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sabon

544 karma · joined October 8, 2008

https://velvetshark.com

Email: mail [at] velvetshark [dot] com

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sabon··on iPhone 17 Pro Demonstrated Running a 400B LLM
It was written by a human.

Source: I'm a human. I wrote it.

sabon··on Why do AI company logos look like buttholes?
Thank you, sir.
sabon··on Why do AI company logos look like buttholes?
I appreciate the serious analysis and reply!

I agree with most of it, but I also don't see why all blog posts have to be serious. I had fun researching and writing it, and I don't pretend it's a scientific masterpiece.

sabon··on Why do AI company logos look like buttholes?
I can't see how it wouldn't be intentional. A weird choice though.
sabon··on Why do AI company logos look like buttholes?
This one boggles my mind. But it's a real logo, so there were at least a few people with decision power who didn't know and let it happen.
sabon··on Why do AI company logos look like buttholes?
Even the Claude one? :)
sabon··on Why do AI company logos look like buttholes?
And when you put the funding, that's where the valuation is coming from.
sabon··on Ask HN: Did you personal website help you get hired? Tell about it
My personal website definitely helped me get hired. Here's how.

Whenever I create something, either for work or personal, I add it to a "Featured" section on my website's homepage. Over time, it became such a nice and comprehensive list that I now use it every time when talking about past projects or whenever a "Can we see some examples of your past work or appearances?" comes up.

It has different types of work and is exhaustive enough that whoever asks, can find what they're looking for. I had a lot of positive comments from prospective employers about it.

What started as a mini project for me to collect all the scattered links for myself so that I don't forget or lose anything, became a great asset that keeps on giving.

Here's the link that I send when asked about "examples of your work": https://www.velvetshark.com/#featured It's an anchor link of my homepage that scrolls straight to the Featured section.

Oh, just to clarify: the "Featured" section is not the only thing that people find interesting. Once they're on the page, they can browse around and find articles that are of interest to them. That helps too.

sabon··on Why do everyone's logo fonts look the same? (2020)
I wrote an extensive article about this: https://www.velvetshark.com/why-do-brands-change-their-logos...

Since its publication it even got featured in a Spanish textbook, and I get tons of traffic to it all the time. The topic seems very much valid for the last few years, with no sign of change.

The main reason seems to be to look good (or even readable) on mobile, but it seems that it's more of a bandwagon than a proven good strategy.

sabon··on Ask HN: Could you share your personal blog here?
https://velvetshark.com Personal, work, non-work, TILs, anything. It's a personal blog, anything goes.

My most popular article, featured on HN (and even got into a Spanish textbook) is "Why do so many brands change their logos and look like everyone else?" https://velvetshark.com/articles/why-do-brands-change-their-...

sabon··on Why do so many brands change their logos and look like everyone else?
Author of the article here.

There are many, MANY versions of images from my article on Twitter, with attribution cropped. I wanted to have a subtle and small contribution and to not be obnoxious. It seems that it's not a good idea. Too easy to crop, post as your own and sound smart.

It's even worse on LinkedIn. There were multiple posts with cropped images, literally tens of thousands of likes, and zero attribution, then not even addressing direct comments and calling them out.

David Perell used one of the cropped images but he didn't know the source. When I commented on it, he added the article to his Twitter thread, with proper attribution.

sabon··on Why do so many brands change their logos and look like everyone else?
Designers decide that they need to change the logo and come up with 50 variations, from bland to wild. Then a committee decides on "the best" one. With each, someone on the committee finds something they don't like, until there's nothing to take away, just bare, sans serif, black letters.
sabon··on Cyberpunk 2077 Refunds
Allegedly, the game was rejected 6 times before it was finally approved. Even then, it was approved on the condition that the big bugs will be fixed by December 10. Apparently, they weren't.
sabon··on How many GNU/Linux users are needed to change a light bulb?
1298.

The article doesn't answer how many, so I've counted.

It takes 1298 GNU/Linux users to change a light bulb.

Including the father of the first user, excluding the 6 that complained, and then complained again (they're counted only once). And also, assuming there's no overlap between all the groups, which is probably unrealistic.

sabon··on Ask HN: What mistakes did you make when starting as a consultant/freelancer?
Freelancember has listed most of the mistakes indeed, along with the solutions on how to solve or avoid them.

Example: https://freelancember.com/excuses-for-not-raising-your-rates... - how to deal with raising the rates and not ending up stuck at the bottom level.

sabon··on Flickr redesigns web and mobile apps to create a powerhouse in photo storage
This is the photo I see in about 80%-90% of the cases: http://prntscr.com/72r7h8

At some point I was even a paid flickr customer. Last uploaded photo was from 2009 I think. Or 2011? Can't remember now because when I want to check I see the photo mentioned above.

sabon··on Why LinkedIn's "recommend" system is broken, and how to fix it
Sure. I'm not saying that letting anyone endorse is a solution. I'm saying that letting endorse only those who have similar skills is not an answer as well. It has to go deeper.
sabon··on Why LinkedIn's "recommend" system is broken, and how to fix it
Endorsing only similar skills? Really?

What if I know I'm bad at something and decide to hire someone who's a professional in this area? And this person does an amazing job. I want to endorse this person to acknowledge the obviously great skill he possesses. But I can't. My skills are not similar.

sabon··on Hidden gems in Mac OS X
iStat pro widget gives you this info (and much more). Once installed, one key press (F4) and you've got all the info you need.
sabon··on Founder Stories Volume 01: Slicehost
I'm still with Slicehost because of Pickled Onion. Only because I know that if I need to do anything with my servers, the articles will definitely help me. Worked every time. And even though there are better and cheaper solutions now, I haven't even thought about moving.
sabon··on Bill Gates Flabbergasted By Gmail
It seems like maximum size for an email is 25 MB.

"With Gmail, you can send and receive messages up to 25 megabytes (MB) in size."

http://mail.google.com/support/bin/answer.py?answer=8770

sabon··on Breaking the Rules
So how should he be best described? No irony here, just asking so that next time I know better how to refer to him.
sabon··on Work Less
Haven't anybody noticed it's actually 36 hour work week, not 32?

M-F 9am-6pm = 4 x 9

sabon··on Facebook intern visualizes friendships, draws world map
He is a true friend to all those Koreans. But the map only shows those who have computers. AND access to internet. Which would be his family, government and more or less that's it. The rest would love to show their friendship and devotion to Kim but can't - lack of computers is killing them...
sabon··on Facebook intern visualizes friendships, draws world map
The most important factor is that number 3: music and video uploads. You just didn't present it as it is. Facebook also has an option to upload video. But the real difference is that VK became practically the alternative for torrents: all the movies and all the music is there. On their servers. Free to search, watch and enjoy. Facebook doesn't have and will never have it.

So if you have all your friend on VK AND you have all the entertainment stuff there - why switch? Unless Facebook comes with some interesting strategies to pull the users, the status quo will remain as is. And from what I hear and see, FB is putting a significant effort into this. It'll be interesting to watch in the nearest 1-2 years.

sabon··on Y Combinator And Yodlee Team Up To Give Startups Access To Financial Data
Access to all those otherwise unavailable, expensive or hard to get data and APIs seems to be the second biggest benefit of applying to YC. The first one would of course be access to know-how and network of VCs.
sabon··on The social network no-one has heard of gets right what Facebook screwed up
I like the irony here:

Take a look at this paragraph.

"As you can see the Windows Live Network have done their best to make the privacy tools simple and easy to use and yet provide you with a sense of control over who can see what is happening in your activity streams."

It is just beneath the graph that is absolutely unusable and too hard to comprehense for well over 90% of the users. If Facebook had such privacy controls - everybody would bash them for making it overcomplicated.

sabon··on Facebook and Zynga Enter Into Long-Term Relationship
Unless Zynga has 10% fees (my guess) and everybody else the usual 30%. I think they wouldn't sign the agreement otherwise.
sabon··on Google Analytics for Facebook Pages
It's only valid for pages built with FBML. So it's good for tabs (sections) but not for the main page itself. The main page is a newsfeed where you just can't put any FBML. So it makes an interesting tool to track subpages but in general it's pretty useless. Clever idea though.
sabon··on The NBA's Locker-Room Nerds
Almost 6 months have passed since the beginning of the season. So it's barely more than 1 per month. Yes, it's still more than most people. But we're talking about most prolific NBA reader here, not the average one.
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