I thought that was a near universal experience for nerdy academic families, along with hatching frog spawn and having a chemistry set and causing minor explosions in the garage.

But if you want to go somewhere super fancy like Ascot and look the part, a silk top hat is de rigueur.

There are now a handful of shops that basically have the entire remaining (good) stock and rent them out for an arm and a leg, and take care of them like rare precious things. Which I guess they are.

Also, there's no reason not to use AI to help you get your thoughts straight, create some bullets you can write from, give you some structure - and then help you proof your finished writing.

The problem is that when you get AI to write something from scratch like this, it decides what the story is, and how to tell it. If you decide the key storylines, work out what matters to you, work with the AI to brainstorm some ideas and then write that up in your own words and then get the AI to help you polish it but not rewrite it you'll have far better outputs.

I posted a really long response to the parent comment, highlighting the stuff that made it stink of AI. Watch out for those if you do this sort of process.

And if you’re writing seriously you’ll know that your first draft often bears no resemblance whatsoever to your final draft. Different character names, different structure, different style, different tone.

You may well have a whole bunch of things that seem completely different and a whole load of fragments that are written revised, scrapped, unscrapped, re-revised, stitched together, pulled apart and then finally assembled into a working draft.

I’m not sure how soemthing that basically counts your words and (maybe) proves you’re not using AI helps with a typical sprawling novel plan.

>Over the next 27 hours, in four distinct waves, all of them tried to use my VoIP (SIP) server to place phone calls on my dime.

As you've clarified in your comment here the companies did not do this. Compromised machines on their networks, controlled by third parties did it.

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49120777

Points: 9

# Comments: 8

It’s not a “real business” by any stretch of the imagination.

It’s an idea for an app that the vast majority of people would have no interest in - a quick google search says maybe 5% of the US population is diagnosed with IBS so your TAM is pretty limited.

Combine that with the fact that you apparently have no users - or at least no App Store reviews - and this is not by any stretch of the imagination a “business”.

Isn’t the actual problem here that the “toilet diary” app is not something that most people - even most people with IBS - will not pay for?

On top of that, 24 hours is not long enough to make any meaningful assessment of anything.

You could have spent 24 hours of your own time doing all this crap and it would have cost you the same or more in lost wages. Plus sleep deprivation.

Nonsense app, nonsense experiment. Half way amusing write up. But why on earth did you waste the time?

> Starting from where each of the 33 boroughs’ residents actually live, and arriving by 7pm on an ordinary September Thursday by public transport, journeys to it span 47 minutes between the nearest borough and the furthest, and no borough needs more than 70. No pub in London does better on both measures.

I had to spell my way through this to work out what it means.

"Starting from where each of the 33 boroughs' residents actually live"

Presumably they live all over each of those 33 boroughs - so this is just nonsense. Or has the "author" carried out a study of the distribution of residential property vs commercial property in each borough, and then picked starting points for each borough? Who knows.

"and arriving by 7pm on an ordinary September Thursday by public transport"

"An ordinary September Thursday" is the sort of ponderous nonsense that AI loves to insert to make writing feel important, but it means nothing at all.

"journeys to it span 47 minutes between the nearest borough and the furthest, and no borough needs more than 70."

"journeys to it" - to what? The pub? Just say so.

"span 47 minutes between the nearest borough and the furthest"

The more I look at this the less I know what it means. The nearest borough is the borough the pub is in - and so someone living next door will take about two minutes to get there. From the "furthest" borough does it take 47 minutes to get there? And by what measure? If you're getting the tube from the "furthest" borough what if you live 20 minutes walk from the nearest tube station?

But then we find that, actually, it doesn't take 47 minutes from the furthest borough because "and no borough needs more than 70". So what's the "span" about? I think it means "if you live in the borough furthest away from this pub, it will take you 47 minutes longer to get there than if you live in the nearest borough". But I suspect the "nearest borough" means "neighbouring borough" rather than the borough in which the pub itself is located.

"No pub in London does better on both measures"

What are the two "measures"? I thought we were talking about one, which is the longest travel time. What's the other measure? I think it means that the two measures are "travel time from the nearest borough" and "travel time from the furthest borough". But this reintroduces the problem of what happens if you live next door to the pub?

Imagine you're looking for a pub in London to visit with friends from around the city, and you want to find one that is a fairly equal journey for everyone involved no matter where in London they live. It's a trickier problem than you might think, and having crunched the numbers there are a surprisingly small number of pubs that fit the criteria. In fact, by my calculations, the best placed pub is The Greene Man on Euston Road because the longest journey someone will need to make, no matter where in London's 33 boroughs they live, is 70 minutes. For those who live closer, in neighbouring boroughs (but not within the borough itself) it will take around 33 minutes to get there - so the span between nearest and furthest is just 47 minutes.

>The bigger finding is what nobody manages: not one of London’s 3,170 pubs is within an hour of all 33 boroughs. Keep the worst-off borough to 60 minutes and the list of qualifying pubs is empty. It stays empty at 65. The first pubs that everyone can reach appear at 70 minutes, and there are exactly two of them, less than a hundred metres apart by Great Portland Street station.

This is even worse.

"The bigger finding is what nobody manages" - this is absolute gibberish.

I think it means "The more interesting data point that this study uncovered is that there are no pubs in London that can be reached in 60 minutes or less from all 33 of London's boroughs."

"Keep the worst-off borough to 60 minutes and the list of qualifying pubs is empty." More gibberish.

Worst-off borough? The poorest? Or do we mean "worst off" in terms of travel time to a randomly selected pub? But that in itself makes no sense, because there are going to be plenty of pubs that you can travel to in under 60 minutes from the "worst off borough". So it must mean something different.

"It stays empty at 65."

No idea what this means on first read. But then, looking back, it means "If you increase the time from 60 to 65 minutes, there are still no pubs that qualify". But there's still the same problem from the previous clause - what are the qualification criteria for this "empty list".

"The first pubs that everyone can reach appear at 70 minutes, and there are exactly two of them, less than a hundred metres apart by Great Portland Street station."

You need to increase the maximum travel time to 70 minutes, and then no matter what borough someone lives in, there are two pubs that anyone can reach.

"Exactly two of them". Exactly two? Or just two? Or slightly less than two? Can you have slightly less than two when you're talking about pubs?

"Less than a hundred metres apart by Great Portland Street station".

Are the pubs "by Great Portland Street station" and one hundred metres from each other? Or are the pubs each one hundred metres from Great Portland Street station? Or are they one hundred metres from each other, and the quickest route from wherever you're coming is via Great Portland Street station?

We then veer into utter gobbledegook.

>"Ranked by keeping the worst-off borough’s journey as short as possible, then by the spread between the luckiest borough and the unluckiest. Every number is a TfL Journey Planner arrive-by-7pm journey from a borough’s population-weighted centre.

This does actually give a little more clarity on the earlier question, of what the "where each of the 33 boroughs residents live" means. It turns out that yes, the author has done some sort of population distribution analysis.

But we're introducing yet more opaque terminology. Earlier we talked about "poorest borough" but now we are talking about "luckiest" and "unluckiest". Is "unluckiest" the same as "poorest"?

‘Worst case’ is the longest journey any borough faces. ‘Spread’ is the gap between the nearest borough’s journey and the furthest’s.

"Furthests's" is 100% actual gibberish.

I could go on.

The whole thing is definitely written by AI, and what's worse is that author either hasn't realised, or hasn't cared that the output is effectively unreadable.

Slop has no opinion on good writing either. My heart sank when I opened your website. I genuinely thought it was going to be interesting and it was just a screed of AI gibberish.

Homeless people and drug addicts may well be victims of circumstance or victims of society depending on your point view - or even victims of their own choices or actions - but there’s a difference between saying “this race of people is problematic” and “this class of people is problematic”.

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49060495

Points: 462

# Comments: 367