upfrog · HackerLangs

12 hours agodiscuss

The author has been an established blogger since well before the modern AI boom. It is of course not impossible that their writing technique has changed, and they now use AI heavily, but preferring BC/AD over the alternative/not always clarifying which strikes me as incredibly weak evidence.

upfrog

23 days agodiscuss

I really don't like the idea of vertical tabs, but given how so many web pages these days work, I should probably give them a try. That said, the tree-based approach is fascinating - points to Zen (and related efforts) for trying such a different paradigm for arranging tabs.

upfrog

23 days agodiscuss

I don't remember if that exactly is line-for-line what I did, but I was at least doing something similar, and not having success.

upfrog

24 days agodiscuss

Two things that I noticed: - Firefox did crash on me more frequently. It wasn't a daily, or even a weekly thing, but it was more of a problem. - Firefox limits how small I can shrink my tabs in the tab bar. Chrome also has a limit, but it is much less restrictive.

That last one was the killer difference for me. Firefox wants me to be able to see (at least part of) the title of each tab, even if that means I can't see all my tabs at once. I want to see all of my tabs at once, and I don't care if I can see the title - the favicon is enough.

I did try configuring Firefox to let me shrink the tabs more, and even tried messing with its GTK configuration, but no luck.

So I do feel a bit bad for using Brave instead of Firefox, but after months of dealing with Firefox's UI I lost patience.

upfrog

last monthdiscuss

The listed flags do in fact have a great deal of variation, and are uniformly beautiful to look at. Yes, we probably need a moratorium on flags with a sun-like-object on the left, but even in that over-used motif, there is a lot of variety in the exact nature of the star. Ugly but kind of distinctive is significantly worse than attractive but kind of same-y - I would rather be represented by basically any flag on this list than my actual city/county flag.

upfrog

last monthdiscuss

Anecdotally, Grok is mostly not that anti-woke. It is coasting off of its reputation from Elon's marketing. That said, it does have meaningfully fewer guardrails, which is a real benefit.

upfrog

last monthdiscuss

If we find a way to make 4-6 years of language instruction reliably lead to a reasonable level of language competency, maybe. But until then, the student's underlying interest in the language is much more important than any abstract sense of usefulness. I took Spanish in highschool, and despite being moderately ambitious about it, never got very good, and never got much use out of it, despite living in Florida and Texas. I suspect (although alternate history is hard, so I can't guarantee) that I would have gotten a lot more out of Japanese, simply due to alignment of interest.

upfrog

7 months agodiscuss

Jailbreaking is definitely an option, but there is value in spending money to provide a market signal instead.

upfrog

9 months agodiscuss

You get invited by actually trying to play. Not everyone who tries will get in, but it's a lot more likely that you'll succeed if you work the problem, instead of throwing up your hands in disgust at the world.

Non-technical skills matter. People and organizations have multi-faceted incentives. If you think the incentives of the people making decisions are leading to bad outcomes, then learn how to make that heard to them. Learn the situation as they see it, and use your own, better-aligned(?) incentives to improve the organization. And if it's not worth trying, so be it. But you need to accept that much of the world is you live in will continue to be shaped by the people who care enough to see "that hustle life nonsense" as a worthwhile trade.

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