Well, to reference Julia Evans another time:

head and HEAD are specifically the third meaning of ‘branch’, i.e. the newest commit on a branch, but can also refer to a commit not on a branch, when in that detached head state.

And while I’m not enamored with these names either, I can’t think of a word that I like better for this meaning.

spicy noodles

I feel like most of the layoffs and the flooded market happened in the US. Judging by the name, bleistift is from the EU…

I also just feel like I’m not writing words for the fun of it. They’re chosen to convey information in a very intentional way to a given target group. Like, just now in that previous sentence, I changed “in a certain way” to “in a very intentional way”, because that’s more precisely what I wanted to say. I try to convey lots of nuances in relatively few words.

That’s my #1 criticism of LLMs, that they just blather on and on. And ultimately, precise nuance requires understanding the topic, the context and the target group, which, if you’d describe it to an LLM, would take longer than to write the actual text itself.

I came into this comment section wanting to make the same argument, but I guess, you could also be carrying around a USB-C-to-audio-jack adapter in addition to your wired headphones…

They do have a history of such things happening, yes, which is why my comment exists in the first place. Normally, I would assume this to just be the result of regular shitty management practices paired with regular shitty profit motives.

The history makes it look like they might genuinely have a higher motive here, and I’m saying I still don’t think so, because it would be far too petty and I don’t see them benefitting that much from it.

Most of it?

Google is blocking popular instances these days, so yeah, you basically need to find an unpopular instance, which usually means it’s new and may not live for long, or it will quickly become popular, because it works, which will cause Google to block it.

Yeah, Google started blocking popular instances of Invidious and Piped in May this year: https://github.com/iv-org/invidious/issues/3822

Every so often, it may start working again when those instances get a different IP address, but it usually doesn’t last more than a few days…

The thing is, I really don’t think, Google would care about Firefox. Firefox is sitting at negligible percentages of usage share. The only real competitor to Chrome is Safari and that’s because of iOS.
I guess, they might impact Safari on macOS with this, but someone would have to try this out to actually see, and ultimately, this could still just be a dumb mistake.

Having said that, Google holds a near-monopoly in both video content and web browsers. They have a special duty to not disadvantage competitors and even if this was an honest mistake, I do think, it deserves a slap on the wrist.

I mean, so far, all of them require tons of humanly produced data.

Discriminative AI (deep learning et al) requires humans to label data for hours on end, per use-case.
And generative AI (LLMs et al) require just insane amounts of human works to copy from, albeit not necessarily limited to individual use-cases.

I guess, what I’m saying is that the ratio of how much labor humans (involuntarily) invested into AIs, compared to the labor these AIs actually perform, is likely a lot higher than 70%.

British people also have mashed peas as their guacamole-but-not.

I have my repos on Codeberg and one of the ‘disadvantages’ is that, well, it’s a non-profit, so I genuinely don’t want to waste their resources.
They ask you to only host open-source repos there, meaning that using it for backups of shitty personal projects, even if I would throw in an open-source license, is just out of the question for me.

And that has weirdly been a blessing in disguise. Like, if it’s not useful for humanity to see, do I really care to keep it around forever?

And I’ve had three projects now where I felt an obligation to push them over the finish line of actually making them a useful open-source project. Which had me iron out some of the usability shortcuts I took, made me learn a good amount of code quality stuff and of course, just feels good to complete.

It looks similar in structure to JSON:

{
    "attr": {
        "size": "62091",
        "filename": "qBuUP9-OTfuzibt6PQX4-g.jpg",
        ...
    };
    "key": "Wa4AJWFldqRZjBozponbSLRZ",
     ...
}

So, it might be some JSON meta language. I just find it weird that it seems to contain all data, so you wouldn’t use this for validating or templating JSON.

But ultimately, it also means with a handful of regex replacements, you could turn this particular file into JSON. Might make building your own parser almost trivial…

I mean, at this rate, I’m imagining Microsoft will have hollowed out OpenAI in a few years, but I could see them buying Boston Dynamics, too, yes

Sure, but some game engines out there do give you quite a bit to work with, too.

And well, I was talking specifically about the guy enjoying the coding without necessarily caring about the end result (like he’d do, if he patched up Starfield without enjoying the game).
If that were the case, even designing the physics can be a fun riddle.

I enjoy how it sounds like the guy didn’t even start out by playing the game, but rather started modding right away. I do get that. The coding itself is fun.

But yeah, the guy could also be making an own game, if it was just about the coding. At some point, you do want your mod to be part of a game worth playing.

Normally, I would reply to the guy, because, you know, he’s a human being, but there’s so many replies, I doubt, he can actually read all of them and potentially someone else has already made that point.

Anyways, I feel like something he kind of misses here is that many of us do it from a heartfelt place. Like, we’re all techies. We’ve all used commercial software to a point where we’ve grown so frustrated with it that we decided it is a waste of time.

So, it’s not us saying “Why don’t you go and just have more time/money?”.
Rather, it’s us saying “This thing is wasting your time? Here is a solution that I felt wasted less time in the long run.”.

Yes, sometimes that does miss the mark, because not every complaint is looking for a solution. Or because we may be frustrated with restrictions of commercial software, which are not a problem for less techy people. Or even because we’re embedded in this tech world and are hoping to make it a better place, which someone just quickly visiting may not care about.

But other times, I do just happen to know a lot about technology and a non-techy genuinely did not know about the solution I suggested and is actually really appreciative of me bringing it up. It does happen. And it’s not easy to discern who would appreciate a suggestion and who won’t.

I certainly don’t want to dismiss any individuals as tech bros. Tech broism is more like a natural phenomenon, which occurs when you lock exclusively privileged people into a room for long enough and then let them discuss user needs.
At some point, they’ll ask themselves questions like “Why do we need privacy?” and everyone else in the room will agree that they’ve never needed it either and then they’ll found Google.

I am very much at risk of this, too. I have to constantly go out of my way to try to re-adjust my perspective, so that I don’t completely miss the ball on what users actually need.

And places like Hacker News naturally form, because of course, we all do want to only talk about topics that we consider relevant. And folks whose needs are not generally considered relevant by the Hacker News community will look for different places, too.

I guess, a question you can ask yourself:
If you’ve ever interviewed a senior engineer who was for example black, gay, trans and/or a woman, did they frequent Hacker News?

Wow, it’s been a while since I’ve been there, but my impression was the polar opposite. That it’s filled with business folks and tech bros. That their unbalanced voting system unearths controversial takes rather than informative comments. Every now and then, you’ll genuinely see a comment from someone with expertise, but that was not worth sacrificing my mental health for.