stahorn · HackerTrans

4 bulan yang laludiscuss

The difference between the fire fighter and the fire safety inspector. The former puts out fires and saves lives and is of course a hero. The latter complains about things that never happen, wastes everybody's time and money and is generally annoying.

stahorn

4 bulan yang laludiscuss

No mass domestic surveillance of citizens is an old trick also. Country A doesn't surveil their citizens and Country B doesn't do theirs. But then they set up the infrastructure and both surveil each other's citizens and then exchange information. Then when they have all the infrastructure, it would be almost a crime to not use it to catch criminals. I mean, think of the children...

stahorn

5 bulan yang laludiscuss

I think this would be good for everybody, not just kids. It doesn't even have to be complicated: Just that after a certain amount of time scrolling/watching, put in a message asking if it's maybe time to stop with some information about how these algorithms try to keep you for as long as possible. Maybe a link to a government page with more information.

It doesn't have to be perfect and there will of course be easy workarounds to hid the warnings for people that want. The goal is to improve the situation though, not solve it perfectly. Like putting information about the dangers of smoking on packages of smokes; it doesn't stop people from smoking but it does make the danger very easy to learn.

stahorn

5 bulan yang laludiscuss

Just like we want to know where the food we eat comes from, we want to know where the information comes from. Of course there's the limit of journalists having to keep their sources secret in many cases. But original publisher I think should be possible.

stahorn

6 bulan yang laludiscuss

Sounds a little bit like the stories from Feynman, e.g.: https://enlightenedidiot.net/random/feynman-on-brazilian-edu...

The students had memorized everything, but understood nothing. Add in access to generative AI, and you have the situation that you had with your interview.

It's a good reminder that what we really do, as programmers or software engineers or what you wanna call it, is understanding how computers and computations work.

stahorn

9 bulan yang laludiscuss

The proper way to work with git: Commit like a madman on your private branch. Short messages, written in seconds, just to be able to remember what you were doing if you are interrupted and have to get back into your work later. If you have a CI pipeline, often you have to make small changes until it works, so no reason to bother with smart commit messages.

At some point, you will have something working that makes sense that clean up. Then use interactive rebase to create one or a few commits that "makes sense". What makes sense is one of these topics that could create a whole bike garage, but you and your team will have some agreement on it. One thing that I like is to keep pure refactorings by themselves. No one cares to review that you've changed typos in old variables names and things like that. If it's a separate commit, you can just skip over it.

Depending on if you are completely done or not, the resulting branch can be sent as a PR/MR. Make sure that all commits have a reason why the change was made. No reason to repeat what the code says or generate some AI slop message. Your knowledge of why a change was done in a certain way is the most valuable part.

Of course, this way of working fits my work, that is not cloud based in any way and with lots of legacy code. It creates git history that I would like to have if I have to take over old projects or if I have to run git bisect on an unfamiliar code base and figure out some obscure bug. You might have a completely different technology stack and business, where it makes sense to work in some other way with git.

stahorn

10 bulan yang laludiscuss

Like that one time the Spotify algorithm found a cool band. Only problem was that they were Chinese. If the name of a band uses some language that's based on some form of the latin alphabet, I can always type something similar to the name and a search engine will find it for me. With Chinese, no chance at all.

stahorn

10 bulan yang laludiscuss

You're doing it wrong: You should just feed other peoples AI-generated responses into your own AI tools and let the tool answer for you! The loop is then closed, no human time wasted, and the only effect is wasted energy to run the AI tools. It's the perfect business model to turn energy into money.

stahorn

10 bulan yang laludiscuss

Here's one. A great read: https://www.amazon.com/Plentiful-Energy-technology-scientifi...

It's available online also: https://www.thesciencecouncil.com/pdfs/PlentifulEnergy.pdf

I read it 14 years ago or so, after the Fukushima accident. I don't think the science has changed since then, or since the 90s when this project was shut down. There continue to be so much money in coal, gas, and oil and it's from there I think most of the opposition to nuclear stems from.

Apart from fast reactors, there's also the traditional reactors and storage of spent fuel. Finland's close to opening their process facility: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Onkalo_spent_nuclear_fuel_repo...

stahorn

10 bulan yang laludiscuss

I was ready for a deep-dive into things like asyncio in python; where it came from and what problems it promised to solve!

stahorn

10 bulan yang laludiscuss

I've become a bit cynic, and I think it will take time until it becomes better. Eventually though, there will be large protests that turn into law that change the dynamics of the now very centralized web.

London was known for having so thick fog from burning coal, and in 1952 it was such a bad event that 4k people died and 100k got badly affected from it. It is was started the Clean Air Act of 1956, that eventually led to clean (cleaner?) air in London.

Another one is Amsterdam. It was a car-centric city up until the 70s, where they started to rebuild it to be a walkable and cyclable city. This started because people protested the dangerous roads, which culminated with the "Stop de Kindermoord" protest.

Maybe if we live long enough, we get to experience a decentralized web again. Next time will come when it's supported by laws, that in turn stand atop a large understanding in the population of why those laws are good and needed.

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