chrbr

Got it.

I know nothing about the reasoning behind the original decision from Synology, nor the internal politics at play, but typically the customer support tail is not wagging the dog of the rest of the company. Might be bias/anecdata from the places I've worked, but product usually drives everything, and the support staff has to deal with the consequences.

Aren't warnings always positioned as being a more immediate threat than watches?

https://www.weather.gov/safety/tsunami-alerts

I’ve also struggled with over-analyzing where stuff should go. I’ve restarted a new Obsidian vault based on PARA [1], and am experimenting with using LLMs (both Cursor and Claude Code) to help me decide where stuff should go. Been a big help so far.

[1] https://fortelabs.com/blog/para/

F1TV had some fun with it in their usual post-race programming: Joylon Palmer (F1TV announcer) did a deadpan "breakdown" of the Lego race during his segment, and Sam Collins analyzed the aerodynamics of the Lego cars in his.

The drivers all said it was the best driver's parade they've been in. I don't know how marketing like this works, and if it was worth it for Lego in the end, but what a masterstroke. Lots of fun organic mentions of Lego over the past week because of it.

This is what I don't get. We don't have masses of unemployed people waiting in the ranks to fill a large amount of new jobs, as unlikely an outcome as that even is. Which means any large uptick in people working in manufacturing would have to come from some other industry. So what jobs would we give up for it?

Yeah, we've used CAPTCHAs to great effect as gracefully-degraded service protection for unauthenticated form submissions. When we detect that a particular form is being spammed, we automatically flip on a feature flag for it to require CAPTCHAs to submit, and the flood immediately stops. Definitely saves our databases from being pummeled, and I haven't seen a scenario since we implemented it a few years ago where the CAPTCHA didn't help immediately.

Reminds me of the advice around the deadbolt on your house - it won't stop a determined attacker, but it will deter less-determined ones.

I agree, I love the Mazda approach to this in my CX-50. I'm not even sure if the display is touchscreen or not, because I always use the wheel-clicker thingie in the console to control it.

This was an intentional design choice from Mazda, of course, that goes hand-in-hand with their philosophy of giving such control to the driver that they "[feel] oneness with the car, as if it is an extension of their body." [1]

When searching around for a quote like that, I found a HN discussion from 2019 about the Mazda decision to eliminate touchscreens. [2]

[1] https://www.mazdausa.com/discover/human-centric-design-puts-... [2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20200335

The paper calls out a few things that they didn't cover:

The CCC+TL model predicts the age of the Universe as 26.7 Gyr against the generally accepted value of 13.8 Gyr. This is of deep concern and needs the model validation against multiple observations, including BAOs, CMB, Big Bang nucleosynthesis (BBN), and globular cluster ages. Our focus here is on BAOs.

I am not in academia and therefore am not qualified to have strong opinions on any of this, but I do like the idea of papers not swinging for home runs all the time by explaining everything, and instead being happy with hitting a single by proposing something intriguing and asking for others to chime in.

Unfamiliar with academia here, and I can't quite figure it out from TFA - does a retraction always imply wrongdoing, instead of mere "wrongness?" Or are papers sometimes retracted for being egregiously wrong, even if their methods were not intentionally misleading?

The entire home-buying process (in the US, at least) seems to be built on shady-looking ways to nickel and dime people. I remember telling friends when going through it that it'd be easy to scam me because I got so used to urgent requests to pay some fee for inspections or legal stuff or whatever that I'd just shell out the money without asking questions.

Yeah, I like that improvement/clarification. Good assertion. Now I wonder if it changes my stance: are the path modern LLMs are on ever going to replicate this environment for acquiring new information that humans currently operate in?

I agree. A thought experiment I had recently:

Let's say we could somehow train an LLM on all written and spoken language from the western Roman civilization (Republic + Western Empire, up until 476 AD/CE, just so I don't muddy the experiment with near-modern timelines). Would it, without novel information from humans, ever be able to spit out a correct predecessor of modern science like atomic theory? What about steam power, would that be feasible since Romans were toying with it? How far back do we have to go on the tech tree for such an LLM be able to "discover" something novel or generate useful new information?

My thought is that the LLM would forever be "stuck" in the knowledge of the era it was trained in. Something in the complexity of human brains working together is what drives new information. We can continue training new LLMs with new information, and LLMs might be able to find new patterns in data that humans can't see and can augment our work, but the LLM's capability for novelty is stuck on a complexity treadmill, rooted in its training data.

I don't view this ability of humans as some magic consciousness, just a system so complex to us right now that we can't fully understand or re-create it. If we're stochastic parrots, we seem to be ones that are magnitudes more powerful and unpredictable than current LLMs, and maybe even constructed in a way that our current technology path can't hope to replicate.

Yeah, I'm in the same boat. I've used YNAB for almost a decade now, but wish it were more powerful for things like investment tracking. I tried last month to get into the ledger systems (beancount, specifically), but it's a huge additional time sink. And implementing YNAB-style envelope-based budgeting on top of them is always a bit of a hack. Went back to YNAB quickly.

Cannot wait for my Intel MBP to be refreshed into an M2 at work. Running Docker turns it into a jet engine. Like having a white noise machine with an unpleasant tone that also generates a ton of heat.

Is there a commonly-recommended introductory text for IFS? I've always found it interesting, and it resonates with me, given my internal monologue(s).

Yep, when I realized I was going deep down the money rabbit-hole of fine-tuning my homelab to grab and serve this stuff is when I just switched back to streaming. Monetarily it'll probably be a wash in the long run for me.

Yep, that's exactly what sparked the idea.

Huh, I had an idea recently to make an API-only game like that. Would let people build their own tools/GUIs and go as crazy as they'd like with building their own AI to control their empire. Just feels extremely niche, even if it scratches my own gameplay itch.

Even with my racing sim rig, I find myself using my curved monitor more than the Quest 2. It's just such a pain to re-calibrate and update the software and tweak my graphics settings every time I want to hop in that I usually just don't bother.

I was thinking the same thing. I know the price points are way different between what Apple's putting forward and what Meta was shipping, but Apple's vision and tech here blows Meta's out of the water. Meta seemed to be approaching the problem with an iterative approach, where the payoff in vision was down the road, and wanted consumers to share the journey to get there - whereas Apple jumped all the way to the end.

When I was house-hunting I ended up writing a console app for my wife and I to do a few things:

- Pulled down applicable YNAB savings envelope balances and future income calculations from a Google Sheets spreadsheet (which included stock prices for determining RSU payouts) to know how much cash we'd have for down payments at any time in the next 12 months

- Allowed us to either give a house price and have it output when we could afford it, or give a month and tell us how much we could afford if we bought on that month

- Do budgetary analysis of what the monthly payment would be, given fluctuating mortgage rates and estimated insurance from scraping Zillow/Redfin

- Calculated transit times to my office and my wife's office using Google Maps

- Allowed for swappable "scenarios" for all the above to show what would happen if we wanted to sell our current place first and then buy, buy and then sell, or buy-renovate-sell, so we could evaluate all options. We ended up going the buy-renovate-sell path in reality, and it was a huge stress relief to have hard numbers showing us the money was going to be fine.

- Output several months of cash reserves for each scenario after all transactions were done, so we could know if we would cut too much into savings

- Output a yes/no decision based on all of the above to keep us grounded and help prevent over-reaching for a house we couldn't afford - basically enforcing rules on ourselves

The "hack" that a couple of the comments in this chain are referring to is only ever taking cabs _from_ a major airport into a city. Often you don't have to play the waiting-on-someone-to-show-up game, there's just a line of them right outside the airport that you can hop in immediately. In some cities there's even flat rates they have to adhere to, depending on where you're going ("$20 to midtown").

I was gleeful when Uber and Lyft came on the scene to have an alternative to cab BS, but the one place they still shine is when going from an airport into a major metro area.

Really enjoying the Wikipedia rabbit-hole this led to. Never knew the Normans made it that far south.

Not often, and I like it that way. I enjoy being around people who are demonstrably better in some dimension. It's a great way to learn something new all the time.

What sort of expectations are you seeing that you'd call absurd, out of curiosity? No agenda here, just also trying to sort through hype and reality.

Agree, and for things like cognitive behavioral therapy, where the "rules" are well-known and well-represented in its training corpus, it's amazing.

Whomst among us hasn't made the old "accidentally let the SSL cert expire" mistake?

Related term I came across the other day: internal locus of control https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Locus_of_control

I had the same problem and hated it. What fixed it was clicking "Not Interested" on enough of the posts to where it eventually gave up trying to show stuff like that. I think you're correct about the fact that it figures out you're an adult male and assumes you want that content, since a common theme with adult males is, well, an interest in attractive women.

The algorithm has now decided to just show me cute animal stuff for several months, which is fine by me. It's all low-effort and mostly dumb, but it's better than unsolicited butts popping up everywhere when I just want to see what my friends are up to.

Now if I could just fix the scenario where somehow it decides I really like garbage pay-to-play mobile games and shows me _nothing_ but ads for them for days on end.