lich_king

6 ms·

1.
by lich_king 6mo ago
I am really tired of this kind of moralizing. The reality is that every time geeks come up with some utopian ideal, such as that we should publish all our software under free licenses or make all human knowledge freely accessible to anyone,
2.
by lich_king 6mo ago
> The ideal is that something intelligent understands what you want to do and gets it done. Maybe? For a couple of decades, we believed that computers you can talk to are the future of computing. Every sci-fi show worth a dime perpetuate
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by lich_king 6mo ago
I don't even think if singling out Dell is useful. Most US companies have long decided that providing good customer support is a drag on revenue and that you can get away with not providing it if the product is problem-free for 99% of
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by lich_king 6mo ago
An article about the AI writing style, written using AI.
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by lich_king 6mo ago
Disproportionately many geeks have very strong opinions about psychiatry, probably because we have a lot of people who consider themselves neurodivergent, as well as plenty of folks who experiment with drugs.
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by lich_king 6mo ago
> He had some pretty awful views that he was pretty loud about, especially later in life. He also cheated on his wife at one point. In 1961, in his early 20s. You get ~80 years on this planet to make mistakes and have views that some oth
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by lich_king 6mo ago
Alternatively, there's money to be lost in the transition. The vast majority of "crypto investors" did not walk away from it any richer. Some folks have gotten lucky, but it's just that: their thesis about the future o
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by lich_king 6mo ago
The comparison gets picked up as the headline; the admission does not. This is exploited quite often, e.g. in science reporting. I'm not saying this is what Waymo did - they don't seem to be bad actors - but absolutely, the patter
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by lich_king 6mo ago
Because most of these things are not multi-trillion-dollar ideas. "We found a way to make illustrators, copyeditors, and paralegals, and several dozen other professions, somewhat obsolete" in no way justifies the valuations of Ope
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by lich_king 6mo ago
We paid for newspapers and they ran ads. We paid for cable TV and it had ads. We went to the cinema and watched ads. Ad-free paid services were a brief aberration, essentially a bait-and-switch: "see how much nicer we are from the old-
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by lich_king 6mo ago
So you're advocating for stronger and more invasive controls?... I think this is a sensible compromise. It gives parents more control than before without relying on shady third-party software or without turning every platform into a co
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by lich_king 6mo ago
> Why not have 2000 hand curated directories instead? It depends on what you're trying to achieve. If you want to have a personal feed of stories from interesting people, 50 is probably enough to give you some interesting daily read
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by lich_king 6mo ago
I think it shows the limits of hand curation. It's a tiny, human-reviewed slice of the "small web", only allowing a subset of blogs... but if you select the "programming" category and click around for a short while,
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by lich_king 6mo ago
This is not how corporate fraud usually happens. You don't tamper with the quarterly report, especially since it gets audited. You tamper with the input data close to the source. For example, you record revenue that hasn't happene
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by lich_king 6mo ago
Looking at the criteria again, I can think of at least three things that arbitrarily exclude large swathes of the small web: 1) The requirement that it needs to be a blog. There's plenty of small-web sites of people who obsess over rea
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by lich_king 6mo ago
Right, but that basically works as a retro alternative to scrolling through social media. If you're looking for something specific, it's simultaneously true that there's a small web page that answers your question and that it
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by lich_king 6mo ago
It's easy to hand-curate a list of 5,000 "small web" URLs. The problem is scaling. For example, Kagi has a hand-curated "small web" filter, but I never use it because far more interesting and relevant "small we
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by lich_king 6mo ago
> Google that now optimizes their algorithm for monetization and not usefulness. I don't think they do that. Instead, "usefulness" is mostly synonymous with commercial intent: searching for <x> often means "I wa
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by lich_king 6mo ago
Because the habitable surface of the planet is less than 100 million square kilometers and only a fraction of that is suitable for subsistence farming. The only reason we can accommodate 8 billion is that the majority of them live in high-d
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by lich_king 6mo ago
> It might be a year or two, or five, or ten Ah, the classic, forever-untestable "it's just around the corner" hypothesis. I've lived through multiple "it's gonna be over in 12-18 months" arguments sinc
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by lich_king 6mo ago
[flagged]
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by lich_king 6mo ago
Sure. I'm not arguing it's fundamentally bad. But it's going to leave some buyers unhappy because nowadays, the point of paperbacks is that you're paying extra for a reading experience , not the text itself. An ebook is
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by lich_king 6mo ago
Yeah, most charitably, it seems to be some sort of an LLM art project. And it's another day when we engage with slop because it happens to say something we like.
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by lich_king 6mo ago
That's one part of the story, but I think you're glossing over two other issues. First, digital printing allows anyone to sloppily OCR public-domain works (or download them from Project Gutenberg), typeset the text haphazardly, an
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by lich_king 6mo ago
I don't find your analogy compelling. More like "calculators make me less motivated to learn how to multiply four-digit numbers in my head". There used to be jobs for people who were good with numbers. They're pretty muc
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by lich_king 6mo ago
A sufficient number of people being angry about something is how you end up with social norms. These norms will shape how the technology is used. Conversely, if your take is that there's no point being angry and we should just take it
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by lich_king 6mo ago
I don't think that "it's more of the same" is a good way to think about it. The internet contained a lot of low-quality content, but even low-quality content used to be fairly expensive and time-consuming to produce. Fur
28.
by lich_king 6mo ago
It is, because of the baked-in asymmetry. "I couldn't be bothered to write it, but you have to read it". Unless your expectation is that I'm going to have my chatbot summarize the messages from your chatbot, in which cas
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by lich_king 6mo ago
Silicone doesn't require plasticizers (because it's elastic on its own) or fire retardants (because it doesn't burn easily). The material itself is also considered biologically inert and is less affected by temperature, solve
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by lich_king 6mo ago
> If they do like it, what's the issue? Are you serious? However goofy that sounds, they paid for a specific fantasy. They would not have paid if you advertised the service as "talk dirty with a random dude in India". If

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