ericrallen

I may be a biased Genesis Kid, but SEGA was always ahead of its time.

Blocking Pinterest and those ad-riddled Stack Overflow clones that were everywhere has been a game changer.

Only seeing the `old.reddit.com` domain is also much more pleasant.

The search results page no longer feels adversarial.

The rate of Issues opened on a popular repo is at least one order of magnitude beyond the number of Issues whoever is able to deal with them can handle.

Just trying to triage and tag all of them can still be a full-time job’s worth of work in a popular repo.

ISPs also have different levels of service for different entities, and seem to just barely care about you as a customer.

An ISP (like one that starts with the first letter of the alphabet and ends with a common abbreviation for an explosive compound) might not think it’s worth coming out and marking their fiber lines when you call the city’s 811 number to mark utilities before digging for a project, like a fence.

If that fence ends up cutting the fiber line when digging a post, the company installing the fence can submit a ticket through a different portal than you as an actual residential customer of the ISP can, and that ticket probably gets responded to well before your attempts to contact them and request a call back because they are always experiencing a high volume of calls.

They’ll never admit any negligence on their part for refusing to mark utility lines, and you just have to remember where they buried the new ones, if they ever came back out to bury them instead of just leaving them aboive ground and flailing around.

Sometimes they even try to charge you for fixing the fiber line.

Not another one.

The bears broke my brain enough the first time I encountered that “stain” where my memory clearly had it labeled “stein.”

I hate in-app browsers, too, but there is a Slack setting that will let you open in Chrome or Safari (choosing Safari opens whatever your default iOS browser is).

You can change the Browser Application setting under Preferences after tapping on your Avatar in the Slack app.

This seems to completely ignore, and maybe even dismiss, the lived experience of all the kids who weren’t diagnosed or treated but who developed coping mechanisms to survive school and adolescent life, then found those mechanisms incapable of dealing with the ever-increasing burdens of adult life and finally sought diagnosis as adults after years of struggling to understand things that have been complicating their lives all along.

This kind of dismissive rhetoric increases the stigma around seeking a diagnosis as an adult, which is already hard enough because an entire system of caregivers, teachers, and institutions already failed the undiagnosed person throughout their life and navigating the health care system, especially for mental health, is extremely frustrating - and challenging from an executive function perspective.

Switching search engines is a pretty low lift, especially if the one you are switching from is an ad-riddled mess where you can’t actually find what you’re looking for.

Switched to Kagi awhile back and 10/10 would recommend. The cost is easily worth having a good, useful web search experience again.

Swapping out mail and other service providers is definitely a bigger undertaking, though.

There are some pretty awesome small, unique bars in Boston, but there could be so, so many more if the liquor license laws and rent prices were more reasonable, though.

We’ll just have an LLM write the tests.

Now we can work on our passion projects and everything will just be LLMs talking to LLMs.

Interestingly, the Kagi Assistant managed to find this thread while researching the question, but every model I tested (without access to the higher quality Ultimate plan models) was unable to retrieve the correct answer.

Here’s an example with Gemini Flash 2.5 Preview: https://kagi.com/assistant/9f638099-73cb-4d58-872e-d7760b3ce...

It will be interesting to see if/when this information gets picked up by models.

Maybe there is some optimization logic that only appends tool details that are required for the user’s query?

I’m sure they are trying to slash tokens where they can, and removing potentially irrelevant tool descriptors seems like low-hanging fruit to reduce token consumption.

Do the project a favor and remove the sticky nav bar on mobile.

It takes up almost half the screen and makes the content nearly impossible to digest.

Good point! I forgot there was a smaller one out there already.

OpenAI’s naming conventions have gotten out of hand.

I believe the “o” is supposed to mean “Omni” and indicate that the model is multi-modal.

Seems a bit unfair (or maybe just ill-informed?) to lump this in with the confusing mess that is model naming at OpenAI.

The parameter count is more more useful and concrete information than anything OpenAI or their competitors have put into the name of their models.

The parameter count gives you a heuristic for estimating if you can run this model on your own hardware, and how capable you might expect it to be compared to the broader spectrum of smaller models.

It also allows you to easily distinguish between different sizes of model trained in the same way, but with more parameters. It’s likely there is a higher parameter count model in the works and this makes it easy to distinguish between the two.

I know there is actual data and then there’s “anecdata,” but it’s hard to reconcile the “jobs go unfilled,” and the experience I know of everyone actually looking for a job right now (and having just recently finished looking myself).

It was bleak out there. Hundreds of applications for a handful of interviews. Maybe a few rejection emails. Mostly silence.

The actual data may not back me up here, but it feels like the worst job market since I started my career ~15 years ago.

I don't disagree with you, but one interesting consideration is that embedding it in a web page seems better than most other distribution mechanisms if you want average people to use it.

Even among a technical crowd, most folks don't want to install some random library or another Electron-based app to test your pet project.

This is a bummer.

Went to Life and Trust in January and really enjoyed it. We were hoping to go back later this year. I only made it to Sleep No More once before it ended, and wish that I had gone a couple more times.

The Life and Trust space was wild and felt truly massive, and even the ambience and scale of the waiting area was fantastic and really felt like it transported you to a different place and time.

Was hoping to see it again and explore some of the storylines that I missed.

I compared the experience with someone and, other than a few key scenes where lots of characters intersect, we saw entirely different shows.

Admittedly, there were parts where too many people moving too slowly in tight spaces made parts of the journey frustrating and by the end I was a little worn out from climbing up and down so many flights of stairs over and over again, but those are the tradeoffs you accept going into it.

Seems like a hard business to keep alive and replicate success from one show to the next.

It’s probably worth noting that they do offer a refund of your subscription price if you don’t perform searches in a given month, which is pretty much the opposite of how every other company with a subscription works.

It wasn’t a day one feature, so there’s some chance that a thing like this could roll out.

The article probably focuses on the overage because that’s what most users are going to be concerned about.

Few other companies seem to try to do things in the interests of their users and balance that against making enough money to keep existing.

This feels a bit like manufactured outrage.

“Allowing zoom” and “being responsive” are not two states at odds with one another.

Preventing zooming is a serious accessibility issue and it makes the content worse for every user.

If you’re properly setting responsive widths, a large enough base font size, large enough input text size, and using border-box for box-sizing, things should just work except for cases where you’re absolutely positioning things or telling them not to word wrap and they are wider than the viewport.

This is kind of a ridiculous take.

Not going to speak for the author, but some of us just want to be able to write a blog post and publish it in our free time. We're not trying to "maintain systems" for fun.

Some of those posts get zero views, and some of them end up on the front page of Hacker News.

Based on the website, was this published in 2016?

The job market in 2016 is unrecognizable to anyone who has had to look for a job recently.

It is absolutely brutal out there right now, and this feels a bit detached from reality.

Given the way accessibility is often an afterthought at best, this is a really good question.

Would love to hear about some of the experiences that screen reader users and other folks who use assistive technology have with things like getting caught in the CloudFlare filters and other “human” verification systems.

It seems easy to get caught in the net of “bot detection” as a normal user, and some of the verification steps don’t always seem very accessible.

Just as a heads up, the Firefox iOS app makes it super easy to set Kagi to your default search engine.

I think it might have even just sync’d over from my desktop settings? I never even thought about it, it just worked.

This really needs some explainer text about what it’s proposing as an alternative and links to reference implementations, current research, etc.

I’m sure most of us would love to see what comes next after LLMs have found their upper bounds.

The article body uses “sycophantic” or some form of the word about a dozen times.

It’s probably not an ideal word for an article title because - based purely on my own anecdotal evidence and conjecture - it’s one of those words that a lot people aren’t familiar with.

It sounds like that particular someone might have had a vested interest in maintaining the current (terrible) status quo around filing taxes in America.

The rest of us hate it.

Logging in to a search engine weirded me out at first, but after about a week I was so pleased with the results that I’ve been happily paying for almost a year now.

I honestly feel like any major free search engine is probably doing more to try to track you anyway.

And if you’re going to search something you want to be anonymous, you can just like use another search engine. I honestly haven’t run into the situation where I needed to.

I do worry that some day someone will be able to see how often I forget basic syntax for some JavaScript or Python method - or how often I can’t be bothered to type out a full domain and just search to navigate to it - but that’s a price I’m also willing to pay.

This is sort of apocryphal - and also anecdotal because I have my own personal experience living in an annexed Boston neighborhood to draw on - but in a lot of the towns/neighborhoods that have been annexed by Boston, people still use the neighborhood name[1] as the city name because you are more likely to get your package when you indicate which “Washington St,” “Boylston St,” etc. you actually live at.

According to one commenter on the subject:

  It doesn't matter, as long as the zip code is correct

[1] https://www.city-data.com/forum/boston/601106-mailing-addres...