Recent submissions

Comment · 27 days ago
The "indie apps" phenomenon has always selected for applications that are relatively simple in scope. If you're doing something that has a large scope, you either need a team large enough to start a business, or you need to go open source and take advantage of community contributions (either directly or by integrating yourself into a larger system that allows your particular application to have a narrower scope). However, simple applications are generally pretty easy to implement with AI, making it hard to justify paying for them.

Theoretically, there should be a gap of applications that are too niche to start a business off of and, prior to AI, too complex for an individual to write on their own, which is probably where any future for indie apps lies. I don't know of any examples of that sort of software though, does anyone know any?

Comment · 3 months ago
Perhaps this is an American thing but I have never once seen the term "cooking" being relegated to only situations where one is making food completely from scratch. However, the discounting of convenience food absolutely happens and I think it discourages a lot of people from trying to cook in the first place.

Recipe websites don't really help with this either, the ones that tend to pop up at the top of Google search results will often be significantly more involved and require way more in the way of ingredients than most people would be able to justify purchasing for a single meal. If a meal has more than five steps and takes more than three perishable ingredients, then it's not something that most people will make if cooking is not their hobby. Those are the meals that I think we should be focusing more on showing to people, and those are the ones that would convince people to cook more.

Comment · 3 months ago
This is also true for pretty much any other category of search that you do as a layman. Specific, targeted queries for official documentation or research are fine, but if you look up basic information about cars, health, or basic computer troubleshooting a massive portion of the results are AI-generated.

If I'm going to be getting AI-generated results, I'd rather read the output of a model that has all the context of my specific situation than slop generated in bulk with a cheap model from six months ago.

Comment · 6 months ago
As someone who also menu-3-1'd their way through the SAT, I'm surprised it was ever allowed. Super useful outside of school but knowing that a good portion of my classmates using Ti-84s were doing the same problems on paper felt rather unfair.
Comment · 7 months ago
Unlike other websites though, VPNs are generally banned from posting on 4chan, which would definitely hurt traffic.
Comment · 10 months ago
Comment · 10 months ago
I can't help but feel this is backpedaling after the AI hype led to people entering university avoiding computer science or those already in changing their major. Ultimately we might end up with a shortage of developers again, which would be amusing.
Comment · 10 months ago
The problem is that it genuinely is. One of the appeals of AI is that you can focus on planning instead of actually doing running the commands yourself. If you're educated enough to be able to validate what the commands are doing (which you should be if you're trusting an AI in the first place), then if you have to individually approve pretty much everything the AI does you're not much faster than just doing it yourself. In my experience, not running in YOLO mode negates most advantages of agents in the first place.

AI is either an untrustworthy tool that sometimes wipes your computer for a chance at doing something faster than you would've been able to on your own, or it's no faster than just doing it yourself.

Comment · 1 year ago
The entire comment is a direct quote from the article. I don't think it was meant as an insult, just a note that the author of the article already was exempting the top level poster from any of the suggestions the article was making.
Comment · 1 year ago
You absolutely can, but it's way more common to only know how to create a blank site with a framework than to migrate an existing site. React used to have a section in its documentation for how to add it to your site without adding a build system (not common knowledge, unless it's setting up a blank site through a script) and they've since replaced it with a brief tutorial telling you to migrate your website to a JS module with a link to a suggested build system.

All of this matters because the person that has to do this setup might not be you. It's certainly a problem with the frameworks themselves that porting a website (even just to add a little functionality) isn't as easy as setting one up initially but there's not really much an individual can do here. It's one reason I like frameworks like Preact so much, they're actually trying to fix this.

Comment · 2 years ago
I'm glad someone here says this. I'm also an amateur radio operator, and I very frequently see people who are otherwise against public resources being exploited for commercial purposes arguing against many of the regulations that ham radio requires, oftentimes the restriction on encryption. Few other hobbies have the idea of protecting their existence as baked in as amateur radio, and it keeps me hopeful that it will continue to exist as the years go on.
Comment · 3 years ago
> The electric-vehicle maker also argued it was unclear whether Autopilot was engaged at the time of the crash.

This doesn't seem to be a very good case study when the core argument by Tesla is that the autopilot functionality wasn't actually engaged.

Comment · 3 years ago
Sounds like a symbiotic relationship to me. The attackers get to advertise their capability for pulling off attacks, and Google gets to advertise their ability to stop them.
Comment · 3 years ago
Is that really the fault of the public domain or a reaction to the fact that Winnie the Pooh was copyrighted for so long? The appeal of horror Winnie the Pooh in almost every single instance has been due to the novelty that it's even possible to do legally, and somewhat as an act of rebellion against the company arguably responsible for holding it hostage for so long.
Comment · 3 years ago
> The situation the author described where the system comes to a halt as memory contents are paged in and out of memory/disk is (subjectively) worse when the only option is for the OOM killer to begin reaping processes everywhere.

This one's interesting since your outcome often depends on what hardware you have. On systems with slow IO, i.e. a slow HDD, it's possible for swapping to make a system entirely unusable for minutes, whereas if swap is disabled the OOM killer is able to kick in and solve the issue in less than a minute. That's the difference between being able to keep most of your work open and none of your work open (because the alternative is being forced to reboot).

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