thenberlin

Two things:

A) With great power comes great responsibility + making the world better through eradication of diseases, heightened food and economic security, improvements to the stability of nations, access to shared research and information, and increased personal agency makes it all better for Americans too.

B) Given you probably find (A) uncompelling, you should familiarize yourself with the concept of "soft power" and try to learn a bit about how relatively inexpensive it's been for the US to have an outsized influence around the world over the past many decades (outside of stupid, unnecessary wars, of course) and the benefits that's yielded for our economic and geopolitical interests across the board. If you'd prefer to not though, don't worry -- provided you're around for a couple more decades, you're going to get a crash course in the alternative.

This is somehow the most Hacker News thread I've ever seen and I love it.

If an LLM is what's going to teach me a new language, why would I ever pay some middleman $100-200 a year for an app wrapper? This guy doesn't seem to realize that embracing AI-first doesn't just put his employees on the chopping block, it actually suggests his whole company is unnecessary.

This is what I don't think the "AI-first" business crowd understands -- in many cases, the moment you admit the humans in your organization can be wholesale replaced by AI, that's a sign it's possible your whole ass business case could be unnecessary LLM middleware.

Entirely uncritical state controlled or substantially aligned media masquerading as news is always bad and should be criticized. See also almost anyone called on in White House press briefings these days.

Plus, you are saying it like all propaganda is somehow the same. Rosie the Riveter != "Russia isn't going to do anything...well, it's America's fault...NATO something something...actually, Ukraine basically deserved it."

I don't know how long ago that was, but I've been a Pixelmator user for at least a few years, and it's leaps and bounds ahead of where it was when I started with it. Coupled with Photomater -- its cousin app -- they're certainly starting to give Photoshop a real run for its money in many ways. Of course, not all ways, at least not yet, but I have personally used it for everything from photo touchups to marketing collateral to art elements later incorporated in a range of things including print layouts and videos. Once in a while I bump my head on a missing or incomplete feature that I was surprised to find not yet implemented, but its getting rarer by the month.

Though way less likely to turn it into a cursed subscription zombie.

Putting concerns about future states aside, congrats to the Pixelmator team. I've been using the app for years and it's a really great piece of software, well designed and well built. It's always been incredible value for the price, especially given that it basically replaces Photoshop for a wide swath of the market without compromising on UX (which is a problem for other competitors) at a price point that's like 1-2 months of an Adobe subscription (I don't even know exactly what that costs any more because Pixelmator + parts of the Affinity suite got me out of their clutches).

Adobe must not be stoked about this news. And I'll just keep my fingers crossed this all heads in a direction that's more Logic than Dark Sky.

A deterrent to prevent additional whistleblowers from coming forward? If the issues are as massively systemic as facts to date suggest, it seems like there might be a number of other shoes that could drop. Boeing's reputation (as well as that of its higher ups) could get a hell of a lot more tarnished and even breach further into legal culpability territory.

I'm not fully convinced that's what's happening here, but two whistleblowers on a massive US company that also happens to be a defense contractor dying in suspicious and unusual ways (especially that first one "killing himself" after he said if he died it wasn't suicide and also smack in the middle of his deposition days...) certainly warrants a non-trivial amount of concern and a deeper investigation.

I don't think you refuted the underlying point so much as gave cause to it. The idea isn't that simply stupid people rise to the top, it's that people who are capable of gaming a system without providing for or attending to the system they're deftly traversing are floated by their EQ/credentials/jargon straight over the corpses of the things they were actually meant to shepherd or build. I have seen this over and over again, and frankly managed to sometimes straddle the line enough to play along and be the beneficiary of this sort of corporate backchannel -- it's a very real, very human thing.

I've watched wildly incapable people bluff their way up a corporate ladder, fail over the course of two years in an elevated role, and then use that previous title to bluff their way into better positions elsewhere (and then leave those positions before they're totally found out to move on to somewhere else with a yet better title). I've watched people come out of McKinsey into the startup world, talk a major game -- they are the best conjurors of business fantasy at strat plannings and my god, those decks -- but then utterly fail to deliver for years only to end up with SVP roles at major companies on the "strength" of their backgrounds.

I get it: play the man, not the puck or whatever...but eventually somebody has to make sure the puck ends up in the fucking net and not sold off to buttress quarterly earnings.

Really cool idea and generally solid execution -- I would totally use this.

That said, a couple bits: 1. I can't seem to click the events on the map in Safari on Mac. 2. The map doesn't load at all in Brave (I even dropped the tracker blocking on the site and reloaded and it still didn't load).

This comment has some real "startup based on some light prompt engineering atop ChatGPT gets put out of business by ChatGPT's latest feature" energy.

Wow, thanks for that -- that's an excellent slide deck.

Yeah, no kidding. This is what LLMs are not meant for 101 -- it'll get a lot right, a solid amount of the time (spare me the anecdotes), but the idea that someone who doesn't know anything about a topic should take its output for ground truth is exactly the sort of misplaced trust that risks flipping these models from massive technological/productivity/scientific/etcetc leap into existential threat.

Think "employment contract."

When you get them all, it's "Queen Bee." I've only ever gotten it once -- for whatever reason, the puzzle just clicked that day -- but it was extremely satisfying.

Psst, there are actually five.

Yeah, +1 to Spelling Bee -- that game is great!

That said, this post needs a SPOILER tag.

Big +1 for Code by Petzold. Just started the 2nd edition that came out last month and I'm blown away by Petzold's ability to pack in meaningful, interesting information without sacrificing readability.

Man, I know this wasn't really the intention of the comment, but I just read through that thread and got a little nostalgic. Crazy that was like 13 years ago. Sheesh.

Yeah +1. This is impressive and I would have used it in a heartbeat for a new project I'm involved in, but the inability to even consider commercialization means going this route is dead in the water. Will be looking elsewhere.

Could not agree more. I've shilled it three times in the past week alone. And I've also taken to mentioning it in any README involving env vars. Awesome tool.

Yeah, same here -- serious 90's nostalgia in the best way. This is awesome.

Haven't done any codebase spelunking, but their FAQ at the bottom of the page states it pretty clearly:

"Who provides the Brave Talk service? The Brave Talk service is provided in partnership with 8x8. And the service is built on the open-source Jitsi platform."

How is she being cynically abused by the people calling for her freedom? You think that in itself is western propaganda?

Also, it's absurd to equate what she's done to any form of violent extremism or the Jan 6 rioters -- that's an apples and hand grenades comparison.

And of course she deserves to be safe and healthy -- I say release her now (hell, my vote would be never imprison her in the first place, but I'm incapable of rewinding time). I just don't think it was "needless to say" coming from you given the rest of what you've written here, elsewhere on this thread, and elsewhere on this website.

Huh, so trying to open up access to real information (instead of, you know, propaganda) about what was happening on the ground in the early days of a pandemic is now being a "Western propagandist?" Would you have said the same if the outbreak had been in, say, Cleveland? Because, if it had, I can guarantee you there would have been loads of on-the-ground reports from citizen journalists streaming online from minute zero (including from some number of folks who might be "vulnerable" people in their own lives!) and not a single one of those people would have gone to jail for it.

Also, to be sure, I don't think that last bit was all that "needless to say."

Yeah, the whole "she should be more polite about it, and really she brought this on herself for not accepting the terms of a made-up agreement she was not actually offered that's not actually mentioned in the article" thing is pretty absurd/transparent.

This woman put her life on the line to do the whole world a service in a time of crisis. Her situation now reflects nothing more than the umbrage her government has taken with information getting out to the rest of the world about what was really happening in Wuhan. Full stop.

Because it's in the article? And you can certainly find out all about it elsewhere on the internet?

What are you insinuating as the alternative, by the way? She's doing it for kicks?

** as the only available form of protest against her detention, arrest and conviction for the sharing of information from ground zero in the early days of what would become a global pandemic

Well, honestly, this looks not great. The "writing" is iffy and the "facts" in the generated content in demo video are questionable at best. Who would use this besides maybe content farms?

I'm neck deep in research and ABD on a CS PhD with a focus on language modeling/NLP and human-centered design...and this kind of stuff makes me a little embarrassed to say that. Anyone involved in AI right now needs to gutcheck that they actually think they're doing something to make the world better and not just noisier or more "sticky" or whatever.

This is incredibly cool. Looking forward to loading it up.

Reminds me a bit of Reaktor's builder environment, but based on that demo video, it seems like a more useable, better thought out version (and you can't beat that price / feature matrix).