Hacker News: alephxyz

New comment by alephxyz in "On Priesthoods"

alephxyz — Thu, 09 Jan 2025 18:59:06 +0000

Fascist Italy supported the Catholic Church and made it their state religion. Same thing for francoist Spain.

A better example would be the chinese cultural revolution and their campaign against the Four Olds.

New comment by alephxyz in "My little sister's use of ChatGPT for homework is heartbreaking"

alephxyz — Mon, 06 Jan 2025 17:13:23 +0000

Isn't that exactly the Chinese room argument though? The human/computer in the room doesn't need to understand Chinese or English to translate?

New comment by alephxyz in "Meta is killing off its AI-powered Instagram and Facebook profiles"

alephxyz — Sat, 04 Jan 2025 15:48:19 +0000

It's performative art. A critique of social constructionism by taking to its extreme.

New comment by alephxyz in "Casual Viewing – Why Netflix looks like that"

alephxyz — Sat, 28 Dec 2024 16:25:50 +0000

>reliable TV or movie critics

>critical drinker

New comment by alephxyz in "Casual Viewing – Why Netflix looks like that"

alephxyz — Sat, 28 Dec 2024 16:09:43 +0000

It's a self-fulfilling prophecy. Content made for disengaged viewers is disengaging.

New comment by alephxyz in "How types make hard problems easy"

alephxyz — Thu, 19 Dec 2024 22:09:33 +0000

>Changing our database schema should cause us to see errors in our frontend code.

I shuddered.

New comment by alephxyz in "Django and Postgres for the Busy Rails Developer"

alephxyz — Wed, 11 Dec 2024 21:11:42 +0000

> Generally the field declaration/migrations system in Django feels to me designed to lead people down a garden path towards bad and dangerous behavior. If I had my druthers I'd enforce a policy in our Django app of "never run makemigrations, all migrations must be manually written SQL".

`makemigrations --dry-run` is helpful to see if your manual migrations are complete but besides that I agree

New comment by alephxyz in "Python with Rizz"

alephxyz — Sat, 07 Dec 2024 21:35:22 +0000

Yes but it's in Java

New comment by alephxyz in "React 19"

alephxyz — Fri, 06 Dec 2024 01:56:57 +0000

I don't think so. Comments about PyTorch or llama are always extremely positive.

New comment by alephxyz in "Training myself to run farther with Strava's API and an IoT dog feeder of M&Ms"

alephxyz — Thu, 05 Dec 2024 17:54:51 +0000

Garmin estimates it using heart rate, body weight and power output. It also adjusts for temperature and altitude if possible. In my experience it still varies a lot depending on which conditions I exercise in but it's a decent tool to see your progress if you're able to test it under similar conditions every time.

New comment by alephxyz in "More than 300 game developers lost their jobs in one day, weeks before Christmas"

alephxyz — Thu, 05 Dec 2024 17:10:10 +0000

Yep. Tencent (Fortnite) and Activision/Blizz (overwatch + COD) are printing money while publishers who missed the battle royale train almost all killed themselves trying to release a bunch of failed overwatch clones.

New comment by alephxyz in "The Porsche Macan EV is being recalled because its headlights are too bright"

alephxyz — Tue, 03 Dec 2024 23:45:05 +0000

Adaptive driving / glare-free lighting is legal in the US and Canada now and is supposed to reduce that problem

New comment by alephxyz in "Hackerrank was broken – but now it's harmful"

alephxyz — Wed, 27 Nov 2024 22:19:46 +0000

>Since everyone started using AI, more candidates started clearing the first round with flying colors. The platforms had to recalibrate to let in their target percentage.

Is there any proof or data on this? Not saying it's wrong but I'm curious how big the effect actually is.

New comment by alephxyz in "Every Boeing and Airbus engine is held onto the wing by only 2 bolts"

alephxyz — Mon, 25 Nov 2024 00:15:16 +0000

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jesus_nut

Although I'm not an aerospace expert I think OP is a bit confused. Most engines are mounted using a front and a rear bracket (and a third for bigger engines), and each bracket uses 4+ bolts.

New comment by alephxyz in "A common urban intersection in the Netherlands (2018)"

alephxyz — Thu, 21 Nov 2024 17:46:16 +0000

The dreaded multi-use path where pedestrians, joggers, dog walkers, parents with strollers, bike commuters, e-scooters, roadies, kids with training wheels and older folks on 4 wheel scooters are forced to share the same 2.5m strip of asphalt, while cars get 2 lanes to drive and 2 for storage

New comment by alephxyz in "Steam drops Windows 7 and 8 support with the latest client"

alephxyz — Wed, 13 Nov 2024 04:09:48 +0000

Okay here are the first few that come to mind:

- displaying a full screen dialog on login asking me to enable OneDrive with options being: yes/remind me in 3 days/remind me in a week;

- ads in start menu;

- using MS Edge + bing for searches from the start menu, disregarding the default browser;

- ditto but for Outlook links (at least this one can be disabled)!

- different pop up/dialogs that prompt you to switch to Edge/Edge+copilot every few weeks

New comment by alephxyz in "Steam drops Windows 7 and 8 support with the latest client"

alephxyz — Tue, 12 Nov 2024 21:44:57 +0000

The big issue with Win10/11 is that it contains malware marketed as features

New comment by alephxyz in "Boeing Wonderland: The Fake Cities on America's West Coast (2013)"

alephxyz — Mon, 11 Nov 2024 16:44:11 +0000

Strategic and cruise missiles are meant to operate in doomsday scenarios without active guidance and instead use a combination of inertial navigation, celestial navigation and terrain matching.

New comment by alephxyz in "ChatGPT Search"

alephxyz — Fri, 01 Nov 2024 13:21:13 +0000

Not just lyrics. Searching for quotations or text excerpts is much harder and double quotes to only get exact matches also returns unrelated results.

On the other hand, chatgpt 4o-mini and 3.5 will just make up source material which is amusing but not very helpful.

New comment by alephxyz in "Riot Games: Peeking into Valorant's Netcode (2020)"

alephxyz — Thu, 24 Oct 2024 18:14:57 +0000

That's why you pre-fire around corners and through doors