Hacker News: trowawee

New comment by trowawee in "People Who Hype Cursor Usually Lack Technical Skills"

trowawee — Sat, 10 May 2025 17:18:24 +0000

They'll be trash, but after a decade bouncing around startups, that's not exactly a problem unique to LLMs. There's probably going to be more startups with more trash than there used to be, but hey: that's job security.

New comment by trowawee in "Ask HN: Why do we celebrate AI-Copilots but reject AI–Generated art?"

trowawee — Sat, 26 Apr 2025 21:34:08 +0000

The interesting thing about art is mostly not its physical existence. The interesting thing about art is that another human being made it to try to express something, in words or colors or film or whatever medium. It's a person trying to show you their interiority, taking something fundamentally unknowable—another living mind—and making it legible to other people. Even when it's art for hire like animation in a commercial, at the end of the day there's some human or humans who put some work in there. LLM-generated art just doesn't have that. There's no interiority to be exposed.

New comment by trowawee in "Tesla falls after Commerce secretary recommends buying stock"

trowawee — Thu, 20 Mar 2025 14:17:48 +0000

The financials have always been crap, though. A lot of his previous assholery was limited to very online people. Guarantee if you poll 100 people if they've heard of the "Thailand pedo guy thing with Musk", most will have no idea what you're talking about. Now it's on every news channel every night.

New comment by trowawee in "Discworld Rules"

trowawee — Sat, 08 Mar 2025 23:07:39 +0000

Probably worth noting that Pratchett wrote most of the "Adam and the gang" sections of Good Omens, while Gaiman was responsible for the riders and the more "mythological" parts. So I do see a pretty clear throughline from Sourcery to the Pratchett parts of Good Omens.

New comment by trowawee in "Why so many children in America have ADHD"

trowawee — Sun, 02 Mar 2025 06:12:08 +0000

Hey! I got diagnosed with ADHD last year as an adult and getting diagnosed and medicated has been a massive improvement in my quality of life. If you have the energy to do it, I would strongly recommend it. The medication is great—I have far fewer "stare at the wall, bounce in my seat, get nothing done" days—but I also appreciate having a concrete diagnosis. Even after decades of assuming I had it, it felt good to actually hear it from a doctor for some reason.

New comment by trowawee in "How can NBA address 3-point boom? Ranking 12 potential solutions"

trowawee — Sun, 29 Dec 2024 01:22:09 +0000

I think the author dismissed that too casually. Anything that makes the three less valuable will result in less space around the hoop. That's not necessarily a bad thing if we want to reemphasize the mid-range shot. The only way to tilt the game back that way is to change the math on the current dunks/layups & threes meta.

New comment by trowawee in "Current thoughts on social media"

trowawee — Thu, 02 Nov 2023 20:19:43 +0000

Yeah, on web with extensive adblocking it's not as miserable (or routing my phone back through my pihole install). But most people aren't adblocking, and the "normal" user experience was jarring.

New comment by trowawee in "Current thoughts on social media"

trowawee — Thu, 02 Nov 2023 17:48:59 +0000

The Facebook aside was interesting. I've been back on FB periodically this year to try to sell some stuff after years off it and it cannot be overstated how terrible the basic experience of browsing the feed is, at least on mobile. It's a minimum of 3-4 ads per actual post from a human I chose to friend, and the ads are just the stupidest, trashiest stuff imaginable.

New comment by trowawee in "Insider trade on Splunk acquisition?"

trowawee — Thu, 21 Sep 2023 17:16:51 +0000

All true in the abstract. But doing it the day before an acquisition is always gonna earn you a door knock, even if you're a serial gambler.

New comment by trowawee in "Insider trade on Splunk acquisition?"

trowawee — Thu, 21 Sep 2023 17:00:53 +0000

"short-dated out-of-the-money call options that cash out a day after a merger/acquisition" is, like, the definition of a suspicious transaction. Somebody's gonna get a knock on the door from the SEC.

New comment by trowawee in "Cellebrite asks cops to keep its technology secret"

trowawee — Sun, 20 Aug 2023 00:51:55 +0000

Radley Balko has a great overview on the fundamental flaws with ballistics forensics[1]. The tl;dr is that the core claim of ballistics forensic analysis, that it is possible to reliably differentiate between two models of the same gun using just casings and shells fired from those guns, has never been proven to be valid.

[1]: https://radleybalko.substack.com/p/devil-in-the-grooves-the-...

New comment by trowawee in "Death of the physical library"

trowawee — Sun, 30 Jul 2023 04:29:10 +0000

Yeah, the “ew, yucky gay people!” asides are both very revealing about the author and fundamentally undermine his argument for the value of libraries.

New comment by trowawee in "Exit Hector, again and again: How different translators reveal the ‘Iliad’ anew"

trowawee — Fri, 07 Jul 2023 21:52:11 +0000

> the above 2 passages cannot be serious at the same time as translations of a literary work

This honestly reads like maybe you don't understand how translation works? I mean, you're clearly coming at this from the standpoint of "I have a culture war axe to grind and I'm gonna grind it", but here goes: languages don't map perfectly into each other. Even languages that exist in the same time, in the same physical locations, where many people are fluent in both languages. There are words in modern Spanish and German that you can't express in a single word in English, and those languages have massive overlap and lots of common roots. There are words in English that mean different things to different people. My 21 year old cousin and my 70 year old father would understand the sentence "I saw Bill Murray on the street today, no cap" in completely different ways.

All of those issues are massively compounded the farther you are from the context of the original text. A 50 year gap between living people in the same country and speaking the same language is enough to make communication confusing; a 3,500 year gap makes it nearly impossible. The article this thread is based on (that you are clearly commenting on without having read) displays 5 different ways that different translators approached the exact same passage in the Iliad over multiple centuries. Lombardo's translation, much like Wilson's, much like any translation, is a work of invention. It has to be, because we aren't Ancient Greeks and we are not operating in the same milieu as the original audience for this work.

You clearly don't like Wilson's work for personal/political reasons, but trying to generalize that to "she's a bad translator" because her translations are different from other translations is a silly complaint that reveals a fundamental shallowness in your understanding of the process of translation.

New comment by trowawee in "Threads isn’t for news and politics, says Instagram’s boss"

trowawee — Fri, 07 Jul 2023 19:46:26 +0000

Right?! This is the dumbest bit from a pretty dumb statement. Politics is just people working out how they're going to interact with each other. There's no way to cordon that off from anything else. You can certainly pretend that those industries don't interact with politics, but that's just another form of politics.

New comment by trowawee in "Exit Hector, again and again: How different translators reveal the ‘Iliad’ anew"

trowawee — Fri, 07 Jul 2023 18:05:24 +0000

Hard to imagine a sillier complaint about a translation than "it tries to convey an ancient text to the people in the era when it is translated". It's like complaining that cooking a steak changes the nature of the meat. Yes, correct, that's literally the point.

New comment by trowawee in "Ask HN: Are you tired of being fully remote?"

trowawee — Sun, 25 Jun 2023 04:22:22 +0000

I was just pointing out why your suggestion that hybrid work is a solution was a dumb idea because it's the worst of both worlds, but you appear committed to a willful misreading of my comment, so...have a great day!

New comment by trowawee in "Ask HN: Are you tired of being fully remote?"

trowawee — Sat, 24 Jun 2023 19:06:59 +0000

Hybrid is the worst of both worlds. You still have to live close enough to the office to get there without an insane commute, so you don't get the "live where you want" benefits of fully remote, but you also have to have enough space in your house to work, so you lose the "home is home and work is work" benefits of working in an office. Plus, unless office and WFH days are rigorously coordinated (which destroys any "flexibility"), you're still going to spend a bunch of time in the office on zoom calls with people who are WFH. It's wild to me that this is being suggested as a compromise. Hybrid just guarantees a baseline level of misery for everyone.

New comment by trowawee in "On Having Enough Socks (2019)"

trowawee — Fri, 05 May 2023 18:05:45 +0000

It's quite fast if you've got 240v outlets in your kitchen. Otherwise it's a little slower, altho I do like being able to hit a button and wander away to do something else, which I never feel comfortable doing when something's on the flame.

New comment by trowawee in "Gitlab loses one-third of its value after company issues weak forecast"

trowawee — Tue, 14 Mar 2023 02:30:45 +0000

Even if you throw out SF salaries as a wild outlier, this isn't actually that ridiculous. An average quality mid-career dev (5-10 years exp.) in a second tier market like Chicago/Denver/Austin/Boston can pretty easily make 170-200 in cash. "[A]ll up" is the key here tho; there's a big non-salary component in the US that doesn't exist in Europe. Tack on health insurance and the total cost to the company will easily blow past 250 right there. Plus, you're probably giving them some equity and a yearly bonus.

I'll be honest, it does sometimes blow my mind to see how low salaries are over there when I look at job postings and Who's Hiring and the like. I'm jealous of a lot of things Europeans take for granted, but it's wild to me to see senior positions in major European capitals paying the amount that I made two years out of a bootcamp.

New comment by trowawee in "Gripes with RSS after one week"

trowawee — Sun, 01 Jan 2023 02:33:58 +0000

Not really; definitionally an RSS feed is just a big list of everything a site publishes. Sure, the rules-based approach will work, and I assume anyone who's been using RSS for a while has built up a set of filter rules that amount to a personal algorithm for their feed. But it's a big initial investment in time and effort to set those rules up. If you subscribe to a bunch of personal blogs, you're fine. But if you sign up for, say, the NYT, the WSJ, and Bloomberg (not a crazy list) the day you set up an account on Feedbin, you'll have 200+ items by the end of the first day. Are you 100% sure you already knew every rule you want/need to filter those items? If not, are you a fast enough reader or willing to just mark as read and ignore stuff? I think a lot of people aren't, and social media has accustomed people to not thinking about stuff like this.