badlibrarian

6 ms·

1.
by badlibrarian 8d ago
The problem with “more harm than good” arguments is that the amount of harm relative to the amount of good is rarely specified. Is it 60/40 harm/good? Then shush, it ain't gettin' fixed in your lifetime. Is it 80/20
2.
by badlibrarian 8d ago
Different site, different backend, different problems. GP was talking about wayback.archive.org, which threw a 429 error just now when I verified the URL.
3.
by badlibrarian 9d ago
Which archives? Wayback is different from Archive. Which is different from Archive-It. And the problem with Wayback was power poles being set on fire by homeless people, then SF power in general, then "upgrades," then "bad ac
4.
by badlibrarian 9d ago
If you use the site, support them. If you are a technical person, offer to help them. But maybe cash, or even the proxy of being able to say they have a large number of cash supporters, isn't really what's needed here? Set up afte
5.
by badlibrarian 12d ago
He doesn't do much better on the other example. Term-frequency saturation is the important part, and he ignores the 1972 paper by Karen Sparck Jones.
6.
by badlibrarian 26d ago
"One of the early victories for me was persuading a young boy of 14 or 15 years of age, named Aaron Swartz, to become the technical architect of the Creative Commons. It took a little persuading, but I told him that this is what he had
7.
by badlibrarian 26d ago
His profile says he wrote for Wired, so I'm inclined to cut him some slack. He spent 4,000 words and six Pantone colors talking about SMS for logins, but never found time to write that powerful, 40 year old men were flying a 14 year ol
8.
by badlibrarian 27d ago
I don't like talking about this, but first hand knowledge is rarer by the day, and there are entire organizations profiting off this mythology. It's pissing me off. Aaron is not a data point to build stupid metaphors around. He wa
9.
by badlibrarian 1mo ago
It can and does and may choose to do so unprompted. That was one of my "holy shit" moments. Previously I watched it spit out nonsense to get around edge cases and avoid tests and uttered many of the things I read in this thread. T
10.
by badlibrarian 1mo ago
I can specifically and directly state that is false.
11.
by badlibrarian 1mo ago
Ah, the classic HN "I keep Wikipedia's list of logical fallacies on my bookmark bar" retort. “No true Scotsman” would require me to redefine “senior developer” to exclude people who disagree with me. I didn’t. And “you’re hol
12.
by badlibrarian 1mo ago
Long bet: the NTSB will require all transportation software to be submitted for independent review, and that review process will be heavily automated by AI, within 5 years. Take it?
13.
by badlibrarian 1mo ago
I've tried. It's like trying to teach squirrels how to Google. Really, you just have to figure out what works for you. You will be rewarded.
14.
by badlibrarian 1mo ago
Very, very senior dev here who has never taken a shortcut in his life. Don't mean to sound like a prick but you're doing it wrong. You have to find your own path through this stuff. It works, promise. I was in your shoes six weeks
15.
by badlibrarian 1mo ago
I'll worry when that stops happening. Probably means I'm getting in my own way or not thinking big enough.
16.
by badlibrarian 1mo ago
Might I recommend HVAC or plumbing, it's honorable work and pays well. Trim trees if you've got the body for it. I don't recommend web work, the last ten years or the next ten. Wouldn't touch the stuff. I skipped the pho
17.
by badlibrarian 1mo ago
It's August 9, 2026 and if you're a software engineer who hasn't had multiple "holy shit, I can't believe it just did that" moments, it's time to consider a new trade.
18.
by badlibrarian 1mo ago
If you repaired televisions in the 70s, most of the IBM 604 trigger circuit looks completely ordinary: a couple of triodes, plate resistors, grid bias, coupling capacitors, and voltages high enough that you kept one hand in your pocket. Shi
19.
by badlibrarian 1mo ago
This represents a small part of what IT is worried about. Offer a beer and say the word "SharePoint" if you want the long version of where this could wind up. The issue isn't letting end-users add features. The issue is twelv
20.
by badlibrarian 2mo ago
Evoking Gödel via GPT, with the requisite em-dash: "No sufficiently expressive formal governor can be simultaneously consistent, complete, and able to prove every relevant proposition—including all propositions about itself." But
21.
by badlibrarian 2mo ago
I just had GPT reverse engineer, from scratch, some ancient Corel Draw documents and turn them into perfect PDFs. None of the open source libraries helped. In fact, GPT didn't make any progress until I told it to ignore them. LibreOffi
22.
by badlibrarian 2mo ago
"The optic cortex is the biggest area of the brain by far. When everything is saturated in fluorescent light, as it is in small studios many times, the fluorescent light is going on and off at 60 times a second, or ideally at 120, but
23.
by badlibrarian 3mo ago
Archives have not taken a consistent stance on this. Preservation, removal, restricted access, de-indexing, and “right to be forgotten” sit on a spectrum. Good archival practice has to include judgment, context, and humility. Sometimes that
24.
by badlibrarian 3mo ago
From http://bbslist.textfiles.com/ Perhaps Dude is among us. 206-246-6647 White Center, VA RaT City BBS (1993-1997) Dude Renegade "Primarily a demoscene board with a vast collection of Impulse Tracker music a
25.
by badlibrarian 3mo ago
"Do you do backups too, for example to guard against corrupt data getting mirrored across both copies, or accidental deletion?" John Gonzalez, Internet Archive infrastructure lead, replied: "We have done experiments to confir
26.
by badlibrarian 3mo ago
It started failing two days ago, when it suddenly couldn't access gmail threads reliably. Then it started popping up warnings that I was over quota when I wasn't. It even let me use Fable briefly, or pretended to. Meanwhile search
27.
by badlibrarian 3mo ago
Exactly. They're both very expensive and prone to surprising you. Sometimes in a good way, sometimes in a bad way. I'd rate them 85%, but you have to run a test because they both fail in different ways on the 15%.
28.
by badlibrarian 3mo ago
The physical version of that magic wormhole is called a slide rule.
29.
by badlibrarian 3mo ago
The first section is the good part. The later reuse of “log” across valuations, dimension, vector fields, orders of vanishing is not so good. Those may be related ideas, but each needs a type signature: from what, to what, and preserving wh
30.
by badlibrarian 3mo ago
This essay needs a type system. Every time it says “log” it should say: log of what, into what? It’s like audio where people say "dB" as if it answers the next question. Relative to what, measured how, and weighted for whom? Autho

More ›