Hacker News: _the_special_

New comment by _the_special_ in "[dead]"

_the_special_ — Thu, 06 Mar 2025 12:57:43 +0000

As an Arab person myself (and not getting into the Palestine occupation debate). It's sad that a non-Arab speaking nation is creating LLMs to better understand Arabic but I am not aware of any Arab nation doing the same effort.

New comment by _the_special_ in "The Great Flattening"

_the_special_ — Mon, 13 May 2024 11:56:38 +0000

" will AI be a bicycle that we control, or an unstoppable train to destinations unknown? To put it in the same terms as the ad, will human will and initiative be flattened, or expanded?"

Interesting line of thinking here. I've never considered this but an observation from my usage of chat AIs at least is an increased willingness to defer my thought-organising process to the AI by just jotting down some random ideas and asking it to make it coherent. I guess on a personal level I'm flattening my own mind?

New comment by _the_special_ in "10 Minutes is ~1% of your day"

_the_special_ — Sun, 03 Mar 2024 15:29:10 +0000

What's the point here? 10 minutes is about 1% of your waking time assuming you sleep 8 hours. Thanks for doing the math I guess

New comment by _the_special_ in "Brave's AI assistant now integrates with PDFs and Google Drive"

_the_special_ — Fri, 23 Feb 2024 11:58:09 +0000

The first browser to index (locally preferably) my browsing history and help me extract/surface useful information from previous pages I have visited will win me over. So far they all seem to be offering the same kind of AI that will crawl the current page and extract information from it.

New comment by _the_special_ in "Become Ungoogleable"

_the_special_ — Thu, 20 Jul 2023 16:17:08 +0000

Another approach of becoming anonymous is to flood the internet with fake content and fake AI generated personas that hold your name

New comment by _the_special_ in "Apple announces multibillion deal with Broadcom to make components in the USA"

_the_special_ — Tue, 23 May 2023 17:01:41 +0000

If you want better wages (relative to the location the employees are) and also lower prices of goods, then you can't have production in the US

New comment by _the_special_ in "Show HN: YouTube Summaries Using GPT"

_the_special_ — Fri, 27 Jan 2023 17:11:15 +0000

Can you state the price of the "packages" in the landing page?

Also, does it always give me 8 bullet points from each video? It would make sense for videos that have chapters to give summaries to each chapter instead.

New comment by _the_special_ in "I recreated famous album covers with DALL-E"

_the_special_ — Sat, 20 Aug 2022 19:43:51 +0000

> an image of someone who's been massaged so much their body has been flattened, as if they were made of dough or jelly

do you want a realistic looking one? 3d rendered? what do you have in mind exactly?

New comment by _the_special_ in "New in Calibre 6.0"

_the_special_ — Mon, 11 Jul 2022 06:48:40 +0000

Calibre is awesome to use on desktop. But as someone who wants to sync his Calibre library with other devices (iphone + ipad), it gets really frustrating.

New comment by _the_special_ in "Why do 70% of families lose their wealth in the 2nd generation? (2018)"

_the_special_ — Sat, 08 Jan 2022 20:19:05 +0000

I understand this is all relative. I come from an African country but even there around 250 acres of both residential and agricultural land is significant money. I'd say only about 20 acres are left where the owners are one of the ancestors.

My dream is to one day repurchase some of the lands and have financially sounder children that could take care of it ;)

New comment by _the_special_ in "Why do 70% of families lose their wealth in the 2nd generation? (2018)"

_the_special_ — Sat, 08 Jan 2022 15:47:53 +0000

I don't know how to put this in a formula, but my observations about my family's wealth disappearing is the following:

Great grandpa had tons of land, dies and leaves it to his children who then left it to their children when they died to split as heritage (so my parent and uncles and their cousins) which they ended up selling and splitting it between around 60 heirs. They bought things that are not really an investment like cars, new furniture, vacations...So all the wealth from my great grandpa has vanished because his great children like to spend money rather than invest.

Edit: typo.

New comment by _the_special_ in "Show HN: A faster way to prototype your APIs using OpenAPI 3 and Swagger UI"

_the_special_ — Fri, 23 Oct 2020 13:05:36 +0000

the README file of this repo does not help me understand what this project is about as someone who has never used OpenAPI (and only faintly used Swagger UI for a short time before).

New comment by _the_special_ in "Plausible Analytics Isn't GDPR Compliant"

_the_special_ — Fri, 23 Oct 2020 11:46:33 +0000

I could not easily find it on the website, but I remember reading about how they do it, basically the ID is generated by hashing the IP + user-agent + a salt key that is changing on a daily basis.

So, no, I do not think it is deterministic.

New comment by _the_special_ in "Plausible Analytics Isn't GDPR Compliant"

_the_special_ — Fri, 23 Oct 2020 11:40:49 +0000

doesn't the GDPR protect against storing "Personally identifiable information"? Plausible does use the IP address for the visitor to create a unique visitor ID, but it does not store it, so I am not sure how can you use that information to link it to an individual.