eitland

Joined 17 years ago

Karma
12,042
Submissions
4,403
Member since
Oct 18
I work for a large consulting in Drammen, Norway. We provides specialists in cloud, machine teaching (i.e. programming), machine learning, project management, digital transformation and more.

We are a nice bunch. If you are stuck in Norway in a less than ideal job and you are a friendly person who knows any of the above as well as enough Norwegian to communicate effectively with Norwegians at work, shoot me a mail.

Writing I think is funny:

- http://erik.itland.no/courses-id-like-to-teach

- http://erik.itland.no/simplified-and-more-precise-privacy-policies-for-big-companies

- https://erik.itland.no/tag:aifails (Less funny. I wish stuff just worked.)

Stuff others upvote on various sites:

- http://erik.itland.no/what-did-google-get-right (About Google+)

- http://erik.itland.no/are-you-making-a-chrome-application-or-a-web-application

Tell HN: I think (2017-02-22) that user data should be treated in much the same way as nuclear raw materials. I would suggest considering a User Data Non-Proliferation Treaty along the lines of https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Treaty_on_the_Non-Proliferation_of_Nuclear_Weapons

I am a:

Sysadmin that prefer nix but have worked for years with a big, widely distributed, safety critical Windows system as well.

Programmer

  * Java, Java EE, Quarkus, Spring Boot
  * C#, Asp.Net MVC
  * Client side Javascript (TypeScript now)

I don't do graphic design.

I'm happily working for a Norwegian company.

You can reach me at erik.itland_at_gmail.com

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Recent submissions

Comment · 2 months ago
We could in Java Swing (and Visual basic, but lets not talk about that) as well. Well, not runtime, but we could design applications and just right click on the objects in the IDE and go directly to the click (or double click or right click) handlers.

Then again, not having to disable this for runtime is a feature if you ask me.

Yes, current web applications are prettier and easier to upgrade but we lost a lot on the way wrt developer experience and ux.

Comment · 2 months ago
It is fine to call out AI if it is annoying.

Someone hunting for things that might be AI and polluting discussions with it is a service I did not sign up for.

Besides it is my opinion that not all AI detectors are reliable and this might currently be a big problem in some cases, especially in education.

Comment · 5 months ago
I agree with you.

The danger is not however that only that people write their own tools for calculations and capacity planning etc.

The danger is people make useful stuff that is very fine as long it is just an internal tool, but then someone add credentials to other systems so it can access and maybe even update stuff and it gets exposed to third parties etc and all of a sudden we have a major data breach going on.

Comment · 5 months ago
Obviously it was not the same s since models that could write programs were not available 10 years ago.

And if you just mean your friend taught himself programming on his own, well that is actually very cool, I did too back in the 90ies and so did many others here.

My point is that it is now possible to vibe code a full application from frontend to backend today and still not be able to understand a line of TypeScript or anything else.

Comment · 5 months ago
My friend who has never taken a programming class (or even touched an IDE before AFAIK) has now put a small app into production.

Complete frontend + backend + database.

Yes, it is an internal app, but it works and everyone loves it.

Does that count as an example?

(Also I absolutely expect him to need help at some point, but so far it has taken his project from absolutely impossible to 3 weeks of work in between work, renovating his house and being a dad for the first time so I was very impressed.)

Comment · 6 months ago
Back in the days we had this in programming as well with palettes of drag & drop components.

It is kind of broken now, much thanks to using web applications (and applications that are basically just wrappers for web applications), but I don't know I if want to go back.

On one side it was much easier when I could hack together a program that was good enough (since everything was the same bland grey).

On the other hand some programs certainly looks nicer today.

And it has become easier to compose logic with solutions like Maven, Nuget and the various frontend package managers.

But yes, we lost drag and drop UI development, we lost consistency and we lost a lot of UX (at least temporarily).

Comment · 7 months ago
It absolutely isn't free here in Norway either, around $86 is what I'd have to pay now to get an id card as an adult (same price as a passport but easier to carry).
Comment · 7 months ago
> That's a big flaw of LLMs, not limited to RAGs: it lacks the fundamental understanding of "good and bad", like Richard Sutton said in that Dwarkesh podcast.

After paticipating in social media since the beginning I think this problem is not limited to LLMs.

There are certain things we can debunk all day every day and the only outcome isit happens again next day and this has been a problem since long before AI - and I personally think it started before social media as well.

Comment · 8 months ago
There is always the option to use battery (some modern mines use this),for example RAAMS.

The problem is of the enemy know you use only mines that work for max n hours or m days they just wait for n + 1 hours or m + 1 days.

There is a lot more to say about this, but there are probably people way more qualified than be here to explain it.

Comment · 8 months ago
My take is that Bluesky got the network effects right, with hyping and gradual release and careful curation of who seeded the network and that is - IMO - the important thing they got right.
Comment · 8 months ago
Let me present my take on why the federated alternatives struggle to replace X:

Twitter didn't succeed because it was a particularly good solution - it really isn't. It succeeded purely on the back of the network effect.

When every open-source alternative simply copies the existing restrictions without adding any unique value, why would users switch to an equally flawed version where none of the accounts they actually want to follow are?

Comment · 8 months ago
How do you combine them?
Comment · 8 months ago
It is really interesting for me to hear your experience.

I have lived in Norway all of my >45 years on this earth and I can say that in the first half of my life were I lived on the west coast, power outages was totally expected.

We had a generator, and we had a gas stove ("everyone" in Norway use electricity for cooking) for those days, a kerose lamp and a wood stove.

The longest power outage I experienced was 3 days, somewhere around 1986 I think, but a few hours could happen multiple times and overnight outages were not unusual.

Comment · 8 months ago
Personally I ignore most ads but I have also bought some really good products based on ads and there are companies I wish would advertise more, for example relvant conferences that I only find out about because someone posted about their experiences being there.
Comment · 8 months ago
In my case I was kinda OK with Google ads until around 2010 and IIRC only began blocking them actively after they had been feeding me trash ads for years.

Maybe you are right in most cases and I was the victim of a fluke.

But from what I have seen from Google after that I don't think so.

Facebook however, a company I disliked then and dislike now are scary good with their ads and have often been even even when I actively tried to avoid them.

All this to say that your theory sounds interesting but I am convinced it is far from the whole story.

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