over_bridge

Joined 5 years ago

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488

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174

Member since

Mar 15

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Recent submissions

Comment · 29 days ago

A new Oasis would have been an instant buy for me but otherwise there's nothing interesting to see here

Comment · 1 month ago

Not only outside but every rental I've lived in has had cheap curtains with crazy light bleed around the edges. It feels like the street light is in the room with me. Then every device I own seems to have a blue charging led. Even inside I can't find darkness.

Bring back the orange I say. Red has certain connotations but orange is friendly enough and doesn't keep you awake

Comment · 2 months ago

Am I the only one who doesn't want a virtual assistant? I just struggle to understand this goal we apparently are all aiming for

I want to be an active player in my own life. I want to do things even if there's some friction.

All I can imagine is that future from WallE where everything is so easy no one tries or does anything at all

Comment · 2 months ago

Today's billionaires aren't like yesterday's. They could be doing cool shit but they are just padding their own private real estate and stock portfolios. Yawn.

Why not make an epic bridge or tower with gargoyles on it? Why not a museum or park?

You can walk around Europe and see buildings from centuries ago. Who is building the things and spaces people in 2426 will marvel at?

Comment · 2 months ago

I'm not American. It's hard to fire people. You have to recycle them into new positions. The author seems to be French so I imagine it's similar there

I do wish it were easier to fire people for poor performance though. Nothing kills morale like tolerating incompetence

If the unemployment benefits are strong then I have no problem with easier dismissal rules

Comment · 2 months ago

Many places I've worked didn't promote hard workers at all. Hard workers were hard to replace so they were kept where they were and even blocked from promotions at times. People floating about with few duties were easy to backfill so could move to new positions, including up.

This is mostly public sector and utilities

Comment · 3 months ago

Jokes on him. I'm a peasant and I've been here for years

Comment · 3 months ago

I find lower intelligence/ status people especially like it. Many of the earliest adopters of AI at my company were the ones who weren't performing. They often felt unappreciated or ignored (for good reason) but AI started telling them they were right. It became their only ally and allowed them to spread their terribleness on a scale we couldn't have imagined. This was a government agency where firing wasn't a thing, only 'performance management'.

For me hearing that every idea is my best yet is my cue to touch grass

Comment · 3 months ago

I mean that it's allowed more bad apps to be created. It hasn't lowered the quality of apps necessarily but the low barrier to entry means things can be created that don't need to exist

Comment · 3 months ago

I've used AI for building a hobbyist note app myself. It's also a mixed bag but a lot of that comes down to how I've changed.

Before AI dev was expensive so I'd spend hours planning features. I filled 5 notebooks with UI sketches and data schemas and lists of names of what to call things. Building was more or less final as I only had 5-10 hrs a week max and wanted to move on.

Now I type directly into the Claude Code chat box and it writes it in front of me. I haven't planned a thing in months. As a result the app swings wildly around based on my whims and feelings. I can rewrite the whole thing based on something I thought of in the shower. Then days later I realize it isn't right and I rebuild it again. All of the rewrites have done a number on the code and I see dead patterns everywhere from stuff long since deleted.

In a professional app I'd have others to hold me accountable so it's not exactly the same but AI has made it very easy to make a lot of bad apps quickly. If you know exactly what you want though it can feel like magic.

I just hope it's still respecting the data loading and caching algorithms I designed so carefully cause I wouldn't know if it wasn't anymore.

Comment · 3 months ago

I feel like I'm crazy here but isn't China just sitting there doing nothing?

On one hand there's the relentless barage of American propaganda. I get that a militaristic society needs an enemy to fight against lest they turn on each other. I get that if you tell people a bad guy is coming for your jobs or your lives then you can maybe get your workers to accept worse conditions and living standards which increases profits. It's ghoulish but there's some logic.

On the other hand I can't see China doing anything except minding its own business. No tariffs. No bullying other nations. No wars started. No threatening allies. They don't let their people waste their lives on brain rot or gambling. They largely align with UN resolutions. They respect international institutions instead of always being the asterisk.

Has American propaganda just failed to work outside it's borders? It's not landing at all

Comment · 3 months ago

I don't trust any American company because they will switch into extraction mode eventually and squeeze every cent they can out of you.

Even if the founders didn't want that, eventually the upper ranks will fill with MBAs and the board with private equity and they will make it that way. Their bonuses are based on quarterly performance not customer experience

Long gone are the companies who served their communities for decades or centuries, providing a stable return to the owners, jobs for the workers and value to the customers.

I'd rather China have my data than America. China might do something with it one day but America built exploiting it into the business model (disclaimer that I'm not Uyghur or Taiwanese though)

Comment · 3 months ago

What I like about Hacker News is each day I open it up, scan the first three pages, open 2-5 links to read, then close it again. Those pages make it easy to monitor my usage and set limits. I used to do the same with Reddit before that changed

I'd fully support removing infinite scroll or even just banning it from under 18 year olds

Comment · 3 months ago

Unless you also believe the neutral view is earth being half flat and half round

I like this analogy. You can't just average two ideas and call it a centrist position. Sometimes one position is right and the people supporting the losing idea should be ignored. Facts are how we decide. People are not logical creatures and will cling to ideas beyond all reason or common sense once they've incorporated it into their identity. There is a reason that right wing appeals to emotion aren't popular with LLMs

Comment · 4 months ago

Or if you read Sapiens you'll know money is a story we tell each other. You can't literally do much with a coin or bank note or numbers on a screen but as long as we all believe it has value, it does. It becomes part of the culture, as you say.

Crypto also has to tell a story about why it's valuable. There was a lot of anti government rhetoric and fear mongering (from libertarians) but the public never really believed the story was true. It was a lot of FOMO.

NFTs failed completely to sell their story but crypto is still hanging on among its supporters. AI is telling a similar story about the value of tokens which is being well received