scubbo
scubbo on Hacker News
If you can't see the beauty and interest in a description of solving a problem with a visually pleasant and unique UI, regardless of the tools used to solve it, that sounds like a you-problem.
This is something that gets glossed over a lot in the debate. "Writing to convey functional information" has a different set of success criteria than "Writing to convey emotion and shared human experience". One might still legitimately argue that knowing that a text is LLM-generated undermines confidence in the former (there's no guarantee that a coherent mind exists that can clarify ambiguities); but much _less_ so than for the latter.
It's _better_ that the illustrations were made by an illustrator, but it still would have been cool and front-page-worthy if that hadn't been the case.
I think this conversation is confusing two things. There are two kinds of exploits that would be possible via the landing pad if certain restrictions didn't exist:
* If the landing pad allowed insertion as well as withdrawal, an arbitrarily large landing pad could allow item teleportation by inserting at one point and withdrawing at another
* If multiple landing pads were permitted on the same surface, items could be teleported (in O(1) time, not 0-time) by launching a rocket from one side of the factory to an intermediate surface (planet), then launching from there to a landing pad on the other side of factory on the first surface (this exploit is explicitly _allowed_ in Space Exploration, the mod which inspired Space Age)
> It's meant to be small [...], even if [...] it's not meant to be used that way
It is not, in fact, _meant_ to be used that way.
This is a weird perspective. The middle planets can be approached in any order. And mods allow near-infinite variety - especially those that build on the platform of custom planets.
> there is only one way to do a thing and no room for a player to invent alternatives.
Sounds to me like you are caught up in trying to chase optimization and bemoaning the fact that there's only one optimal strategy. Do a no trains run! Or a no bots run. Or a 1000x science modifier run, or Lazy Bastard, or Death World, or... there are plenty of constraints, both programmed-in or self-imposed, that can push you out of the "standard" optimal strategy.
In this sense, it's a synonym for "language". Usually used as "mother tongue" (meaning, the language one grew up speaking).
> expecting compassionate or empathetic behaviour from companies, and [another thing, which is not the same thing as the first thing but merely similar or related]
> your naive and self-centered definition of "trust"
I never gave one? For what it's worth, I agree with your second paragraph, despite your first being needlessly aggressive.
> The only reason to keep repeating that kind of worldview is to absolve companies behaving in shitty, toxic or downright evil ways.
Or...to warn people away from ever expecting compassionate or empathetic behaviour from companies, and remind people not to trust them?
Ah - I use Usenet, not Torrents, that'd explain it. Thanks!
> bypassing Cloudflare CAPTCHAs
Can you say more about this? I've never encountered this problem in nearly a decade of running the same stack.
Not the person you're replying to, but I assume they're referring to the ability to see something like:
```
src
├── app
│ └── page.tsx
└── components
└── header.tsx
```
EDIT: Lol. I'm not even going to edit it. Hacker News, you also suck.
I read it as "a button for re-enabling JavaScript"
He is (inaccurately) known for his engineering _because of_ his marketing.
I also hate Twitter and cancelled my account.
I'm able to read it while logged out - and if I wasn't, there's xcancel.com, and others.
You're not doing yourself any favours.
> Discovering they weren't didn't change the quality of the writing - it only changed the implied relationship with the author.
> But that's a parasocial experience, not a feature of the words on the page.
So? Consumption of media does not exist in a vacuum - how one feels about the work is inextricably affected by the context in which is was encountered and how one views it. We feel prouder (subconciously or not) of reading works that are considered "great" or "weighty". We feel nostalgia for rereading books from our youth, or affection for a book lent by a loved one.
The writer is not saying that the words _themselves_ were changed by the new information, but that his perception and experience of them was. That experience _is still real_.
> Why do we expect authors to be scrupulously physical
"We" don't. Some people prefer it - others don't care. You're free to fall into the latter camp if you want; but the former is a valid preference, and one which _could_ be served by a market.
> I see nothing wrong with readers gobbling up AI-written books for the rest of their lives.
> Because to me, authenticity makes for a better reading experience.
This pair of sentences gave me pause, until I realised that they're not in contradiction - the author is deliberately non-judgemental of _others_ making a personal choice that _he himself_ would prefer not to make. Remarkably rare, nowadays.
I'm surprised to hear that that was your perspective! I felt that it dealt with otherwise-opaque topics in a very approachable way.
> “Ever eaten scubbo? No? Nothing like a bowl of scubbo when you’re hungry. You can put anything in scubbo. Pork, beef, mutton, rabbit, chicken, duck… anything. Even rats, if you’ve got ’em. It’s food for the marching man, scubbo. Got some on the boil out there right now. You can have some of that, if you like.”
> The squad brightened up.
> Thoundth good,” said Igor. “What’th in it?”
> “Boiling water,” said the corporal. “It’s what we call ‘blind scubbo’"
Monstrous Regiment, Terry Pratchett (GNU)
Fair perspective, though I actually prefer this for two reasons:
* When it's proposing responses for me to choose between, a description like "I close the PR and you make a followup" is ambiguous - is "I" there "the entity making the proposition (the LLM)" or "the entity making the choice (me)".
* I have a line in my `AGENTS.md` specifically instructing it to call me by my name; if it stops doing so, that's a telltale that context-bloat is pushing out other instructions.
> I am a big YC fan in general
Genuine question - why?
Yeah - by comparison with this, "a computer takes over some digital work, thus permitting me to get things done in the real world" is positively benign!
I salute your dedication to understanding and fixing a problem that bothers you - but I must add my voice to those who think that this is not a good design for general use. The viewport is the region within which content should be positioned, and thus within which they should be centred. By your logic, left-aligned content in a browser with a left sidebar should be deliberately covered.
> People understand that reverse hacking can happen when connecting to random ssh server, right?
No, actually, I've never heard of such a vector. How would that work?
I was amused and irritated in equal measure when a senior manager at $LAST_JOB demanded that documents include "no jargon", then went on to use many terms like those you've listed here with no indication of awareness of the contradiction.
Just like the famous observation that "anyone driving slower than me is an idiot, and anyone driving faster than me is a maniac" - "jargon" is just any term-of-art that you're not currently familiar with. Attempting to communicate like Up Goer Five is inefficient. The solution is not to ban jargon - it's to:
* Cultivate a glossary for any terms that were introduced _within_ the domain/company, which are not in common usage outside
* Normalize a culture that does not shame asking what something means
TIL the word (ROT13 for spoilers) "fgbcvat" :)
I'd seen the articles making claims about LLM-idiom being unconsciously imitated by humans, and reassured myself that _I_ couldn't possible be so impressionable.
Then during a presentation I was making today, a coworker wrote in chat "If <scubbo> says 'You're absolutely right' one more time, I'm checking his house to see if we're actually talking to an agent".
They got me.