roveo

My experience with greenfield is that when you're just starting out, you have to be really strict and careful about overall architecture, establish a framework, provide structure, separate concerns well.

If the project is not throwaway, this first set of iterations is critical, without guidance LLMs will just bolt on things and produce special-cased spaghetti, even the very-frontier models.

Once the framework is established, it's smooth sailing.

But I haven't gotten to "very large" size yet, I expect it produces another kind of coherence problems.

HN is essentially the only news source that I consume in addition to local news that are likely to have stories that do affect me personally.

When I stopped reading X, I had this thought one morning:

> The political crisis, the bloody war, the looming apocalypse only exist to distract you from the fact that you didn't fold the laundry.

The longer I live news-free, the more I find it true.

It's called "tacit knowledge" and I think we generally overindex on explicit, formal knowledge and ignore tacit knowledge. You can see that with language learning, we treat languages like something you "learn", but in my experience it's closer to a motor skill like playing tennis.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tacit_knowledge

I'm using eigenrobot's (X user) prompt for ChatGPT and the style is very recognizable. Everything lowercase, tone, zoomer abbreviations, esotheric style of jokes.

Telegram wasn't fully blocked in Russia even for a single day. They tried to block it and failed miserably. The team actively circumvented the blocking by deploying to new IPs faster than they were blocked, and in addition to that every IT guy in Russia had a tgproxy instance running for family and friends.

After a while they just stopped trying and decided that it's less reputational damage to just let it be.

> GPT4 alone will especially not be that useful for analytical work. However, developers can make it a semi-capable analyst for some use cases by connecting it to data lakes, describing schemas, and giving it tools to do analysis. Usually this is not a generalist solution, and needs to be built for each company's application.

I've been thinking about this a lot lately. I'm a data analyst and all these "give GPT you data warehouse schema, let it generate SQL to answer user's queries" products completely miss the point. An analyst has value as a curator of organizational knowledge, not translator from "business" to SQL. Things like knowing that when a product manager asks us for revenue/gmv, we exclude canceled orders, but include purchases made with bonus currency or promo codes.

Things like this are not documented and are decided during meetings and in Slack chats. So my idea is that in order to make LLMs truly useful, we'll create "hybrid" programming languages that are half-written by humans, and the part that's written by LLMs when translating from "human" language is simple enough for LLMs to do it reliably. I even made some weekend-prototypes with pretty interesting results.

Thank you for your game, kind stranger, I've just wasted my day.

You can edit any of your messages in ChatGPT and the chat will start from there. Not quite branching, because you will lose the old "branch".

Oh, I recently moved to Israel, and at first was shocked with how much worse design in general is. Like, typography, ads and of course UI. There are maybe 3-4 common fonts used everywhere, and I think it's a common problem for "rare" scripts. It seems you need some "critical mass" of visual content to come up with good design practices and figure out what looks good in your cultural landscape.

I imagine this word should be of Indoeuropean origin, Eastern Slav words for a mill also contain m-l-n (e.g. melnitsa).

Modern English lost the "n" part, but it was present in Middle English, milne.

I did the same thing, but also mapped Caps Lock to Cmd+Shift+Ctrl+Option (so-called Super key) when it's pressed together with another key. Useful for application switching and other custom stuff.

Oh, I actually received such a call from a government-funded polling agency while still in Russia. Told them everything I think about it (which was still somewhat difficult despite the fact that the actual risks were low), but some questions were tricky to answer in such a way that actually reflects my opinion, e.g. something like "do you think our army is succeeding in defeating the nationalist batallions in Ukraine and protecting the people of Donbas?" Yes/No/Refuse_answer

A better idea would be to use custom inputs that produce "typos" that the user didn't make. E.g. you have a "zip/postal" code field and your input sneakily swaps 2 neighbouring characters at some point, resulting in error "this zip code doesn't exist". Or change 8 to 9 etc.

Or you could make a "check your input one more time before confirming" step and display typos in e.g. names/emails there.

There's another thing that was different at Euromaidan vs current Russia: Yanukovich and his people had somewhere to run (Russia). Putin doesn't.

Also Estonia isn't a prime destination for Russians in this situation. Countries that don't require a visa are. Yesterday 42 passenger planes landed in Yerevan (Armenia), normal number being 3-4 daily.

It's a huge pile of money and other stuff (like gold) that the central bank can sell if the want to support the Ruble. Basically they sell dollars and buy rubles on the open market to keep the price from falling.

Ummm, yes. There’s Shpilkin’s famous research (dont know if available in English) suggesting that about 30% of latest Duma election ballots were fake.

And what people also don’t understand is that they falsify on all levels. First, they persecute their opponents and deny them access to media. If they think an opponent has a chance and isn’t sufficiently toothless, they just don’t register them. Then they cast fake ballots during actual voting. There are reports of fraud during counting: police is known to remove independent observers from the room. If the results at this point are not satisfactory enough, they rewrite the numbers in counting protocols. And even if that’s not sufficient (like in Lukashenko’s case), they can just declare any result they want and beat/jail anyone who disagrees.

I think western commentators on Russian elections/popular opinions just can’t wrap their heads around how corrupt the system is.

Most people in Russia aren’t pro-Putin. They’re indifferent, don’t think about these things much and mind their own business.

Yeah, I think this time period will be called "The Great Cancelling of Russia" in the history books.

Persecuting Russians who oppose the invasion, who fled Russia and went to the West because they don't want to be associated with the regime, is just plain stupid.

These people are actually your allies and a very valuable resource (intellectual, economic, political). Some of them risked their lives supporting opposition, cried for sanctions for years while your politicians benefitted from the regime's corruption and you did nothing. And now you're persecuting them like they're accomplices.

This is incorrect. Electoral rating of Putin (as of 2021) is around 30%. The central election committee will just declare the results that Putin wants.

People in the West who live in (relatively) democratic countries just go around saying "Russians elected him" without actually understanding what living under an autocratic rule is like. Putin never won a free and fair election. He persecuted his opponents, denied them access to media (and as of today, there's no independent media left) installed dummy ones that play into his hand and falsified the elections.

It's like seeing hunger in a 3rd world country and saying "why don't they just learn how to program and get an actual job?"

I wouldn't agree. Of course there's a push for homogenisation because everyone has to speak Russian, which is the official language of the state, but nobody is stopping people in the "national republics" from using their corresponding languages. Chechens speak Chechen at home, Tatars speak their language (if they want to). Modern Russia inherited this from the USSR's policies towards ethnic minorities. National languages are taught in schools.

I'm not a fan of Putin's policies here, but inside Russia it's certainly not oppressive in the linguistic sense. If you agree on the unity of the state (don't want actual political independence), you're free to use your language.

Interesting, just yesterday I discussed with a friend of mine how dumb it is for Putin to attack and try to capture Kiev, because urban warfare is very difficult and usually leads to very heavy casualties. She asked "why?" and I realised that I have an intuitive understanding about this because I've played Call of Duty and she hasn't (obviously not saying that CoD is representative of actual war, but you get the idea of what a sniper or machine gun nest in a city is just from game mechanics). Things that are obvious for some people are absolutely not obvious for others.

Btw, Pavlov's House defence is mentioned in the article and there's a corresponding mission in CoD.

Well, it's complicated.

I think Putin's understanding of a "Nazi" is deeply connected to the Russian trauma of WWII that the West still doesn't get. Russians believe that due to the sheer number of lives lost, the USSR (and so Russia as its successor state) played _the_ central role in WWII. I encourage you to watch this video https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DwKPFT-RioU (the relevant parts start at about 4:40 and 9:40)

I personally think that it makes no sense to talk about "who made the victory" because it was an allied effort and none of the allies could have done it alone. But at the same time, I think that westerners just don't get how personal and traumatic this was for the people of Russia.

So, Putin is very sensitive to any view on WWII that differs from his. Things like "this was just two dictators (Stalin and Hitler) fighting". Or the view of some Ukrainian nationalists that the communists and the nazis were just both occupants (same view exists in Poland), or even that the nazis were liberators from communism. There's history of collaborationism in the Ukraine, as is everywhere, but not everywhere the collaborationists are viewed by a lot of people as national heroes, not as traitors who joined the aggressor (the nazis). I personally understand why this view exists, but for Putin and most Russians it's just outrageous.

So, for Putin a nazi is mostly someone who disagrees with the Russian view on the role of the USSR in WWII. That includes nationalists from countries that Putin views as satellites/buffers (ex-USSR and socialist block), but Western countries that don't get how it looks from the Russian side, even those that were allies in WWII, are also tinted with this "nazi" color.

It is a page with a schematic depiction of a floor lamp. "Click anywhere to turn the light on/off" is written below. When you click, the light turns on or off depending on the previous state, and background color changes accordingly between dark and light. The on/off state is the same for all visitors of the page, so, since this is on the front page of HN, it flickers quickly. Hence the strobe warning.

Look up the stuff David Sinclair is doing with his team. They are already rejuvenating and regrowing severed optic nerves with Yamanaka factors in mice and are preparing to start human trials.

It's not rock-solid that this is going to happen for the whole body soon, but some truly breakthrough things are happening right now in this field, nothing like the previous decades.

In the world of data analytics/BI are many people whose main job is writing SQL.

What's up with

    if __name__ == "__main__": some random code

at the end of module files? Never seen that, why is it used? I understand that it's a guard that only runs when the module is executed directly, but what is the code put there? For developers to quickly visually test stuff by running the module?

Here, for example https://github.com/willmcgugan/rich/blob/master/rich/color.p...

there's also "да не ебет", which means roughly, "well, it doesn't fuck me"

In many languages "saint" and "holy" are the same word.

Yes, in addition to the ridiculously long life (30h seems to be the standard), they also have somewhat-easily replaceable standard cell batteries. (judging by iFixit guides)

My friend has an older model that he uses every day for like 4 years, the battery is still reasonably good. And after that, you can still replace the battery and they'll be good as new.

So I opted for over-ear Sony and never looked back. The considerable investment (about 130% of top AirPod model in my country) is totally worth it in my opinion. My wife's AirPods became unusable for a single 1-hour call after about a year.