HN user

frostiness

199 karma
Posts0
Comments26
View on HN
No posts found.
GPT-5.6 12 days ago

This is also true for pretty much any other category of search that you do as a layman. Specific, targeted queries for official documentation or research are fine, but if you look up basic information about cars, health, or basic computer troubleshooting a massive portion of the results are AI-generated.

If I'm going to be getting AI-generated results, I'd rather read the output of a model that has all the context of my specific situation than slop generated in bulk with a cheap model from six months ago.

Ti-84 Evo 3 months ago

As someone who also menu-3-1'd their way through the SAT, I'm surprised it was ever allowed. Super useful outside of school but knowing that a good portion of my classmates using Ti-84s were doing the same problems on paper felt rather unfair.

The problem is that it genuinely is. One of the appeals of AI is that you can focus on planning instead of actually doing running the commands yourself. If you're educated enough to be able to validate what the commands are doing (which you should be if you're trusting an AI in the first place), then if you have to individually approve pretty much everything the AI does you're not much faster than just doing it yourself. In my experience, not running in YOLO mode negates most advantages of agents in the first place.

AI is either an untrustworthy tool that sometimes wipes your computer for a chance at doing something faster than you would've been able to on your own, or it's no faster than just doing it yourself.

You absolutely can, but it's way more common to only know how to create a blank site with a framework than to migrate an existing site. React used to have a section in its documentation for how to add it to your site without adding a build system (not common knowledge, unless it's setting up a blank site through a script) and they've since replaced it with a brief tutorial telling you to migrate your website to a JS module with a link to a suggested build system.

All of this matters because the person that has to do this setup might not be you. It's certainly a problem with the frameworks themselves that porting a website (even just to add a little functionality) isn't as easy as setting one up initially but there's not really much an individual can do here. It's one reason I like frameworks like Preact so much, they're actually trying to fix this.

I'm glad someone here says this. I'm also an amateur radio operator, and I very frequently see people who are otherwise against public resources being exploited for commercial purposes arguing against many of the regulations that ham radio requires, oftentimes the restriction on encryption. Few other hobbies have the idea of protecting their existence as baked in as amateur radio, and it keeps me hopeful that it will continue to exist as the years go on.

Is that really the fault of the public domain or a reaction to the fact that Winnie the Pooh was copyrighted for so long? The appeal of horror Winnie the Pooh in almost every single instance has been due to the novelty that it's even possible to do legally, and somewhat as an act of rebellion against the company arguably responsible for holding it hostage for so long.

The situation the author described where the system comes to a halt as memory contents are paged in and out of memory/disk is (subjectively) worse when the only option is for the OOM killer to begin reaping processes everywhere.

This one's interesting since your outcome often depends on what hardware you have. On systems with slow IO, i.e. a slow HDD, it's possible for swapping to make a system entirely unusable for minutes, whereas if swap is disabled the OOM killer is able to kick in and solve the issue in less than a minute. That's the difference between being able to keep most of your work open and none of your work open (because the alternative is being forced to reboot).

It's not about managing. It's about the friction to reaching out for help and lost productivity from having to schedule meetings combined with inexperience making it hard to decide which problems are worth the friction of reaching out and which ones aren't. There's also the sense of isolation that being remote gives, because asking for help over a private message makes it look like you're the only one that needs help. All of this is still a problem regardless of clarity of expectations and tasks.

My preferences are likely going to change once I get more experience under my belt but I absolutely feel there are some facets of remote work that benefit senior engineers at the expense of junior engineers.

On the other hand, as someone on an old android device, the performance difference between the two is massive and it isn't getting better. Some sites (usually the ones that are actually important such as restaurant menu) are perfect on Chrome and nearly unusable on Firefox, even with an adblocker.

Performance already matters a lot on desktop browsers, but when battery life is thrown into the mix, it matters even more.

You can have both. People can intentionally choose platforms that make them feel less free in exchange for convenience. It just means that the convenience (and network effects) that they get out of using a more convenient platform are more valuable to them than the ability to communicate freely. When most people are using these platforms non-anonymously (i.e. to talk with their friends) they probably also get less out of privacy than people talking to others they've never met in person.

It's worthwhile to consider a balance between convenience, plausible deniability (people don't really want to be that guy in the coffee shop on Tor), and privacy. Privacy platforms nowadays consider privacy above all else because most people heavily into privacy are purists that don't want to sacrifice any privacy in exchange for having more people to talk with. It's one of the reasons I still respect Telegram with all of its shortcomings, because even though it's relatively insecure in comparison to its competitors, it takes convenience into account and as such has more users than most all privacy-centric messengers while still providing end-to-end encryption for the people that desire it (at least in theory, the cryptography's a bit shaky).

If you look at the list of top sellers, new arrivals, upcoming games, and games on sale, most if not all of them have native Linux support, which is something you absolutely could not have said just a few years ago. In my experience, at this point bad Linux ports are more of an issue than a lack of them.

I agree though honestly, if Proton works fine and the game runs under it, I'd much rather have that than a bad native Linux port. Plus, I have a lot more trust in Proton to keep things compatible than Windows.

I don't even own a Steam Deck and I've been seeing the benefits just from its existence. Now, almost every game on Steam has a quick accessible rating that lets me know if it works fine on Linux. This has led to me being able to buy games confidently that I never would have otherwise. In addition, the effectiveness of Proton for running Windows games is baffling, and something I never could have expected when I first switched to Linux back in 2015.

Back when Steam Machines first came out, the expectation was that there would be a new push to get games working on Linux, which unfortunately didn't end up happening as strongly as expected. However, with how much of a success the Steam Deck was, it seems that the rush to get games ported to Linux actually is happening. I'm excited for the future.

Every now and then I see a post like this one that laments that the age of web pages looking unique is gone. Sure, I can agree with that, but it's hard to say that it wasn't a good tradeoff. The original article admits that it was able to decrease the barrier for entry for writing a blog by a LOT, and while it did make customization a lot less likely, it meant that people that were not going to write anything suddenly had the ability to.

I'm thinking primarily of sites like YouTube here. Sure, we all sacrificed the ability to customize the way that we serve videos to others, or the freedom of not being on a platform that someone else owns, but some of the best people on the site are people that aren't technically focused at all. These people would not have been able to publish anything if the barrier for entry wasn't lowered.

And on the opposite side, if you look at places trying to bring back the small/old web, you run into the issue that generally everyone there has the same interest of programming or technology, since it's borderline essential to get into these places in the first place. It's sometimes surprising what kind of people you find on there, but most of the time it's just a bunch of programmers. The freedom of the old web was brought back at the cost of the diversity of people that populated it.