pavel_lishin

When we had a child, we decided that my spouse should absolutely go back to work, even though that job just barely paid for daycare. But it meant that my spouse could leave the house, have adult conversations, and not have their full life, 24/7, revolve around a single thing.

And besides, maybe the person running dates by Claude just does that for a bit of fun as a hobby. People have weird hobbies! Better not to yuck someone's yum.

Sure. But assuming that he's referring to Emmie Chang, it's very weird to record every conversation you have in general, and extra weird to be doing it on first dates.

If I went on a date and realized I was being recorded, I would immediately leave. This isn't normal, this is a wild choice to make. I will absolutely yuk this yum, the same way I would yuk the yum of someone who follows their date home and records them through a window.

It's up there with Milhouse.

After that kind of a stretch, you're ready for any kind of exercise.

It's interesting because I like math, and typically posts like this generate a lot of interesting comments. Plus, in general, I'm wildly disinterested in the AI discourse that eats up 50-75% of the front page, so frankly anything that's slightly more interesting than that gets an upvote from me.

I'm upvoting this because it's interesting. I don't have to fully understand something to find it interesting.

I think this is just an ad.

Yeah, but they also bring along some <rot13-spoiler>bpgbcv naq eniraf, naq na vafnar sbezre-uhzna ehaavat ba na nag-onfrq fhofgengr.</rot13-spoiler>

It feels the same here - I've visited hospitals (as a guest, not a patient) quite a bit over the past year+, and I've noticed quite a few. I think women still outnumber men by at least 2:1, but it's not uncommon.

I'm guessing the goal is to get that parity up to 1:1, or something close.

That graph looks incredibly un-diverse. Assuming it's accurate, it's mostly childless white male Americans, who skew heavily towards being students.

This sounds like less of a "let's get mad at the FCC!" situation, but more of a "let's get mad at companies defrauding the US Government" situation.

Hell it is almost impossible to use one if they don't recline.

Exactly, lol. I just scootch it closer to myself and lose another 5 points of comfort.

I almost never recline my seat, and my moral calculus is this: I will get approximately 5 Comfort Units from doing this, whereas the person behind me will lose approximately 100 Comfort Units.

(For comparison, I'd say that sitting in a first class seat on an airplane is somewhere around 1000 Comfort Units.)

The seats are all terrible, they barely recline from my perspective, and there's just no reason to do this. I don't particularly care if someone else's calculation is different from mine. If someone in front of me reclines, I don't begrudge them the slightly more comfortable position they're in now. Flying sucks - my situation didn't get that much worse if they reclined.

In person or online.

How often have you met people over the phone in the past decade?

I will say that blocking all unrecognized numbers, though, is an unworkable idea. Any parent or caregiver knows that they need to be able to occasionally receive calls from a number they've never heard of before.

It brings to mind the Chinese Room argument: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_room

If a person in a Chinese Room doesn't actually understand Chinese, though the system as a whole behaves as if it does - can we say that the engineer merging PRs and deploying to production understands the system or maintains it?

You get actual humans calling you from unknown numbers? Lucky! I only ever get "Chase" from "Home Security Solutions" or whatever.

It's not "just" greasing the wheels, because previously each call required a human being to spend the equivalent amount of time on the phone with a victim, interacting with them - you couldn't just play a cassette tape at them, you know?

And it likely requires working with other people, your "employees", who are both a liability, and a cost.

With AI, you can make a thousand calls in parallel, for significantly cheaper, out of your own basement.

This greases the wheels of voice fraud like a gatling gun greases the wheels of hitting a guy with a rock.

I think the hardest thing to come to terms with is not that this is the new reality, or even that this is soon going to be the new reality for our older relatives, but that this is coming for almost all of us.

Does it matter if the developers understand the system they maintain?

Are they maintaining it if all they do is type prompts into Claude?

In fact, biological systems produce no metals

I'm going to be very pedantic and point out a counterexample: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scaly-foot_gastropod

Any mention of sundials reminds me of this funny bit I saw elsewhere online:

“what time is it” you ask, i pull out my 2.7 metric ton granite sundial and immediately crush both of your feet, I loudly announce “it is cloudy”

Shouldn't this have a "Show HN" in front of it, as per the guidelines?

What's also fun are alphabet differences.

Yeah. Slavic names are fun here. Polish names are already long due to their di- and tri-graphs, and transliterated Russian and Ukrainian names can easily eat up the "maximum character count" if you have a lot of sibilants in your name. And that's before you meet with someone who has to try and stumble over the various zh, sh and sch sounds.

A question for any Portuguese or Spanish speakers here, which I think are languages and cultures in which these sorts of name patterns are common - when you see a name like "Roberto Antonio Ferreira De Almeida", is it obvious where the "given" name stops, and the "family name" starts?

I'm guessing in this case it's fairly obvious, since I'm guessing Ferreira is analogous to something like Smith, but are there names where it's not obvious?

And are things like middle names even a thing there? Or is it all "given name consisting of several words"?

Why would a product talk its users out of using it?

I'd argue that it's not that Claude is better, but that Google has gotten worse.

In our interviews with users, a common theme that’s emerged is a desire to better understand how, exactly, AI can be integrated into daily life.

I don't want to integrate AI into daily life.

Maybe? But I would think there's a limit to how much you can do with an "overexposed" image, right?

I had this problem, and was able to get around it by disabling mouse reporting in iTerm2.

This feels like generically good advice when interviewing in general - show an interest in your potential future employer.