for list comprehension it's gonna tell you lies sometimes

Edit2: Unless you mean like really general language specifics. Like how do I make classes in Ruby. In that case yeah that works

rmholt··on Apple shuffles AI executive ranks in bid to turn around Siri
But opening the interface would be horribly insecure though. People could make competing products to Apples own offering!
rmholt··on uv downloads overtake Poetry for Wagtail users
For me personally the killer uv feature is pyenv integration, which poetry doesn't do
rmholt··on uv downloads overtake Poetry for Wagtail users
According to these docs

https://docs.astral.sh/uv/pip/environments/

I think uv supports conda envs

rmholt··on Warning users that upvote violent content
Is it possible your entire account got shadow banned, due to unrelated reasons? Afaik it's not even possible to shadow ban a single post, but they do that to entire accounts.

EDIT: Also that's a really pessimistic leap, "my account got shadow banned (on one platform, and you don't know it was the nuclear)" to "truth is no longer allowed on (implied all!) mass platforms"

EDIT2: Also, how the saying goes, shit happens. I got banned on so many servers and forums, for random reasons. And I moved on?? Create another account if you have to, it's not like they can enforce the no multiple accounts rule well

rmholt··on Warning users that upvote violent content
In contrary to modern popular belief, this is not the case (at least on reddit).

Have a look at Banned Subreddits at https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Controversial_Reddit_communi...

Unless you are advocating genocide, murder, outright advocating for ethnic cleansing, or are violently sexist/racist, you're fine.

rmholt··on A sysadmin's rant about feed readers and crawlers (2022)
Maybe a warning after 3 requests and a ban on 4 per 24hr, but I understand the sentiment
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