kixiQu
Joined 10 years ago
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2,421
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800
Member since
Oct 24
Recent submissions
Comment · 4 days ago
Font-cloning of dubious quality not novel to the LLM era!
https://luc.devroye.org/fonts-27506.html
> Anyone who has a digital "OPTIfont" and a font editor can readily view the problems, including usually several times too many Bezier points within any character. I counted 78 control points on a minimal character, for instance, that should have had less than a dozen.
For a lot of folks, they're never going to notice the difference, but this gets into target audience sophistication, etc. etc.
(edit for clarity: I'm pretty confident the ChatGPT typeface clones would be low quality. Notable too, however, that the Century Library ones might also be!)
Comment · 4 days ago
Convincing yourself that your local birds aren't sufficiently interesting is a great way to rationalize avoiding getting into birding. (Source: I am trying to learn to distinguish all the pigeons that constitute most of the bird population near me. They're great.)
And it is a classic for folks with limited mobility:
https://www.nytimes.com/wirecutter/blog/birding-window-get-s...
There's a reason why it has a reputation as a great retiree hobby - it's "go sit on a bench and pay attention" not "first, purchase a mountain bike of adequate spec...".
Comment · 5 days ago
Are you saying that the population that has access to virtual reality hardware is "much larger" than the population that has access to going outside?
Comment · 9 days ago
This looks like it's capturing how wealth is shifting around from people moving. But how does this net out with changes in wealth / income / whatever from people who stayed put? It'd be very interesting to learn that California was actually contracting, but while this data presentation suggests it, that's not what's actually here....
Comment · 17 days ago
FTFA:
> Can this be gamed? Teaching the AI to write less like stock Claude and stock ChatGPT? Yes, absolutely. And honestly that would be great. Because half of the irritation is that all these AI-written article sound the same! If they're all being written with each individial's, each company's, own rules and preferences and character that'd probably be nice?
Comment · 23 days ago
To my knowledge economists do not believe this one is black-and-white, but that's much more of a question about the issuance of H1B visas they begin with anyway.
Comment · 23 days ago
This is also why I as a US citizen strongly support green cards for everybody in the industry who's fractionally eligible for them - my working conditions are shaped by what they can get the labor force as a whole to put up with, and that's shaped by visa indenture.
Comment · 23 days ago
That doesn't feel accurate to me. If you're laying off employees en masse while getting new h1b visas, maybe - but everybody I know who's gotten a green card from tech employment was employed and working for a long time before that process even started.
Comment · 1 month ago
> I don't really see what damage this would do or why you'd have to apologise.
FTFA:
> I didn't learn these libraries. Hell I barely know which libraries I've built on top of! Open source development used to run on attribution, how can I attribute what I barely know I've consumed?! Why would those developers continue to work on these projects when they now go even more unappreciated than they used to be?! I assume many have stopped.
> And those are just the libraries. The code it is generating is synthesized from being trained on code they have sucked out of the public (and perhaps not so public) internet. Code like my own from my own Github page and many many others, all without attribution or compensation. I could have paid someone to build it, freelance software development used to be a thing, but I didn't. I bet that market is pretty dry these days.
Comment · 1 month ago
Even pre-LLM: I've found a lot of colleagues (mystifyingly to me, both seniors and juniors) who really want to be able to turn their brain off when doing investigations into complicated cross-system behavior (feedback loops abound), and they don't like hearing that it can't be collapsed into a runbook. If a drinking bird (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Drinking_bird) on an Enter key could do it, I could rig something up so I wouldn't need you!
Comment · 1 month ago
did you reply three times to my comment?
Comment · 1 month ago
negative parallelisms everywhere in an advertorial for digital downloads: truly the era of LLM advertising
if this had had the period source material in it, it'd've been fun to see, though. pity.
Comment · 1 month ago
> If you don't want your content to end up in some database/archive don't publish it for the whole world to see.
This principle somewhat reminds me of the line that "If you're not paying for the product, you are the product", and it seems to me similarly misleading - my data gets harvested and sold by companies with which I have non-paying relationships and by companies I have to pay for things (I am made the product in both cases). As you note - the AI companies are ignoring copyright law and pirating everything that seems useful to them regardless of whether it was published for free access.
The potential externalities here are troubling.
Comment · 1 month ago
> Please don't complain about tangential annoyances—e.g. article or website formats, name collisions, or back-button breakage. They're too common to be interesting.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
(reader mode works perfectly well on this site afaict)
she/her