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ryanwhitney

3,116 karma · joined July 9, 2011

https://rw.is ryan.whitney@me.com
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ryanwhitney··on The bond market isn’t buying what Fed Chair Warsh is selling
I believe they're referring to when Joe Biden said "I am a Zionist."
ryanwhitney··on Google Flow Music
> Application error: a client-side exception has occurred (see the browser console for more information).

Nice

ryanwhitney··on Strikes in Middle East since 28th Feb in real time
Seems like the sword and shield icons are backwards in terms of who started the war. And “bloc” vs “coalition” lol.

Wonder how much of this came out of the prompter’s mind versus the LLM itself.

ryanwhitney··on I'm reluctant to verify my identity or age for any online services
While I have no idea of the actual outcome, I’ll muddle through the extra step + thinking to opt-out where possible.

My own personal bend is that I do not want to be sold anything and I want anonymity where possible. We’re constantly being advertised to. Anything small action that I can take to deter that, or make the ads less personalized/interesting/distracting to me, is worth it. Even if I also will never knowingly click an ad.

It’s probably largely a control thing psychologically. With cookie banners specifically, I also don’t want to concede to dark patterns which make accepting easier than rejecting.

ryanwhitney··on Show HN: Cover letter generator with Ollama/local LLMs (Open source)
Sad for all involved.
ryanwhitney··on VPN location claims don't match real traffic exits
I use obscura—which routes through mullvad—and the reddit problem is very annoying.

I finally hit the point of searching for mirrors yesterday and turns out, they exist.[0]

It’s really only suitable for lurking or being able to view search results, but it has eased the pain a bit.

0: reddit-viewer.com

ryanwhitney··on Everyone in Seattle hates AI
Our (on-the-way-out) mayor likes it!

"I said, Imagine how cool would this be if we had like, a 10-foot wall. It’s interactive and it’s historical. And you could talk to Martin Luther King, and you could say, ‘Well, Dr, Martin Luther King, I’ve always wanted to meet you. What was your day like today? What did you have for breakfast?’ And he comes back and he talks to you right now."

ryanwhitney··on Apple AI chief John Giannandrea is retiring in spring 2026
Rather have dumb Siri than bullshit machine Siri. Glad they scrapped most of it but they shouldn't have ever even launched notification summaries.
ryanwhitney··on Code like a surgeon
Look at my beautiful cathedral

Look at my cathedral of tailwind ui

I’m sure they put locks on the doors

ryanwhitney··on ChatGPT Atlas
That's funny you mention that—very similar experience here. My partner and I often get a laugh out of the strange occasional errors. Things like responding with "…huh?", and then completing the task.

I'd rather see a robot fail rather than eat the world and fill it with trash. But the running use case does sound very annoying!

ryanwhitney··on ChatGPT Atlas
> Siri sucks.

I’m surely in a niche group here, but I’m appreciating Siri more and more.

It’s a mostly competent tool for basic operations and simple questions. For something I interact with over audio, I’ll choose that over a bullshit machine any day of the week.

ryanwhitney··on Wikipedia says traffic is falling due to AI search summaries and social video
They reported a headcount of 644 for 2024–2025.

It's all very open if anyone wants to track down details themselves: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Category:Wikimedia_Foundatio...

2025–2026 is in-progress: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Foundation_Annual_...

>Similar to last year, technology-related work represents nearly half of the Foundation's budget at 47% alongside priorities to protect volunteers and defend the projects of an additional 29% – a total of 76% of the Foundation's annual budget. Expenses for finance, risk management, fundraising, and operations account for the remaining 24%.

ryanwhitney··on Navy SEALs reportedly killed North Korean fishermen to hide a failed mission
The focus is the drugs and domestic murders, but JSOC's practices are detailed (daily night raids, low threshold for targeting, low accuracy) and give background to how everyone involved became so broken.
ryanwhitney··on Navy SEALs reportedly killed North Korean fishermen to hide a failed mission
The Fort Bragg Cartel by Seth Harp covers this well. JSOC basically runs an around-the-clock global assassination squad where innocents, family members, and children are killed with intent. Then they come home and try to fit in with a less murder-acclimated population.
ryanwhitney··on Vibe Coding Through the Berghain Challenge
I think chatgpt is their writing partner too. Maybe the other way around.
ryanwhitney··on 996
Call me back when the company store is up. I don’t want to grind for my boss’ VC-bux unless I know everyone working here is also all in.
ryanwhitney··on T-Mobile claimed selling location data without consent is legal–judges disagree
Wow, yep, thanks for that.

I was certain I had disabled all of these through the normal t-mobile dashboard, but sure enough there were about 5 still enabled including the “sell my personal information” ones. Ouch.

ryanwhitney··on Workout.cool – Open-source fitness coaching platform
This looks great. Yours isn't loading for me, but workout.lol looks like it'd provide the perfect level of instruction. (I'd skip the exercises/sets screen and DIY, but picking muscles and getting ideas/examples is helpful.)

One note: if you're using the same video set as workout.lol, the one that loaded for me (male_dumbbell_hammer_curl_front_ani.mp4) could be compressed from 3.3mb to <300kb with little quality loss.

ryanwhitney··on VisionOS 26 keeps pushing Apple's newest platform toward the future
I think it comes down to the actual interface design vs visual consistency. Windows 8 UI suffered because of bad information density, constantly changing tiles, and lack of consistency throughout the OS. You’re mostly in windows, but you occasionally get a big low-density tablet UI to try and parse.

I see the Vision-inspired bits coming through as mostly visual design with a bit of fluidity in menu styling. All of the core menus are still basically the same and tailored to their platform.

That said, a lot of that visual design made more sense in VisionOS where transparency helps you see and understand the real world around you.

I haven't used them and I’m not sure I like them—especially transparency on a desktop—but I do think there’s a difference in strategy.

ryanwhitney··on Changing Directions
Glad he linked articles on Facebook's culpability in the genocide of the Rohingya people as well. That should be an absolute, disqualifying reason when considering taking their money.

Very strange to see the level of criticism here aimed at someone choosing to explore other paths. You're not a shortsighted fool for trying to do something else. Especially something that's directly, meaningfully helpful to the people around you.

ryanwhitney··on How AppHarvest’s indoor farming scheme imploded (2023)
In comforting news, post-bankruptcy, the founder and CEO of AppHarvest has gone on to start…uhh…The Nuclear Company?[0] Hopefully when it's ready they'll invite McConnell back to flip the switch.

0: https://www.thenuclearcompany.com

ryanwhitney··on OpenAI to buy AI startup from Jony Ive
They only have a landing page: https://www.lovefrom.com/
ryanwhitney··on Ditching Obsidian and building my own
Pricing page:

Open License $0 for qualifying users

Freely download and self-host Directus for any project without the need for a license. Get Started

If you and your organization have less than $5M in total annual income (revenue and any funding), then you do not need to pay for self-hosting Directus. This applies to all projects, including production and commercial projects.

ryanwhitney··on How to have the browser pick a contrasting color in CSS
Not parent, but the generalization is true. There’s usually a base layer (red/300, etc) and a more semantic layer (.text-danger).

As your link covers, there’s then a million different ways to implement/extend that based on whatever theming and systems you’re implementing on top.

ryanwhitney··on Material 3 Expressive
“then spend zero brainpower on systems without graphics acceleration”
ryanwhitney··on Technical analysis of the Signal clone used by Trump officials
https://archive.is/2025.05.04-225615/https://www.404media.co...

Why are these being instantly marked as dead?

ryanwhitney··on The Dire Wolf Is Back
Yep, an absolutely empty PR grab. And seems not closer to a red wolf either, but entirely distinct from wolves as we know them. Only similar via convergent evolution.[0]

0: https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/dire-wolves-were-...

ryanwhitney··on Mountains, Cliffs, and Caves: A Guide to Using Perlin Noise for Procedural Gen
I have no idea why people do this. To me, it only serves to devalue the rest of the content.

It’s especially egregious in this case because the post is about something visual. The art is built-in! Why oh why.

ryanwhitney··on Tether and Circle are battling to win the US stablecoin market
The artist’s name (Richard Chance) is right under it.

https://richardachance.com/

ryanwhitney··on Republishing my Simpsons fan site, twenty years later
> I vaguely knew C++ to be the more powerful language but regardless of that, it seemed cursed because it was more steps away than PHP from building things that I could put on the internet.

Still true!

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