Recent submissions

Comment · 2 months ago
I think if the right to work from home was encoded in law for any job which was practically possible to do remotely, you'd have a better shot at keeping rural villages alive without relying on foreigners. That would keep the local culture living instead of replacing it.

But this is better than nothing I suppose, at least it prevents ghost towns

Comment · 2 months ago
I was thinking about this the other day, but along a slightly different path. I realised there is no need to use web technology to provide native experiences anymore. Bundling a web browser was always a way to ship native apps to multiple platforms with minimal effort, but these days prompting up an actual native client for each platform is already accessible even to small shops!

That's probably one of the biggest sources of software slowness, and we can just stop using it now, with almost no trade-off. Neat!

Comment · 2 months ago
The source of the word is almost certainly the Swedish town Särna in this case. Note that ä is not an a, in sound it's more similar to e than a, although it is distinct from both.
Comment · 2 months ago
My hot take is that AI is a multiplier. Software engineers skill can be measured on a scale from -10 to +10, where 0 means you introduce as many bugs as you solve, or something along those lines(this scale is loosely defined, don't think too much about it)

Any engineer who's skill value evaluates below 0 on my scale, ends up with a large negative number when they use AI. Anyone with a positive number ends up with a large positive number.

The extra bugs you're seeing are from devs on the wrong side of 0 on my poorly defined scale.

Comment · 2 months ago
..... In such a way that most commonly used button is replaced by an ad 0.001 seconds before you click it
Comment · 2 months ago
Sweden. Our system is pretty good at emergency care, but absolutely abysmal at preventive care, imo.
Comment · 2 months ago
This is the real reason women live longer than men.

Doctors won't see me unless I'm dying, or at least tell them I am. And I am, if I understand things correctly, which I might not tbh, in a high risk group for prostate cancer, given that I was diagnosed with chronic prostatitis at 22. I've even asked for checkups but was denied. And where I live you can't really pay for health care (but you can pay to skip the line, which I guess is almost the same thing).

Comment · 2 months ago
I had to look it up, but it seems like you do a lookup per number before calling, and nixregistret will basically tell you if that number is in their register or not.

I'm not sure how enforcement works, from the copy on their website it seems like it's purely voluntary to even check there, but serious companies do because their customers will hate them forever if they call people who are registered.

I'm actually surprised it works so well given the apparent lack of enforcement. The only calls I ever get these days are from someone with an Indian accent who says "hello I'm calling from Blockchain", and even that has been a while!

Comment · 2 months ago
Nix-registret is awesome! I didn't realise just how good it is until I transferred ownership of my number to my company, which automatically took me off the list(companies can't be in nix) which almost immediately made me regret owning a phone.

There are tax benefits to having the company foot the phone bill, but it's not worth it, currently.

Comment · 2 months ago
Definitely agree with LLM texts being boring and lacking personality. Which for technical text is fine, but devastating for fiction. I wonder if you could coax it into writing less average formulations with some clever prompting?

I don't oppose LLM fiction on principle, and I don't think McCormick does either, but it's just too damn boring to be worthwhile, and I think McCormick hits the nail on the head as to why. This seems like it'll be the last frontier for LLMs, good fiction requires a departure from LLM nature, and that'll inherently be difficult to solve.

I do wonder if you could do something like style transfer on texts? I'm not a very good author either, but occasionally I'll get an idea for a story and wish I had the skill to write it in a way that'd be worth reading, but my poor prose tends to get in the way. Would be cool if I could feed it my poorly written attempts and say basically "this story but in the style of [insert great author]" the way you can snap a photo and get it in the style of a Van Gogh painting.

If nothing else I think I'd enjoy a Tolkien sci fi story, or a Asimov high fantasy.

Comment · 2 months ago
I'm not convinced this is true in any sense at all anymore. Can you name a piece of hardware that isn't supported by Linux? I was gonna suggest maybe the surface tablets, but a quick googling suggest even they run it just fine.

20 years ago hardware support was a major concern for us Linux aficionados. 10 years ago it was a minor concern. Today I think you may have some issues with newer apple hardware, but it's not like you can install windows on that either, and there are projects with some progress towards running Linux on those too.

Comment · 3 months ago
It's even Carolus rex paludis! Not sure if fable is a history buff or a Sabaton fan, but I repeat myself.
Comment · 3 months ago
As one of the Devs responsible for the technical part of that transition: thank you. We tried real hard to give users the best possible experience, but I think it has nevertheless been the least appreciated piece of code I have ever written. So it's nice to finally hear some positive accounts from users!

So, again, just thanks for saying this.

Comment · 3 months ago
Or perhaps all of your thousands of children being in peril, having found themselves on a murderous human, with no obvious path to escape as the gigantic scary human swaths hundreds at a time?
Comment · 3 months ago
But that's just the thing with open weights: you're not doing any business with company that made the model. They might publish the weights to a, say, European host, and then you download the model from Europe and and run it on your servers in America, and suddenly it's very hard to tell where the model was originally created.

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