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arthurdd

Re:Ask HN: What are you working on? (August 2026) on Sunday August 02, 2026 @06:23PM (#49149039)
I'm working on an interactive wildlife & plant identification quiz powered by iNaturalist: https://arthurdick.github.io/local-biodiversity-trainer/
I don't think poker is good for people either. The goal of poker is to win, taking money from other players by exploiting their weaknesses. It's a training ground to become ruthless, unempathetic, and deceptive.
Humbled to see the new official timeline of physics: Newton, Maxwell, Einstein, and now... Grok in 2025 claiming a single bit-flip explains life, the universe, and everything. What a time to be alive.
Re:Do Communication Skills Matter? on Thursday August 21, 2025 @02:19PM (#44976217)
Software development is rarely a solo activity. You will need to communicate with other developers, product managers, designers, and non-technical stakeholders.
Re:Ask HN: Do you still bookmark websites? on Saturday August 16, 2025 @01:57PM (#44925560)
I still use traditional browser-based bookmarking, and sync with my Firefox account. I don't see the need to share my bookmarks.
Re:Why LLMs Can Think (as per new fundamental theory) on Friday August 15, 2025 @08:49PM (#44918952)
An LLM will generally go along with whatever you prompt it with. Try asking it to be skeptical: https://g.co/gemini/share/78b94bea5977
Re:Why LLMs Can Think (as per new fundamental theory) on Friday August 15, 2025 @07:02PM (#44918271)
The "Participatory Interface Theory" is not a scientific theory. It is a work of science fiction masquerading as physics. It uses the following techniques to create an illusion of credibility:

Poetic Language: Replaces rigorous explanation with evocative metaphors.

Jargon Salad: Mixes terms from physics, computer science, and philosophy to sound profound.

Reverse-Engineering: Builds a complex model designed to reproduce a known anomaly (MOND) and presents this as a success.

The "One Falsifiable Prediction" Gambit: Creates a single, specific (but logically weak) prediction to gain the appearance of being scientific, while ignoring a mountain of contradictory evidence.

While the vision it presents is beautiful and thought-provoking, it has no demonstrable connection to reality.

Re:Ask HN: What ad-hoc software do you use regularly? on Friday August 15, 2025 @02:31PM (#44915903)
I built my own recurring task manager, Perennial Task, to overcome the limitations I faced with TaskWarrior. Both are open source, so it's not something I was paying for.
Re:Remove YouTube links from Gemini responses on Tuesday August 12, 2025 @04:59PM (#44881752)
I think you could more simply disable the YouTube app in the Gemini settings.
Re:Ask HN: What are you working on? (July 2025) on Monday July 28, 2025 @12:09AM (#44707161)
Recently I've been working on a project I call term-to-svg. It's a command-line tool that converts terminal session recordings into animated SVG images.

https://github.com/arthurdick/term-to-svg

Hi Matt, I can't find any contact info in your profile. You may want to review the OpenAI best practices for API key safety: https://help.openai.com/en/articles/5112595-best-practices-f...
Good work! It took me 21 moves.

1. d4 d5 2. c4 Nf6 3. Nc3 e6 4. cxd5 exd5 5. e4 Nxe4 6. Bd3 Nxc3 7. bxc3 h6 8. Nf3 Be7 9. O-O O-O 10. Bb2 Nc6 11. Qb3 Na5 12. Qa4 Bd7 13. Qxa5 c5 14. Qxd8 Raxd8 15. Rfe1 c4 16. Rxe7 b6 17. Ne5 Be6 18. Bc2 Rfe8 19. Rxa7 Ra8 20. Rxa8 f6 21. Rxe8#

PlotBranch is a side project of mine generating branching stories using GPT4. You may run into a generation screen if you request a page nobody has viewed before.

"The Paradoxical Quest" is the most popular story, but there are more to choose from on the homepage if you are interested.

Re:Ask HN: Does your personal page get any interaction? on Sunday August 28, 2022 @05:08PM (#32632074)
My site is mainly for my own entertainment, and I've only been contacted a handful of times with nearly 20 years running it.

It is probably helpful to present a competent image when job searching. It shows you can develop and run a site, and that you have interests of your own.

Since experimenting with the GPT models I do notice when posts and articles seem to have used generated content, but I can't identify what it is that gives me this feeling. Maybe it is just a feeling.

When using the models, I find the content generated frequently must be edited to be useful. Presumably if it doesn't wander off or repeat itself too much, there is a human in the loop guiding the generation. Take it as seriously as you would any anonymous post on the Internet.

Fact check important stuff by seeking reputable sources. Treat the rest as entertainment. Even if it is possible to detect, just because text is generated does not mean it's incorrect.

I imagine given the way text is generated using probabilities, it can in theory be detected when stretches of text are using high probability words in sequence. I'm not aware of any tools that do this at the moment though.

Re:Google Timer is gone on Wednesday August 03, 2022 @04:21PM (#32336277)
I've hacked together my own replacement, as a mini project on my blog:

https://arthurdick.com/blog/timer/

Re:Show HN: Draw on Paper on Friday October 01, 2021 @08:01AM (#28717335)
This is a vector drawing web app I've been working on in my spare time. It is open source and hosted on Github at https://github.com/arthurdick/drawonpaper