xnorswap

परसोंdiscuss

It's clearly a bug. The UI defaults to "system preference" but then gives you dark mode anyway, even if your system preference is light mode.

To get back to actually using system preference, you have to choose light/dark then choose system preference again.

xnorswap

परसोंdiscuss

FYI Your docs don't respect system-mode choice until you click into light/dark mode then back to system.

They just show up in dark mode if there's no local storage setting set yet.

xnorswap

3 दिन पहलेdiscuss

The AGENTS.md is interesting, apparently the primary most important principle is, "Avoid em-dashes like the plague".

That's an odd request. I always use my own voice for certain things, such as posting to hacker news, or writing my thoughts on a proposal. But for other things such as writing up a bugfix, if I'm getting an AI to write it, I'd rather not hide the fact I've done so.

In fact I usually go out my way to mark it as AI written, to give a heads up to any human reader so they don't waste their time if they don't want to read it.

edit: I'm not sure why my comment is attracting downvotes, perhaps it's being interpreted as anti-AI. I'm not against AI writing, but there are contexts where people would like to know whether something is AI written or not. I would rather it was well identified than hidden, so people can make their own judgement whether to gain insight into a human writing or whether it's just process they can skim or feed through their own agent.

"Avoid em-dashes" just seems like a crude attempt to avoid AI writing coming across as such.

xnorswap

3 दिन पहलेdiscuss

Because people expect:

  1. bug fixes and updates
  2. Services to work in the "cloud"

If you bought a piece of software, received precisely that version and never got updates, and didn't expect your data to magically follow you around, then we could have that model, as evidenced by that model working well back when software largely did work that way.

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3 दिन पहलेdiscuss

Debugging and diagnosis is very tool call heavy, whether that's grepping / transforming logs, calling out to profilers/tracers, or even just writing up incident reports.

Bug diagnostics is about being okay at coding but better at tooling.

Given a good diagnostic report, it can be handed to opus for the fix.

Opus is okay at writing reports, but it still regularly gets table widths wrong in typst documents, leaving the last column full of text but only a handful of characters wide.

xnorswap

3 दिन पहलेdiscuss

I do think HN should have an obit: category and filter them out the main page.

It's one thing to have obits for people who wouldn't be covered by regular news, but "75 year old celebrity dies" is not any kind of new phenomenon.

It generates a decent amount of upvotes and discussion based on name recognition and nostalgia, but every thread is essentially the same, "Oh, that's sad, I liked their work, <personal anecdote of how they were touched by it>.".

xnorswap

4 दिन पहलेdiscuss

Why the 15 year cut-off?

Besides, I don't doubt the US spelling has taken over, that has happened a lot in a wide range of fields, but it doesn't invalidate the British spelling, even if it isn't as widely used in recent published papers.

It's like claiming that the element is sulfur not sulphur, because papers are increasingly written for an international audience. In British English, the element is Sulphur, regardless of whether you can find an "important paper" using the spelling.

xnorswap

6 दिन पहलेdiscuss

> Preventing crimes before the happen is in general just unquestionably good

Is that satire?

In a world where as if by magic all crimes are prevented, then there is total power in the hands of those who define what a crime is, including being able to label protest as a criminal act.

Complete crime prevention is a totalitarian police state.

xnorswap

6 दिन पहलेdiscuss

It's cypher in British English.

xnorswap

6 दिन पहलेdiscuss

Surely the last place you'd want to use those weaker consistency guarantees is a concurrency limiter?

xnorswap

6 दिन पहलेdiscuss

I understand the romantic appeal of discovering "abandoned" books and forgotten ideas.

However I suspect my reaction to your anecdote is very different to the one that most people might have, because I think that behaviour is harmful to the library. ( A very minor harm, but a harm nonetheless. )

They have identified books that people don't borrow, and have made it clear they want to get rid of them. That's to benefit the library, catalogue and storage isn't free and endless.

So they have a signal that no-one is borrowing these books, and they can replace it with books that do get borrowed.

Along you come and interrupt that signal, in a way that doesn't have underlying desire to borrow that book. So the clock gets reset, and so it goes.

In software development terms, imagine you develop a product with a number of features with a public API, and telemetry points that a feature goes unused. You want to clean up the code so you mark some endpoints as deprecated and list that in your change log.

Now imagine there's a developer who looks at the changelog for deprecation warnings, then goes out their way to develop apps that call them.

"Unloved books" might seem more romantic than un-called API endpoints, but the library needs to rotate and refresh to stay healthy.

If you want unloved books, then pick them up for next to nothing from the sale outside the library, most libraries will practically give away books they've rotated out, and you're actually doing them a favour "disposing" of them while likely giving them a token amount of money for it.

xnorswap

7 दिन पहलेdiscuss

It would be better if they were aligned to the delay repay thresholds.

xnorswap

पिछला माहdiscuss

To most of us that's worth a ton, whereas he's probably had enough front-page posts that there's less value to him, although still likely more than $12 worth.

xnorswap

पिछला माहdiscuss

What strikes me about that is how much "dead air" there is without background music and how much of a long-format that was for broadcast.

You just wouldn't get away with that on TV now, the closest thing is some twitch or youtube streams, but even they'd have relentless background music ( and donation/subscription thank you sounds ) and other media at the same time.

But an actual non-live, edited programme? This whole 90 minute programme would be edited down to a 10 minute segment with endless repetition and audio stings, even on the BBC.

To me this shows how much we've lost from the TV format and the ambition it once had. Somewhere since it has fallen into a weird combination of lack of ambition but with a self-congratulation, where programmes often restate what they are doing as being ground-breaking.

xnorswap

पिछला माहdiscuss

I had something similar happen where someone linked a blog article, I thought it sounded like slop, especially since they were posting 2-3 articles a day, but I wasn't sure so I checked their back catalogue.

I then saw they've always written like that, and always posted 2-3 articles a day, so I figured they're prolific and LLMs copied their style.

Then I read their first post again, and realised I should check the wayback machine.

Sure enough, they had gone through their entire post history, and had rewritten it with an LLM, to make it less obvious when they started using them.

Now, this was always a bit of a junk site, a knock-off Boing Boing, but it seems incredible to me that someone would replace their original posts with AI gen.

Surely it destroys any reputation you might have?

A site they've been running for nearly 20 years, overwritten by slop.

Compare:

Original: https://web.archive.org/web/20191017113113/https://www.geeky...

Rewritten slop: https://www.geeky-gadgets.com/metal-detecting-sandals/

xnorswap

पिछला माहdiscuss

It's LLM phraseology.

It comes up with a scenario where it could be a problem ( license removal ), and then it generates why a license might get removed ( "cost-saving" ).

It's not a person thinking, so there's no real thought to whether it is really a likely scenario, it's just something that sounds plausible.

I read too many blogs, I've come to spot these phrases that trip a feeling of, "Wait, do people really do that?".

You'll still have someone along in the comments to suggest that this article isn't AI slop, and that people really do remove individual one-drive licenses from active people in an organisation to cut costs, that this is just "edited" by AI, etc.

But it's slop from start to finish. Or in LLM speak, "The slop is real".

xnorswap

पिछला माहdiscuss

Yeah, lab leak is hard enough to contain with human viruses, but labs have well established protocols to prevent it happening.

Computing doesn't have good protocols except for air-gapping, we really just have lots of layers of best-effort detection, and billions of devices which mix data and instruction often in a careless fashion.

I used to not believe in the dangers of AI or the risk of internet-collapse from "rogue AI", but a genuine self-mutating virus could genuinely take down the internet and need an entirely new separate net. ( Or we'd discover if the current backbone actually has the power to break encryption to stop it. )

And this time, you can bet any new internet would be corporation captured. CompuServe and AOL failed because of the open internet, but we're a very different world now, governments would support the corporation led locked-down approaches for "safety".

I don't for a second believe the capability is actually there yet, but it's no longer unthinkable that such a thing could be created in a lab within a decade. Once out in the wild, there's a lot of idle compute out there to harness for self-improvement and spreading.

xnorswap

पिछला माहdiscuss

Often this kind of thing is put in as a relief valve to stop people demanding legislation. They can push back by pointing to this kind of measure, despite knowing in practice that employees aren't really free to use it.

xnorswap

पिछला माहdiscuss

I hate it when companies use this kind of trick to get around legislation or privacy concerns.

"Employees are able to turn off tracking".

Sure, but there is a power imbalance, and employees will come to understand ( although never stated in any handbook ) that the rate at which they disable it will be taken into account in performance reviews.

Just like "unlimited PTO" is not a benefit, because employees self-regulate their use down to less than they'd get if they negotiated a fixed amount.

It's a twisted legal trick to get out of an obligation.

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पिछला माहdiscuss

They said that, but they described it as "Several seconds", so I assumed there was plenty of other lag too.

Searching the article again, I see in the FAQ:

> Xochitl takes approximately 12 seconds to update the notebook on-disk

12 definitely isn't "several" in my understanding, but regardless, I guess there's little the author can do then.

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Gorilla: A fast, scalable, in-memory time series database (2016)

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