Hacker News: seti0Cha

New comment by seti0Cha in "From 0/10 to 8/10: Microsoft Puts Repair Front and Center"

seti0Cha — Tue, 25 Jun 2024 16:48:54 +0000

This is likely a result of HEIC being under patent and requiring licensing. I'd guess Microsoft doesn't want to foot the entire bill for something only of use to a possibly small subset of users.

New comment by seti0Cha in "Apple apologizes for iPad 'Crush' ad that 'missed the mark'"

seti0Cha — Fri, 10 May 2024 19:26:16 +0000

The romantic ideal is that art is not about consumption, but the reality, both historically and currently, is that art objects are by and large made to be bought and sold. If you disqualify all works meant for consumption, you would have very little left that we currently recognize as art.

New comment by seti0Cha in "93% of paint splatters are valid Perl programs (2019)"

seti0Cha — Mon, 29 Apr 2024 19:06:01 +0000

Looks like that plan was abandoned: https://blogs.perl.org/users/psc/2022/05/what-happened-to-pe...

New comment by seti0Cha in "Air Force picks Anduril, General Atomics to develop unmanned fighter jets"

seti0Cha — Thu, 25 Apr 2024 21:36:51 +0000

Maybe, but not necessarily. It really depends on what they actually believe (or say they believe) specifically. If their belief is "societies work better when governments don't interfere with markets", then their beliefs say nothing about what individual people should do in situations where a government does interfere with markets. They may also believe that if you can't fix something, taking advantage of it is justified, in which case they are not being hypocritical. That's not to say you can't regard such a position as unethical. However, I think many if not most people use systems they are in favor of dismantling. For example, people who believe housing is a human right don't typically donate their houses when they move, they sell them on the open market.

New comment by seti0Cha in "Air Force picks Anduril, General Atomics to develop unmanned fighter jets"

seti0Cha — Thu, 25 Apr 2024 18:17:52 +0000

Libertarians aren't anarchists. They don't generally believe that there should be no government (although you can find people who believe just about anything). I don't think there's anything hypocritical about libertarians taking government contracts for defense. If they were taking government contracts or jobs around regulating markets or building public housing, then that would be closer to hypocritical, but I'm not sure that even qualifies. Hypocrisy isn't benefiting from something you disapprove of, it's engaging in it, so arguably, they'd have to be the ones issuing the laws they disapprove of for it to be hypocrisy.

New comment by seti0Cha in "I spoke with a Google worker fired for protesting $1.2B Israel contract"

seti0Cha — Fri, 19 Apr 2024 16:42:10 +0000

Just to be clear...your position is that wearing face masks when around people indoors is the prudent choice in perpetuity? I honestly don't understand your perspective. What is it about covid19 that makes that necessary as distinct from all the other communicable diseases that humans have passed around for millennia? Or is it your position that wearing masks was always the smart thing to do?

New comment by seti0Cha in "Lions OS: secure – fast – adaptable"

seti0Cha — Thu, 18 Apr 2024 20:15:19 +0000

It appears my memory has failed me yet again. Sorry about that, pvg!

New comment by seti0Cha in "Lions OS: secure – fast – adaptable"

seti0Cha — Thu, 18 Apr 2024 19:08:54 +0000

That's Paul Graham's account, so maybe not just speculation. I didn't realize he still read this site. Not to jump on to OPs paranoia but I kind of thought he was frequenting some secret meta-HN site that still talks about entrepreneurship. Paul, if you see this, let me in! I swear I won't complain about capitalism!

New comment by seti0Cha in "Ask HN: Slow thinkers, how do you compensate for your lack of quick-wittedness?"

seti0Cha — Wed, 28 Feb 2024 18:28:59 +0000

Also a slow thinker. I try to make everything asynchronous. In conversations, I let other people talk until my brain has had time to produce something worth communicating. If people ask my opinion before that, I say I'm still thinking about it or I ask questions to get more context and delay needing a decision. Sometimes I start by saying "let me restate what I think the issues are". Often by the time I've talked through the problem, the answer has become clear to me, or at the very least I know what more I need to figure out. I also actually tell people I'm a slow thinker and often say "I'll have to think on that and get back to you". Sometimes that's literally a minute or two later, which must seem strange to them, but that's how my brain works. The results are generally good enough that people think I'm smart regardless, so I try not to worry about it. Possibly there's some anxiety component to the whole thing because not worrying about having the answer in time itself makes it easier to reach an answer.

New comment by seti0Cha in "The Second Golden Age of Emacs"

seti0Cha — Tue, 27 Feb 2024 22:09:32 +0000

I don't know what plugins OP had in mind, but for me at least, a bunch are usability improvements that make the Emacs environment easier to program. use-package, for example, provides a nice way to programmatically install and configure all the plugins you need. My emacs file config file now is self-bootstrapping - I drop it on a new machine, fire up emacs and everything is there and configured as I like. You could do this before, but it was more work and I had never bothered previously.

New comment by seti0Cha in "Hans Reiser on ReiserFS deprecation in the Linux kernel"

seti0Cha — Thu, 18 Jan 2024 19:05:39 +0000

Christians believe in evil AND believe in redemption. If you are looking for people who believe that positive change is impossible, try genetic determinists.

New comment by seti0Cha in "Statement regarding the ongoing Sourcehut outage"

seti0Cha — Fri, 12 Jan 2024 15:32:46 +0000

Goes against their principles is an explanation for why they don't like it, so I don't see anything wrong with saying "if they don't like it". OP is correct and under no obligation for explaining their motives.

New comment by seti0Cha in "Google Cuts Jobs in Engineering and Other Divisions"

seti0Cha — Thu, 11 Jan 2024 22:06:05 +0000

I'm not saying it's guaranteed to protect you, I'm saying that on average you are going to come out ahead. I've been in the industry 30 years. I've seen all kinds of good and bad management, firings, layoffs, promotions, and attrition. When you excel at your work, the odds are very good that someone will notice. Even if your boss does not, your colleagues likely will. That turns into strong referrals, which helps you find better opportunities whether or not you get laid off.

New comment by seti0Cha in "Google Cuts Jobs in Engineering and Other Divisions"

seti0Cha — Thu, 11 Jan 2024 18:14:41 +0000

That's a bad strategy unless your highest priority is to avoid work. If you want to make more money or have more stability, you will absolutely do better on average if you do more than the minimum. While high performance does not guarantee security, and management doesn't always make the best choices about who to let go, the "do the minimum" people do tend to be the first to go. You don't have to outrun the bear, you have to outrun the slowest guy running from the bear.

New comment by seti0Cha in "Signs that it's time to leave a company"

seti0Cha — Thu, 11 Jan 2024 01:32:00 +0000

Hmm. I don't want to sound harsh, but I've been in the industry for nearly 3 decades and I've never been in a place where HR has been effective in helping train managers. I'm not saying it never happens, just that I haven't seen it. In fact, I wouldn't generally characterize HR departments as paragons of good management, so I'm not sure they are usually in a position to teach such things. Not their fault really, I don't think good management is that teachable. It's mostly learned through experience.

New comment by seti0Cha in "Show HN: Start every terminal session with a vivid reminder of life's value"

seti0Cha — Wed, 03 Jan 2024 20:09:05 +0000

It's super easy to create your own cows. Just look at any of the files in /usr/share/cowsay. You basically just have to get an ascii picture and add a couple of tags. Mine's a hypnotoad.

New comment by seti0Cha in "What happens when your AI girlfriend dies?"

seti0Cha — Tue, 28 Nov 2023 16:57:51 +0000

> I don't think we necessarily disagree, since I don't read you as saying there's never any place for AI chatbots

Definitely not. I can, for instance, see how chatbots might be of great use in palliative care or to help ward off cognitive decline in the elderly.

> We need independent research that isn't just done by the AI chatbot companies themselves so that folks can figure out optimal approaches for training them.

Yes, definitely.

New comment by seti0Cha in "What happens when your AI girlfriend dies?"

seti0Cha — Tue, 28 Nov 2023 16:08:50 +0000

I went back and reread the thread and I see your point. Calling it "feeling good" is certainly oversimplifying. However, I don't think it materially changes my position. Is the woman who is using an AI boyfriend to cope with a verbally abusive RL boyfriend avoiding a problem that she would be better off confronting? Is the woman who has AI children to deal with the grief of not having real children hiding from a grief that will need to be faced eventually? I don't know the details, so I won't venture to say it is so. If it is, though, this is a real problem. We need to come to terms with the brute reality of our existence. The reality is, death and loss are inevitable, other people have their own lives and make choices that hurt us, yet we need them. Perhaps some encouragement and respite through AI can ease this. But it would be very easy for this respite to turn into a refuge, which is one of the mechanism by which drug use becomes drug dependence.

New comment by seti0Cha in "What happens when your AI girlfriend dies?"

seti0Cha — Tue, 28 Nov 2023 15:02:54 +0000

Honestly, I think people who have explicitly replaced children with pets are kind of pathetic. I'm not condemning anyone or demanding that others make the choices I have, but I find something very sad about those "I love my grand-dog" bumper stickers. Perhaps those people are perfectly happy, but I can't help but see a huge gap between what a grandchild can provide vs. your child having a dog that you love.

New comment by seti0Cha in "What happens when your AI girlfriend dies?"

seti0Cha — Tue, 28 Nov 2023 14:55:02 +0000

I think the comparison is apt. If the goal is simply to make each individual feel good, then a chemical approach would seem far more efficient. If, on the other hand, you are concerned with society as a whole continuing to function, you should be concerned about people becoming less accustomed to doing the hard work of maintaining relationships with other people. And it is hard work, especially with romantic relationships. This stuff seems like the emotional equivalent of junk food. It tickles all the right parts of your brain in a way that healthy food usually does not, but it's not sustainable.