Hacker News: elbigbad

New comment by elbigbad in "Apollo will close down on June 30th"

elbigbad — Thu, 08 Jun 2023 23:51:00 +0000

It’s also, like, Reddit. Not some financial or health database. It’s an Internet forum largely populated by literal children and teens.

New comment by elbigbad in "Sync will shut down on June 30"

elbigbad — Thu, 08 Jun 2023 23:43:44 +0000

And among the worst sorts of people imaginable. Maybe they should be paid positions that are interviewed for and regularly undergo performance reviews.

New comment by elbigbad in "Apollo will close down on June 30th"

elbigbad — Thu, 08 Jun 2023 18:02:07 +0000

Just in case anyone sees this and takes it seriously: this is absolutely not now that works.

New comment by elbigbad in "Royal Navy says quantum navigation test a success"

elbigbad — Wed, 07 Jun 2023 13:16:57 +0000

Can you talk more about this source of error? When I google this, your post is the main thing that comes up for the term…

New comment by elbigbad in "I will never participate in weird internet caste systems"

elbigbad — Wed, 07 Jun 2023 02:01:37 +0000

The sports cars analogy doesn’t resonate with me because there’s a functional difference between regular cars and sports cars. And plenty of people buy sports cars like Miatas, which have less than zero cachet or coolness factor, and thus can’t really project being “above” anyone.

Clothing with the modifier “extremely” probably makes sense though.

New comment by elbigbad in "Had a call with Reddit to discuss pricing"

elbigbad — Wed, 31 May 2023 20:33:23 +0000

I found Apollo to be fairly shady. I paid for the app and they “lost” my account or something so suddenly I could no longer use the pro features. Pretty lame, no amount of support could help, so I used the app for a while as a free user because I didn’t want to pay twice. One day they pushed like 50 modals over the course of a day to “upgrade to pro” and eventually moved to a monthly subscription service, which suddenly made me realize why they “couldn’t find” my previous account.

Love the features, but feels shady to me still. The API pricing thing does suck, but at this point I’m not willing to throw any money at them.

New comment by elbigbad in "How much would it have cost if GPT-4 had written your code"

elbigbad — Mon, 29 May 2023 22:58:11 +0000

Better discoverability and so people could very easily install and run. Git adds more overhead.

New comment by elbigbad in "Txti is shutting down"

elbigbad — Sun, 28 May 2023 13:31:33 +0000

Cixin Liu of course. Now let me tell you about “elbigbad’s Theory of Relativity” (hat tip to Einstein who had a hand in its development). More modernly phrased: “‘You miss 100% of the shots you don’t take’ -Wayne Gretzky” - Michael Scott

New comment by elbigbad in "Txti is shutting down"

elbigbad — Sun, 28 May 2023 12:59:45 +0000

I’m guessing the admin stopped caring as much about the mission of the site, which actually seems quite compelling, or it wasn’t as profitable as they thought, and was looking for a reason to divest themselves of it. Spam is hard to fight, it does suck in that manner, but certainly possible and certainly pulling the plug on an otherwise passion project screams “don’t care anymore.”

New comment by elbigbad in "Txti is shutting down"

elbigbad — Sun, 28 May 2023 12:50:45 +0000

I don’t know who Yancy is but they have some complete lack of shame to steal someone else’s idea almost word for word and prepend their name to it. I don’t know what I could muster that absolute “I don’t care at all what people think of me” if I tried, and I have here and there I just don’t have it in me.

New comment by elbigbad in "The First Social-Media Babies Are Growing Up–and They’re Horrified"

elbigbad — Sat, 27 May 2023 21:38:42 +0000

Of course it’s not. Neither of my children’s faces have ever appeared on social media. It just requires a little discipline on the parents part, which seems to be in short supply these days.

New comment by elbigbad in "Waste coffee husk turned into a wonder material key to mitigating climate change"

elbigbad — Tue, 23 May 2023 04:48:44 +0000

The most woo woo articles somehow get traction outside core hours.

New comment by elbigbad in "The $40M bet that made South Korea a food and cultural power"

elbigbad — Sun, 21 May 2023 23:34:39 +0000

The largest city in the world is Tokyo which is about 40M people.

New comment by elbigbad in "No Screens Cafe"

elbigbad — Sun, 21 May 2023 19:31:10 +0000

Boomers love this sort of thing. Or at least talking about loving this sort of thing. Maybe they’re too addicted to Candy Crush style games though where they won’t actually patronize these sorts of places though.

New comment by elbigbad in "Pushing through when no one cares"

elbigbad — Sun, 21 May 2023 19:10:58 +0000

I had to look this up to make sure this wasn’t some low effort trolling. It does seem real, which raises the question: With regard to getting people to listen to your advice, wouldn’t it have been better if you had created or done something notable in the past 25 years rather than be a self-titled “Visionary” on LinkedIn?

New comment by elbigbad in "Study finds 90% of Australian teachers can't afford to live where they teach"

elbigbad — Sun, 21 May 2023 15:06:23 +0000

This is unnecessarily reductive, but it probably sounded good in your head or if someone only considers it for a few seconds before thinking about it.

Of course meaning can be instant, and value can be delayed.

New comment by elbigbad in "Palantir seeing 'unprecedented' demand for its military AI"

elbigbad — Sat, 13 May 2023 20:06:43 +0000

No more than Microsoft Federal’s value add is the same, which is to say very little, even though MS Federal sends plenty of people to help set up Azure cloud services and has a consulting arm. The whole Palantir model is built around scaling their software platform and making it as sticky as possible, not specifically throwing consultants or staff augmentation at a problem.

I have no love for Palantir, or Peter Thiel, but you seem to be under a misapprehension about some of the basics of the company.

New comment by elbigbad in "Palantir seeing 'unprecedented' demand for its military AI"

elbigbad — Sat, 13 May 2023 19:12:58 +0000

If I see an army forming over the horizon, it would be foolish to not build defenses, even if they’re not actively attacking at the moment.

New comment by elbigbad in "Palantir seeing 'unprecedented' demand for its military AI"

elbigbad — Sat, 13 May 2023 19:11:03 +0000

It would lose its FUD-factor if it became too much more specific…

New comment by elbigbad in "Palantir seeing 'unprecedented' demand for its military AI"

elbigbad — Sat, 13 May 2023 19:07:10 +0000

It’s basically a vacuum for any and all data that categorizes and raises relevant insights to the end user while making it “easy” to find what one is looking for. Fairly straightforward. I think the value add is that this isn’t really available on government networks to this scale. I know lots of people who love their software, and many who dislike it.

Every part of the government, particularly defense, is made of closed-off enclaves with their own unique integration or deployment constraints, which leads to needing “forward deployed engineers” to integrate their platform for each program. This is part of the scale issue, another part is that there are only so many customers. This isn’t really like infosys at all because these engineers are not only paid very well, but they’re not straight up staff augmentation (though they can be to some degree, sometimes, especially during the training phase of getting the users to understand the platform).

Everything you said in this comment is way off I think.