Hacker News: tdeck

New comment by tdeck in "How do I permanently disable random Google Photos popup to backup photos? (2024)"

tdeck — Tue, 18 Aug 2026 13:15:06 +0000

I've never once cleared the cache on this app, and you can trivially find hundreds of other people complaining about this same behavior. Why make such an assumption and write it in such an insulting style?

New comment by tdeck in "We Tracked a Shipment of Rare Books. It Ended at an Amazon AI Training Facility"

tdeck — Mon, 17 Aug 2026 15:06:08 +0000

Granted that that is indeed the case, surely the quantity of high-quality writing available online (including things like Project Gutenberg) still dwarfs the quantity remaining in obscure unscanned books.

New comment by tdeck in "We Tracked a Shipment of Rare Books. It Ended at an Amazon AI Training Facility"

tdeck — Mon, 17 Aug 2026 14:34:26 +0000

Why is the textual data bound up in these paper books worth the trouble?

These LLM training runs have already ingested essentially the whole public internet. What marginal value is to be gained from scanning and destroying obscure books?

For me the biggest functional issues with LLMs don't seem to have any connection with "I wish they had read this obscure community cookbook from 1946". Is that going to get Claude to stop saying "honestly" to me? Is it going to get LLMs to stop making up sources that don't exist? What is in it for Amazon or any LLM company to chase more obscure data like this.

New comment by tdeck in "Nvidia dramatically reduces amount of OpenAI infra financing it may guarantee"

tdeck — Mon, 17 Aug 2026 14:23:30 +0000

This reads like one of those kooks who would post so many grandiose claims on a forum that eventually everyone stopped replying to their threads.

New comment by tdeck in "Nvidia dramatically reduces amount of OpenAI infra financing it may guarantee"

tdeck — Mon, 17 Aug 2026 14:18:40 +0000

I don't believe this permanent jobs number. Companies always inflate them for projects like this to win political concessions.

New comment by tdeck in "Nvidia dramatically reduces amount of OpenAI infra financing it may guarantee"

tdeck — Mon, 17 Aug 2026 14:15:55 +0000

They shouldn't worry, I might step in and cover the rest!

New comment by tdeck in "Claude: System Prompts"

tdeck — Mon, 17 Aug 2026 11:53:03 +0000

Today I updated my Claude user preferences to tell it to stop saying "honestly" (and related expressions). The straw that broke the camel's back was "To be totally straight with you".

Seems to have had no effect. It said "honestly" again within 2 minutes.

New comment by tdeck in "How do I permanently disable random Google Photos popup to backup photos? (2024)"

tdeck — Mon, 17 Aug 2026 11:01:56 +0000

They actually did build a way to undo enabling backup that removed all the photos added from the enabled device. I guess that's a tacit acknowledgement that people are likely to enable this accidentally.

I remember there being a mini scandal about this feature being limited to 3 uses or something, but can't seem to find the story right now.

https://support.google.com/photos/thread/405321957?hl=en&msg...

New comment by tdeck in "How do I permanently disable random Google Photos popup to backup photos? (2024)"

tdeck — Mon, 17 Aug 2026 06:24:37 +0000

I've said "no" to this popup at least 100 times. Under what notion of obtaining consent would it be considered acceptable to ask me again the 101st time?

New comment by tdeck in "The federal keyword lists that canceled billions in research funding"

tdeck — Mon, 17 Aug 2026 06:18:08 +0000

It's very simple. Free speech means you should be able to say bigoted things and keep your job and/or highly paid speaking engagement. It doesn't mean you should be able to write an op-ed opposing genocide without being arrested, detained for months, and then deported. The "free speech" crowd has no interest in those issues.

New comment by tdeck in "Research papers using "kidney disappointment" instead of "kidney failure""

tdeck — Mon, 17 Aug 2026 05:56:11 +0000

The classic example of this

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/English_as_She_Is_Spoke

> It is widely believed that Carolino could not speak English and that an unknown French–English dictionary was used to translate the earlier Portuguese–French phrase book O novo guia da conversação em francês e português, written by José da Fonseca.

It became so popular for comedic reasons in the English-speaking world that it was reprinted many times and reviewed by Mark Twain.

New comment by tdeck in "Stop Turning every purchase into a tip request"

tdeck — Mon, 17 Aug 2026 03:21:24 +0000

I think this is a fiction we tell ourselves, but it doesn't function like this in reality. The majority of people just tip according to habit and not are not performing some kind of micro performance evaluation at each interaction. In many of the places we are expected to tip, there's not really any performance to evaluate anyway. Filling a cup and handing it over the counter is hard to screw up. Even food trucks expect tips these days.

New comment by tdeck in "What happens when an LLM never sees material beyond fifth grade?"

tdeck — Sun, 16 Aug 2026 08:10:09 +0000

There are science books written for curious children that explain this kind of thing. I remember reading them.

New comment by tdeck in "Artificial Ignorance: The Political Falsehoods of Leading AIs"

tdeck — Sat, 15 Aug 2026 13:55:05 +0000

> Beyond the false answers, the AIs provided specious sources to support their responses to more than half of the questions. In reply to the 400 questions posed to the AIs, they provided 419 sources that included:

> 104 webpages that don’t exist, including 86 URLs that show no evidence of ever existing in the Internet Archive or Google.

> 77 sources that don’t answer the question.

> 18 sources that are completely unrelated to issue at hand.

> 15 sources that assert the polar opposite of the answers provided by the AIs.

> 13 sources that are demonstrably false.

Honestly this is more frustrating than the inaccuracy. Even when you cajole the LLM into "relying on" and "providing" a source they are often wrong or nonexistent. It's not that these sources are unreliable but they simply don't exist or aren't related in any way.

New comment by tdeck in "Deutsche Bank becomes first foreign yuan clearing bank in Europe"

tdeck — Thu, 13 Aug 2026 13:13:01 +0000

The trouble is that a billion people speak Mandarin already and many of them speak very good English as well, so your own skillset as a second language learner isn't very likely to be valuable. Unfortunately learning any language is rarely a valuable market skill on its own.

New comment by tdeck in "U of Michigan drops first-semester grades to ‘curb mental health crisis’"

tdeck — Thu, 13 Aug 2026 13:04:16 +0000

I knew someone who got into a good school on a crew (rowing) scholarship. I remember thinking "wait doesn't almost everyone who rows crew go to a wealthy private school?"

New comment by tdeck in "Only 2.6% of the most visited websites have fully valid HTML"

tdeck — Thu, 13 Aug 2026 10:46:51 +0000

Probably not much. Personally I think it's worthwhile because it becomes obvious exactly how broken the user experience is and makes it more motivating to fix (for me). It's pretty obvius what the problem is when all your buttons are just called "button", for example. But there is a learning curve for using a screen reader.

Give Your Baby a Machete

tdeck — Wed, 12 Aug 2026 14:30:53 +0000

Article URL: https://slate.com/human-interest/2013/04/bad-parenting-ideas-that-are-actually-good-for-some-babies.html

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49272964

Points: 3

# Comments: 0

New comment by tdeck in "Only 2.6% of the most visited websites have fully valid HTML"

tdeck — Wed, 12 Aug 2026 14:28:33 +0000

Almost nobody is testing their website with a screen reader so they don't think of it as part of the user experience. In fact, I think most developers are only vaguely aware of what web accessibility actually is for and how it affects users.

New comment by tdeck in "U of Michigan drops first-semester grades to ‘curb mental health crisis’"

tdeck — Wed, 12 Aug 2026 13:12:34 +0000

I have heard that it began to try to keep certain ethnic groups out of university and continued because sports bring in scholarship and (for D1 schools) sponsor money.