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modriano

1,023 karmajoined 9 yıl önce

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modriano
·dün·discuss
Have you ever wanted to try flying a plane or running a city or being a tycoon of roller coasters without having to invest much time, money, and energy to take flight lessons, run for political office, or work your way up through an amusement park company? Sim games let you play with these complex systems easily and walk away when you get bored.
modriano
·dün·discuss
I don't know. If they were training on this, I feel like they would be able to get the shape of a bike frame right; it's a pretty simple polygon, and a lot of the bike frames that are getting generated would be impossible to steer.
modriano
·3 gün önce·discuss
Looking at the FAQ for the data source [0], specifically this part

> What methodology is used to calculate Statcounter Global Stats? > Statcounter is a web analytics service. Our tracking code is installed on more than 1 million sites globally. These sites cover various activities and geographic locations. Every month, we record billions of page views to these sites. For each page view, we analyse the browser/operating system/screen resolution used and we establish if the page view is from a mobile device.

I assume they infer the OS and stuff from the User Agent and other stuff in the headers of requests. And I assume scrapers collecting data for AI systems don't include the standard User Agent stuff Statcounter classified when they made their data collection tooling. So my guess would be non-browser-automation style scrapers that are getting around defenses and have header data Statcounter doesn't know how to classify to an OS.

[0] https://gs.statcounter.com/faq#methodology
modriano
·3 gün önce·discuss
Being bombed to hell and then split in half and starved of resources until 1989 really hindered Berlin's economic development. It's not the powerhouse one might expect given its cultural output and being a nation's Capitol.
modriano
·4 gün önce·discuss
You can edit OSM from its main site [0], although there's a much steeper learning curve when using the site (as you have far more freedom and it's not super easy to figure out the standard way to tag some situations).

[0] https://www.openstreetmap.org/
modriano
·10 gün önce·discuss
So, uh, any chance us Claude subscription people are going to get the 11 days of Fable 5 access (at non API pricing) we were deprived of?
modriano
·10 gün önce·discuss
I used Fable 5 for maybe 10 hours in the window when it was available. It was much better than Opus 4.8. And I have found the Opus models to be excellent, but Fable 5 was cranking out incredible research on some data sources I wanted to plumb into my project.

I wouldn't personally pay API pricing for it for my personal projects, but I bet it's going to be absolutely slammed with usage for the next month+.
modriano
·18 gün önce·discuss
If you go to pcpartpicker.com, you can select components and it only shows parts that are compatible with the parts you've already selected. It made selecting parts super easy. And I was shocked at how easy it was to build a PC. It only took maybe 90 minutes including 20 minutes skimming a YouTube video on how to assemble a PC. And installing Ubuntu was maybe 30 more minutes (15 minutes to make a bootable thumb drive and 15 minutes to install the OS on my new machine).

It was so much less of a hassle than I had expected.

That being said, I wouldn't make a PC until RAM and storage prices come back down to earth.
modriano
·22 gün önce·discuss
Yeah, and I'm a big fan of the the hardware. I bought a refurbished MacBook Air in 2022 (M1 or M2, I don't recall) to try it on and see how I liked it. I mainly used it as a thin client to ssh to my homelab, but it was far and away the best laptop hardware on the market and I loved the battery life. I found that I couldn't use it with two (non-duplicating) external monitors, so I considered the test a success, gave the MacBook Air to my wife, and bought a MacBook Pro (which I'm still using mainly as a thin client and ssh-ing to a Linux machine and working there; plug for Tailscale, it makes everything really nice and easy).

I know it's silly to have a MacBook Pro just for the screen size, its ability to drive two external monitors, and the battery life Apple Silicon achieves. And I feel a bit rude not really learning much about the dev tools the community has made for MacOS. But it is just really nice hardware (I just wish it wasn't such a chore to configure my Macbook to have the same ctrl+c, ctrl+v keyboard shortcuts when using an external keyboard, but the hardware is sufficiently better than anything else on the market that I tolerate it).
modriano
·22 gün önce·discuss
Up until 2019, Windows was my daily driver and had been for the prior ~20. years. I had been regularly ssh-ing into Linux machines, but it didn't seem like a place I could live. Then, in 2019, I built a PC and, wanting to get more proficient in Linux environments, I made it a dual boot setup with a Ubuntu desktop partition and a Windows partition, expecting I'd inevitably get frustrated on the Linux partition by sidequests debugging driver issues or setting up peripherals, unproductive yak-shaving stuff. I had to google a setting or two over the first couple days, but other than that, everything just worked on the Linux partition. Things opened quickly, things installed easily, and things I was worried about (e.g. nvidia and printer drivers) were either automatic or a one-time step so small I don't remember it. After a couple weeks, I noticed there hadn't been a single moment where I had to switch to the Windows partition, and a month after that I reformatted the Windows partition ssd and added the storage to the Linux partition.

If you have considered switching to Linux and worried that it would be a chore, give it a shot (if you have the freedom to choose). It has been polished and ready since at least 2019. I have to use a Windows machine for work and, like this New Outlook issue shows, MSFT has concluded most users can't or won't leave so there's no margin in improving UX and some margin in doing things that make UX much worse. I don't think I'll elect to have a personal Windows machine ever again in my life.
modriano
·geçen ay·discuss
I don't know. Just looking at the bike frames (specifically the fact that the AI generated bikes have rather unsteerable front forks), it's clear to me that frontier labs aren't spending much time tuning models to make bikes look coherent, which I assume is an easier task than making a pelican riding a bike look coherent.
modriano
·geçen ay·discuss
Yeah, that would be my assumption too (based on my admittedly incomplete personal experience where I got my furnace running by manually spinning my draft inducer motor, which kept spinning).

As exhausting the combustion products is a critical safety feature, I would be surprised if any furnace was designed such that it could possibly keep running if the draft inducer motor stopped. It seems like it would be trivially easy to make a circuit such that gas valves could only open if the draft inducer motor + fan wasn't spinning.
modriano
·geçen ay·discuss
Is there a useful abstraction that doesn't help solve a problem someone has?
modriano
·geçen ay·discuss
The legal route can be very expensive, and it can be short circuited when the parties come to some agreement, which is harder to do when parties are unnecessarily antagonistic.
modriano
·geçen ay·discuss
> “The tech industry proceeds in accordance with commercial logic, which is antithetical to the values of mathematics,” declaration co-author Michael Harris of Columbia University

As a former physicist and current data scientist/engineer, I know for a fact that commercial utility drives math research and researchers.

Math is a tool to solve problems. Some mathematicians might only love the process of using the tool, but commercial logic absolutely drives mathematician attention to develop commercially useful tools.
modriano
·geçen ay·discuss
> Agricultural subsidies exist primarily due to lobbying,

That's mostly true, but it's also true that we don't want to starve. There are 330 million hungry mouths in the US and we've got to keep production way above that level or it becomes a big political problem real quick.

If we just let the market set prices, in years where farms are all producing bumper crops, oversupply would push profits way down. This would force many producers to sell their farms (most likely to corporate-scale farmers) and leave the sector. Subsidies keep a nonzero number of producers producing independently. Granted, the corporate-scale farmers (who also accumulate funds via subsidies) can buy out producers who want to sell, but with subsidies, more producers can afford to say no and stay independent.
modriano
·geçen ay·discuss
MSFT was pretty arms length for the first 5-6 years. I was honestly kind of impressed and it made my opinion of MSFT better. But then AI made it too attractive of a target and MSFT couldn't help but make it a place the former CEO wanted to leave (and it has been running headless for about a year now).

It's quite disappointing objectively, but I expected worse from MSFT.
modriano
·2 ay önce·discuss
Creators can only create as long as they can sustain the costs of creating (including opportunity cost).
modriano
·2 ay önce·discuss
Maybe. I didn't see enough in the article about the repo owner/committer to make any inference about their intentions and wouldn't jump to conclude it was incompetence or malice or crafty leaking. The only real signal I saw was that the repo didn't immediately turn private when the person was notified.

For some people, yeah, this could be a career killer. For some other people, it might just precipitate a flight back to Moscow or Beijing or something.
modriano
·2 ay önce·discuss
Sure, it could be incompetence. It could also be an intentional strategy to tie up CISA/DHS resources, poison or obstruct CISA/DHS investigations/operations, open up systems to sunlight and journalism, or cause general chaos.

The not-responding-when-notified part makes me think it's not just incompetence.