Hacker News: throwaway86530

New comment by throwaway86530 in "Show HN: Tetris in a PDF"

throwaway86530 — Thu, 09 Jan 2025 20:06:27 +0000

I got the same conclusions. Unless I misunderstood, Pdfium is based on Foxit so that should work. And as both pdf.js and pdfium decided to implement only a thin part of the adobe js sdk, then there are good chances that it works there too.

New comment by throwaway86530 in "Diagram as Code"

throwaway86530 — Tue, 05 Nov 2024 16:00:50 +0000

Sometimes I feel they are even too much trained on Mermaid. I prefer graphviz but claude very often output a mermaid diagram even if I gave a valid graphviz example in my prompt.

New comment by throwaway86530 in "The Classic Adventures Solution Archive"

throwaway86530 — Sun, 03 Mar 2024 20:15:16 +0000

That resonates with my experience, role playing with my 4 year old daughter was a blast. Playing a character while being DM is a very good idea to pass hints and have more fun, I did not thought about this.

> although it takes a bit out of me lol

So much this. Preparation took time, and the game itself consumed a lot of my time and mental energy. Sadly, this came to a point were my daughter was highly motivated to play, but I was often not in the mood for that or had enough time to play, so our sessions became less and less frequent, to disappear entirely. I think it's been more than one year we did not play (she is 7 now).

Nevertheless it was a great experience. All fathers should consider give it a try. For the record, I never really played this kind of game before, just witnessed some.

We probably played more than 30 games. Toward the end it followed the same template where she was a witch (a gentle witch of course) that went from towns to towns to solve issues (generally related to magic). Most often she had to learn a new incantation along the way to help her in this adventure. Sometimes she also had to use previously learned incantations written on her notebook. That was a bit a trick on my part to get her read a bit. Drawing a basic plan of the city helped a bit, so toward the end we did that a lot.

In one year or so, his brother will be old enough to play, so I might try again. Something that would help is pre-made campaigns (just in case someone knows some nice resources for that). As I am thinking about this, I guess generative IA can be leveraged for this purpose.

New comment by throwaway86530 in "An invitation to a secret society"

throwaway86530 — Fri, 21 Jul 2023 09:59:04 +0000

Regarding how slow academia is adopting open science and other practices that would help fixing the disastrous state of scientific publishing, I am starting to think that forming societies competing with academia has a strong potential to make things change. You can't play with new rules inside a system governed with old rules. I have some skepticism with the approach described in this article, but I applaud the initiative, we need to form strongly cohesive groups that do science with their own term and see what comes up in the end.

New comment by throwaway86530 in "Show HN: I built a better UI for ChatGPT"

throwaway86530 — Tue, 07 Mar 2023 14:10:45 +0000

Very neat. I am already using it.

One feature I would love is passing a prompt (or even a conversation) using queryparams. It would help for the integration with other tools.

Another feature I'd love is to exploit the 'system' agent. From the documentation, there are three possible agents : User, Assistant and System. My understanding is that system can be exploited to drive the expected general behavior of the assistant and seems very useful to that regard.

Last thing, if it was open-source I could clone it and that would dismiss any fears from having my API key stolen. But that's up to you of course.

New comment by throwaway86530 in "Ask HN: Should HN ban ChatGPT/generated responses?"

throwaway86530 — Mon, 12 Dec 2022 15:17:42 +0000

Discussions are supposed to go both way. The first way - I learn things - is still valid, maybe even more with the advance of AI. Even if all the contributions I just read were AI generated, I would have liked it. I guess. But the second way - I teach things - get partially destroyed if I lose time interacting with bots. Forums need to be reinvented to provide some sense of trust. I am not sure that's the end of online privacy though, we are smarter than that and we will certainly figure out systems that will ensure a human wrote it without gathering personal informations.

Somewhere else someone pointed out that using AI to reformulate our thoughts while masking our own style is a possible protection for our anonymity considering the kind of threat showed in this post: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33755016 . This should seriously be taken into account.

New comment by throwaway86530 in "A religious sect landed Google in a lawsuit"

throwaway86530 — Thu, 16 Jun 2022 19:49:38 +0000

The author delayed his attempt to do something about the cult and got fired because he planned to do so. It would have been better to be fired after raising concerns to the HR. This would have been both more ethical and would also give a more solid ground for the trial, so that's a bit sad. Yet, that's so much better than the tons of people who knew and did nothing. Good luck to him!