xouse

I’m decent at excel, but not amazing. I’ve tried again and again to use LLMs including Claude to solve specific, small, well defined problems in excel with a 0% success rate. My experience so far has been if I can’t do it LLMs can’t either.

If LLMs are a 6/10 right now at basic coding then they’re a 3/10 at excel from my experience.

Filament is really cheap. Basic pla is roughly 2-3c a gram. I couldn't see this being more than 500 grams, so maybe $10-20 for filament, maybe $30 if you use abs or something.

I'm guessing the rest of the price is paying to have it printed by a third party.

The way I look at it, information is a force multiplier on action. If there's no action then 50 times zero is still zero.

The easiest way to estimate/visualize it is that the normal dump trucks you see on the road are 20 ton dump trucks. So at a maximum it's two dump truck loads, which doesn't go very far. In reality sand is pretty dense/heavy so it's even less than that.

As far as cost goes, I paid $250 for my pixel 3xl in near mint condition. New phones lose so much value in their first year that you can buy them for a fraction of their retail value. I can keep it till it's no longer supported in oct 2021 and sell it and buy another great phone for $2-300 and repeat every 2ish years.

The premium on buying brand new phones is outrageous.

Yes. Music trackers have always been a ton of effort, but in their prime trackers had the advantage of having basically a monopoly on music discovery. If you wanted to find out about citypop in 2011 what.cd was the place, now youtube will recommended it to you on a Joe Rogan video.

People didn't go to what.cd and jump through all those hoops to find rare music, they went to find good music, and now Spotify and YouTube do a good enough job of that with a lot less effort.

As a funny example of that I discovered Billie Eilish when Ocean Eyes first came out from a private tracker and now she's about as big as anyone. So it isn't just about discovering rare czech folk singers, but any music that you might like.

I think the hardcore demographic you mentioned is spot on and does exist, but they were always a minority and the evaporation of the less hardcore users explains why the scene is so much smaller now.

I disagree, the community is both more fragmented and smaller, what had 144k users on its last day vs the 35k of its spiritual successor today. The few music trackers that have sprung up post what.cd after said spiritual successor are all pretty small. The niche genre trackers all have about the same user numbers since then so they cancel out. Then factor in that waffles has been down for some time now and the difference is pretty big.

I can only estimate because exact numbers are hard to find, but I'd say peak what era music tracker community total users was in the 350k region and we're probably somewhere around 100k now.

People have learned from what.cd. Lots of people have the same sense of inevitable doom you do so there's more people who have put thought and effort into being capable of rebuilding quickly if that happens again. Just varroa musica alone has created a giant decentralized metadata archive(and that's not even its main purpose just a neat side effect) that would make the restarting process much easier.

The downside is that the post what community is so much smaller. Spotify et al really put a huge damper on the music tracker community, and that makes it less resilient.

I have experience in an unusual domain that's shaped the way I think about truth and misinformation. I play super smash bros melee for the Nintendo gamecube competitively, and I view it as an odd sort of sanity test for the limits of truth.

The deck is impossibly stacked in favor of truth in melee. To start off with we actually have Truth with a capital T. Press Y and dpad down and you bring up white text telling you exactly what state your character is in. Imagine being a psychiatrist and instead of the messy uncertain process of diagnosing patients you can press a button that freezes time and white text from a debug menu god forgot to remove from the public release of life appears. Time switches to frame advance mode and "DepressionModerate 27" floats over your patients head.

Not only do we have the truth, but we have a community that values performance and has a vested interest in the truth.

And not only that, but there isn't even political or partisan resistance to the truth.

Ok, so this is a world where pure objective truth exists, science tools are free easy and available to all, the populace cares about truth, politics doesn't exist, there's no real incentive to spreading misinformation, and there are no large scale or individual actors purposely spreading misinformation. And yet even in this best of all possible worlds microcosm truth always seems to be barely hanging on by the skin of its teeth.

There's always someone around the corner who says that powershielding an attack incurs no shield stun.

I don't think people appreciate just how fragile the truth is even before adding in bad guys. I think we fall too quickly into viewing truth and misinformation through the most exciting narratives. Like getting in a frenzy over shark attacks and neglecting the thousands of people killed by the boring old flu.

I've always been surprised some inspired performance artist hasn't done this to the live sound feed at a big music festival like Bonnaroo or Coachella yet. Audio runs from the stage/band to a sound guy in the middle of the field who controls the mix then from there it goes back across the field to the PA system mounted on stage. The audio cables are literally just big snakes that run right through the crowd where anyone could access them. Highjack a post mixer cable and bob's your uncle.

The only hitch would be that afaik at festivals the pa arrays are passive so you'd need to steal power too so you can power an amplifier and send a powered signal, but if you managed that it'd be even worse than the tv broadcast intrusion because there's no easy way to shut it off, the sound guy has no control because you're after him in the signal chain and nobody onstage is set up to handle something like that. It's not like beyonce is gonna climb the scaffolding and start unplugging speakers when the crab rave starts playing inexplicably.

I think applications of AI to creating 3d modeling assets for videogames. Gaming is a >100 billion dollar industry and art can be as much as half of costs for AAA games. It seems to me like it's the lowest hanging fruit of AI in terms of difficulty vs potential revenue.

People think touch typing takes a long time to learn, and getting good does take a while, but it only takes about an hour to memorize the alphanumerics and which finger types what well enough to break the hunt and peck looking at the keyboard cycle forever. Once the cycle is broken just typing casually is enough to eventually achieve mastery. It's only that one or two hours that really suck, and then that week or so of being kind of mediocre that keeps people stuck in the suboptimal local maxima of not touch typing.

I know a lot of people who think they can touch type the number row, but I've yet to meet anyone who can actually do it at anything resembling their normal typing speed and without errors. If people could there would be no reason for the numberpad to exist. I'm a very fast typist and I've always struggled with touch typing the number row.

Thirty minutes into using a split 40% keyboard and I was using the number row at full speed, something that has eluded me my whole life. And of course, it's a hell of a lot easier to hold down a key with my thumb and touch type the qwerty row than to make the normal awkward stretch that fullsize keyboards use.

That told me pretty much everything I needed to know. Once I learn a layout I can type any key that's on the home row or the rows that are directly above or below it and a thumb modifier faster than I can type any keys outside of the three home rows sans a modifier.

The idea that many people have that somehow 40% keyboards are about having less keys at your immediate disposal is completely backwards. There are 36 keys that are within a 1 key displacement of the home row. With the natural 36 and two thumb modifiers on each side that's already 180 keys that are all touch typeable, and that's without even getting into any of the fancy stuff like being able to tap for one function and hold for another, or using two modifiers at once, or using a vim style leader key, or chording, or having modes that you can switch into.

The smaller keyboards aren't about having less keys, it's not like I woke up one morning and decided to never use function keys or curly brackets again, it's about removing all the cruft that that can't be pressed easily and mapping it in a way that it can.

This is one of the rare good fits for blockchain. You can get the hash of a video, or hash for each segment of a video, then store that hash in a blockchain transaction, which makes it publicly verifiable while also serving as a timestamp.

A news organization could have their own wallet that they're sending currency from which acts as a verifier that it's them, then they store a hash/s of their video on the blockchain. Then you could have a facebook/twitter player that checks the hash of shared news video clips and could display a lock icon and message that says something like this video is verified non tampered from the CNN source.

Your value as a human being isn't dependent on your coding ability. It sounds stupid and trite, but it's true. A lot of these types of insecurities arise because we allow things access to our self worth that we shouldn't. Letting other people's opinions affect your core self worth is like giving them root access to your computer and letting them write directly to /

And I think in this analogy having thick skin is kind of like a firewall, it'll keep things out, but it's often just security theatre.

It makes sense to give other people access to your computer. The world is boring as a singleplayer game, but how much access is the right amount? It's worth thinking deeply about where your self worth is stored and who and what in your life has r/w privileges.

Also, this may sound really out there, but if you don't have a good basis for self worth/self love, but if you can figure out the right way to frame it, consider asking your parents or other close friends why they love you. It's a very on the spot kind of question so don't put any value on if they don't answer, but I asked my mom that once when I was in a really dark place(and we don't have a very good relationship) and I was really blown away by her answer to the question. She straightforwardly listed all the positive qualities she admired in me and asking her that was probably one of the best decisions I ever made. It really improved our relationship and probably forever positively impacted my view of myself.