Viewing profile — lich_king

I am really tired of this kind of moralizing. The reality is that every time geeks come up with some utopian ideal, such as that we should publish all our software under free licen…

> The ideal is that something intelligent understands what you want to do and gets it done. Maybe? For a couple of decades, we believed that computers you can talk to are the futur…

I don't even think if singling out Dell is useful. Most US companies have long decided that providing good customer support is a drag on revenue and that you can get away with not …

An article about the AI writing style, written using AI.

Disproportionately many geeks have very strong opinions about psychiatry, probably because we have a lot of people who consider themselves neurodivergent, as well as plenty of folk…

> He had some pretty awful views that he was pretty loud about, especially later in life. He also cheated on his wife at one point. In 1961, in his early 20s. You get ~80 years on …

Alternatively, there's money to be lost in the transition. The vast majority of "crypto investors" did not walk away from it any richer. Some folks have gotten lucky, but it's just…

The comparison gets picked up as the headline; the admission does not. This is exploited quite often, e.g. in science reporting. I'm not saying this is what Waymo did - they don't …

Because most of these things are not multi-trillion-dollar ideas. "We found a way to make illustrators, copyeditors, and paralegals, and several dozen other professions, somewhat o…

We paid for newspapers and they ran ads. We paid for cable TV and it had ads. We went to the cinema and watched ads. Ad-free paid services were a brief aberration, essentially a ba…

So you're advocating for stronger and more invasive controls?... I think this is a sensible compromise. It gives parents more control than before without relying on shady third-par…

> Why not have 2000 hand curated directories instead? It depends on what you're trying to achieve. If you want to have a personal feed of stories from interesting people, 50 is pro…

I think it shows the limits of hand curation. It's a tiny, human-reviewed slice of the "small web", only allowing a subset of blogs... but if you select the "programming" category …

This is not how corporate fraud usually happens. You don't tamper with the quarterly report, especially since it gets audited. You tamper with the input data close to the source. F…

Looking at the criteria again, I can think of at least three things that arbitrarily exclude large swathes of the small web: 1) The requirement that it needs to be a blog. There's …

Right, but that basically works as a retro alternative to scrolling through social media. If you're looking for something specific, it's simultaneously true that there's a small we…

It's easy to hand-curate a list of 5,000 "small web" URLs. The problem is scaling. For example, Kagi has a hand-curated "small web" filter, but I never use it because far more inte…

> Google that now optimizes their algorithm for monetization and not usefulness. I don't think they do that. Instead, "usefulness" is mostly synonymous with commercial intent: sear…

Because the habitable surface of the planet is less than 100 million square kilometers and only a fraction of that is suitable for subsistence farming. The only reason we can accom…

> It might be a year or two, or five, or ten Ah, the classic, forever-untestable "it's just around the corner" hypothesis. I've lived through multiple "it's gonna be over in 12-18 …

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Sure. I'm not arguing it's fundamentally bad. But it's going to leave some buyers unhappy because nowadays, the point of paperbacks is that you're paying extra for a reading experi…

Yeah, most charitably, it seems to be some sort of an LLM art project. And it's another day when we engage with slop because it happens to say something we like.