rogual

I can honestly say I've never seen a young man with "GRIND HARD" tattooed across his forehead.

Scroll scroll scroll.. I'm sure the article will tell us what he said, won't it? Scroll, scroll.. won't it?

Reader, it didn't.

I have a cron script which configures a today-only email address in Postfix.

Mail sent to t20260617@foon.uk will reach me, but only for today.

So, any time I'm giving away my email address against my will, which is most of the time, they get to spam me for exactly one day.

Wouldn't get nearly as much engagement.

"Loaded dice, rolled one word at a time" is when I twigged it.

If we had this tag it might also stop the comments from turning into another Great AI Debate every... single... time...

It's lovely to see some Pratchett on HN, a nice chance to talk about our favourite Discworld books, but then the top comment is just some boring AI hater.

I agree, I think that's a good summary of the comments.

It's more like: Person: Finds the article beautifully written. Comments: Doesn't find the article beautifully written.

Now Comments looks less like an unreasonable control freak and more like they're just someone who has different ideas about what's beautiful.

I must concede that when you take what I said and spell it wrong, it does indeed look very silly.

It's a good point, and one I hadn't considered.

Are the comments really saying that? That the person isn't allowed to think it's beautiful?

How to get your AI company's blog to No. 1 on Hacker News:

1. Pick an author nerds like.

2. Tell Claude "Write an article about Terry Pratchett, in his style."

3. Don't even fix the faux-witty phrases that, upon closer inspection, make zero sense, like "Sir Terry Pratchett, who knew more about furniture than most", or "Most physics departments would settle for that." or "The Author, refusing to let the Narrator off the hook".

4. Bask in the praise for your wonderful writing.

The funny thing is, Pratchett would have a field day with this. I can imagine it now, one of his golems starts writing these bizarre things and becomes a literary sensation in Ankh-Morpork, and there's like one actual writer, William de Worde or someone, who's just like, but it doesn't mean anything! But nobody is listening to him.

It's not remotely beautifully written. It reads as if someone prompted "Write an article called I Miss Terry Pratchett, and write it in his style."

It's full of attempted Pratchettisms that, if you're paying attention, make no sense.

It's on a blog where almost every post is about AI.

It's the opposite of Terry's warm, intelligent, humanist writing and an insult to his name.

Man I would love that tag. As an enjoyer of Pratchett's witty prose, seeing this is just sad.

I'm really surprised to see everyone praising the article. It's... it's slop, isn't it?

And then there are the memories [...] that arrive uninvited, settle in, and start terrorising the other occupants by kicking over the chairs.

Sir Terry Pratchett, who knew more about furniture than most, put it this way:

"Rincewind tried to force the memory out of his mind, but it was rather enjoying itself there, terrorizing the other occupants and kicking over the furniture."

He "put it this way", in the exact same words you just used? Also, he knew more about furniture than most? What? Why?

"Mathieu and I had read every Pratchett the school library would admit to owning, plus several it would not."

This has the cadence of a witty sentence unless you're paying attention and realize it makes no sense.

“In the beginning there was nothing, which exploded.”

Nine words. A complete cosmology. Most physics departments would settle for that.

It's eight words, and the thing about physics departments makes no sense.

The Author, refusing to let the Narrator off the hook.

Again, cute sentence, unless you're paying attention and you realize it doesn't mean anything.

Fellow former British schoolkid here. One part that really sticks in my memory about "IT" class was when they were preparing us for an exam that asked "which of these are functions of an image editor" and we had to memorize that, I think "fill tool" was, "pen tool" wasn't, "adjust brightness" was, and so on, without reason or reference to reality. There was just a list and you had to know it.

I imagine these people were delighted when a Big Computer Company offered to step in and design a curriculum for them.

What I'd love to see is videos of nontechnical folks using language models to create software.

When I use them myself, I just see them crushing it and think, this thing is now doing my job for basically $0, I am no longer economically relevant. But I've spent a lifetime learning to program, so it's possible I only get good results because of the way I think to prompt it.

I really can't get the outside view so I can't decide whether AI is going to make me homeless or not. I think we need the videos.

Worth also noting that this chart has the bottom of the Y-axis cut off, exaggerating differences and making visual intuition basically useless.

First few paragraphs I was trying to guess how this was going to turn out to be a metaphor for AI. The modern disposable product is the LLM, right, and the cloth diaper is doing things yourself? But, no, it really is just an article about baby poo.

Good read!

Inscryption, too. I didn't know it started as an LD game until after I played it, and it was great to see how much of the atmosphere and mechanics were already there in the LD version [1].

[1] https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/43/sacrifices-must-be-ma...

This is one of those bugs that taught me something, so I did this writeup. I hope it's interesting. I tried to write it like a murder mystery, showing you the bug first and then dropping clues until the reveal, so maybe if you're into graphics programming you'll go "aha!" at some point and figure it out before you get to the end.

I've been updating my game Blackshift (https://store.steampowered.com/app/741110/Blackshift/).

It released in 2020 but I've never stopped adding things and tweaking it. Recently I added mirrors that spin when you shoot them, called "flip-flops" because they work a bit like flip-flops from computing.

I'm also tinkering with some new game ideas, because I'd like to make something popular that can sustain me financially, and the gaming market, as difficult as it is, does still seem to value human soul and creativity.

I took the pilot one as an abstract logic type question where you're supposed to assume the premise is true, so I said yes and the page said I was right, because that's a "valid logical deduction" or something.

Then there was another question in the same format that said "if you study hard enough you'll pass the exam. You didn't pass, so you didn't study hard enough." So I thought, oh, another logic one, and said yes to that one too, but the page was like, "not quite! You might fail for other reasons!"

Weird article. The author talks about Unicode "public use areas" (which don't exist), clarifies that they're sometimes called "public use access" (a term appearing only in this article) and are invisible while also being used for flags and emojis and also having special meaning to JavaScript interpreters and also representing letters in the "US alphabet".

There's a real vulnerability here but whoever wrote this has no idea what they're talking about.

Good article, and I feel your pain. Sometimes it feels like there's no point creating anything anymore, because shitty people will just steal it.

In case you're interested, though, I just wanted to point out that there are things you can do.

In my experience, Google does respond to requests to scrub infringing sites from their results if you submit their Copyright Claim form. They even give you a dashboard with the status of your claims. Probably worth trying your luck if you can be bothered.

Also, many of the theives have X and Bluesky accounts, and I don't believe either of these services let users censor replies to them.

There's also the payment platforms that are collecting money for your stolen work on behalf of these guys. They might be interested to hear about what's going on.

Then there's the hosting companies themselves, of course, hosting the infringing websites.

It's a pain, and it would be better if you could just create stuff and people weren't shitty, but we live in a fallen world and sometimes you gotta defend yourself. Up to you, of course, and I totally get it if you don't have the energy, but I've been through the same thing and you do have some power.

140. Good fun. I like how it teaches you things, too. I learned that toads are considered frogs, axolotls are salamanders, and that it's "anemone" not "anenome". If you type in Unicorn it accepts it as "Unicorn spider" with a fun message. Don't forget to think of insects, birds and fish too, all of which it accepts. I love this kind of detailed, handcrafted thing that someone put a lot of time and effort into.

If you wanted to develop this more, some fun features might be telling you the most commonly entered animals you missed and the most unusual ones you thought of. Appreciate you probably want to keep it a static site though.

It seems like AIs work how non-programmers already thought computers worked.

I don't have much to add to this right now other than to say this is really fantastic writing. I don't normally enjoy "my journey" kind of blog posts, but this one feels full of valuable insights, and I'm grateful to the author for sharing. It's also just nice to read something written by a skilled writer.

It's funny how "think of the parents" is the new "think of the children".

I do have the "second visual canvas" people here are talking about, but the thing about mine, and I haven't seen anyone say this yet, is that I don't have full control of it.

For example, I have a memory from childhood of visualizing a yellow bucket, and it showed up in my mind's eye with big cartoon eyes. I tried to delete the eyes because I just wanted a normal yellow bucket, but they kept coming back.

Also, when reading Harry Potter as a kid, Severus Snape always showed up in my mind's eye with the head of a crocodile. I remember telling my brain, no, he's just a guy, just give him a normal man's head, but it never worked. Even now when someone mentions Severus Snape I see him with the crocodile head.

Anyone else, or am I just nuts?

Thing is, italic and bold don't have just one meaning.

Italic can mean: emphasis, foreign word, word which is being defined for the first time, title of referenced work, mathematical variable, and many field-specific uses.

Bold can mean: strong emphasis, term that needs to stand out and be found easily while scanning, mathematical vector, and again, field-specific uses.

If a markup language only has tags for emphasis and strong emphasis, then you can't put bold or italics for any of the other reasons you might want to use them, so anyone wanting to do those things can only misuse the emphasis and strong-emphasis markup, so it de-facto starts to mean bold/italic anyway.

It's at least reasonable to propose a markup language where you have to say "this is emphasis, this is a foreign word, this is a title of a referenced work," etc. but not everybody is writing a document that needs that much metadata. At least HTML retained <i> and <b> when it introduced <em> and <strong>.

Styles, like words, can have several meanings, and forcing authors to separate them feels a bit like forcing them to write the word "set" differently for each of its 10+ meanings.