Hacker News: lwswl

New comment by lwswl in "How do we capture wasted human intellect value from an addictive internet?"

lwswl — Thu, 28 Jul 2022 00:31:00 +0000

Can watching cat videos be turned into productive intellectual activity?

The answer to my question is yes, however, I don't quite know the answer to yours, as enjoyment is somewhat subjective.

However, watching cat videos creates data(and also uses the intellect, i.e., to identify cats, and make some sort of vague judgement), and that data could potentially be leveraged to make algorithms, which makes it a potentially productive activity.

As for what algorithms? Well, algorithms that find out which videos people are more likely to watch, so they can watch even more cat videos.

You are correct, it is an opportunity, and one already leveraged, by the same people who caused the problem.

New comment by lwswl in "Why is Meta's VR software so bad?"

lwswl — Thu, 28 Jul 2022 00:06:06 +0000

They want it to run at 120 fps on unplugged devs. What do you expect?

New comment by lwswl in "A little trick to spam the spammers (2021)"

lwswl — Tue, 26 Jul 2022 22:06:03 +0000

state duplication

New comment by lwswl in "Ask HN: Is the world suffering from shallow knowledge?"

lwswl — Tue, 26 Jul 2022 14:45:37 +0000

Presumably you can use a lighter and drive a car though.

One of those two may no longer be the case for people soon...

New comment by lwswl in "Can we protect land for nature and carbon by simply buying it up?"

lwswl — Thu, 21 Jul 2022 20:13:22 +0000

this is wrong

New comment by lwswl in "Tell HN: Internet Archive is facing a Big 4 Publishers lawsuit"

lwswl — Mon, 18 Jul 2022 18:45:09 +0000

It would be harder to focus all the blame, and the hand of the law, on a single institution.

Currently, only the IA will fall, and anyone who benefited from their seeming folly will have no issues.

New comment by lwswl in "Tell HN: Internet Archive is facing a Big 4 Publishers lawsuit"

lwswl — Mon, 18 Jul 2022 18:42:57 +0000

I believe there are certain large corporations(far larger then Harper Collins et al.) which would benefit from an enlarging of the domain of fair use around now.

Those pockets are large, and the display of the dollar does more to sway Judges than any real interpretation of the law.

It is safe to say that they will succeed in their (seemingly useless) endeavor.

New comment by lwswl in "Ask HN: How to deal with children's online habits?"

lwswl — Sun, 17 Jul 2022 20:34:13 +0000

There is always a silver bullet. There just isn't always a werewolf.

New comment by lwswl in "Ask HN: What is with the new URLs on facebook.com?"

lwswl — Sat, 16 Jul 2022 18:45:44 +0000

Facebook could also just make it completely opaque, and just add random data to their urls(by which I mean a+b=c, not a+b=ab), and then subtract it on their end. Then you literally might not be able to see anything, not even the webpage directory.

New comment by lwswl in "Ask HN: What makes you optimistic about the future?"

lwswl — Thu, 14 Jul 2022 21:12:26 +0000

Whats wrong with cyberpunk dystopia?

New comment by lwswl in "Ask HN: Is it possible to get an 18-year-old to spend less time on the computer?"

lwswl — Thu, 14 Jul 2022 01:20:24 +0000

SO it should be out of the house for him.

New comment by lwswl in "Decompiler Explorer"

lwswl — Thu, 14 Jul 2022 00:23:48 +0000

Symbol names could be inferred from context

New comment by lwswl in "Ask HN: Do you assume good will at work?"

lwswl — Tue, 12 Jul 2022 00:43:09 +0000

I always assume lack of will.

New comment by lwswl in "Long Covid symptoms leads to woman applying to end life"

lwswl — Tue, 12 Jul 2022 00:29:31 +0000

"First do no harm" I can only imagine what Hippocrates would think...

New comment by lwswl in "An Ubuntu kernel bug causes container crashes"

lwswl — Fri, 08 Jul 2022 22:56:35 +0000

The more container bugs the better. I hope they can't fix it.

New comment by lwswl in "Gun applicants required to list social media accounts"

lwswl — Fri, 08 Jul 2022 22:02:55 +0000

The second amendment only applies to those who would assemble into a militia, and it is much easier to do so with communication and thus social media.

New comment by lwswl in "Vision-based AI drones outfly world-class human pilots"

lwswl — Thu, 07 Jul 2022 21:57:29 +0000

Since when has google been making slaughterbots?

Or do you mean those dogs they were building for the military?

New comment by lwswl in "Show HN: PDFs that are readable by human eyes only"

lwswl — Thu, 07 Jul 2022 21:04:46 +0000

But there are many things that the machine can read, that is completely unintelligible to (most) humans.

New comment by lwswl in "Show HN: C3 – A C alternative that looks like C"

lwswl — Thu, 07 Jul 2022 20:05:50 +0000

c++ just understands that the only purpose you could e using it for is "struct foo". if you have a function "int foo()" as well, then you'll still need the struct tag(which really is necessary because you can do things like call structs like functions)

New comment by lwswl in "Show HN: C3 – A C alternative that looks like C"

lwswl — Thu, 07 Jul 2022 19:39:52 +0000

A good number of those don't have mandated return types, so that keyword is their way of copying c(++)'s look, so its "func main()", like "void main()", instead of just "main()", which to a some people may look strange.