HN user

geoelectric

2,175 karma
Posts0
Comments927
View on HN
No posts found.

I think that's a pretty bold claim, that it'd be different every time. I'd think the output would converge on a small set of functionally equivalent designs, given sufficiently rigorous requirements.

And even a human engineer might not solve a problem the same way twice in a row, based on changes in recent inspirations or tech obsessions. What's the difference, as long as it passes review and does the job?

One could argue that's a cynically accurate definition of most iterative development anyway.

But I don't know that I accept the core assertion. If the engineer is screening the output and using the LLM to generate tests, chances are pretty good it's not going to be worse than human-generated tech debt. If there's more accumulated, it's because there's more output in general.

Turn off swipe typing in the keyboard settings, and tap typing works a bazillion times better. It's like toggling a completely different codebase behind the keyboard and resetting it back to when blind-tap and autocorrect actually functioned as expected.

I assume the code that checks for tap vs start-of-swipe is to blame. I have no idea why that would cause word recognition and/or autocorrect to work so differently, but it seemingly does.

I've noticed the iOS keyboard has fundamentally different tap recognition based on whether swipe typing is enabled.

It looks the same but behaves differently enough that I have a hard time believing it shares code. When I turn off swipe, my tap accuracy goes MASSIVELY up, and a lot of the autocorrect screwiness seems to abate considerably. I can go back to blind thumb typing.

That said, swipe is so useful, I’ve left it on, and I deal with the degraded tap behavior. But maybe that’s a trade-off for you to consider.

I’m pretty sure temp chat mode doesn’t prevent the model from accessing your past chats and personalization. It just means that chat won’t be saved to them, to be seen in the future. It’s the same as incognito mode in browsers—it doesn’t prevent your search history from being used; it just keeps that session out of it.

If the experiment had been based on the idea that that option isolated the question, it may have been flawed. I found my ChatGPT’s o3’s accuracy went way down when I cleared personalization and deleted all past chats (turning off extended memory would’ve been equivalent, I think).

Importantly, only once did the o3 reasoning mention it was fishing from my past chats—that’s what clued me in I messed up the isolation—but the guess rate was still radically different from all the times before once I cleaned house. That suggests to me that it was quietly looking before, and it just didn’t make the cut for explicitly saying so.

The fact you had to clarify "at dancing" is why they're different.

Think about it as a decomposition where "dancer" means "dancing person."

In the simple case, both "blonde" and "dancing" separately modify "person." If you diagram that it’s a Y: either modifier could be removed without changing the meaning of the other, and their order isn’t important.

In the complex case, "bad" modifies "dancing," which together modify "person." That’s an ordered chain, which is more complex to build and comprehend. Your clarification illustrates the chaining and why it’d be a fundamentally different meaning if that wasn’t understood.

I’m not even touching whatever you were going for with the blonde/brunette thing. It's plain they used the example because there's no possible way hair color could be a modifier for "dancing," and they wanted something unambiguous.

You can also assign it to the triple click shortcut in Accessibility. You probably can to the double/triple back taps too, though I haven’t tried.

I do use a standalone Lectrofan for sleep as I prefer my noise machine to be across the room and Alexa-controlled (via a smart switch), plus it’s louder and the brown noise is “browner.”

But I keep iOS BG sound mapped to the triple-click shortcut for when noise-cancelling just isn’t enough in loud restaurants etc. It works great with AirPods for reducing my noise sensitivity issues.

I respect your experience, but your message added literally nothing to the conversation besides “you probably suck because people like you generally do.” It was nothing but a personal attack.

That’s considerably harder to respect, and it put me in the position of feeling like I needed to defend the parent of your comment.

Being more direct, since you seem to value that: consider keeping that sort of thing to yourself unless it has an actual constructive point beyond insulting the person to whom you’re responding. However true it might be per your subjective experience, posting it here only makes you look bad.

If nothing else, choosing a straw man of not understanding Chesterton’s Fence, when that was already directly contradicted by the parent comment, comes off as you being the ignorant one.

You may be comfortable with the ad hom, but maybe you shouldn’t be so comfortable with that.

This is technically the law in California, too (and possibly that’s where you live) but in practice the ability to do common law name-change has been abolished at a bureaucratic level.

Since at some point everything official now routes back to either a passport, an immigration/naturalization document, a court-issued name change doc, or a marriage certificate, those are effectively the only ways your name can be changed.

The problem is that all the law can do is make it legal for you to use whatever without it being considered fraudulent to try. But if your law is like CA’s it doesn’t specify other institutions other than possibly state government ones have to honor that and, in particular, it can’t constrain the federal government at all.

So that leaves the DMV as the one possibly effective way to do common law change, on the off chance somewhere will just accept your license as proof of identity. But now that driver’s licenses are subordinate to passport info or equivalent via Real ID, that route is pretty much toast too.

You might still be able to get the alternative state-only DL / state ID with a common law name, and maybe open a bank account with that, but then the credit reporting companies (or Chexsystems) don’t have to honor it so you’re possibly screwed anyway. Plus without a Real ID you’ll have to show a passport to fly domestically, and that will have the name you don’t like.

And, of course, none of this helps with your paycheck because you can’t satisfy an I-9 with a DL. It requires a federal document, too, which—if your state info doesn’t match your federal info—needs to be a fully identifying federal passport/equivalent. So even if you get the bank account with your chosen name, you might run into issues with your checks being to a different one.

At this point, it’s just not worth trying common law name change anymore. You either flip a few hundred for the official change or you accept the fact that you’ll have a public name and a private name.

(And I say this as a “Geo” who strongly dislikes seeing “George Jr” on stuff so I feel your pain. I just tell my employers that my given name only goes on paychecks, benefits, and tax forms, and is to never be used publicly. That has always worked.)

Unless they radically edited what they said after you replied, I’d say the approach they favor necessarily includes understanding the fence. It’s a bit rude to just lump them in with “folks like themselves” as an ad hom.

Even as a left lib who thinks the primary purpose of a government should be to pool money into public good, I doubt all the fences that are up are there for good reasons anymore. Questioning them in a careful and rational manner is healthy, and I wish it were done more. Wanton destruction like we’re seeing now isn’t.

I think that’s in line with what your parent comment was saying too. They might be more surprised than I would be as to how many fences are justified, but it sounds like they believe it’s important to check.

Yeah, once OS-9 came out we got some decent game ports too. That’s where I discovered Epyx Rogue! It was very late in the lifespan of the system though.

C64/128 was what I was thinking of more than anything re 8-bit competition, keeping in mind I’m talking mid-late 80s by this point. I do also remember Atari 800 (and later) doing considerably better than you imply. But you’re right, Apple captured the early-mid 80s gaming market nicely.

I learned assembly on a 6809 (TRS-80 CoCo) platform. It was only later that I really appreciated how cool of a CPU it really was.

It’s a shame that Tandy missed the boat on including coprocessors for game support in their computers, especially that one. If they’d just included decent audio and maybe something for sprite management it would’ve been highly competitive.

Mubi has a truly fantastic art house selection along with a few more accessible films like the recent critically acclaimed horror, The Substance.

It’s worth checking out on trial, or at least browsing the catalog, but the collection was too esoteric for me to keep a subscription. If you like art house, though, and especially if you’re cool with diving into unknown titles, it’s pretty impressive.

Exactly this. I’m, for better or for worse, pretty dependent on Echo for voice control of my lighting and sound system.

But I’ll never buy one with a screen again after having them co-opt my other Shows. The screens barely add any value, but they mainline ads into your home.

Yeah, but I wondered about the same thing as GP.

It’s one thing to be another voice in the crowd of people all saying the same thing (even a very deep pocketed voice) and another entirely to be the object example everybody discusses by letting it be believed that with all your billions, you’re scared too. People are more affected by things they decide for themselves than things you tell them, hence show don’t tell.

Were that to be the case, I wouldn’t consider it 4D chess. It seems like a straightforward strategy to me.

Re you not being sure how sync would work with multi-device passkeys, you can share a passkey between devices with 1Password, Apple’s Keychain, etc, and use it to log in from any of them. I typically do this rather than manage them per-machine.

Per-machine passkeys would ostensibly be better hygiene, but only if I somehow kept them unsynced (easier said than done if you’re using Keychain). Having to manage that process would probably be more mistake-prone than just using the single passkey from my encrypted 1Password store.

I’m pretty pumped about it actually. I have high-frequency hearing loss in one ear (along with replacement tinnitus) that just randomly crept in on me a few years ago, probably after some ENT infection or the other.

The hearing specialist who tested me said it’s fairly significant—eg I can’t hear consonants at the end of words clearly, think he rated it as 75yo hearing and I was ~45, and he asked me if I happened to shoot guns on that side. But he did not recommend going so far as a hearing aid yet.

I personally am skeptical, especially a few years later. What the AirPods solution might do is let me audition the idea. If it turns out whatever it does is beneficial, that will certainly prompt me to get myself retested for the real thing. I should get re-tested anyway, but there’s not much better to motivate you than concrete evidence.

The Atari 7800 2 years ago

I got my 5200 right around the time of the video game crash, so ended up with a decent library sourced out of remainder boxes.

Those controllers though—terrible durability.

Yeah, that’s another good comparison.

The Palm equivalent in that comparison would be Fitbit and possibly Pebble. Apple waited until there was a proven market in wearables, then figured out how to combine that market with the strengths of their existing ecosystem to improve upon value. Then they propped up the model line with $$$ until they actually became good enough for people to buy.

I’m relatively optimistic they can do that here too, but that device needs to have a model that does everything it does today (well, maybe not the creepy visor eyes) and more for less than $1000 and at about 2/3 the weight max, before I think AW-like adoption will possibly happen.

The thing is that I don’t really see the Vision Pro as Palm OS. Palm OS was out for years and years and was really successful, all things considered.

Sure, it wasn’t as ubiquitous as iOS or Android now, but it obviously filled a niche for a large enough number of people that it stuck around and pioneered that market. I had a Kyocera 6035 Palm “smartphone” over half a decade before the iPhone came out, and the Handspring Treos were also awfully popular among early adopters.

That credit here goes squarely to Oculus/Meta, and the Quest in specific.

Vision Pro, at best, is a Newton, stuffed with tech cool enough to be Really Neat, but with either too much tradeoff or that doesn’t go far enough to be a sea change in usability. There’s a little bit of Pippin in there too, with Apple not quite understanding how much games and game like activities drive VR adoption and how best to leverage that. Ultimately, the Vision Pro is a tech demo for a much better device and ecosystem in the future.

I think the one thing the VP has going for it over a Newton is timing. For once, later is better. Newton did all their stuff way early—then Palm came out with a fraction of it and turned out to be Good Enough so everyone forgot the Newton.

In this case, we already have Quest out as the Good Enough device, which makes it the right time to start discussing what the evolution would be. In that sense, I think the Vision Pro is very interesting.

Unless someone explicitly told you that’s the reason for the original takedown, I’m deeply skeptical you’ve got it right. That’s especially true with the chorus of redditors saying they also use that function.

I realize you didn’t find anything else that looked like it crossed stuff up, but I’d bet money the bot was looking at something entirely different.

For one, looking at the API docs for SleepTimeout doesn’t suggest it changes the saved OS-level user settings. It’s just a screen keep-awake like many games use without permission. And for another, I’m pretty sure for minor stuff that can be easily remedied they don’t nuke your app listing to the ground so you can’t remedy it.

Even the bit where they nuked your entire account on reupload implies a pretty good chance that whatever was offending the scan was still in there. I doubt they insta-ban everyone who uploads a similar app again unless it somehow registers as evasion.

That bot was almost certainly identifying your app as a scam—or you as a scammer—for some other reason. It’s possibly not even one that would make sense to you. That’s the problem with bots. But I just really doubt it’s for the reason you’re guessing.

I am ADHD and this article resonated with me. Stuff I need to do sporadically floats in and back out of my head, and it’s rare that I’ll bring myself to act on them immediately. The technique is simply to have a pad on me and write a task down if it floats in.

Even without an external todo system that reinforces remembering the task tomorrow, but the article acknowledges you can reconcile with an external system at the end of the day.

Would I stick with it? Dunno. But the general ideas are the same as extracting a Today list in GTD daily (given that the original system was designed around index cards and paper), or as the way BuJo doesn’t roll over unfinished tasks from the last rapid log automatically and makes you define them again each day. In the latter case, the repetition of recalling and recording the task every day is an explicit feature.

As for putting things on the list as you do them, I actually have an electronic version of that on my phone already as a shortcut called Give Me Credit.

If I ask Siri (on phone, HomePod, etc) to give me credit for a task it goes into Todoist as a Today task in my Credit project, prefixed with a cash icon ready for me to immediately check off. That way I don’t give myself the impression I never get anything done just because it’s not sufficiently planned first.

ADHD is an umbrella term and we’re all a little differently affected. I don’t think there is such a thing as “this organizational system isn’t for ADHD folks.” It’s just not for some folks, period.