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thornton

13 karma · joined December 2, 2014

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thornton··on Fish in the Wrong Place
I was imagining to click a link to an indie hacker’s blog about a story outlining how it’s beneficial to “fish in the wrong place” to solve a problem or something
thornton··on VimGraph
This is one of those times when I want someone to explain the value to me. Like is this to help coding agents be more efficient?

Forgive my ignorance!

thornton··on Word2vec-style vector arithmetic on docs embeddings
We’ve done similar work. Use case was identifying pages in an old website that now 404 and where they should be redirected to.

Basically doc2vec and cosine similarity. Totally nonsensical matching outputs to the point matching on title tag vectors or precis was better so now I’m curious if we just did something wrong…

thornton··on The Peter Principle and exploiting overconfident workers
Weird unethical employer hack aside.. No one that works with/for me has the interest in an adjacent position with a more promising career trajectory.. so how common is this?
thornton··on Researchers complete first human trial on viability of enteral ventilation
Agreed!
thornton··on Ask HN: AI agents and the future of UI/UX design. Opinions?
that AI is trained on the old way of doing things. So AI can continue coding or can continue generating UIs that are all You know, Predictions based off of what the past was like. But then we’re at this weird inflection point too where you can’t really have just more of the same be the answer. Everyone kind of agrees that chat which is being used for pretty much everything right now, is nonoptimal user experience for most use cases. And yet that’s what we’re doing.

We don’t really know any better. Even agents that will take 15 minutes and then come back to you they’ll summarize a bunch of stuff along the way. That’s considered, like, good UX practices. That’s the best practice right now. Using using a small model to summarize a thinking models reasoning, as you go so that the user knows that while it’s waiting, things are actually happening.

So I think If anything, whatever is next becomes something new. And therefore it’s gonna be hard for AI in its current form, LLM driven m to solve for it. Without us doing some of that human computer interaction design thinking, for a long while.

thornton··on The DOJ still wants Google to sell off Chrome
The main problem with Google anti competition is how chrome is being leveraged to mine user behavior signals for search engine algos. That is the unfair advantage that needs to be killed off
thornton··on The average American spent 2.5 months on their phone in 2024
That’s 20.83% I don’t think it’s that far off.

I just opened screen time in my iPhone, checked devices for phone, selected weekly tab, and flipped back last few weeks to get average of 42 hours per week, with 168 hours in a week puts me at 25% for December.

I’m apparently above average!

thornton··on How I run LLMs locally
These systems will collapse over time because the incentives are being removed for them to exist. So you won’t be able to point to your answers in quora or whatever but they’ll live in the training records and data and in some shape in neural nets being monetized.

I’m not like anti what’s happening or for it, it’s just, that social credit depends on those institutions surviving.

thornton··on Google search won't autocomplete searches related to Trump assasination attempt
Google is doing this because political content is harder to fact check and they do have initiatives to fight misinformation online. Autocomplete/suggest results are an aggregation of related searches so people could search something false and it shows on autocomplete making a user think a statement is true. Essentially autocomplete can be hijacked generally. Also auto suggest was originally an effort to reduce the number of unique searches which are generally quite high, something like 30%! By funneling people to certain results pages they could increase bids on ads for those results and have an easier time with QC by not having to account for as many completely unique searches. By leaving autocomplete off they actually generate more search intent data around those types of queries which they can do whatever they want with. I’m sure Google can predict a close election better with auto suggest off on political search intent. While I don’t love anything G does, I do think in this case it is a good practice to turn off autocomplete for certain types of news results. If Bing and DDG are showing autocomplete I hope it’s being monitored or those suggestions.
thornton··on Ask HN: Struggling with poor memory and executive function. What to do?
Yeah this. Sounded like a specific flavor of ADHD I’ve been lucky enough to build a toolset and team around my ineptness in a bunch of places including memory.

Ironically poster sounds pretty smart and good communicator