Hacker News: sofayam

New comment by sofayam in "Ooh.directory: a place to find good blogs that interest you"

sofayam — Sat, 14 Feb 2026 16:19:14 +0000

Strange, I looked around and couldn’t find a single contentful or authentic site in your index, rather the opposite.

New comment by sofayam in "Recovering from AI addiction"

sofayam — Sat, 12 Jul 2025 07:30:35 +0000

I read somewhere that it is a consequence of the way these things work that they will naturally be more cooperative and helpful if you are nice to them, and if you order them around brusquely they will be less so. Maybe following the patterns of interaction in their training set (?)

New comment by sofayam in "What if no one misses TikTok?"

sofayam — Sat, 18 Jan 2025 18:53:15 +0000

Either it is a guilty pleasure and you are secretly relieved that the temptation is being removed. Or prolonged use of the service has turned you into an apathetic apolitical blob of mindless jelly with no agency and no energy to effect change on your environment.

New comment by sofayam in "Take the pedals off the bike"

sofayam — Wed, 15 Jan 2025 11:07:09 +0000

And now you’re all just being mean.

New comment by sofayam in "Take the pedals off the bike"

sofayam — Wed, 15 Jan 2025 09:18:42 +0000

This guy was not really trying to explain to hacker parents how they should teach their kids to ride a bike. As has has been adequately demonstrated in the comments they already know aaaaaaaall about that. His actual point, which seems to have whooshed past most people’s heads, is much more interesting: can you learn a thing more effectively by first simplifying that thing so radically that a seasoned user would find it useless? Also not exactly a totally new idea but, depending on context, just counterintuitive enough that you may miss it.

New comment by sofayam in "AI Decodes the Calls of the Wild"

sofayam — Tue, 24 Dec 2024 17:54:21 +0000

If we could talk to animals, then, on the positive side we could explain things to them like “watch for traffic when you cross this road” but we could also deceive them. A lot of what hunters and farmers have done since time immemorial has used our superior - or maybe just different - intelligence to exploit or trap animals, but imagine the chaos we could wreak if we could literally argue them into behaving against their best interests. Not everyone would use this ability responsibly, especially if there was money to be made.

New comment by sofayam in "Discarded delights: The joy of ex-library books (2021)"

sofayam — Wed, 20 Nov 2024 11:54:59 +0000

Sure. But while I can understand this approach for rare objects which are the result of great craftsmanship (I would rather not have a crack in my faberge egg) a book is generally a mass produced article with little individual character until someone has left their mark on it.

New comment by sofayam in "Discarded delights: The joy of ex-library books (2021)"

sofayam — Wed, 20 Nov 2024 11:37:02 +0000

If you are going to collect books as physical objects, rather than their much more convenient digital versions, then it strikes me you should actually find the signs of previous interactions with that object (library stamps, marks from other readers etc) make them more interesting than pristine copies that no one has read.

New comment by sofayam in "The Distribution of Users’ Computer Skills: Worse Than You Think (2016)"

sofayam — Mon, 23 Sep 2019 13:51:34 +0000

I know a suprising number of people 10-20 years older than me who regularly use desktop computers but do not understand what a window is e.g.: that windows can cover each other up, and that there are special places you must grab or click them to either resize or move them, that you can shrink them into a dock without closing the application etc.

Rather ironic considering that the operating system they all use is actually named after this, for them, inscrutable abstraction.

Those guys at Apple knew what they were on to when they created iOS with its one app at a time paradigm, even if it is slowly adding all that complexity back in to the more recent versions.

New comment by sofayam in "American Phrase Book"

sofayam — Tue, 10 Sep 2019 05:47:21 +0000

“works” as in “gets the other person to leave me alone”?

New comment by sofayam in "On the Pleasures and Sorrows of Life Without Screens"

sofayam — Mon, 03 Jun 2019 09:50:43 +0000

Fits nicely with the Southpark creators views on Pot: it makes you feel fine with being bored and it's when you're bored that you should be learning a new skill or some new science or being creative.

New comment by sofayam in "How to set your Google account to delete itself after you die"

sofayam — Thu, 30 May 2019 07:53:56 +0000

Good feature but the three month window they grant is way too short. Winding up someone’s affairs after they have died often takes longer. A year would make more sense.

New comment by sofayam in "To Remember Everything You Learn, Surrender to This Algorithm (2008)"

sofayam — Wed, 08 Aug 2018 07:39:17 +0000

The only difference in the eval version (i.e. not yet registered) is you can’t change the wallpaper, ... which is free enough for me

New comment by sofayam in "People in these countries work the longest hours according to OECD"

sofayam — Wed, 18 Jul 2018 09:06:48 +0000

Pretty much chased me away. Then I came here just so I could bitch about it. Content suicide.

New comment by sofayam in "The dots do matter: how to scam a Gmail user"

sofayam — Sat, 07 Apr 2018 19:10:12 +0000

Interestingly Gmail will let you filter in a dot sensitive way. Anyone missing my dot gets sent to a folder called “wrongguy”. Whenever I drop by to look at it it’s full of spam.

New comment by sofayam in "Free Range VHDL – VHDL programming book available for free"

sofayam — Sun, 29 Jan 2017 22:30:45 +0000

Actually yes - the H stands for hardware: that's any kind of digital logic. You just need a different "back end" and then in theory the same model can run on various targets - in fact there is a whole business model around getting a design up and running on an FPGA and then porting it to an ASIC once you can justify the volume.