orthogonal_cube

Any plans to let people create accounts to track their scores over time?

It would be very surprising for somebody without a formal software development background and years of experience.

Looking back at 2015 when Python 2 was still supported, there was a lot of confusion for why Python 2 would create a tuple while Python 3 created a generator for the following statement:

  foo = (x for x in [10, 20, 30])

I am able to see my PCP and dentist within a week if I want.

This is very much location- and provider-dependent, regardless of rural or urban setting. You also have to factor in that some doctors do not work at a single clinic but may schedule their week to spend certain days at one facility and the rest at others (ex. Monday and Thursday at Facility A, Tuesday and Wednesday at Facility B, Fridays off) which can limit the ability to see them in the same week especially if the facilities are not owned by the same organization.

Healthcare access and quality aren’t consistent. Some states or areas in the same state will have better providers than others. Some health insurances will cover things without question and others may fight against you on covering things.

I recently had knee surgery and hit my deductible due to the procedure but insurance billed me for full price on part of the it because they deemed it to be “experimental and unnecessary.” There was some back-and-forth between the surgeon’s office, my insurance, and myself to understand why only a part of it wasn’t covered. This was an additional $1,200 that eventually I had to pay for; even after paying $1,100 up front because of my high-deductible health plan. I’m financially stable enough to cover it without it destroying my savings but this kind of surprise isn’t uncommon for US citizens even with recent laws trying to make costs more predictable.

Was this by chance inspired by a previous submission (now defunct) that had a similar premise?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40536488

Edit: I believe it was transferred to a new domain at https://wordnerd.co/

$240/yr in software subscriptions but likely far more than that by selling the extra metadata they can extract from the service

Are Ubiquiti products commonplace for companies that contract with the US government outside of the DoD/DoW?

Since DoD/DoW generally requires STIG compliance, and none authored are for any specific Ubiquiti product, we can cross that off the list. Sure they can get exceptions or use a more generalized STIG but stakeholders generally have pre-defined limitations on what they will and will not allow on networks they sponsor.

It was fun exploring this to make a native-shell-only peer-to-peer file transfer utility at work for some automation scripts. At least, it was until trying to replicate it in Powershell was somehow triggering Crowdstrike and the corporate Cybersecurity team thought I was writing malware.

This is not uncommon when becoming disillusioned with something that has been hyped up and forced upon you for an extended period.

The fatigue of the product (and sting of false promises) causes the negatives to overshadow anything positive to say.

I find this study interesting but wonder if the wording is specifically done to cause some sensationalism.

However, there is a twist: for positions on distributed teams, the firm consistently hired more experienced workers, even after reopening. This divergence suggests that the firm’s hiring decisions were influenced by the complications of remote work rather than other macroeconomic trends.

They don’t consider (almost intentionally) that remote positions don’t have the same restrictions as in-person positions. Anyone meeting desired qualifications can be considered for a remote position. Only people willing to relocate to, or already live near, a target office and meet the qualifications can be considered for an in-person job. Remote positions therefore are likely to be more competitive and difficult for inexperienced candidates because the pool of candidates is far larger. The hiring manager is incentivized to pick the person they believe will contribute the most for the amount they’re willing to pay.

The findings about mentorship in-person may be true but it is strange to put that as the deciding reason. There are no details provided over how “quality” is quantified nor decided. Selecting a sample size of one firm to analyze in detail without looking at others to confirm this feels very flawed.

I miss working at a place which allowed this.

Some employers get tangled up in just the legal review process.

Once I asked permission to submit a patch to a project and it had quite an interesting email trail. It came down to a single question: if the patch was written during hours billed to a customer for the purpose of fixing a bug in a deliverable product, and the library being patched had to be recompiled and delivered with the source code, and the contract states that all work and intellectual property associated to the product would be transferred to the customer, do we have authority to release the patch in the public domain?

Legal didn’t want to answer it.

I frequently reference this exact meme to people whenever someone complains about complicated or difficult-to-write code. Now that’s you’ve made this project I suppose we have zero room to complain anymore!

Dang, haven’t read much on Julia as of late. I remember using it for a CS 300-level course around 2016 when learning about tokenizing and parsing as part of language fundamentals. Julia has undoubtedly made some significant performance improvements since then. Would love to see a follow-up that explores what, if anything, from this still holds true and what improvements can be made.

To answer the first question, a number of veteran independent researchers probably wouldn’t have touched such a system. Plenty of companies will send their lawyers after you if you tell them that you’ve discovered a vulnerability of some sort and wish to responsibly disclose. Even if you do things in good faith, the company has zero reason to assume the best from you and can hold a sword over your head by citing poorly-written laws that lean in their favor regarding computer fraud and abuse.

DoD does appear to offer a “Defense Industrial Base - Vulnerability Disclosure Program” for all public-facing DoD/DoW systems.[1] However, this might not include contractor-controlled assets or services. I cannot view the HackerOne page that it redirects to (login is required) to view more details.

[1] https://www.dc3.mil/Missions/Vulnerability-Disclosure/DIB-Vu...

Honestly I’m surprised this wasn’t already a feature in macOS. Thank you for coding it and publishing as open-source!

SQLite did decently well but I think they should’ve done an additional benchmark with the database loaded completely into memory.

Since they’re using Go to accept requests and forwarding them to their SQLite connection, it may have been worthwhile to produce the same interface with Rust to demonstrate whether or not SQLite itself was hitting its performance limit or if Go had some hand in that.

Other than that, it’s a good demonstration of how a custom solution for a lightweight task can pay off. Keep it simple but don’t reinvent the wheel if the needs are very general.

Seems the installers hosted by them are fine. The links on the site have been changed to direct people towards Cloudflare R2 storage with various copies of malicious executables.

Looking forward to information down the line on how this came about.

That’s the ironic part.

Plenty of consumer-grade devices have had very lax security settings or backdoors baked in for purposes of “troubleshooting” and recovery assistance. It’s never been limited to foreign-made devices.

Security has never been part of the review process. The only time any agency has really cared is when encryption is involved, and that’s just been the FBI wanting it to be neutered so they can have their own backdoors.

Why does it ask a yes-no question if it isn’t prepared to take “no” as an answer?

Because it doesn’t actually understand what a yes-no question is.

even configuring servers is easier with Claude

To what extent is Claude configuring these servers? Is this baremetal deployment with OS configuration and service management? Or is it abstracted by defining Terraform files to use pre-created images offered by a hosting service?

Ha, well I’m not on the spectrum but ADHD does have some overlap here and there.

Good writing doesn't have mad tangents anyway, there should be a flow and natural transition.

In general, yes. Technical documents, research reports, news articles, and other formal publications should follow this.

Anything else which allows a bit more freedom in expression? I’d say it’s a matter of taste.

The stigma comes from people being lazy and letting the AI do the heavy lifting of thinking.

This is essentially my point. The AI emits an answer and people will, in turn, copy and paste the result as-is. It’s a repeat all over again of people simply copy-pasting something from Wikipedia and trying to pass it off as their own.

I couldn’t tell. I struggle with such subtleties.

I probably should’ve checked ‘454545’ in the ascii table. Seeing how it translates to ‘---‘ could’ve hinted towards that, but the clever use probably would’ve been applauded instead without thinking it was a joke.

Ah well. Egg on my face I suppose.

I wonder how many other patterns we attribute to LLMs are common in neurodivergent writing just as a result of so much of the training data being areas of the internet where I'd imagine neurodivergence is overrepresented vs. the general population.

It’s a very interesting thought experiment and if we had the data to support exploring it I’d love to see what we could find. I’d imagine that some subject-matter experts would probably be discovered as being neurodivergent to the surprise of nobody but themselves.

(They probably wouldn’t appreciate opening Pandora’s box!)

Isn't this what parenthesizes are meant for?

Parentheses add emphasis to a sentence or statement. Normally the use of it allows the sentence to be complete with or without it.

Em dashes may also add or increase emphasis but are normally treated as an aside. Think of it as a comment by the author to inject themselves, sometimes in ways which do not form a complete sentence.

For example: When you read this sentence (in your mind) it should feel complete and correct. Perhaps you read in your own voice — something I don’t normally do — or without one at all.

I don't understand what the issue even is here, and the RFC also doesn't clearly outline it.

The issue is written there but may not make sense unless you know someone who stylistically writes with high-than-average em dash usage. I, for example, get inquiries and comments at work from employees who ask what LLM model I used for “generating these reports” because of the presence of em dashes. They do not believe me when I say not a single word was written by LLMs because, “there’s an em dash. Only LLMs use em dashes!” This is categorically untrue and erodes the authenticity of work from people because of the correlation.

Their aim is to implement a new Unicode character which programs like text editors could inject when a person types an em dash. It attributes to a human being behind the document, typing characters out individually. Actions like copy-pasting text in bulk wouldn’t replace em dashes since it can’t attribute a human as writing it out.

Historically, the em dash (—) has served as a flexible punctuation mark used by human authors to indicate interruption, emphasis, or sudden changes in thought.

I learned about the em dash in high school and adapted it to my writing style very quickly for analysis and opinion documents. It felt natural given the amount of tangents I can go off into, particularly when including analogies for the reader’s understanding.

I was surprised to find out in my career that it was rarely used by others. Subconsciously I pulled back on how often I used it — especially when it was once suggested that frequent use could imply neurodivergence. Important and lengthy documents which I’d written and published (internally) at work still display them. On occasion there have been comments asking if I’d somehow accessed early AI models to assist in writing these works because of their presence. I think I averaged two em dashes per letter page.

I find myself on the fence with proposals like these. They have good intentions but they do not solve an issue at its core. An LLM is going to reflect one of many writing styles. If today it’s frequent em dash usage, tomorrow it could be frequent parentheses. Swapping Unicode characters becomes a cat-and-mouse game with the cat always two steps behind. The real issue is that the social contract is broken because LLM output is attempted to be passed off as human work. Review and revise that social contract instead to adapt to the existence of the new tools.

Agreed. Without the context it just feels like a petty reaction. For all the reader knows, it could be completely unrelated to AI. The repository owner could’ve had a falling out with the maintainers regarding features or may be trying to inject their own malicious code into the fork.

Probably depends on what “consumer-friendly” entails, how it’s stored, and the quantity of data.

If we’re talking the average tech-illiterate to literate-but-cost-and-space-constrained person, probably Blu-Ray. A burner+reader combo with a stack of dual-layer discs is probably cost-effective. High-capacity HDDs would probably be equally effective if you can guarantee that they’re stored away from accidents and mishandling, but if it requires a SATA-to-USB adapter with assembly then it might possibly be out of reach for some consumers, and any risk of damage from movement could rule it out entirely.

If we’re talking tech-savvy consumers who don’t have the IT budget of a corporation, maybe LTO-5 or LTO-6 tapes could work. Tapes themselves are very affordable and have a good shelf lifespan. Used libraries can be had for under $600. The primary issues would be finding one with an interface that works with your existing equipment and software to support tape read and write.

Seems as though the process of changing the password on their end may not be as straightforward. Or they’re just worried that misconfiguring it may prevent them from getting connected again.

In any case, as long as it’s not directly routable to the internet and there’s a plan to phase it out, probably nothing to get worked up about.

I hope the sound of the drive isn’t particularly bothersome. It’s rather impressive to still be working.

Physical durability will play a major factor here. If schools are expected to provide the Chromebooks then it will all boil down to the level of abuse/neglect the hardware can handle.

Replacing a low-resale value $250 Chromebook that is equally sensitive to being dropped, exposed to liquids, or having debris get into hinges and keyboards will be heavily favored over a $500 MB Neo. The Neo’s processor and storage may have better lifetime but it doesn’t mean anything if the equipment ends up bricked.

Schools in affluent areas may favor these for reasons you state. Judging on how students treat textbooks though should demonstrate how short the lifespan would turn out to be.