chrisfosterelli

Joined 12 years ago

Karma
5,062
Submissions
780
Member since
May 14
Want to chat? Email: chris.james.foster (at) gmail (dot) com

Website: https://fosterelli.co Also: https://pathandfocus.com And: https://corunio.com

View on Hacker News

Recent submissions

Comment · 18 hours ago
The biggest thing the bugs introduce from an LLMs perspective is a necessity for realtime response. Without them, the LLM can take as long as it wants to decide and do its next operation on the factory. With them, not responding fast enough results in death (particularly early game where a lot of biter combat is player driven). I presume it doesn't do great at this.
Comment · 3 days ago
That's a good point, the use case for mobile app dev would be quite appealing even if a little niche.
Comment · 3 days ago
The touch bar's specific advantages grew on me and I liked the slider for volume/brightness. But I definitely haven't missed it either.
Comment · 3 days ago
I agree, there's definitely places where I could see it being useful. I just wonder if it's too marginal to justify it. I felt the same way about the touch bar.
Comment · 3 days ago
I think my comment was internally consistent with my phone use.

My comment was not about touchscreens in general, it was about touchscreens on laptops. The phone touch experience is excellent because everything is designed for touch. Correspondingly, if you plug a KBM into a phone, it's a very poor experience.

If my phone's display is oil repelling, it simply doesn't work very well. I regularly wipe the screen to keep it clean. Luckily, this is very easy to do since my phone is the size of my hand and the display is attached to a solid box with no hinges involved. I can clean it with my shirt when I notice smudges and am in the habit of doing so. A laptop screen is much more annoying to keep clean.

Comment · 3 days ago
I have never wanted to touch my laptop screen or felt any sort of desire to do so. In fact I try really hard not to touch it so that I don't get smudges on it.

The laptop touch screen always felt like an awkward use case to me because the ideal UX for touch and KBM are so different. If you're designing for use on laptop/desktop you need to design for KBM-first -- since the majority of devices will be -- and therefore the touch experience suffers, and users with a touchscreen just use the KBM.

I don't think the average consumer cares that much about this either. I've noticed my grandparents often buy laptops with touchscreens accidentally and then proceed to mostly interact with it by accident.

Part of me wants to believe that a company like apple must/would do this right if they were going to do it but on the other hand there's the whole touch bar debacle and it doesn't seem like their foldable phone is starting off with the best reviews either.

Comment · 18 days ago
Eh but if Milwaukee was to then invent a power tool that it claimed could soon do the contractors' whole job... OPs question would correspondingly exist there too.
Comment · 18 days ago
HDR support on Apple TV is fairly hit or miss depending on the player you are using.

HDR10+ is supported in some players (infuse) but not others (plex) and will fallback to HDR10. Profile 7 DV files do not play properly on Apple TV period even though it will display the DV logo (though frankly very few devices can do this). Profile 5 and 8 DV files will play properly depending on the player and the content mapping level in the content (2.9 is well supported but 4.0 causes HDR10 fallback or black screens in some cases). Apple TV also doesn't support HD audio passthrough great.

Comment · 22 days ago
Thanks, I am not a musician so I found your comparison to it very interesting. I otherwise agree with everything you've said and I think the creative aspect is something that is absent from my alternate communities
Comment · 22 days ago
In my defense I didn't suggest I cannot :)

I have not been attending as many tech meetups or keeping tabs on tech news like I used to. I've been spending more direct time with friends (tech and not). I've also found enjoyment spending a lot of time in more niche internet communities that are not actually about software dev but tend to attract a lot of software dev people. I've definitely noticed I'm spending far more time on other, non-tech hobbies of mine. It has been a while since I've done any OSS stuff or organized a tech meetup.

There's the whole component of identity you mentioned. I've considered myself a 'computer guy' since elementary school and it's been a bit odd to think what I would be if not that. I'd never have even entertained that idea until recently, but in the short term I think I have developed enough of a product mindset and business skills to stay useful in tech. Maybe I need to think of myself as a 'product guy' or 'entrepreneurial guy' instead.

If AI is soon able to replace everything we bring to the table as the maximalists are claiming then honestly all knowledge work go out the window pretty quickly. If that happens then that is its own scary thought and I don't think we're really ready for that economically / socially. I pay a lot of attention to my retirement funds lately.

So frankly, I think I'm instinctively doing what you suggest... But I think it's also natural to feel some weird feelings about it all!

Comment · 22 days ago
I did my Masters in ML and a decade ago it seemed AI was so exciting. You could build relatively good models at home. Our university had a cluster that could train SOTA models. It seemed like every year we were discovering a breakthrough new neural net structure.

Nowadays all the development is done at a bigtech lab, and you aren't going to be able to tell anyone about it. Everyone else is relegated to interacting with slightly larger and larger LLMs over an API. On one hand it's cool that the tech is now far more accessible and impactful, but on the other AI has become immensely boring.

It's a little uncharitable take as I know some people are doing some cool innovative stuff still, and not every tech needs to be new forever anyway. I would feel less strongly if it wasn't impossible to not keep hearing about it :)

Comment · 22 days ago
This is well put and something I think a lot of us struggle with.

The internet itself seems filled with the AI maximalists who have no end of hype for the latest prompt 'technique' or AI doomers that would skin you alive if you mention you used AI to make a photo once.

Quietly among peers I talk to there seems to be a very different group that exists: those that recognize AI is super valuable for getting a lot of work done but also feel that suddenly the work is so much less exciting than it was before.

Sure, there's the obvious "I enjoy the mechanics of programming" component that's gone but then there's also this general feeling that is hard to shake which feels a little deeper. I've wondered about it. Is it all the layoffs? The suddenly shaky economics for a lot of our companies? The uncertainty of the career's future in general?

I think the author has put their thumb on it well to describe it as a lack of intellectual community. That feels like at least part of it.

Comment · 27 days ago
I agree. Neural networks are proven to be universal functions. If we can describe human intelligence as a model, there exists a neural network to replicate it. This doesn't guarantee that our current training methods are able to build such a network or that we're able to model "intelligence" effectively.
Comment · 1 month ago
> What I don't understand is why Sony is the one being targeted for this when this has been the case with any digital purchase for 20 years?

Examples: literally two days ago Sony permanently removed access to over 500 movies for people who had "purchased" them, and only a couple months ago Sony announced their plan to permanently shutter physical media production for Playstation.

I agree with you that it's a systemic issue but it also doesn't surprise me that Sony is seen as the lead boogeyman. I think if you asked the average gamer what their opinion of Valve's business practices was vs. Sony you'd get a very different answer even if the legalese in the TOS is similar.

Comment · 1 month ago

Live from the official Hacker News API

A modern reader for Hacker News · SvelteKit + Skeleton