EdgeExplorer

Agree. I wouldn't change a thing. There are so, so many unscrambling words games. If someone just wants to casually unscramble words, they can find something more to their taste.

As implemented: There is a clear "game over". You did as well as you could; try again tomorrow. That's great. The length/difficulty gets harder as you go on, so getting to 18 is a true challenge. Also great. The letters are in the order they are in, no reshuffling. This is also great. You can't just spam reshuffle until you see it; you have to make do with what you got.

Heh, joke's on the author. I've built both a flashcard app and a notes app using AI, and I've learned more Polish in 6 months than other languages I've studied for years. Jury still out on the notes app.

But of course he's not really wrong. I've been a heavy user of Anki and a heavy reader of certain schools of academic literature on second language acquisition and knew exactly what I wanted and why and how it differed from existing tools.

The lesson I take is that you need a specific problem that you truly understand, whether it's your own problem or not.

Seriously. My experience with 15 years of home ownership is probably more like 3% per year. I don't think I've ever had even a single year where 1% was accurate.

This is a pretty niche problem compared to the every-ticket-of-every-big-show scalper problem. This affects <1% of ticket buyers. Scalpers currently affect 100%. Seems like a pretty reasonable trade-off.

Also, solvable. Everyone needs an ID that matches ticket or to be accompanied by someone with an ID that matches a ticket purchased in the same transaction (cap number of non-ID tickets per ID ticket, don't let people appearing over 30 in on a non-ID ticket). Then, when buying tickets, allow specifying a named alternate for each ID ticket in case the person can't make it.

Heck no. The world would be a way better place with no personal automobiles. Trains, yes. Even trucks and buses, sure. Cars, nooooooooooo. Cars are among the most clearly net-negative inventions to come out of industrialization. They should be criticized and fought until finally defeated. Self-driving cars are a massive waste of human and physical resources to provide a solution that is still strictly worse than proper urbanism and transportation network design.

I'm somewhere on the pro-AI spectrum (great tool, let's use it *where we've evaluated it and it's the best tool for the job*), but... 100% agree. AI is a tool and outcomes should speak for themselves. I'm not impressed by what tools you used building your thing, and "AI" is not a feature or a benefit on its own.

Indeed. "AI-enabled pointer" is misdirection. This isn't an AI-enabled pointer; it's sending screen to AI, which yes, includes pointer position. The AI doesn't live in the pointer. The AI lives, apparently, so thoroughly in the system that it can see and do anything, and the pointer is just a way of giving it context.

Facebook has a real name policy and is a prime example of internet-fueled insanity. Why does deanonymization not help Facebook be a more positive place?

> Ablation (Latin: ablatio – removal) is the removal or destruction of something from an object by vaporization, chipping, erosive processes, or by other means. Examples of ablative materials[clarification needed] are described below, including spacecraft material for ascent and atmospheric reentry, ice and snow in glaciology, biological tissues in medicine and passive fire protection materials.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ablation

The poster is saying that a case can wear out and be replaced without damage to the phone. You can let the case take all the damage, then get a new one. But if you let a phone take all the damage (even if it's a tougher phone), you can't remove that damage.

My point wasn't supposed to be that copyright is bad (or that it's good), just that the business logic of fighting the sharing of lyrics is incomprehensible to me.

That aside, I think there's a lot more complexity than you're presenting. The issue is who gets to benefit from what work.

As hackers, we build cool things. And our ability to build cool things comes in large part from standing on the shoulders of giants. Free and open sharing of ideas is a powerful force for human progress.

But people also have to eat. Which means even as hackers focused on building cool things, we need to get paid. We need to capture for ourselves some of the economic value of what we produce. There's nothing wrong with wanting to get paid for what you create.

Right now, there is a great deal of hacker output the economic value of which is being captured almost exclusively by LLM vendors. And sure, the LLM is more amazing than whatever code or post or book or lyric it was trained on. And sure, the LLM value comes from the sum of the parts of its source material instead of the value of any individual source. But fundamentally the LLM couldn't exist without the source material, and yet the LLM vendor is the one who gets to eat.

The balance between free and open exchange of ideas and paying value creators a portion of the value they create is not an easy question, and it's not anti-hacker to raise it. There are places where patents and other forms of exclusive rights seem to be criminally mismanaged, stifling progress. But there's also "some random person in Nebraska" who has produced billions of dollars in value and will never see a penny of it. Choosing progress alone as the goal will systematically deprive and ultimately drive away the very people whose contributions are enabling the progress. (And of course choosing "fair" repayment alone as the goal will shut down progress and allow less "fair" players to take over... that's why this isn't easy.)

I'm not one of the downvoters, but it may be this: "Many sites have been doing that for decades and as far as I know record companies haven't gone after them."

Record companies have in fact, for decades, been going after sites for showing lyrics. If you play guitar, for example, it's almost impossible to find chords/tabs that include the lyrics because sites get shut down for doing that.

The obsession with protecting access to lyrics is one of the strangest long-running legal battles to me. I will skip tracks on Spotify sometimes specifically because there are no lyrics available. Easy access to lyrics is practically an advertisement for the music. Why do record companies not want lyrics freely available? In most cases, it means they aren't available at all. How is that a good business decision?

There are better answers in the linked book. :)

But no, nothing is sacred. Not only that, from a historical perspective, the current pace of language change is shockingly slow because of the impact of media. It would not be at all unusual for a word like drop to move entirely to a new metaphorical meaning causing other words to have to fill in the gap. In German, you "let fall" something. Even if anything was sacred, "drop" would be far, far from sacred. It is very easy to replace.

(The closest thing to sacred is words for familiar, every day objects and people. "Mama" is pretty nearly universal, for example. But even so, we literally don't even know where the word "dog" came from, so no, nothing is sacred.)

There are many many examples if you search (or even better, read the book!), but here are a few:

"silly" originally meant something more like "blessed"

"fear" meant "danger", referring to a thing feared, not the feeling

"nice" meant "foolish" and literally comes from roots mean "not knowing"

This kind of change in meaning is very, very normal. This is just how language works. I really think you will enjoy the book. The author is very easy to read and covers a ton of linguistic ground.

Tried it out. The categories require way too much trivia / pop culture knowledge for me to be interested. I can look at the items and know right away that I just don't know and no amount of thinking will get me there.

This really isn't a word game; it's a trivia game, and if you like trivia and know pop culture, I can imagine it would be fun. But I don't like trivia or know pop culture, so it was just random guessing and experiencing the insanely aggressive negative feedback for being wrong over and over (would definitely tone that down).

Sorry, but not for me. Best of luck with finding your target users! Nice design work and name.

My proposition is that likes are very different from the non-verbal responses you describe.

Non-verbal responses can only happen in 1) an existing conversation with 2) a small group.

Likes often happen 1) in place of conversation and 2) within a large group.

A like could be given drive-by by any of your 1000 connections at any with no other engagement. That is nothing like "uh huh" and head nods. In fact, if someone outside your small group conversation interjects an "uh huh" randomly while walking past, it's a bit rude.

What do I say to my cousin that I see a few times a year but would like to maintain a connection with? Do I just randomly send them pictures of my food and posts about what I've been up to? Do I send an occasional random banality like "how's the weather"? Neither of these seem like good strategies.

But if I could see the occasional (low frequency) update on things in their life or interesting to them... I could maybe see an opportunity to reach out for a real conversation about something of mutual interest.

Imagine you're suddenly teleported to a party with a hundred people you know and like but aren't super close to. How do you join a conversation? I mean, if it was people you were really close to, you'd just go up and talk to someone. That's group chat / SMS. But if it's more aquaintence level... one of two things probably happens: You overhear something that you're interested in and connect on that, or you randomly drop in various conversations at a surface level until something clicks.

That's what I'm after. Conversation that naturally flows from a spark. You don't need that with your closest friends, but you don't need a social network to keep up with your closest friends either. I imagine social networking as the tool to provide ongoing sparks for real direct interactive conversations on an occasional but ongoing basis with people you aren't close enough to to just call/text.

Yes, but with better UX.

"Hitting" with any of your friends is precisely the type of interaction I want to suppress. The way you know if what you say to your friends in real life is interesting to them is if they engage with it. If your feedback mechanism is anything other than the other side of a mutually interesting conversation, you probably aren't having ordinary conversation with friends. What real life feedback mechanisms most closely resembles likes? Applause. Who applauds? An audience.

Friends *can* give non-verbal cues in real life that they are interested (nodding, laughing, etc.), but likes are very much not like those non-verbal cues. Non-verbal cues only work in a very small group. There is no non-verbal cue that works to show interest in the context of "any of your friends" in real life. Emoji reactions in the context of a back-and-forth chat could work as non-verbal cues, but again, those are very different from drive-by likes with no additional engagement.

In this hypothetical social network, if you post something and no one responds to it or engages with it in any way verbally, you would be encouraged to do the same thing you would do in real life if you kept trying to talk about something in a group of friends and no one engaged with it verbally... find something else to talk about (or find a different group for that topic).

The goal is very much to mirror the experience of talking to your friends, but facilitated in a way that makes it more asynchronous and scalable (within the limit of your actual real life connections).

There are a lot of people in my life I would love to stay better connected with, but maintaining a direct chat can be difficult (what to say) and it doesn't always make sense to put people in group chats because the group might only make sense to me (people I used to work with that I actually like, for example). If I could post about what's going on in my life, what I'm working on, what I'm into right now, etc. and have my real-life friends opt-in to an actual conversation about that... well then it's much easier to stay in touch. I have no interest in knowing how many of my friends "like" what I'm sharing. If we aren't mutually talking to each other, we aren't engaging as friends no matter how much they may like it. They're just my audience if they have nothing to say back.

Sorry I didn't have time to make this shorter. My goal isn't to convince anyone of anything, just to share a perspective that might be interesting to you, OP or anyone else building something "social". You might sum it all up with the question: What if social media tried to be as much like real life friendship and as little like "influencing" as possible?

The problem with social media is that it encourages influencers broadcasting to followers over friends mutually interacting and winning over contributing (Great post here about ordinary / competitive conversation: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43080290)

So fix these problems.

1. No followers. Mutual connections only. Put a strict limit of 1000 connections in place to enforce this. No one actually has a mutual connection with more than 1000 people. This only hurts people trying to gain an audience. Heck, make it so if you haven't read someone else's posts in a year, they stop seeing yours. Do whatever it takes to prevent one-to-many connections.

2. No public content. No one wants the whole world to read their conversations with their friends. The only reason you would want that is if you want to build an audience.

3. No likes. No scores of any kind. If you show people a number, they will try to make it go up. No one tracks a score with their friends.

4. No newsfeed. Don't reward people for never shutting up. Maybe a chronological list of *friends* by most recent update and click into that to see all their updates.

5. No algorithm. Give people tools to find what they want to see; don't try to decide for them.

6. No re-post, no share, no forward, etc. Content lives in one place only, the account of the person who posted it, and it is only visible to who they said it should be visible to.

Avid go player with some basic familiarity with other classic abstract strategy games here.

There are some interesting ideas here but it feels like it's lacking a driving force pushing the game forward. It seems like the players can just keep rearranging their pieces in their own area refusing to engage and risk capture. Retreat seems to often be a sensible strategy.

Perhaps this is most similar to chess but in chess if your opponent just moves back and forth you can easily line up an unstoppable attack while they are messing around. It's unclear here how to avoid the situation where the opponents just dance around each other making sure they never get captured.

Could also compare to Stratego where there just isn't anywhere to retreat to, forcing players to engage.

Other abstracts like go and Othello are always adding pieces to the board so there's no way to stall or slow play the game.

Whoa. This is really cool. I've thought a lot about markup / configuration languages. Aside from types (won't get into typed/typeless here) there are basically just a few possible structures: lists, maps, tables (lists of maps with same keys), and trees (xml-like with nested nodes of particular types) are the ones I think about.

Most existing formats are really bad for at least one of these. Tables in JSON have tons of repetition. XML doesn't have a clear and obvious way to do maps. Almost anything other than XML is awkward at best for node trees.

Confetti seems to cover maps, trees, and non-nested lists really well, which isn't a combination any other format I'm aware of covers as well.

Nested lists and tables seem like they would be more awkward, though from what I can tell "-" is a legal argument, so you could do:

    nestedlist {
        - { - 1 ; - 2 }
        - {
            - { - a ; - b }
            - { - c ; - d }
        }
    }

To get something like [[1, 2], [[a, b], [c, d]]]. Of course you could also name the items (item { item 1 ; item 2 }), but either way this is certainly more awkward than a nested list in JSON or YAML.

I think a table could be done like JSON/HTML with repeated keys, but maybe also like:

    table name age favorite-color {
        row Bob 87 red
        row "Someone else" 106 "bright neon green"
    }

This is actually pretty nice.

In any event, I love seeing more exploration of configuration languages, so thanks for sharing this!

My number 1 request is a parser on the documentation page that shows parse tree and converts to JSON or other formats so you can play with it.

Also worth mentioning... even if you're trying to do "ordinary conversation" on the internet, someone is going to come in and steer it to competitive.

I think that captures what keeps me off social media.

I enjoy a good ordinary conversation with my friends and aquaintences, but social media won't let you have that. Every post, no matter how unserious and innocuous, is a valid target for competition or outright abuse/taunting/mocking/shaming/threatening, which I suppose Aristotle didn't encounter often enough to put on his list.

Sign language is not gestures.

This is covered in (among many other places) the introduction to the Wikipedia article on sign language: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sign_language

Obviously you could train some kind of neural net to calculate any function, but this would never make sense for a well-known function like sine. Neural nets are a great solution when you need to evaluate something that isn't easy to analyze mathematically, but there are already many known techniques for calculating and approximating trigonometric functions.

Training a neural net to calculate sines is like the math equivalent of using an LLM to reverse a string. Sure, you *can*, but the idea only makes sense if you don't understand how fundamentally solvable the problem is with a more direct approach.

It's always worth looking if mathematicians already have a solution to a problem before reaching for AI/ML techniques. Unfortunately, a lot of effort is probably being spent these days programming some kind of AI/ML to solve problems that have a known, efficient, maybe even proven optimal solution that developers just don't know about.

Because I don't universally prefer light or dark in all cases at all times?

All language is "random stuff arbitrary people make up".

"Rules" are just discovered patterns in the arbitrariness of language, convenient ways to capture and communicate how most people within a certain linguistic context express a certain idea. They are point-in-time observations of an evolving natural system, sharing much more in common with aphorisms like "April showers bring May flowers" than with the law of gravity or the tax code.

The English language is whatever English speakers and hearers agree it is. No linguistic "authority" can stop the inexorable evolution of language.

(Language evolution has dramatically slowed, but that's because of the printing press, the radio, the television, and the Internet creating massively larger and more durable linguistic communities than ever existed before, not because of authority.)

And to the original point of this thread... all of these so-called names for groups are nonsense. "A group of owls is called a parliament"... by whom? No one ever. Thus a group of owls is not called a parliament or a stare or a hoot or anything else cute. A group of owls doesn't have a name because owls don't form groups. In the unlikely event someone discovered a large group of owls together, I am quite certain they would call it a "flock", no matter what someone who thought they were clever wrote in a book.

Yeah, this is a trigger for me. (:

Dr. Geoff Lindsey is a great reference. Another is John McWhorter, specifically his books The Power of Babel and Words on the Move.

Linguists are scientists of the natural world, not law-makers.

This thread is a great example of how, even with an explicit author's note, different people will always interpret things differently.

So I guess I'll add my interpretation.

This is neither a horror story nor a story about AI safety. It is a parable.

> Before I came along, this world was content with believing that human life was sacred, but all the while turning its back to all the ways it actually treated human life like trash

> imagine a society very different from our own in which the sacredness of human life is taken absolutely seriously

The lesson is to be honest about the implications of the belief that human life is scared, or perhaps more generally, to be honest about the implications of whatever values you hold most dear. For different people this will lead to different actions and different political beliefs (as the author said he is not endorsing any particular political belief and I won't either), but one thing we surely cannot escape is taking very, very seriously any position of power or influence over human life.

The image of a dystopia brought about by a poorly-aligned AI is a means to an end, not what the story is about.

https://www.protolabs.com/ does this all day every day, but your iterations for fine-tuning you should probably try to do by finding a local 3d printer.