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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 29th, 2023

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  • It just makes too much sense… The only way to get past electron is a better electron. Or just fix electron

    We’ve been going after this concept for decades now. That’s what java swing was supposed to be, what python gtlk was supposed to be, and I’m sure there were others before that and there’s been a hell of a lot since then

    It’s all trade-offs between flexibility, ease of use, and performance. Also between maintenance cost, portability, and existing library support

    Electron is a good compromise. The execution could be better, but it’s come a long way. There is no one size fits all solution, but there are some decent options that handle that compromise differently


  • I mean, they kinda don’t. Companies are entities made out of policies guiding how people split up objectives into smaller parts. The more people involved and the more indirect it is, the less coherent it gets

    Legal says you need one popup for compliance. Marketing or analytics say you need more users to log in. Elon wants to remind people to call it Twitter.

    By the time it filters through managers to the devs, they probably know it’ll be a horrible experience, but what are they going to do? It’s not their job. They’ll get brushed off. There might even be a compelling reason to do it in this way - with this in particular, annoying and intrusive popups are malicious compliance with the EU cookie laws. But everyone seems to be doing it this way - that’s probably what legal is going to recommend rather than interpreting the law themselves

    So the problem is the structure. If you want a hierarchy of obedient replaceable cogs, you’ve made sure no one sees the full picture






  • Psychiatrists don’t generally do therapy, and therapists don’t give diagnoses or medication

    Therapy is a bunch of techniques to get people talking, repeating their words back to them, and occasionally offering compensation methods or suggesting possible motivations of others. Telling you what to think or feel is unethical - therapy is about gently leading you to the realizations yourself. They can also provide accountability and advice, but they don’t diagnose or hand you the answer - people circle around their issues and struggle to see it, but they need to make the connections themselves

    I don’t give AI too much credit - I give myself credit. I don’t lie to myself, and I don’t have trouble talking about what’s bothering me. I use AI as a tool - these kinds of conversations are a mirror I can use to better understand myself. I’m the one in control, but through an external agent. I guide the AI to guide myself

    An AI is not a replacement for a therapist, but it can be an effective tool for self reflection




  • Just to put this in context:

    There’s only so many ways to turn a bunch of files into one - mainly, you stick them back to back. Easy.

    Then, there’s an infinite ways to compress that file… You could come up with you own method, but what good is that? It’s better and smarter to use a format already supported by your users

    So of course most bundles are the same archive type under the hood. Everything from backups to installers - you shouldn’t be inventing new formats without a damn good reason



  • I think this is a non-issue

    Captchas aren’t easy to bypass - run of the mill scammers can’t afford a bunch of servers running cutting edge LLMs for this

    Captchas were never a guarantee - one person could sit there solving captchas for a good chunk of a bot farm anyways

    So where does that leave us? Sophisticated actors could afford manually doing captchas and may even just be using a call-center setup to do astroturfing. My bigger concern here is the higher speed LLMs can operate at, not bypassing the captcha

    Your run of the mill programmer can’t bypass them, it requires actual skill and a time investment to build a system to do this. Captchas could be defeated programically before and still can now - it still raises the difficulty to the point most who could bother would rather work on something more worthwhile

    IMO, the fact this keeps getting boosted makes me think this is softening us up to accept less control over our own hardware


  • I think this is a non-issue

    Captchas aren’t easy to bypass - run of the mill scammers can’t afford a bunch of servers running cutting edge LLMs for this

    Captchas were never a guarantee - one person could sit there solving captchas for a good chunk of a bot farm anyways

    So where does that leave us? Sophisticated actors could afford manually doing captchas and may even just be using a call-center setup to do astroturfing. My bigger concern here is the higher speed LLMs can operate at, not bypassing the captcha

    Your run of the mill programmer can’t bypass them, it requires actual skill and a time investment to build a system to do this. Captchas could be defeated programically before and still can now - it still raises the difficulty to the point most who could bother would rather work on something more worthwhile

    IMO, the fact this keeps getting boosted makes me think this is softening us up to accept less control over our own hardware