Recent submissions

Comment · 16 days ago
Comment · 1 month ago
Literally last night I was trying to set up books in Jellyfin and dismayed to see the bookshelf plugin archived with no mention of ongoing support.

Very happy to see it’s been folded into the server!

Comment · 1 month ago
The key point being:

> Because women tend to earn less than men and are likelier to hold multiple jobs, the figure suggests hiring is clustered in low-paying, contingent roles, meaning it’s not “necessarily a positive story for women overall,” Indeed Hiring Lab said.

Odds are that this is much more a reflection of a very poor job market, rather than a good outcome for women (or discriminatory hiring practices).

Comment · 1 month ago
My belief is that humans need to struggle through the process of learning to code, learning maths etc. in order to actually build the neural pathways to do the hard things AI can’t do yet. I feel some skills atrophying for me, and I worry even more for the younger people who will never get the chance to think without AI.

Another concern I have is that computers don’t need to be “generally superhuman” to replace 90%+ of office jobs. Computers have always been superhuman at some things, and LLMs have massively jumped the number of tasks that can now be automated to human-level quality or better. I’m not sure it matters if they scale to true AGI.

Comment · 2 months ago
I also review all of my AI-generated code. I feel that it’s disrespectful to my teammates to send unverified slop for review.

I’ve noticed that while my coding skills have very noticeably atrophied (to the point I am consciously scheduling time to manually code, just for practice), my ability to read and comprehend code quickly has actually improved quite dramatically.

I notice style inconsistencies and semantic errors far more quickly and consistently when reviewing both human- and LLM-generated code, as compared to a year ago. Cognitive tradeoff hypothesis and all that…

Comment · 2 months ago
Comment · 2 months ago
There is Filecoin, which sounds somewhat similar conceptually to what you describe (albeit with the standard blockchain caveats).
Comment · 4 months ago
It was always an American company. In order to launch rockets from countries in the US sphere of influence (even from NZ), companies must obtain an FAA license.

Rocket technology itself is so intensely regulated by US export control laws that it’s practically impossible to develop an orbital launch vehicle without being a US- or Europe-registered company.

It is a real shame. It also looks like a lot of engineering work is shifting away from NZ — Auckland seems to be focusing more on operations and space systems, and the launch stuff is moving to the US with Neutron.

Comment · 4 months ago
This Microsoft notion of “devices that don’t stand alone but surround you” sounds an awful lot like Google’s “ambient computing” of yonder.
Comment · 5 months ago
This is the right balance for me as well.

I use an agent to generate a first-pass attempt, and then (deadlines willing), I manually read every line at least once so I understand what the code actually does.

Then I manually fix the inevitable slop that is mixed in with the good stuff, and only once the code is up to my personal standards do I send it.

This probably reduces my “AI performance boost” to 30-50% instead of the huge gains reported by others. But I retain the ability to reason about the codebase and use AI much more precisely when I’m trying to troubleshoot production outages or subtle bugs — something I notice the rest of my team struggles with, since adopting “agentic workflows” everywhere.

I think actively working to retain some cognitive flexibility and “muscle memory” around coding tasks is going to be rather advantageous in the long run.

Comment · 5 months ago
As another, intermittently suicidal person, I have never received helpful support from a hotline. In fact, I have never managed to speak to another human on the phone at all.

Out of four hotline calls in my life, mostly as an older teenager, I waited for >1 hour in every case, listening to pre-recorded “please continue holding, we will get to you” messages and elevator music, before giving up.

The only time I contacted a human it was via a text chat, and the interaction was laughably shallow — they hit me repeatedly with condescending, “reflective listening”-style questions and basically offered no depth or consideration to my situation, or me as a person.

If these services demonstrably save lives then that’s great, but they did absolutely nothing for me.

Comment · 6 months ago
> Also, why is he talking about “friends” and “strangers”? We all know he means “women".

Does he? It seems like he socialised mainly with men in the documented interactions. Perhaps he really was just lonely in the general sense.

Comment · 6 months ago
Separation of functions/concerns is not great, for starters.

The testes are dangerously exposed, the plumbing is convoluted and failure-prone (and doesn’t recover well from mechanical insults).

The prostate, which serves no function outside of reproduction, lies inline with the urethra and quite consistently loses flexibility and becomes enlarged with age, causing all sorts of structural issues impacting basic urological function.

Female reproductive vs urinary anatomy is largely physiologically distinct (proximity and UTI risk notwithstanding). Though plenty of room for improvement there too — starting with endometrial tissue being far too prolific. Fun fact: endometrial tissue can migrate to the brain and cause haemorrhaging in severe cases of endometriosis.

Plenty of room for improvement across the board, I’d say!

Comment · 8 months ago
How could you forget YouTube Chat?
Comment · 1 year ago
From my perspective (talking very generally about the mood and environment here), it’s important to remember that Google is a very, very big company with many products and activities outside of AI.

As far as I can see, there is a mix of frustration at the slowness of launching, optimism/excitement that there are some really awesome things cooking, and indifference from a lot of people who think AI/LLMs as a product category are quite overhyped.

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