randlet · HackerLangs

24 gün öncediscuss

Great book. I really enjoyed the audiobook version which is narrated by the author.

The cadence and wording sure reads like AI to me. OP, personally I find this really off putting and does not make me want to learn more about your app.

randlet

geçen aydiscuss

> Software has been transitioning from a craft into an industrial process for the last two decades or so

This seems like a good insight and it feels true to me as well.

My guess is the absolute number of people who treat it like a "craft" is higher than 20 years ago, but as a fraction of all developers it has shrunk dramatically.

randlet

3 ay öncediscuss

I assumed it was AI too

"All of this happened over text—not an organized workflow system, but good enough to handle a weekend’s worth of work, one weekend at a time. For a moment, the business worked. In reality, this was the easy part."

And

"The logo was the Boston Celtics logo. The problem? It’s not a minimal, modern logo; it’s a detailed, hand-drawn image from 1946."

have a pretty AI like cadence.

edit: No shade to OP....I'm glad it's not AI, but I'm sad my default is assuming AI now :/

randlet

4 ay öncediscuss

House was also a wonderful read. In many ways I enjoyed it more than SoaNM due to the parallels with software development but in a completely different domain. Building a house is remarkably similar to building an application.

His whole catalogue is fantastic really. Definitely a favourite author of mine.

randlet

4 ay öncediscuss

> a job that wasn't that hard to begin with

The more experience I get the harder the job seems tbh

randlet

4 ay öncediscuss

"bugs were appearing everywhere out of the blue. The codebase was a huge mess of nulls, undefined behaviour, bad error handling. It was so bad that we actually lost a client over this."

Especially wild considering their product is literally an automated bug finder lol.

randlet

4 ay öncediscuss

This is one of the big reasons I won't travel to the US anytime soon, even for work events. I really don't want to be put in a situation where you have to give a border guard access to your phone or risk detention or a future travel ban.

randlet

4 ay öncediscuss

Sudbury is 150k+ people so not exactly tiny in terms of Canadian cities (30th most populus).

randlet

4 ay öncediscuss

Wouldn't staying feel like implicitly condoning the actions of the "psychopaths"?

randlet

4 ay öncediscuss

> The only power you have is to quit.

This is an incredible power when exercised en-masse.

randlet

4 ay öncediscuss

"Either you think that forced labour in Malaysia is OK in which case this seems bizarre"

It would be an interesting poll to see what the populace actually things about this statement...

randlet

4 ay öncediscuss

I considered this too, but I think it's unreasonable in the end, since there seems to be a fundamental difference/motive between an individual consumer and an entity trying to generate profit. A consumer should be able to trust that the product they're buying was manufactured in an ethical manner.

randlet

5 ay öncediscuss

Parent is making the point that people from the US often forget that other countries exist and adhere to different rules & regulations and it seems like you're unintentionally emphasizing it for them.

randlet

5 ay öncediscuss

/r/epstein post from the creator:

https://reddit.com/r/Epstein/comments/1r3joqr/i_mapped_every...

-------

A week ago I posted about an open database I’ve been building to cross reference Epstein case material. That post did way better than I expected (568k views, 4.6k upvotes) and it hugged my server to death twice.

Since then I basically did nothing but ingest, clean, and index more data. The database is now big enough that “just read the docs” is not advice, it’s a cry for help. What it was last week

    ~6,000 documents
    1,708 flights
    2,700 emails
    1,438 people

What it is now

    1,522,060 documents (all DOJ releases we have access to so far), full text searchable
    1,708 flights (1997 to 2019) with manifests where available
    10,000+ emails indexed with threading
    1,350 people (cleaned: removed duplicates + nuked a bunch of false connections)
    638,000 docs run through redaction analysis
        ~1.8M individual redactions detected
        ~616k flagged by our tooling as “looks questionable, take a closer look”
        ~39,500 pages of text recovered from under black bars (you can see examples on the site)
    107,000 named entities pulled out via NLP (people, orgs, places, dates)
    1,530 audio/video transcripts
    4,300+ photos/media (raid photos, exhibits, property shots, government releases)

That’s not a typo: 1.5 million documents. If you search a phrase, it searches inside the actual pages (OCR where needed) and email bodies, not just titles.

So what changed, besides “everything is bigger”? 1) The redaction stuff is getting hard to ignore

I’m not saying “every redaction is evil.” Some of them obviously protect victims, minors, addresses, etc. But the patterns are weird, and the volume is insane.

I also worked with u/Sea_Doughnut_8853, who independently processed 519k PDFs with their own pipeline. That let us sanity check a lot of what we’re seeing across the corpus.

We’re flagging ~616k redactions as “potentially improper” based on patterns (context, repetition, surrounding text). That does not mean “definitely corrupt.” It means “this is the pile worth human eyes.”

We also recovered a lot of hidden text. If you want to judge it yourself, the doc pages show the redaction density and any recovered text we can reliably extract. 2) Entity extraction is the only way to deal with this scale

107,000 entities means you can stop playing whack a mole with PDFs. It’s still not “truth,” it’s just structure. But structure beats drowning. 3) This week’s real world developments are in there too

If you missed the news cycle, Congress has been pressuring DOJ about redactions, and Rep. Ro Khanna read six previously redacted names on the House floor:

    Leslie Wexner
    Salvatore Nuara
    Zurab Mikeladze
    Leonic Leonov
    Nicola Caputo
    Sultan Ahmed bin Sulayem

Important caveat: being named in a document is not proof of wrongdoing. People show up in emails, contact lists, forwarded threads, or because someone mentioned them.

Related:

    Reporting says Wexner’s name appeared in an internal FBI document as “co conspirator,” but he has not been charged.
    Maxwell invoked the Fifth in a House Oversight deposition and her lawyer floated testimony in exchange for clemency.
    House Oversight depositions are scheduled: Wexner (Feb 18), Richard Kahn (Feb 25), Darren Indyke (Mar 5), plus Hillary Clinton (Feb 26) and Bill Clinton (Feb 27).

All of those items are indexed, with the underlying documents linked where available. New tools since last week

    Full text search: search inside 1.5M documents, 28k OCR entries, and 10k emails
    AI research assistant: ask a question in plain English, get an answer with citations back to the source docs so you can verify it yourself
    Degrees of separation: shortest documented path between two people, with the supporting flights/docs shown at each hop
    Redaction analysis on every doc page: how heavy, what got flagged, what got recovered
    Investigation Dossiers (new today): community made evidence boards
        pin any person/doc/flight/email
        add notes
        upvotes + comments
        “community notes” style fact checks
        sorting like hot/new/top
        I put up 14 starter dossiers so it’s not an empty ghost town

What still bugs me

The government didn’t just withhold whole documents. In a lot of places, it looks like they blacked out specific names or transactions inside documents they did release. Maybe there are legit reasons for some of it. But at this volume, it needs scrutiny.

Also, the 2013 to 2019 passenger manifest gap is still a thing in the public record. Tons of flights, but not the corresponding names. The database

Everything is at EpsteinExposed.com. Free. No ads. No paywall. You can browse without logging in. Accounts are only for making dossiers and posting notes.

There’s also a community forum for collab research: https://board.epsteinexposed.com

If you find errors, call them out. If you want a specific thread turned into a dossier, say the name and I’ll help you get it set up. TL;DR

The database went from ~6k docs to 1.5M in a week. Full text searchable. We ran redaction analysis at scale, flagged a huge pile for human review, recovered a lot of hidden text, and the current Congress/DOJ redaction fight is now fully indexed in the same place. Update:

I went to sleep thinking this would be a normal update post and woke up to it hitting r/popular / r/all.

Thank you. Seriously.

In ~4 hours this hit ~750k views and people have already donated ~$800. That is wild, and it genuinely helps keep the lights on while I keep ingesting and cleaning data and everything goes toward making the site better!

A quick housekeeping thing because it needs to be said on posts like this:

Being named in a document is not proof of wrongdoing. People show up in emails, contact lists, forwarded threads, or because someone mentioned them.

Please don’t dox, harass, or post “I found their address” type stuff. If you want this taken seriously by journalists and agencies, it has to stay clean and source-based.

If you spot bad OCR, duplicates, broken links, or a false connection, call it out. That kind of boring cleanup work is how this gets stronger.

If you want to help, the best thing is still commenting and sharing. Second best is reporting errors or building a dossier on a specific thread so the research is organized and verifiable.

Also, small but important technical update: Semantic / Smart search is going live soon. Keyword search is great, but it misses anything that is phrased differently. Smart search uses a hybrid approach so you can search meaning, not just exact words. It’s already wired up, I’m generating the embeddings now and seeding them into the database next.

randlet

6 ay öncediscuss

In your first link the narrator says he "doesn’t understand the physics of it" but there's really no physics involved (ignoring scatter). It’s just a consequence of the math. It’s relatively easy to understand if you think of it in terms of the surface of a sphere. There is a fixed amount of light coming from a point source, and as the light travels outward you can think of it as being spread over the surface of a sphere. Since the surface area of a sphere is 4pir^2, if you double the radius the area quadruples, and therefore the light intensity at any point on the sphere drops by a factor of four.

edit: And now after rtfm I see there's a nice demo of this!

randlet

8 ay öncediscuss

I have the same and really like them other than the BTE still require an induction loop necklace for Bluetooh.

randlet

9 ay öncediscuss

> This is just how *some* humans are.

randlet

9 ay öncediscuss

Gotcha. I should have realized you meant that from the rest of your post.

randlet

9 ay öncediscuss

> I understand the self-interested desire for the ultra wealthy to have lower taxes on an individual level,

I don't. It seems like mental illness to me