ryandrake

They should be a $5 piece of machined metal. I don’t know how we let car keys turn into computers. Not everything has to be a goddamned computer. If your car requires a computerized remote control to open, it’s defective and should be returned.

There are already many people who are trying to rewrite the past. Holocaust deniers, Moon Landing deniers, people who deny the US Civil War was about slavery, and so on, and that’s just one country. Give one of them the ability to put their thumb on the scale when training an LLM and they absolutely will.

> Having spent a couple decades working in and around digital video production tooling and engineering, as well as being a filmmaker and home theater enthusiast, it's worth mentioning that today almost all television image enhancement features are net negative

Yep, generally you don't want anything the TV manufacturer markets as "enhancements." They basically all add things to the signal that were not part of the director's or video editor's vision. Any cinephile will remind you that there is one correct setting for "brightness," "contrast," "color," and "tint". "Sharpness" should almost always be zero, and any other setting that claims to "enhance" the picture should be turned off for correct output.

The worst ones now are the "motion smoothing" modes that take your normal FPS movie and try to interpolate them up to 60FPS, 120FPS or even 240FPS, giving them that cheap, crappy "soap opera" effect. Turn it off as soon as you turn on your TV for the first time.

What's the alternative? Without public comment, politicians will just do whatever they want without accountability or open opposition. With public comment, politicians will still just do whatever they want without accountability but at least there is a record of opposition.

Excellently put. IMO the worst/scariest thing about AI is what it has done to the methods and work habits of some of the people who I've always looked up to as good software engineers. They now earnestly say things like "We don't have to look at code, understand it, or review it anymore. AI does all that." and "We don't have to test our software because if a bug is found in prod, you just tell the AI to fix it and deploy it instantly." Decades of software best practices thrown out the window in a year because of this psychosis!

Almost everywhere I've worked, the "designing and writing code" part was about 5% to at most 10% of the calendar time that it takes to make and release a software product. The remaining 90-95% of the time is: aligning stakeholders, meeting with all contributing teams to prioritize, gaining approval from various executives to commence the project, obtaining security reviews, privacy reviews, legal reviews, and so on, soaking in dev, staging, and beta environments to find bugs, manual QA testing, aligning with marketing--potentially waiting on key external marketing events, waiting for various people to come back from vacation, waiting for Mike to answer his E-mail... These things take the vast majority of a software project's time and can't be automated by AI.

So, AI is making 5-10% of your project much faster. Whoopdie doo.

If you're a big enough company, you can sell a rock inside a hard-drive-shaped case and claim in advertising it's a hard drive, and not suffer any consequences, at least in the USA where we treat corporations with kid gloves.

Contrary to what the religious warriors claim, I can assure you nobody's head is going to explode, nobody is going to get cancer, and nobody is going to suffer psychological damage by briefly riding past these billboards. Truly, let's get serious here.

Yea, it's harmless, and a criticism of digital billboards, and it can't be swept under the rug by the billboard companies as if it didn't happen. Really great stunt!

But she was not obstructing the right of way. Presumably people could move around her. It's not illegal to stand on the sidewalk. It's possible they might try to stretch (IMO bogus) "loitering" laws to get her, but doing so would make their intentions crystal clear.

Is it a lawful order to command a person who is not committing a crime to move from a public sidewalk she has every right to be on?

It's an interesting question: How do you define the line between a 'forum' (which most don't consider addictive or harmful), and 'social media' (where there is growing evidence of addiction and harm)? What are some attributes of social media that are missing on forums?

Opaque ranking algorithms?

Human curation / moderation?

Automated curation / moderation?

Voting / flagging?

Infinite scroll?

Images and/or auto-playing video?

Advertising inline with posts?

Profit motive to get users to do certain things?

I don't know where you draw the line, and what makes Facebook harmful but Hacker News not harmful.

I got a bunch of them but only because I am a super hardcore TNG nerd. Most casual trekkies probably don’t even notice the names of the episodes. It’s still a tough game.

I guarantee the Unhealthy Snack Industry has their top scientists hard at work trying to find some kind of formula to make people on GLP-1 drugs go back to craving the soda and doritos.

Ideally, every API to call a function that provides the developer "dangerous" access to your system, should give the developer a text string argument to explain/justify to the user why it's needed. Then, instead of a confusing "Do you want this app to use Bluetooth?" pop-up with zero context, you let the developer convince the user.

I think the visibility of these dialogs serves as a warning to the user--but they should do a better job directing the user's attention to where the threat is. If the user is getting annoyed at all these pop-ups, he should direct this annoyance at the developer who is (in all likelihood) asking for access to more of the user's computer than he needs.

The fact that there are so many popups should mean apps are reaching for access to your system way beyond what they should be. It shouldn't mean Apple needs to get rid of the pop-ups.

Some people like to live dangerously!

Yea, but I just don't feel like going to a site that doesn't want me as a visitor. F them.

StackOverflow is great if your question is "How would we have done X back in 2012?" Because you can't re-ask or re-answer questions that have had their correct answers change as technology changed. So the sites is stuck back in time when each question was first answered.

I stopped when they killed old.reddit.com for non-logged-in users.

Why wouldn't the IRS accept a tax return created by your own software? How would they even know it was custom software? Ultimately your tax return is just a stack of papers that gets sent to the IRS.

> well there's no statute of limitations on murder at least, so 800 more days

This assumes The Other Side will do anything if they do get into power. My prediction: A milquetoast moderate leads the (D)'s and declares: "In the interest of unity and moving forward, we will not go after anyone in the previous administration. Let us all hold hands and get past this with minimal drama... They have pinkey promised they will never behave this way again when they get to power, and we believe them."

> I am personally dealing with colon cancer, and one of the incredibly annoying things about the awful disease is the number of truly clueless people who use it to advance some culinary agenda they believe in without evidence.

Sorry to hear this, and it's really a shame that whenever health and disease topics show up, every conspiracy theorist comes out from under their rock to try to explain their "theory" to you. Just look at the comment-trainwreck on this HN article. A significant percentage of the comments are "I have a theory that it's [....]" and it's always something mundane, untestable, and vaguely victim-blamey like diet.

100%. Once you get used to an Apple 5K display, the normal and even "high end" gaming monitors just look awful.

I've got a 2014 Retina iMac and a 2017 Retina iMac. Both of them run flawlessly but are now past Apple's support window. And third party software developers are mostly already adopting a "LOL we don't care" attitude about them. The hardware works impeccably, but software developers refuse to lift a finger to make their software run on them anymore. The Apple ecosystem is infuriating. With great sadness, I retired both of them a few months ago and am now running a boring Linux box with a pretty standard DPI monitor. I miss the Macs but their window of usefulness is way too short.

Side note: I feel old. As soon as it started mentioning the set of younger actors, I didn't recognize a single name. I feel like I'm watching new-ish movies, I just don't know who the actors are and it seems like they're all kind of interchangeable "undifferentiated young good looking people".

A much-needed advantage is also keeping old devices useful. Every Apple phone slowly outlives its supported software to the point where the official AppStore has almost nothing in it. Today, it's extremely difficult to find 3P apps that work with my current iPhone 7, which is not that old, because the ecosystem cuts off old phones very quickly.

Or, we're going to have to start choosing banks without apps or with apps that don't have such ridiculous restrictions. Fortunately, at least in the USA there is an abundance of banks and credit unions, so if one of them treats you like this, just move your account over to a different one. I've changed my primary bank in a single day--It's not hard.

Exactly. I don't want my government to be efficient above all else. I want it to be over-provisioned, so when I need it, it's there. I want there to be slack in the system so that a busy day doesn't crush the service I receive. Government should not operate like a ruthlessly optimizing business.

I don't know if it's really specific to one culture. Look at US companies after they go through a lengthy legal saga, it's obvious they screwed up, they're paying fines or having to adhere to court-imposed consequences. Their press releases:

"We admit no wrongdoing. We are only settling to move past this. Our business is strong/secure/competent."

It's like the first rule you learn when you go into corporate communications is to never admit you did anything wrong or project anything other than confidence and correctness.