Hacker News Reader

tsumniaon Digg is gone again

Damn. I still have faith that what a lot of us that migrated to new Digg envision is possible. Post pandemic Internet has choppier waters than before, but I'm going to try and keep a positive outlook and I look forward to their followup emails.

Thanks for the fun this past year Digg.

tsumniaon FFmpeg at Meta: Media Processing at Scale

Damned for virtual signalling if they make posts about their contributions, damned for destroying tech when they don't. I love these kinds of articles and share them with students all the time.

tsumniaon Building a new Flash

> I think Minecraft and Roblox replaced flash for the new generations.

I think this is the biggest shift. Minecraft starting out as a .jar file allowed for reverse engineering and modding support became a huge part of its "culture". Coupled with artists focusing on spritesheets, you got to have that same Newgrounds online underground scene but for the next generation of kids.

Roblox is takes a similar place now that Minecraft is ~15 years old and all "grown up". Maybe once Roblox hits that similar fate this new Flash will be ready to fill its shoes.

tsumniaon Interview with Øyvind Kolås, GIMP developer (2017)

I started with GIMP and still pull it up first before worrying about Photoshop. For me, the "fighting muscle memory" comes from "huh, GIMP does it like this..."

tsumniaon Dan Simmons, author of Hyperion, has died

Oh absolutely, I don't want to spoil anything but (to sound like a nutcase for a second) if there is an Illuminati then I think they were avid readers of Carrion.

Apropos given your username XD

tsumniaon Dan Simmons, author of Hyperion, has died

I favor Carrion over Hyperion and find myself repeating Sheriff Bobby Joe Gentry's line "I like junk" quite often.

tsumniaon This time is different

Just chiming in to say thanks for the Pratchett quote! I dare say he's about to beat out Douglass Adams for my top author. Feets of Clay and Hogfather should be must reads for people dealing with AI right now imo.

tsumniaon Large-Scale Online Deanonymization with LLMs

I recently decided to play around with this, given... well my profile... and I will say that Gemini was good at zeroing in on who I was, but for whatever reason would refuse to stay my name.

tsumniaon The Misuses of the University

I like Discworld's take on "advanced culture" - Ankh-Morpork is simple built on top of the skeletons of the original city multiple times over.

tsumniaon A simple web we own

> The missing piece is still discovery.

I think the key issue here is that Attention is a temporal construct, meaning discovery is often tied to "being the first thing that comes to people's minds" which means SEO, reverse engineering the ranking algorithms, and constantly having to manage an "online persona". Note none of those things contribute to the actual work you're doing, just your "marketing department" (and whatever time/financial "budget" you intend to give it).

MrBeast figured out the YouTube algorithm - post early and often. Is that how we exist on modern Internet when every website/thumbnail is engineered by a team to maximize clickthrough rates? I agree RSS is useful, but it faces the same scalability issues if everyone starts filling up your RSS feeds. Given the limited amount of time you can devote to a particular task, we'll return to the era of A/B testing Headlines.

tsumniaon Management Time: Who's Got the Monkey? [pdf]

Gonna spend the morning giving this a read. I'd also like to also recommend, in case any one is dreading the "ugh boss talk", the book "The Fred Factor" by Mark Sanborn [1].

[1] https://www.amazon.com/Fred-Factor-Passion-Ordinary-Extraord...

tsumniaon Douglas Adams on the English–American cultural divide over "heroes"

> Although to be fair, he does tend to revert by the start of his next story.

I'd say that's most of the Discworld series though. Protagonist is living peaceful, MacGuffin ensues chaos, Protagonist (or Arbitrary Thing) saves the day, the Disc goes back to normal, and the Turtle continues to move.

Discworld is my favorite series and I think Hogfather and Feets of Clay should be mandatory reads for people going into AI.

tsumniaon Douglas Adams on the English–American cultural divide over "heroes"

Referencing does not necessarily equate to sentiment though. Similar to seeing Calvin from Calvin and Hobbes peeing on thing decals isn't representative to the admiration to the comic series. The "woop woop woop woop" adult voice is another core element to US culture making fun of authorative figures, but doesn't dismiss them as unneed aspects to life.

tsumniaon Use social media mindfully

I'm still on Facebook (and Digg for those HNers that hop on to all the tech boards - you know I see you), but it's to keep up with some family that are there. But I adopted a simple catchphrase (GET OFF THE INTERNET) and time my posts for Sunday mornings to get all them folks that were waking up and immediately scrolling. Repeat that for a few weeks, and I think its helped give people the "please disconnect" message.

I'm a huge wrestling and movie dork, so... screens. And the embedded videos on Reddit didn't help since I could watch wrestling on /r/SquaredCircle rather than support the product I like. In conversations, I've blamed The Walking Dead, as that was the first show I recall encouraging people to "hop online to chat" while the new episodes aired. Then "live tweeting" became a thing and here we are.

Friends and family are still there, but they've at least gone from the "grow your business online" or "complain about politics" to talking about the NFL, or a painting they finished, or some music piece they're working on.

I still want to disconnect more, but we don't really have a cure for "shiny rock addiction" yet.

tsumniaon Ask HN: What did you find out or explore today?

"Space Cowboy" makes it sound like you're in a cyberpunk future

tsumniaon Simpler than Photoshop but for free AI Landscaping

We had a few trees fall in our backyard last year and one of the first things I did was throw a picture into Photoshop for its generative fill tool. I removed the fallen trees, then added some raised garden beds and a gazebo (for good measure).

I'll play around with the tool a bit later, as the above is an idea I have for a homework assignment. I'd be happy to chat off HN about some of the ways this type of tool would be super beneficial for landscapers/engineers.

tsumniaon Ask HN: Share your personal website

https://www.doctorsensei.com

I'm a Doctor. I'm a Sensei. I'm a Doctor Sensei.

tsumniaon Video Game Websites in the early 00s

While I agree with current "Top-Level Internet" as I call it, the blurb is referring to the '99-'00s era when we were still very much disconnected. Those clubs had a forum on AOL and that was it.

I think Discord is where the "New Internet" is forming, because that's where this generation of kids are hanging out. We were in the Nintendo chat rooms, and they're in the modern day equivalents. We just think they are on Twitch and Kick because that's where the grown ups are playing games, but remember there's a reason Roblox is popular.

Kids don't want to hang out with grown ups.

tsumniaon Video Game Websites in the early 00s

Here's one from my old AOL days. We originally just used email, AOL message boards, and a scheduled weekly chatroom, but once the Web took over it merged into Starmen.net [2]

Since we're on a "reminsence about legacy Internet" trend right now, here's the opening to [1]:

"What most people forget to remember is that it’s not just about the game. It’s about the people, it’s about the newsletters, it’s about the discussions, the trivia, the polls, the websites, and the meetings. Everything that was a part of the club was a part of the community, and there was so much involved that it was almost too much to handle. Who had the time to be a member of some 15 Online clubs? I can distinctly remember sending out invitations to join Moonside and receiving replies along the lines of “Sorry, I’m already in like 5 of these things.” Now, I wish there were more clubs and to any of you who have one: I will readily join. The only last great, recently active club I can think of now is the EarthBound Gang, arguably the greatest Online EarthBound Club ever. In early 1999, a lot of the clubs started dying out. I know that mine began to slow down, only to be restarted in the fall of 99’, and again in the summer of 00’. But as a whole, the EB clubs were never restarted, which is a shame, because some of them were downright fun."

[1] https://www.angelfire.com/ga3/ebhistory/intro.html

[2] https://starmen.net/

tsumniaon Video Game Websites in the early 00s

I think <map> should make a comeback [1]. Then we could go back to having sick looking art pages

[1] https://www.w3schools.com/tags/tag_map.asp

tsumniaon During Helene, I just wanted a plain text website

Likewise, we've always liked to "name things". My personal desktop is named "Foundation" (first built PC) and my car is named "Big Boi" (first adult purchase). Generic names are fine for operational equipment, but no one wants to refer to natural disasters as "HURR-2026-EC02". That's why COVID is "COVID" instead of "severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2".

tsumniaon During Helene, I just wanted a plain text website

May I interest you in my doctorsensei.com/how-to-get-off-the-internet.html page?

tl;dr Use dark mode and set f.lux (or the equivalent) to Cave Painting. Helped me out a lot

tsumniaon During Helene, I just wanted a plain text website

Now that's a template I haven't seen in a long time! Thanks for the fun trip down memory lane that "started it all".

tsumniaon Ask HN: What would you do if you didn't work in tech?

Fly some drones, maybe thermal image wildlife

tsumniaon On the Existence, Impact, and Origin of Hallucination-Associated Neurons in LLMs

> You're just arguing about semantics. It doesn't matter in any substantial way.

While I agree for many general aspects of LLMs, I do disagree in terms of some of the meta-terms used when describing LLM behavior. For example, the idea that AI has "bias" is problematic because neural networks literally have a variable called "bias", thus of course AI will always have "bias". Plus, a biases AI is literally the purpose behind classification algorithms.

But these terms, "bias" and "hallucinations", are co-opted to spin a narrative of no longer trusting AI.

How in the world did creating an overly confident chatbot completely 180 years of AI progress and sentiment?

tsumniaon You have reached the end of the internet (2006)

Now that we've reached the end of the Internet, enjoy instructions on how to get OFF the Internet.

https://doctorsensei.com/how-to-get-off-the-internet.html

tsumniaon Computer science courses that don't exist, but should (2015)

Reread my last sentence - allow me to rephrase it:

If you mean "BIAS" as in avoiding "RACE/ETHNICITY/SOCIOECONOMIC_STATUS", most groups state they do not use them for decision making and still deal with the "general public" not believing them because results do not support their opinions.

tsumniaon Computer science courses that don't exist, but should (2015)

I linked my lecture about how I see "ethics" as another term for "politics" in the academic sense.

Other points to note: All AI will always have bias; a) because neural networks literally have a constant called 'bias' in them; and b) training a prediction algorithm means it is being trained to be bias and running a clustering algorithm means lumping commonly themed attributes together.

If you mean "BIAS" as in "RACE/ETHNICITY/SOCIOECONOMIC_STATUS", then most groups already do this, state they do it, and still deal with the general public not believing them.

tsumniaon Computer science courses that don't exist, but should (2015)

Feel free to review my Ethics in AI lecture: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XBJRDxwbI9Y

This isn't a "Trump Era"/"Right Wing Talking Point" amigo, its the truth; also it's always been this way, listen to some punk rock. Is AI allowed to generate child pornography? Because that is currently being argued as protected by Free Speech in courts because no child was actually involved [1]. Sorry your ethics class was useless, I don't believe mine is.

[1] https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2024/11/21/pennsy...

tsumniaon Study finds growing social circles may fuel polarization

"An information flow model for conflict and fission in small groups (1977)" by Wayne W. Zachary [https://www.jstor.org/stable/pdf/3629752.pdf]

I know this paper isn't about social networks, but we know this, we knew it in the 70s. The only difference is that we continue to ignore and forget it.