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xmprt

5,150 karma · joined April 23, 2019

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xmprt··on Too AI; Didn't Read
Not really ironic. They even say it here:

> Not anti-AI. Pro-giving-a-damn.

AI isn't the problem. The problem is that people are sending text without proof reading.

xmprt··on ChatGPT now knows what you do on other websites via ad collector
> OpenAI's ad collector at bzr.openai.com sets a cookie called __obi, scoped to .openai.com

This sentence is way too much detail and it's literally the first thing you read. I can pick apart most of the sentences in the article. Another one:

> Across 932 decoded sync tokens, 736 carried subject_type: account_user and 196 carried anonymous

This sentence is pointless. What matters to proving that "It works when you are logged out" is to show that the identifier is stable. Why does the reader care about the actual counts.

AI has a tendency to do this which makes AI generated text a lot harder to read. The raw prompts likely don't have the specific websites and cookie names because that's not relevant to the reader or writer for that matter - it's a footnote at best.

xmprt··on AI-generated posters don’t have to be horrible
The goal for most of these vertical shorts is soap opera so this is a feature and not a bug. Also, in order to maintain engagement, they often need to have continuously escalating plots which makes for bad writing (typically in good plots you have dips in action before the next climax). The problem isn't what AI can generate and rather what people are asking for (both the audience and the producers).
xmprt··on Android 17 is the first since 3.x to add new APIs without releasing to the AOSP
Valve is working on supporting apks for their new VR operating system. If this goes anything like Proton then I'm hopeful for the future of Android without Google.
xmprt··on Android 17 is the first since 3.x to add new APIs without releasing to the AOSP
Google is starting to turn into early 2000s / late 90s Oracle.
xmprt··on Astra for Law
Many lawyers are owners/partners compared with software engineers who are more like cogs in the machine. They also bill hourly/contingency per case compared to engineers who are salaried. If a partner in a firm thinks they can take on more cases because of AI assistance then they will because that's just more money in their pockets.
xmprt··on Why I didn’t sign the Fields medallists’ letter
> We fund astronomy well beyond the solar system despite there being no real prospect of practical applications

There are a lot of immediate practical benefits to learning more about the physics and chemistry of the universe beyond our solar system.

xmprt··on Why I didn’t sign the Fields medallists’ letter
Also it ignores the fact that the core of calculus and the idea of dealing with infinitesimal quantities was independently discovered for many centuries. eg. Archimedes use techniques that were eerily similar to integrals.

The work that Newton and Leibniz did was in formalizing it and coming up with the notation that would end up being more widely accepted and applicable. It's very likely that the techniques would have been developed later to solve a practical problem.

xmprt··on Astra for Law
> The biggest wallet wins

This was already always the case. If anything, making this more accessible will reduce the barrier to entry for whether or not it's worth your time to take on a case. Instead of 50 lawyers spending 100s of hours on a case, you can have 1 or 2 lawyers + Astra working on it and if there's a case you can add more real lawyers.

xmprt··on Tao: Open math problems being non-renewably mined by AI
If there are no incentives for mathematicians to work on and share progress in tough problems because they will get scooped, then they will end up quitting and in net we will see less progress overall.
xmprt··on ChatGPT Images 2.5
reddit used to shared how much gold purchases went towards their server costs (pretty sure it wasn't 100% accurate but at least good to an order of magnitude). It was approximately $1/hour and they served ~100M monthly active users. So I don't think those metrics would demonstrate how wasteful traditional data centers are like you think it would.
xmprt··on LG TVs caught spying even when offline or on standby
> your average Smart TV buyer is prepared to sign into Netflix, Disney+, Hulu, Prime Video, Crunchyroll, Youtube etc

I think this is starting to change a bit especially as companies crack down on password sharing. Once the dam breaks, there's gonna be a pretty drastic and unstoppable migration towards the "dumb" TV products + more open alternatives. I'm already seeing a lot of families start to move to DVDs and Blurays for kids who just watch the same 5 movies on repeat anyway.

This migration is already happening away from Windows. Gaming was the big moat that Windows had but now with Steam Proton and better Linux alternatives, a ton of people are starting to move away and while it's not a significant majority yet, I think the tides have already turned and there's not much Microsoft can do to turn it back.

xmprt··on Watch Los Angeles get built, one building at a time (1880–2026)
Why are you acting like there isn't a definition of inefficient. I think "underutilized" is a pretty good definition.

The fact that every single person has a small private park in their front and backyards that's enjoyed maybe a couple hours per day at most is pretty wasteful - if it was shared the utilization would go way up and space used would be way down. Same goes for all the parking lots needed to facilitate car traffic - if we used more efficient/shared options like buses or trams then the parking lots that sit empty most of the day could be replaced with more businesses or houses that allow people to live closer to the services that they need every day.

Meanwhile, we have big bottlenecks in our city downtowns where all the density is packed. Spread that out and things get a lot more efficient - your commute probably goes down too because you can live closer to work. Suburbs don't work without a productive city near them - otherwise they're just rural areas.

xmprt··on Twitter Viewer – View Twitter Without Account
Bigger "guns" diplomacy. They don't need any legal basis for a C&D. Just depends on whether you have enough money to fight it in court.
xmprt··on Show HN: Bribes.fyi – Compare bribes statistics department wise
Not much to see here. Crowd sourced, vibe coded app. Not sure what "verified" means because the only verification they did was require a checkbox that "I confirm this is a genuine experience"
xmprt··on Grok 4.6
> Yes that's been obvious since the beginning

But if it's so obvious, then why are we still relying on it in the system prompt. It's just wasting context at this point.

xmprt··on Hackers Stalked Me by Hijacking a Smartwatch for Kids
You can brush that $177M fine aside but I'm almost certain that none of the Chinese companies above with these security vulnerabilities will pay even $1 in fines.
xmprt··on “Code was never the hard part” is an insult to all programmers
> Ask claude, use ssh with key-based auth and he will take care of it :) just saying

This already goes over the heads of most non-developers.

I think you're misunderstanding my point. It's not that LLMs aren't a useful tool or that they won't replace some developers. But rather that software development as a specialty won't go away because most people can't build software with LLMs in a way that won't blow up.

xmprt··on “Code was never the hard part” is an insult to all programmers
Most of the people who say LLMs will replace developers have never built and deployed a real app. I know someone working on an app that they were deploying and after "writing" thousands of lines of code with Codex, they needed help to deploy it despite getting pretty clear (IMO) instructions from the LLM. Later they were struggling to set up a test environment or add backups to the point that I was worried they might break production.

The few people who manage to write good quality production apps with AI are developers whether they like it or not and that number isn't high enough to obsolete existing developers.

xmprt··on Hackers Stalked Me by Hijacking a Smartwatch for Kids
To be fair, in many (maybe all?) of those cases, those companies faced consequences. I highly doubt this company is going to face any consequence for this data breach.
xmprt··on Devtools must be open source
It's still the same problem. Now instead of checking if the code is correct, you have to check every day if your prompt is still validating the correct features that you expect to work.
xmprt··on Go 1.27 Interactive Tour
One of the reasons it took so long to implement generics in Go was because there was a lot of stuff you could do that didn't need it. Now that generics are there, a lot of that stuff is still the best way to solve the problem and many of the methods that require generics are in the standard library so it's rare that you absolutely need it.
xmprt··on The Kurzgesagt Situation is Insane [video]
Because Content ID was built following a $1B lawsuit by Viacom regarding copyright infringement. Google doesn't have an incentive to build something similar for creators until some celebrity or large corporation starts suing them for using famous actor's likenesses. YouTubers alone can't fix this because they make too much money from YouTube to be able to take a stand (such as move content off platform to Nebula or the like).
xmprt··on The Silicon Valley Founder Meat Grinder
There's more truth to the "Forbes 30 Under 30 to prison pipeline" than people give it credit.
xmprt··on The AI trade now runs on borrowed money, and the lenders are repricing it
I think in this case, the OP is talking about "loss" from a financial perspective. Airlines are incredibly useful for society but don't make money and operate on razor thin margins. AI will likely have a similar financial picture. Of course you'll have you Claude and Codex enthusiasts just like you have the Delta vs United frequent flyers but a lot of people just book the cheapest ticket they can find from an aggregator website.
xmprt··on UEFA and its national associations will not participate in FIFA competitions
I can agree that it definitely makes it a different game/playstyle but I'm still not sure if it's guaranteed worse. Putting ads during the break is obviously bad and a cash grab but from a gameplay perspective, it's not clear that a short break during the half is necessarily worse.
xmprt··on Delayed Gratification – Proud to Be 'Last to Breaking News'
Agreed. But I think newspapers like The Economist have argued points like "Brexit is bad" quite well and it's not very nuanced because however you slice it, it has been catastrophic for the UK unless you're a corporate lawyer who has suddenly gotten a lot of new business.

Saying something deserves nuance because 1 out of 99 experts disagrees is exactly how you end up with increasing measles cases or adding 6 more lanes to a highway.

xmprt··on Delayed Gratification – Proud to Be 'Last to Breaking News'
> Even if I agreed with them I don't like "100%" biased news

I can understand why this might seem like a good take to have but sometimes you need 100% biased news because some things are 100% biased. Things like climate change is real or genocide is bad should not be controversial takes. Convincing people that there are two sides to an argument is exactly how you end up with sensationalism and extreme views that push the Overton window.

xmprt··on Exercise works for depression. So why isn't it treated like real medicine?
The idea that doctors are not talking about exercise as if it's some big conspiracy to make more money from the top is ridiculous. Any doctor will say that exercise is the best thing you can do for yourself but most people also know that it's super inconvenient and most people don't follow that advice.

If anything, the people making it out to be some big conspiracy against mainstream medicine are doing it more for the money because they're often peddling some alternative medicine or supplements.

xmprt··on The startup's Postgres survival guide
ORMs are just tech debt. Even if your highest cost is developer salaries, you're just pushing that cost down the line.
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