pen2l

Reddit is one of the most potent places where opinion-shaping has been happening. I've been getting ads for Reddit everywhere recently (even thought I've been a reddit user for about 20 years).

r/worldnews is pretty tightly controlled, it's a default subreddit meaning 50+ million people see the posts submitted in this subreddit, and most critically, the ensuing conversation in comments which goes only in one direction. Frankly I'm impressed this all was pulled off so seamlessly.

I think a switch happened inside me roughly 5 years ago, that I went from eschewing walled gardens to now valuing them more and more. Too much of my life has been wasted fighting through dark patterns, finding cancel screens, or being had by manipulative subscription arrangements wherein there are cancelation fees or complex terms of service that somehow make cancelation difficult.

When I paid 1k-something dollars for an iPhone 16 a few months ago, I did not pay for a general purpose computing device, no, I paid for a device that can take pictures, and has certain apps that I like which I know how much I'm paying for, and I know that with ease I will be able to active/deactivate its subscription with zero struggle. That's what I paid for, a device made by a company whose discretion I trust and support, and I pray it continues being this way.

I'd rather another one not exist, because then it would become a game of incentives... app owners might only make their apps available on THAT App Store, resulting in App Store's value being diminished. I would like that the one App Store be the one and the only one in a KISS principle. Apple so far hasn't failed me, and so I continue to trust it and its judicious management and curation of apps.

Folks who care about having any app they want through alternative stores I wish would just opt for Android systems.

People here miss the value of a tightly moderated walled garden: I don't have to worry about downloading things that are misleading or are chock full of dark patterns, because it has been vetted by an App Store that I trust. And when I download an app with a subscription through App Store, I can see any time how much it costs, I can cancel it any time no fuss: https://www.iphonelife.com/sites/iphonelife.com/files/styles...

Meanwhile, any subscription I sign up for through another channel, I have to wade through a sea of dark patterns to reach a cancel screen.

This is why I choose to have an iPhone, because the garden is walled and I can relax. If you want freedom to have multiple different app stores, Android is a better option for you.

Bottom trawling in particular seems horrendous. Here is Attenborough narrating about the horrors of it and how it affects the ocean floor: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tXp3jo_uGOQ

I understand it's cool to slam Harvard these days but it is nonetheless a behemoth when it comes to research output.

https://www.harvard.edu/about/history/nobel-laureates/

https://www.nature.com/nature-index/research-leaders/2024/in...

https://hms.harvard.edu/about-hms/history-hms/timeline-disco...

https://www.harvard.edu/in-focus/innovation/

Roughly a third of the 50-something of Harvard's Nobel laureates were immigrants by the way.

I was recently banned from r/worldnews over a comment which I thought was relatively innocuous. Anyway, that made me start investigating and smelling things and suddenly when you see it, it's hard to ignore. r/worldnews is completely, unmistakably compromised. It's the third largest subreddit with about 50 million subscribers. The situation is so vivid and clear that it's unthinkable that owners are unaware that it is compromised, from moderations to the dominant commenting user base. So what in the world is happening and how did it come to be this way? Spez et al were compromised? How?

The most charitable and perhaps the most rational explanation is that the 'propaganda' effort is impressively, surprisingly, exhaustively grassroots [1] and that's why reddit's overlords cannot simply contain it -- after all, it's real people, very committed and very real indeed. Although I would think that even if this were true, were reddit's operators uncompromised, they'd at least feel compelled to investigate the moderators of the subreddit which has a readership of 50 million, because even if the activity is organic, what's going on crosses a certain threshold of what should be permissible, if only for the richness of debate and discussion. I won't approach the complex topic of whether grassroots led propaganda effort constitutes something that is illegitimate and whether it warrants management, moderation, or some sort of penalty.

I'm not extremely educated about the complex history of Israel and jewish people, though I'm trying to learn more these days. Knowing what I know so far: It is a unique group of people for sure, and 2000 years of oppression, I think, has resulted in a special kind of cohesion that even when scattered throughout the world, they partake in strong self-advocacy. In my experience, this kind of self-advocacy doesn't exist with any other group.

I apologize if my comment reads prejudiced or inappropriate, please tell me if it does, certainly and obviously it is not meant to be.

[1] https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2024/01/24/gaza-is...

I've opined about the atrocious announcement pages from Google before (across the board they are offensively sucky), but to give that a rest and speak on-topic about the announcement in question -- good lord what a step back it is, how ugly, insipid, spiritless, and unimpressive it is. Expressive? It's exactly the opposite. Material team, what have you got against shadows, soft bevels, borders, those 2px worth of adornments which carry the weight of gold in terms of communicating clickability, state, different types of buttons, providing instrumental cues and abstraction about everything, why have you failed to learn from UI/UX of the decades behind you?

It's even infecting Flutter, because it wants to push Material. This is genuinely depressing. And makes me appreciate the command of Steve Jobs, the guy leading Stripe, etc. because when you see abysmal offerings like these, you just can't help to.

And it's phenomenally hard to not be judgmental about this, because after release after release it shows they are not learning.

I can appreciate this argument comes from folks who frequent this forum, who can discern scams from legitimate things.

But I'm sad for this decision for myself and for the lay man and woman out there. In recent years I've gone out of my way to sign up for subscriptions with App Store if I have the option, because of the true boon it offered in a world of dark patterns: managing a subscription in one place where I have scope of everything, with the expectation that I won't have to jump through barriers or puzzles to cancel, clear-as-day information of when a subscription renews, how much it costs, etc. This was what Apple was good at. I hate that my friends and family will now probably unwittingly get had as a result of this.

Interested in reading more about this, that symptoms are more aggressive in the morning, can you refer to studies if you were thinking of some in particular?

It's really hard to believe, but OpenAI kind of did Apple a bamboozle.

I use advanced voice mode in ChatGPT, and I had a bit of a eureka moment. It is the first time ever that an AI chat /actually works/. I've tried Siri, Alexa etc extensively for years, but AV mode in ChatGPT is the first AI voice chat thing that /actually works/: I can comfortably interrupt it, I can misspeak, and I can rely on it to have continuity in the context of a conversation... and the responses I get actually answer my question, most of the times. It all just works...

But for whatever reason, whatever OpenAI is giving to Apple in this Apple-OpenAI partnership, is more or less worthless. They're not giving them the keys. I wish AI voice chat would be relegated or commoditized to being just a feature (and I hope/think recent OSS advancements make that be the case), but until then I have 'Action button' set to start voice conversation with ChatGPT.

Curious to see Apple's next move though, with the recent changes in this landscape.

Banksy's identity is kind of an open secret, it's Robin Gunningham, people in the 'know' have known this for a long time. But we all every now and then partake in the effort of keeping it an (open) secret, for respect of the art and the mystique, and for the respect of the artist's very own desire.

While all of this is true, that DeepSeek wouldn't be here were it not for the research that preceded it notably Google's paper, then Llama, and ChatGPT which they're modeled after, its release still did something profound to their psyche, the motivation and self-actualization this instills to the Chinese. They witnessed the power of their accomplishments: a side-hustle project knocked off an easy trillion. This is only egging them on and will serve to ramp up their efforts even more.

Separately, I do think that now that the Chinese leadership saw this, that they have the chops to pull this off and then some, they are probably going to rein in future innovations; they'll likely demand that the big future discoveries remain closed-sourced (or even unannounced/unpublicized).

Every day that passes I grow fonder of Google's decision to delay or otherwise keep a lot of this under the wraps.

The other day I was scrolling down on YouTube shorts and a couple videos invoked an uncanny valley response from me (I think it was a clip of an unrealistically large snake covering some hut) which was somehow fascinating and strange and captivating, and then scrolling down a few more, again I saw something kind of "unbelievable"... I saw a comment or two saying it's fake, and upon closer inspection: yeah, there were enough AI'esque artifacts that one could confidently conclude it's fake.

We'd known about AI slop permeating Facebook -- usually a Jesus figure made out of unlikely set of things (like shrimp!) and we'd known that it grips eyeballs. And I don't even know in which box to categorize this, in my mind it conjures the image of those people on slot machines, mechanically and soullessly pulling levers because they are addicted. It's just so strange.

I can imagine now some of the conversations that might have happened at Google when they choose to keep a lot of innovations related to genAI under the wraps (I'm being charitable here of their motives), and I can't help but agree.

And I can't help but be saddened about OpenAI's decisions to unload a lot of this before recognizing the results of unleashing this to humanity, because I'm almost certain it'll be used more for bad things than good things, I'm certain its application on bad things will secure more eyeballs than on good things.

This comment is a perfect example of what the origin of complete nonsense with sticking power looks like on the internet: a couple insults and denigrations, a refutal without substantiation, and a confident suggestion for one to do their own research (of course without providing a reference study from a journal of consideration) and calling it a day.

Fructose from whole fruits is processed and metabolized differently. Indeed fructose trapped inside fiber will take some time to be digested, and a sharp blood spike is prevented. Sugar from fruits is not bad in the way sugar from soda is bad.

https://www.bmj.com/content/347/bmj.f5001.abstract

Fructose in fruits is trapped inside webs of fiber, the gut can more capably deal with fructose in this form vs. fructose found in candy or soda. GP is more right than wrong.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Western_Governors_University

In both of these as well as submission link, one of the things that is clearly and strikingly different from modern UI is the lack of very abundant amount of padding space. I think it's almost the mantra that we need breathing room, e.g., between different options in a radio-group box list of items... but I find lesser space (as was characteristic of older UI's) to be more honest... more respectful to me as an end-user, more information-dense.

I don't want to discard whatever innovation has been done, but man I find myself being nostalgic of old UI quite often.

I mean, unless the US and EU tariff the hell out of imports.

That is what is happening. But I wonder if that'll result in animosity for the upper ruling class. Tariffs when it suits them, but never when it suits us down below.

Many would love the BYD because all other EV's are completely out of their spending budget.

A better example than Figma is Rive, made with Flutter.

Works well local-first, and syncs with the cloud as needed. Flutter space lends itself very well to making local-first apps that also play well in the cloud.

Safari on MacOS, running on new apple silicon on a fairly souped up MBP, which I use for various computationally intense tasks.

Kind of amazed (and confused) really... that the thing which finally gives it a challenge is a blog homepage.

I'm disappointed. I'd long looked up to Josh for good UI/UX, but like a lot of other UI/UX folks who are left alone to their devices go too deep in their tunnels and at some point lose touch from where the rest of us still stand.

I have a mathematician friend who studied mathematics at MIT and then worked in a research team at Google for some time. I caught up with him, and casually half-jokingly told him that I tried to understand some of his papers but I got nothing out of them.

And he replied, in earnest, that some of the papers are needlessly and deliberately complicated and obfuscated for a whole host of reasons (political reasons, career reasons etc).

This jargon-heavy circumlocutious academic speak you find often in papers, it's a gate-barrier... to keep out non-native English speakers, up-and-coming scholars? I don't know, but whatever the case, let's hope the outflow of papers written with LLM assistance takes a blow at the problem, when the corpus of literature is so diluted with all this that corporate-speak and jargon-heavy speak as a differentiator for in-group or whatever has a lesser incentive to exist.

https://paulgraham.com/simply.html

I remember once, what like 15 years ago or something, I got an email from some business that I was subscribed to that I’ve been unsubscribed and refunded some money as they see I’m not using the service I signed up for or maybe forgot about it and that I should reach out to them if I’m still interested.

Can’t even imagine that happening in this day and age. In fact big companies probably covet this demographic (subscribe and forget) and go to great lengths to secure them in their webs.

It’s pretty “popular” in United States also, well at least in my group of peers whenever we’re going for sushi one of us will have ordered katsu curry.

My absolute favorite is the curry as it’s made by Yayume sushi in San Ramon.

AI is gonna introduce new information to input new resolution from nowhere either which way, so we're just priming and massaging and optimizing our input so as to remove any obstructions that might trip up the AI enhancer. But yes you're right, ideally the enhancer should know how to take into account compression artifacts but this one doesn't.

The original contains artifacts that tend to arise after compression, as the other poster notes (posterization and such). I wonder if you'll get better results if you make the original go through a gaussian to smooth those artifacts, and then feed it to the enhancer.

Suspend all knowledge of copyright law as it exists today for a moment and approach this hypothetical on first principles: a lot of GPL copyleft data is used in the making of an AI tool, that when asked for it, can itself recreate code similar to what was input... also, the creator of that AI tool will reap in all the profits without giving a single penny or even recognition of the value it guzzled from GPL data it was trained on to creators of original copyleft data. Is this fair? What do your scruples tell you?

No, of course not. We should probably revisit copyright law, given that it was written at a time when no-one foresaw modern AI tools, its capabilities, and its effects on creators and societies.

Given that you guys are in charge of both uv and rye, why keep two alive at the same time? Why not just kill rye now to avoid fragmentation, and confusion that comes with the burden of having to choose between the two?

Worth noting that the uv folks (https://astral.sh/blog/uv) have taken over reins from this Armin project.

DaVinci Resolve is great (I'm partial to all Adobe replacements; Resolve is indeed a great alternative to Premiere, and Pixelmator, Rebelle, Affinity, etc. are great replacements for Photoshop), but none of these are OSS.