selfsimilar
selfsimilar on Hacker News
There should be some teeth, but also we should be prepared for a small amount of "unfairness" baked into the system. If there are no controls, everyone will cheat. But if there's too many obstacles (turnstiles, checkpoints, conductors, cameras, etc) then people won't want to ride.
People like what they like, so if that's not your jam I wouldn't sweat it. That said, Moby Dick is perhaps a poor example of "literature" to start on if you're not sure you like "literature", mostly from being so long. If I might recommend trying Cosmicomics by Italo Calvino, or The Cyberiad by Stanislaw Lem, as they are easy to dip in and out of are nominally "sci fi" while still laying some claim to "literature". Lem and Calvino may lead you to Borges or PKD or Ursula K LeGuin or China Mieville - more genre artists that arguably aspire to being more than pulp.
I get this sentiment, but I think there's probably a LOT of people who are doing good things, cool things, helpful things, who are helped by Al Gore's free and open Internet. But most of them don't bother to upvote, or post a "thank you" or anything because the medium makes everything so frictionless. It's only the OSS zealots and the people who have issues who you'll hear from. The vocal minority. It's kinda shitty, but learning to ignore the haters and bad actors is table stakes. But feeding AI farms is the new threat, and that' definitely something unsolved. Going dark is certainly a solution. Small enclaves of invite-only blogs and tweets, I guess...
Your entire nervous system is in a constant loop polling the external world. Add that to current AIs and see what happens.
Honestly, though, the next big thing that needs to happen is proper "learning" in real-time. Allow for training (weight modulation) and queries to happen simultaneously. That's the full package.
I’m very interested in this approach. I’ve hosted friends’ websites for decades but I’ve been the single-point of failure, so “cooperative” is very enticing.
I’m currently working on a cooperative “lights-on” solution which might be complementary.
I don't know much about the SSH this app uses (Citadel) which uses NIOSSH under the hood. I prefer using Mosh (
https://github.com/mobile-shell/mosh) for mobile apps where connectivity is often spotty. Does NIOSSH use a model that accounts for that?
This is such a garbage take. Yes, if you're running a cloud-backed service, a subscription makes sense. But the overwhelming number of complaints have been when previous download-only apps (e.g. Photoshop) become part of a subscription service (Creative Cloud). And people complain when the option of a thing that didn't need the cloud (like a garage door opener) now is only available in a subscription model (see "Unauthorized Bread" by Cory Doctorow). It's called "enshitification".
yes but again, who has $2M to bet, even at 1/500 odds? You have to be a billionaire to make 500 bets hoping one hits, then you’re back to just being a billionaire again.
I would short xAI but the market can remain irrational longer than I can remain solvent. Plus all the foolishness to prop it up with other businesses just seems like bad accounting.
Bullets don’t kill you, it’s the bleeding that gets you. Wait, no, it’s not the bleeding since you could just put an IV in, it’s the loss of blood pressure. No wait, it’s not the loss of blood pressure since we can reattach severed limbs that have been at 0/0 for hours. It’s the lack of oxygen to the brain and other vital organs. Bullets definitely don’t kill you /s
16 bytes equals immediate “black magic” and “it’s a witch”. I get it in the abstract - generative art and CAs and fractals have infinite depth. But this is madness. I love it so much
> For 7 months I'd been prompting and shipping without ever sitting down and actually reading the code Claude wrote. I'd look at the diff, verify it compiled, test the happy path, move on. But now something was fundamentally broken and I couldn't just prompt my way out of it.
I stopped reading after this, because this is the dumbest way to vibe code anything larger than a single-use tool.
Claude is a collaborator, and honestly a decent voice of dissent, but it will never offer that unprompted. "Make this thing" - "OK".
You need to review the code. You need to say "I want this, AND HERE IS THE LONG-TERM VISION. Now offer critique and the trade-offs for various implementations."
Or just realize that in every hand-written project you learn the contours of the problem space as you go along and if the tool is big enough you'll feel the urge to do a green-field rewrite of hand-rolled code after a few years. You get there quicker with the robot's help. This is not a new lesson.
I saw Aadam at almost every show I went to in the early aughts, and he recorded a few of my shows, too! Great guy!
Hashcash was a proof-of-work system that would have put a computational tax on email. I don't know what kept it from getting more traction other than simple chicken-and-egg network effects, but it's a good idea, and worth resurrecting.
http://www.hashcash.org
I know nothing about this author, but this reads to me a lot like late Philip K Dick but without the "what is real" element. After his religious event in 1974, he wrote some real bangers - A Scanner Darkly, Valis, The Divine Invasion - alongside his religious exegesis. This feels a bit like an alternate timeline where PKD saw even more drugs as the way to chase this feeling, but somehow came out the other side.
Number one indicator? A single punctuation mark that's trivial to make on most keyboards (option-dash on macOS). And generally people who write software are extra fixated on punctuation for obvious reasons: missing semi-colons break your build, etc. Maybe in some other niche message board people will use dash and em dash interchangeably, but here?
Also, if the a single character is how you're red-flagging LLM output, do you know how easy it is to avoid? I didn't use it here at all, but how do you know I didn't run this through some slop-machine to tighten my prose? It's really low-effort take to say "just avoid em dashes so we know you're not an AI".
https://www.mcsweeneys.net/articles/the-em-dash-responds-to-...
The best training for immune robustness is going outside and get exposure to a wide range of stuff. But for indoor spaces, air quality is going to be dominated by the microbes and viruses of the people in the space itself. For public spaces and shared residential spaces with poor airflow this would be great - grocery stores, nursing homes, etc. For condos, apartments, SFH, etc. it's probably less necessary, but probably wouldn't hurt. Or nice to have when company comes over, or someone in the house is sick and "polluting" the air.
"The language is intentionally neutral and apolitical, without any stance on social or political issues."
I don't applaud or condemn this, but it's strange that it's on the home and history pages. Putting this in a code of conduct document for collaborators might make sense, but on the home page? Maybe I'm the weird one, but for most languages I consider them a tool. So it's like going to the hardware store and seeing a hammer that has a label "This is not a Liberal or Conservative hammer." Yeah, buddy I know. It's just a hammer.
Posted by
selfsimilar on Saturday November 01, 2025 @09:33AM
from the earslap.com dept.
I think the word you're looking for is "astigmatism".
Octopodes don't actually have a very long lifespan, as adults die shortly after mating. Which is only to say that the decision to consume is more complicated for this creature than others, because if the goal is to minimize suffering, an ethically aquaculture-farmed octopus harvested after mating will not live much longer anyways.
And I've always found the argument that "more intelligent/sentient creatures deserve more protection and rights" to be basically a post hoc defense against cannibalism. We can't know what "suffering" feels like to less intelligent and "simpler" animals so why make our sentience a criterion for the morality of eating? Just from a safety concern we shouldn't be eating humans, but not because we "suffer uniquely more" than other species.
The same impulses of MAGA culture warriors to protect US history against "woke" is explored here. Our cultural icons are all flawed, because they're human, but examining them critically is very hard because we project so much on them. Navigating this moment is very hard because of "cancel culture" and "anti-cancel culture". We can't and shouldn't erase these men (and it's overwhelmingly men) from history, but trying to add any nuance or criticality to their story is very difficult in our current moment.
There’s an obvious religious element to this. Whether it’s the idea of Maya or that this realm is but a precursor to heaven or hell. I think that at least some people believe that morality is more arbitrary if this realm is not ”real”. And just as people seek refuge in religion or other ideologies in order to give their life meaning, if this realm is not, in fact, real, then the meaning they thought they had established evaporates.
It's in Puerto Rico, a US territory that has toyed with formally joining the union as a proper state. This is NOT a developing country.
Walabot DIY 2 in expert mode looks great! Definitely a bit more single-purpose for walls - only works on flat surfaces and probably has trouble w corners. Great suggestion, thanks!
Posted by
selfsimilar on Friday July 12, 2024 @11:43AM
from the ask-hn dept.
I have an older house (1950s) and I'd really like to see behind my walls without physically excavating so I can try to run some wires without encountering surprise obstructions. There are tools which use WifI to do detect humans[1] (https://www.tomshardware.com/news/wi-fi-routers-used-to-detect-human-locations-poses-within-a-room) [2](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40897828) but I'm...
Dogs eat other dogs' excrement in part to keep a healthy and diverse gut culture. I prefer kissing.
Posted by
selfsimilar on Friday December 29, 2023 @08:30AM
from the nature.com dept.