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signorovitch

151 karma · joined January 5, 2025

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signorovitch··on Account bans on Reddit
Of course, gotta keep that precious human content clean for the data miners
signorovitch··on How and Why I Journal
Ironically, the novelty of a negative point value seems to be the primary driver of traffic to this post.
signorovitch··on How and Why I Journal
Seems possible, though I’m surprised there isn’t a check for negative point values. Perhaps something’s been changed on the backend recently, since it seems this hasn’t happened before.
signorovitch··on How and Why I Journal
Responding to the actual content of the post… :P

Starting a long term commitment like journaling isn’t that hard. Just write something. There are a million apps and special notebooks to make it as easy as possible. I often hear people say staring is easy, maintaining is hard. Maintaining is also easy. Journaling doesn’t get harder with time. We often just underestimate how little your future self will care or value the same things current you does. It’s true that life gets in the way or a busy period will knock you out of your new habits. But starting again is still easy. Maintaining a journaling practice for a long time isn’t really that hard, it’s just hard to keep caring.

signorovitch··on Vera: a programming language designed for machines to write
> The evidence suggests the biggest problem models face isn't syntax

So then why is the first mentioned and most obvious difference from other languages

> There are no variable names. @Int.0 is the most recent Int binding

LLMs are trained on code written by humans. They are most “familiar” with popular programming languages, have large datasets of examples and idioms to draw on. I don’t see the advantage of inventing a new language the machine must “learn” with syntax unlike anything it’s been trained on.

Validation and testing are also already things we do with human written code, too.

signorovitch··on Can You Find the Comet?
Not to play the musk’s advocate, but there is a case to be made that proving internet access in remote places is more valuable than a perfect night sky. If you live in the cities you can barely see the stars anyway, so you’re not missing much. But in an austere environment, connectivity can be the difference between life and death. It also lowers the bar, encouraging more people to visit wild places and make them more likely to support their protection in more meaningful ways.
signorovitch··on Can You Find the Comet?
FWIW, if you actually want to photograph a comet or anything that doesn’t move in the sky, you’d take multiple exposures that would make the moving light sources like satellites disappear. Taking HDR photographs like this has an number other benefits as well.
signorovitch··on Sawe becomes first athlete to run a sub-two-hour marathon in a competitive race
Feel a bit bad for Yomif Kejelcha who also broke the 2-hour mark, with this being his first competition marathon, but managed to neither break a record nor win.
signorovitch··on NASA Force
Fedora linux
signorovitch··on Why Japan has such good railways
Japan also has amazing car infrastructure too! Last time I was there visiting family in the mountains, I was quite impressed by the number and quality of tunnels and spiral ramps. The highways are similarly privatized, with tolls like train fares reducing the need for government subsidies.
signorovitch··on NASA Force
Ran smooth on both my iPhone and my 13-year-old thinkpad x230.
signorovitch··on PBS Nova: Terror in Space (1998)
Amazing that this is still up, and that so many of the links still work. Great find!
signorovitch··on Backblaze has stopped backing up OneDrive and Dropbox folders and maybe others
The primary trouble I have with backblaze was that this change was not clearly communicated, even if perhaps it could be justified.
signorovitch··on The Lazarus Sign
What I thought was interesting is the movement seems similar to the involuntary positioning I have observed in individuals with hyperventilation syndrome (hands curled in over sternum). I have no idea if these are related though.
signorovitch··on Stop Using Grey Text (2025)
I’m looking at gray text on an off-white background right now :P
signorovitch··on I'm losing the SEO battle for my own open source project
> This isn't an SEO problem. This is a Google problem.

I've tested on a few of the big search engines, and nanoclaw.dev is never in the first page.

Gemini was also unable to find the .dev, even in "Research Mode." The only way I was able to get a direct link to nanoclaw.dev was with chatgpt, which found it by scraping the GitHub (it also spat out links to a couple of other copies it found from google.)

Seems this is a wider SEO issue, one which infiltrates even the technology supposed to replace it.

signorovitch··on A new Polymarket account made over $500k betting on the U.S. strike against Iran
FTR, her actual response was

    “Already addressed this, wasn't on purpose and everything else still stands.”
signorovitch··on A new Polymarket account made over $500k betting on the U.S. strike against Iran
That same account[0] has also already lost at least 100k betting on similar middle eastern conflict markets. Not at all ruling out insider information, certainly looks suspicious, but it’s easy just to find one big win or winner.

[0] https://polymarket.com/@magamyman

signorovitch··on Ghostty – Terminal Emulator
My only issue with ghostty is it isn’t immediately recognized by some programs through ssh (eg less) and they don’t operate properly. However there’s a one liner that solves the problem permanently on the remote machine[0] so it isn’t too bad. Hopefully in the near future ghostty’s terminfo will be shipped with common linux distros.

[0] https://ghostty.org/docs/help/terminfo

signorovitch··on Aesthetics of single threading
Single-threading is also what allows you to stay up all night writing the 8 page essay that's due at 6:00am, what lets you drive for hours on end, what remembers protocol during a crisis. Not detracting from the OP's point at all, just single threading doesn't always have to be pleasant. One of its advantages is powering you through unpleasantries and getting what needs to be done done. Sometimes when we think we are 'multitasking,' we're just looking for ways to avoid the problem.
signorovitch··on Cloudflare threatens Italy exit over €14M fine
I find myself on Cloudflare’s side here, or at least Cloudflare finds itself on the side of privacy.
signorovitch··on Conbini Wars – Map of Japanese convenience store ratios
I wonder if this information would be a useful addition to a geoguessr player’s toolbox.
signorovitch··on Floor796
Reminds me of xkcd's "Click & Drag"

https://xkcd.com/1110/

signorovitch··on It's insulting to read AI-generated blog posts
I tend to agree, though not in all cases. If I’m reading because I want to learn something, I don’t care how the material was generated. As long as it’s correct and intuitive, and LLMs have gotten pretty good at that, it’s valuable to me. It’s always fun when a human takes the time to make something educational and creative, or has a pleasant style, or a sense of humor; but I’m not reading the blog post for that.

What does bother me is when clearly AI-generated blog posts (perhaps unintentionally) attempt to mask their artificial nature through superfluous jokes or unnaturally lighthearted tone. It often obscures content and makes the reading experience inefficient, without the grace of a human writer that could make it worth it.

However, if I’m reading a non-technical blog, I am reading because I want something human. I want to enjoy a work a real person sank their time and labor into. The less touched by machines, the better.

> It would be more human to handwrite your blog post instead.

And I would totally ready handwritten blog posts!

signorovitch··on Renaming the default branch of Rust-lang/rust
The anti-“master” argument feels pretty weak to me, but just as weak as the vehement opposition feels hidebound. It’s a name of a thing. If it changing it makes more people happy and likely to contribute, why not.
signorovitch··on How many elephants?
I thought at first it would represent everything in elephants; elephant volumes, elephant hides, elephant-years &c.
signorovitch··on Zed: High-performance AI Code Editor
I’ve been using Zed a few months on my fedora laptop (thinkpad x230) and haven’t had any performance issues. Definitely faster than any other graphical editor I’ve used. Perhaps a driver issue would be slowing it down?