Hacker News: dTal

New comment by dTal in "Bullshit Machines"

dTal — Wed, 13 May 2026 00:24:26 +0000

What an obnoxious website. I'm not clicking through your silly javascript animated slideshow one sentence at a time just to read an article.

New comment by dTal in "EU to crack down on TikTok, Instagram's 'addictive design' targeting kids"

dTal — Wed, 13 May 2026 00:14:29 +0000

Reddit is as bad as the others, now.

New comment by dTal in "Ratty – A terminal emulator with inline 3D graphics"

dTal — Mon, 11 May 2026 19:42:49 +0000

ipython-qtconsole seems very underappreciated to me.

New comment by dTal in "Local AI needs to be the norm"

dTal — Mon, 11 May 2026 15:56:21 +0000

>it really doesn't need to be local

I urge you to reconsider this attitude. If AI has a tenth the significance people claim, you're signing away your life; your ideas, your privacy, your very sovereignty of mind, all under someone else's control and revocable at any moment. Don't move your brain to the cloud.

Imagine an alternate timeline where we never had personal general purpose computers, only dumb terminals to access corporate servers on subscription. Don't vote for that world with your wallet, today.

Don't be a cloudhead!

New comment by dTal in "Local AI needs to be the norm"

dTal — Mon, 11 May 2026 15:45:38 +0000

Just because we'll have to pay for the hardware, doesn't mean we'll have meaningful control. Look at what happened with phones - weak and limited slaves to the mothership, secured against pesky users with powerful encryption, yet costing more than a vastly superior laptop; quasi-mandatory platforms for highly addictive experiences, centered around the flow of information.

And now with LLMs we can create even more fabulously addictive experiences, even more finely tuned information flows, even more treacherous servants. I very much doubt that we'll be allowed full control of it all. Every effort will be spent to centralize power, and every effort will be spent to extract as much cash as possible from us for the privilege.

New comment by dTal in "[dead]"

dTal — Mon, 04 May 2026 21:37:18 +0000

>By the way, this post was totally built with the help of another language model which is not Claude!

Yeah, it shows.

New comment by dTal in "Stitch together lots of little HTML pages with navigations for interactions"

dTal — Mon, 04 May 2026 21:03:11 +0000

My god, a "web" of documents - it's brilliant! The best part is the documents can even be on different domains, world wide!

New comment by dTal in "The USB Situation"

dTal — Sun, 03 May 2026 14:24:44 +0000

As with headphones, you can always just not wiggle it! Or arrange so that it doesn't rotate once it's fully inserted. There's nothing magical about the contacts in a USB connector.

New comment by dTal in "When Dawkins met Claude – Could this AI be conscious?"

dTal — Sun, 03 May 2026 12:07:01 +0000

I would caution against deriving too much of your philosophical worldview from a scifi book about posthuman vampires that has been deliberately engineered to make a philosophical point that is most certainly not a consensus.

For alternative viewpoints: Daniel Dennett considered philosophical zombies to be logically incoherent. Douglas Hofstadter similarly holds that "meaning" is just another word for isomorphism, and that a thing is a duck exactly to the extent that it walks and quacks like one. Alan Turing advocated empiricism when evaluating unknown intelligence. These are smart cookies.

New comment by dTal in "The USB Situation"

dTal — Sun, 03 May 2026 11:24:16 +0000

For what it's worth, it'd be pretty easy to design an RJ45 compatible connector that didn't have that flimsy plastic latch.

New comment by dTal in "The USB Situation"

dTal — Sun, 03 May 2026 11:17:29 +0000

The cables fail from bad design.

The connectors are great.

New comment by dTal in "The USB Situation"

dTal — Sun, 03 May 2026 11:15:58 +0000

USB-C is very far from a perfect connector. The female side still has a fragile plastic tongue that can break. They also reliably wear out with use, both the cables and the socket. We've all seen them fail. Actually all the USB connectors do eventually, because they all rely on a thin piece of sheet metal not bending when lateral force is applied. And, reversibility notwithstanding, they are still hard to fumble into place compared to (say) RJ45, or 3.5mm TRRS.

I have no love for Apple and their proprietary nonsense, but even lightning is a strictly better connector than USB-C - easier to insert, less fragile, better wearing. Still too many wires though.

I wish we'd used something like TRRRS, and stuck to 4 wires. Very robust, any orientation, easy to fumble in blind.

New comment by dTal in "Learning Pseudorandom Numbers with Transformers"

dTal — Sun, 03 May 2026 10:46:12 +0000

Uh this is apocalyptic for computer security, no?

New comment by dTal in "Maryland becomes first state to ban surveillance pricing in grocery stores"

dTal — Wed, 29 Apr 2026 19:30:40 +0000

Well that's easy enough - don't apply sneaky pricing when there's two people looking.

New comment by dTal in "Maryland becomes first state to ban surveillance pricing in grocery stores"

dTal — Wed, 29 Apr 2026 19:12:15 +0000

E-ink price tags are not uncommon. Technology to track individual customers through the store based on smartphone RF is already deployed in many supermarkets. Some stores even do scan-as-you-shop, where the customer scans the item at the shelf, rather than at the front of the store. There are certainly a lot of i's to dot and t's to cross, but it's hardly a theoretical impossibility - find the right store and you could do it today with no more than a software update.

New comment by dTal in "Talkie: a 13B vintage language model from 1930"

dTal — Wed, 29 Apr 2026 10:25:01 +0000

404

New comment by dTal in "Talkie: a 13B vintage language model from 1930"

dTal — Wed, 29 Apr 2026 10:16:27 +0000

On the contrary, I think a "simulator of common objections" that reflects all the blind spots and biases of wider society is an extraordinarily valuable tool for exploring and evaluating new ideas. You might find that, in neatly summarizing what "everyone" thinks and justifying it as best it can, the LLM inadvertantly shines a spotlight on common misconceptions. Look there for the novelty.

In this case - the concept of using automated computing devices to manipulate numbers that represent ideas at arbitrary levels of abstraction was, by 1930, nearly an entire century old. Talkie's myopic viewpoint does not represent the most farsighted viewpoint, merely the average. So if, in 1930, you had read the writings of Ada Lovelace, gotten very excited, and wanted to figure out how to pitch it to investors - Talkie might have been very useful.

New comment by dTal in "How ChatGPT serves ads"

dTal — Wed, 29 Apr 2026 09:51:32 +0000

The word I have heard is "bullshitting". Lies at least orient themselves with regard to the truth, bullshit floats free

New comment by dTal in "Localsend: An open-source cross-platform alternative to AirDrop"

dTal — Tue, 28 Apr 2026 14:13:26 +0000

I love this software for its reliability (as compared to, say, KDE Connect, which I gave up on after years of frustrated use after it became clear that the developers did not believe there was an issue and it would never improve).

I do not love that it is a heavy electron app that takes many seconds to launch on my mid-spec machine and burns 20% of an entire CPU core the entire time it is running.

Why can't we have a simple command line tool that works?

New comment by dTal in "The quiet resurgence of RF engineering"

dTal — Mon, 27 Apr 2026 19:22:42 +0000

Bit older than 8 years but even cramming a working GPS reciever into a phone was a huge, nontrivial achievement.