idle_zealot

Joined 10 years ago

Karma
6,332
Submissions
1,375
Member since
Jan 16
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Recent submissions

Comment · 2 days ago
Can you reference some? I recall never trusting Proton, but I never had a reason why, just gut feeling. This stuff is vindicating, but I'm curious if I actually had a reason to feel the way I did or was right by accident. I don't have a great track record; I trusted Bitwarden and regret it, and the Mullvad situation is very disappointing (though not really related to the quality of the tech).
Comment · 6 days ago
If I recall, they banned Lula's account and promoted Flavio super hard in the recommendations feeds.
Comment · 6 days ago
Really depends on the political climate. Such a ban is very difficult for two main reasons:

1. It's going to be very unpopular, enabling the domestic opposition to take advantage rhetorically. Without a local mandate it's political suicide, so you'd need to build up to it for a while and turn the public against Facebook/Instagram. Tricky if that's their primary mode of engagement with community/news/entertainment.

2. An attack on a powerful private company tends to scare other capital owners. If you depend on donors and local (or international) businesses to maintain your lifestyle or electoral viability then it can be tricky to convince them that your ban is limited in scope and won't prompt additional regulatory action or contribute to a social shift of people expecting more from their leaders. If you fail to provide adequate assurances then capital is likely to side with Meta and sink you for trying to cut them off.

Comment · 7 days ago
Writing is a skill. Use it or lose it. You've set yourself on the track of being perpetually unable to communicate in your own words without a machine intermediary massaging your ideas into grey paste. It's not good for you or your readers.
Comment · 16 days ago
I'm all for advancing human understanding, even if it might lag behind machine understanding, but there is a way to have machines prove they understand something we don't: ask them to build something functional that we can't. If your hypothetical future comes to pass, and we ask the machine to build a cancer-curing healing ray, and it works, I'd say that's its own win. Then we can spend however long it takes trying to understand how it works. It's depressing and disempowering in a way, but I think overall I'd be happy with that future.
Comment · 19 days ago
Curing aging doesn't stop death entirely. There's still the attrition of living in the physical world. Some portion of the population will trip and break their necks every year.
Comment · 21 days ago
Japanese katakana

#include <iostream> using namespace std;

There are some mistakes though, like using ウ instead of ク in インウルード

Comment · 26 days ago
Which word from this wave won't be unalive in 50 years?
Comment · 26 days ago
You're right that it's in-group signaling, but that's actually why it's going to basically disappear within a few years. This sort of youth slang rotates out regularly.
Comment · 29 days ago
> Someone in the thread below says their bug was closed because of mentioning that they use AI to confirm the bug they had encountered

I don't know about this particular case, but if I saw someone report a bug and as evidence claim they had X Y and Z LLMs verify it I would be pretty upset. If you're going to use an LLM to make a replication, just do that and give me the replication, don't point to your notoriously error-prone tools as though they lend your report credence.

It's in a similar vein to people who reply to questions with "well Claude says: <chat transcript dump>"

Comment · 1 month ago
It is reproducible. It has to be for their feature to work. They're trying to find some way to communicate to people that the recording is to a ring buffer, and isn't durably saving everything it hears indefinitely. It's an unenviable position to have to find a way to sell your engineering that enables a fairly privacy-preserving implementation of a feature that intuitively feels like it depends on surveillance to a mass audience. Made especially difficult by the environment where most products really are surveilling you even when they don't need to.

Of course, Apple still collects more data than it needs to and abuses users in other ways, so I don't really feel bad for them.

Comment · 1 month ago
Most people who claim to be against big government are really just opposed to the idea of the government restricting them, personally. If it's their friends wielding government to hunt and punish the right people then they're in support. You could see this well before the current turn, recall the overlap between small government support and pro-police, pro-military, pro-death penalty, pro-stop and frisk "law and order" types.
Comment · 1 month ago
Apple tried this, I forgot which year, there was a push to make the Apple TV a console. Arcade support, controller compatibility, it all shipped. You can plug in an Apple TV and pair an Xbox controller right now and play a surprisingly large number of AAA and indie games, from Resident Evil VIII to Slay the Spire. It was too little too late, though. Most games are played on phones, and the console market is falling apart. Microsoft seems to be pulling out, Sony is basically shipping locked-down gaming PCs with a couple of exclusive games. Nintendo is holding course more or less, but their main value propositions are simplicity and first-party exclusivity, and phones already ate the first half of that.
Comment · 1 month ago
What you're identifying is a more fundamental bifurcation in why people are interested in AI. Some people have intent, a vision, something they know is possible but lack the technical skills or time to bring into reality. Others want the computer to handle the intent, the technical aspects, the decision-making, the whole process, but be able to go back and specify changes reactively when they don't like something about the result. It seems the latter cohort is much larger.
Comment · 1 month ago
In the case of the featured sections in the first screenshot, there should at minimum be a visual well indicating the horizontally scrollable strips. Invisible scroll panes are insane.

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