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todd3834

2,517 karma · joined November 23, 2009

@mrtoddwilliams

toddsurfs at icloud [dot] com

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todd3834··on Show HN: I Built an AI-Powered Headshot Generator
I tried to use it but never got the verification code in my email (including spam).

Looks cool, I love to follow the indie hacker scene on Twitter: how does it compare to https://www.headshotpro.com/ or https://photoai.com/

You might find a lot of inspiration from levelsio on Twitter and danypostmaa since they are in the same space and share a lot about their marketing

todd3834··on US developers can offer non-app store purchasing, Apple still collect commission
It’s very interesting to read through the threads. I’m seeing two sides of the argument but clearly the majority here are not happy about what Apple is doing or anyone who tries to stick up for it. I hope people continue to share their perspective. Even if it is not popular to the HN crowd because I appreciate a balanced discussion.
todd3834··on US developers can offer non-app store purchasing, Apple still collect commission
Do you really think they wouldn’t care if developers left their platform? They care because it’s beneficial to them. I don’t expect anything else from any corporation including the ones who’ve employed me.
todd3834··on US developers can offer non-app store purchasing, Apple still collect commission
They probably do care a lot about developers staying on their platform. The 30% is only from companies making more than $1 million. Otherwise you can qualify for 15% small business program.

I don’t need them to be my friend or to care about me but as a share holder I want them to succeed. So far their R&D has proven valuable to me as both a consumer and share holder.

I don’t care if a few people who already have everything get richer. Since I believe the company is doing great things and I think it still has a bright future ahead I get to share in that upside too. And so can you if you want to.

todd3834··on I quit my job to work full time on my open source project
Here are some of my often use cases: Long kunernetes commands, or ssh into an ip you don’t have remembered, curl commands when testing an api. Anything on the CLI that is long and either hard to remember or just annoying to type.
todd3834··on Nvidia CEO: We bet the farm on AI and no one knew it
Luck is spelled W.O.R.K.
todd3834··on Perplexity Labs Playground
While I understand what you are trying to say with your analogy I think it shows a misunderstanding of how they work. If you meant a very good autocomplete then yes that's exactly what they are. However, predicting the next word in an autocomplete can be naive or rather involved.

> not really useful for anything other than a VERY good spell checker.

Try GitHub code pilot. Try asking it to summarize something you know nothing about and then tell it that you need the explanation to be more simple several times. How can you compare this to a spell checker?

todd3834··on Rage: Fast web framework compatible with Rails
I wonder if the name comes from how funny “RageController” is to read in the code
todd3834··on OpenAI board stands firm in face of staff revolt over Sam Altman's ouster
At this point I’m assuming the employees signing the letter are aware of enough details to decided whether or not Sam did something so wrong he should have been fired. With this many employees siding with Sam, I can’t imagine this looks good if any of this goes to a jury in the lawsuits that follow.
todd3834··on OpenAI's employees were given two explanations for why Sam Altman was fired
Fair enough, I should have said, it’s my opinion that it has had a positive impact. I still think it’s easy to see them as a non profit. Even with everything they announced at AI day.

Can anyone make an argument against it? Or just downvote because you don’t agree.

todd3834··on OpenAI's employees were given two explanations for why Sam Altman was fired
I don’t think OpenAI ever reported to be profitable. They are allowed and should make money so they can stay alive. ChatGPT has already had a tremendous positive impact on society. The cause of safe AGI is going to take a lot of money in more research.
todd3834··on A coder considers the waning days of the craft
> At one point, we wanted a command that would print a hundred random lines from a dictionary file. I thought about the problem for a few minutes, and, when thinking failed, tried Googling. I made some false starts using what I could gather,

If this is the skill level of the coder then I’m not surprised that they are worried about GPT. However they should be stoked GPT can help them code at a much higher level

todd3834··on Apple's Blue Ocean
I really enjoyed the first half talking about how Apple and Nintendo followed a blue ocean strategy. Then the second half ranting about removable batteries felt totally out of place. I’m not sure I buy the blue ocean strategy of that, although well written.
todd3834··on Google owes executive $1M after losing gender bias lawsuit
Maybe but I imagine his future at the company will be strained after this. Is he willing to do this on exit? Since there is no financial issue I’m not sure what he would win.

Not a lawyer… etc…

todd3834··on Bill Gates demonstrates Visual Basic (1991) [video]
What a great read! Thanks for sharing. Trip down memory lane to a very happy time in my life.

jaguar32 and master32, :) swapping bas files was the only way I could actually do difficult stuff in the beginning

todd3834··on Bill Gates demonstrates Visual Basic (1991) [video]
Thank you for making hacking on AOL punters and proggies accessible to a middle school kid in the 90s. Your project is the reason I’ve made an entire career of writing code.
todd3834··on United Airlines plans to board passengers with window seats first
The only thing people care about is room for their carry on. Otherwise put me on last, first or in the middle I don’t care
todd3834··on Tesla is launching their developer APIs
For anyone wondering what you can actually do with this. The Fleet API link at the top is the documentation: https://developer.tesla.com/docs/fleet-api
todd3834··on Mistral 7B
This is my hello world test for coding assistant for LLMs. CodeLlama and GPT4 crush the answer. I love seeing innovation in the space but Mistral kind of failed me on my first test:

---------------------

>>> Write code that will track swipes in Typescript

. Swipe should be detected when the user moves a finger over 30% of the screen, and then drags it all the way to the end of the screen.

## Getting started You need to have yarn or npm installed before you can run this app

### Running in browser ```bash yarn install yarn serve ```

### Running with docker Use the docker-compose file located at ./docker/docker-compose.yml ```bash cd <path-to-project> docker-compose up ```

## Screenshot ![Screenshot](./images/screenshot.png)

todd3834··on GPT 3.5 vs. Llama 2 fine-tuning: A Comprehensive Comparison
What has me excited about Llama: I've built some tools that I think would make sense to offer for an affordable "lifetime price" but they currently rely on OpenAI api / GPT4. I cannot get myself to offer lifetime memberships to something with an ongoing cost. Lately I've been considering building Electron apps with Llama for code embedded targeted toward Apple Silicon devices. I think with this stack I wouldn't incur any ongoing costs and these utilities could exist for a one time fee.
todd3834··on Apple finally put USB-C in new iPhone, but limited to 23-year-old USB 2.0 speeds
Spot on! I read the article and for some reason thought that Apple has made a big mistake. You’ve reminded me that I literally never plug my iPhone in. I charge with MagSafe and transfer everything over the network.

Next iPhone should have no port!

todd3834··on California moves to decriminalize use of magic mushrooms, other psychedelics
I’ve been around a lot of people on mushrooms. I will say that the experiences I’ve observed never made anyone think they could fly off a building. Maybe they were just lucky or the shrooms were always weak.

However, I have very real concerns about the effects on those who might have dormant mental illness. I have no proof but the idea that many kinds of drugs could amplify or accelerate a mental illness scares me in a mass consumption setting.

If there is no evidence for this then I’d like to know. If there is evidence for this then we need to really make it clear and educate people of the risk.

todd3834··on Show HN: Host a Website in the URL
Perhaps they meant CSP
todd3834··on Falcon 180B
> The use of the Work or Derivative Works to provide applications and integrated end user products which use the Work or Derivative Work in the background shall not be considered Hosting Use.

It almost sounds like they just want to avoid something like an AWS LLMA service to spin up off their hard work but building an app around it would be fine.

todd3834··on Falcon 180B
I wish I understood the commercial license. If you can’t host it, and they don’t offer it through an API, how can you use it commercially?
todd3834··on Killed by Google
My favorite one on the list would be Google Wave. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Wave

For some of these other ideas, I’m actually surprised Google even launched them. It’s hard to imagine most of these ideas moving the needle for Google at all. This must be the result of 20% time. I’ve heard they no longer have that?

todd3834··on Accessible Palette: stop using HSL for color systems (2021)
This is the library the author references. I’ve used it myself and it works great

https://github.com/gka/chroma.js

todd3834··on Block YouTube ads on AppleTV by decrypting and stripping ads from Profobuf
In a previous role I was tasked with increasing the lighthouse/pagespeed score across some web properties. After some iterations and very little improvements we would be asked what else we could do. Did we need to speed up the backend? Could we lower latency, etc…

The solution: I set up a query param that would disable google tag manager. All of the crazy tracking and telemetry stuff we didn't control was the biggest issue.

todd3834··on GPT-3.5 Turbo fine-tuning and API updates
> It is very important to us that the deployment of fine-tuning is safe. To preserve the default model's safety features through the fine-tuning process, fine-tuning training data is passed through our Moderation API and a GPT-4 powered moderation system to detect unsafe training data that conflict with our safety standards.

I wish there was some documentation on what kinds of things are determined unsafe. There are plenty of things I think we would all agree are unsafe. I'm sure we don't want fine tuned models on how to cause physical harm on other people.

I don't envy the challenge of making the call for more gray area, sometimes even cultural differences, in what is safe or not. Seems like a very hard problem we've seen social media struggle with. I'm reminded of some of the Covid "misinformation" being deemed as unsafe

todd3834··on Show HN: Practice coding interviews with tips and solution analysis with GPT
lol, interviews almost feel that way sometimes. ChatGPT isn’t solving the questions for you in this app. It gives you hints to help you solve it. Think of it like GitHub copilot is able to understand quite a bit when given enough context. Behind the scenes, we give it the context.
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