Hacker News: wastholm

New comment by wastholm in "Why Do AI Chatbots Have Such a Hard Time Admitting 'I Don't Know'?"

wastholm — Tue, 11 Feb 2025 15:19:21 +0000

As a tiny and very informal experiment in metacognition, I once told ChatGPT something along the lines of "I will now ask you a question. If you are not sure you know the correct answer, you will respond with only '418 I'm a teapot', nothing else." I then asked it for the correct identity of Jack the Ripper (the first thing I could think of that famously has a lot of theories but no agreed-upon "correct" answer).

The first time, as expected, it ignored my instructions and started hallucinating. But when I did the same thing again some months later, I was surprised when it actually answered only "418 I'm a teapot", indicating that it knew it didn't know the answer.

Just an anecdote. I'm sure there are people doing actual research in this area.

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

wastholm — Sat, 11 Jan 2025 05:58:24 +0000

Not OP, but I found a series, not a movie, titled _One Cent Thief_ that fits the description. Sounds interesting.

https://archive.org/details/OneCentThiefSeries

New comment by wastholm in "Cooking and bird safety"

wastholm — Sun, 05 Nov 2023 18:16:13 +0000

The best frying pan I've ever owned is the cheapest-possible cast iron one I got when I moved out of my parents' house 30 years ago or so. Very rarely does anything stick and when it does I fill the pan half way with water, put it back on the stove, let it boil for a couple of minutes while I do something else and then wipe it clean.

I have parrots so I theoretically have a strict "no Teflon in my house" rule but with a Japanese wife I've had to grudgingly tolerate a Teflon-coated rice cooker.

New comment by wastholm in "Could we make the web more immersive using a simple optical illusion?"

wastholm — Sat, 04 Mar 2023 09:05:01 +0000

I still use (KDE Plasma's) wobbly windows, but set very low. In general in GUIs I prefer a very quick animation to an instant change, perhaps because it helps make things seem more fluid and dynamic and because it guides my eyes to where a change is happening in case I'm not already looking straight at it.

New comment by wastholm in "The PocketReform is a made-in-Berlin Linux handheld"

wastholm — Tue, 28 Jun 2022 08:48:55 +0000

Something like this?

https://store.planetcom.co.uk/

No affiliation, just a (mostly) happy owner of a Gemini. They don't seem to sell those anymore and I can't vouch for the other models but they look nice too, I guess.

New comment by wastholm in "Vim Galore: everything you need to know about Vim"

wastholm — Fri, 28 Jan 2022 15:57:35 +0000

> If not pure coding projects, at least for things like markdown, having a preview could help.

Everybody's needs are different, of course, but I personally find that Vimwiki [1] gives me all the preview I need, right in the editor, when editing Markdown.

[1] https://vimwiki.github.io/

New comment by wastholm in "The Windows 11 taskbar is an annoying step backward"

wastholm — Fri, 21 Jan 2022 06:39:35 +0000

To each their own indeed. For me, as someone who uses KDE/Plasma by choice and Windows because sometimes I have to, it has been a source of humor for years and years how an environment literally called Windows can have such hilariously bad window management. No point to focus, no configurable window shortcuts, no send to front/back, no minimizing a window when its application is "busy", bad and inconsistent visual indication of which window has focus...

New comment by wastholm in "Simple.css – A classless CSS framework"

wastholm — Sat, 15 Jan 2022 09:18:07 +0000

A nitpick perhaps, but I was surprised to see `cite` used to enclose the author's name in your `blockquote` example. I was under the impression that `cite` is meant to be used to mark up titles of books and similar, not author names, and MDN[1] seems to agree with me here.

That aside, nice work! This could surely be useful as a default stylesheet for Markdown documents and the like.

[1] https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/HTML/Element/ci...

New comment by wastholm in "Workers quit jobs in droves to become their own bosses"

wastholm — Tue, 30 Nov 2021 15:34:11 +0000

A very significant part of the pool of interesting projects in "my" market is only available under framework agreements for which solo consultants will not be considered (but Kvadrat will). If I were completely solo, I would have to bid for such projects through brokers who would happily charge me between 5% and 20% without really giving me anything back besides acting as gatekeepers.

Instead, all my cold calling, contract negotiations, billing and accounts receivable — things I'm not good at and don't enjoy doing — get taken care of. I'm happy to pay for that. The "luxury" of "business friends" is included.

New comment by wastholm in "Workers quit jobs in droves to become their own bosses"

wastholm — Tue, 30 Nov 2021 07:18:26 +0000

I work at a place where about 500 independent consultants/contractors have outsourced branding, training (to a degree), office admin, and, above all, sales to a shared organization.[1] Those who want can become "partners" by buying shares (I have). Importantly, this setup also provides a community because solo consulting can otherwise get lonely at times. But essentially we're all still entirely "our own" and free to choose how much we want to work, whether we want to pursue side projects, etc.

We pay 17%. So not quite the 15% you mentioned, but also far from the 30% others talked about.

We're only in Sweden for now, so maybe this isn't immediately accessible to you. But it shows that it can be done.

[1] https://www.kvadrat.se/

New comment by wastholm in "Bespoke Synth 1.0 – open-source software modular synthesizer"

wastholm — Wed, 15 Sep 2021 05:50:05 +0000

Thanks, I'll keep this in mind. (I have given some Calf plugins some light usage in Qtractor without noticing any obvious problems.)

New comment by wastholm in "Bespoke Synth 1.0 – open-source software modular synthesizer"

wastholm — Wed, 15 Sep 2021 05:18:03 +0000

> Stay away from CALF even though they look pretty.

Why, what's wrong with them?

Thanks for a very informative comment!

New comment by wastholm in "The web is swallowing the desktop whole (2017)"

wastholm — Thu, 09 Sep 2021 05:12:23 +0000

> mobile web browsers provide a worse experience compared to native applications, unlike Electron or Chrome on Desktop that provides a much better experience in general

Electron apps are perhaps faster and cheaper to make than native desktop GUI apps for most organizations because they already have Web developers, but I've never heard anyone claim they're "better" than native, if that's what you're saying. Do you mean they're somehow better for the end user? If so, how?

New comment by wastholm in "The open calendar, task and note space is a mess"

wastholm — Mon, 30 Aug 2021 18:51:38 +0000

I've been using KOrganizer[1] for longer than I can remember. For better and/or worse, it's pretty tightly integrated with the Plasma desktop. For now at least, I use it with Google Calendar as its backend. Every once in a long while, it gives me some scary-sounding error message about failing to sync — but so far as I can tell the sync works just fine, albeit sometimes with a bit of lag.

I recently also started using it with my work-mandated Office 365 calendar. According to some docs somewhere that I can't find right now, there were quite a few hoops to jump through to make that read/write so I settled for read-only.

[1] https://apps.kde.org/korganizer/

New comment by wastholm in "Mathematical Coincidence"

wastholm — Thu, 15 Jul 2021 07:37:35 +0000

I don't know if it qualifies as a "mathematical coincidence" or not, but I find it amusing to demonstrate to kids that you can multiply 142,857 by 1, 2, 3, etc., and the result is always a number with the same digits but in a different order:

2 × 142,857 = 285,714

3 × 142,587 = 428,571

4 × 142,587 = 571,428

Etc. But then, suddenly:

7 × 142,857 = 999,999

New comment by wastholm in "MPs: Octopuses feel pain and need legal protection"

wastholm — Sun, 20 Jun 2021 14:31:58 +0000

I got a 404 at that address but this seems to be the same article (I had to override a TLS certificate warning to get it):

https://www.theessayexperiencefall2013.qwriting.qc.cuny.edu/...

New comment by wastholm in "The rise of E Ink Tablets and Note Takers: reMarkable 2 vs Onyx Boox Note Air"

wastholm — Tue, 15 Jun 2021 13:30:04 +0000

I have not but it looks interesting so I will. Thanks!

New comment by wastholm in "The rise of E Ink Tablets and Note Takers: reMarkable 2 vs Onyx Boox Note Air"

wastholm — Tue, 15 Jun 2021 13:02:29 +0000

Sure, you can SCP all the files you want but even if they're PDFs or EPUBs they won't show up in the interface. (I can't remember if I actually tried this or if I just read it somewhere. Maybe it's worth a shot.)

New comment by wastholm in "The rise of E Ink Tablets and Note Takers: reMarkable 2 vs Onyx Boox Note Air"

wastholm — Tue, 15 Jun 2021 12:59:42 +0000

Yes, but the "only over USB" thing is unfortunate so I find myself mostly using the bundled cloud service, which is usually something I try to avoid relying on. Some sort of peer-to-peer sync like Syncthing would be great.

New comment by wastholm in "The rise of E Ink Tablets and Note Takers: reMarkable 2 vs Onyx Boox Note Air"

wastholm — Tue, 15 Jun 2021 12:34:21 +0000

I bought a Remarkable 2 a month or two ago because I wanted a cool hackable e-ink Linux computer. But instead I immediately started using it as an e-book and document reader and note-taking pad, and nothing else. And, so far at least, that's perfect.

The screen is beautiful (a bit gray, but the black is really black so the contrast is still good), the device is thin and reasonably light, I only have to charge it once a week or so, and there are absolutely no distractions. I have even rediscovered the visceral pleasantness of writing by hand.

I especially like that it's *not* running Android (which I dislike more with each release). The biggest drawbacks, to me, are the fragile pen nibs and the inability to just SCP a PDF or EPUB to the device and have it work (their sync software works but isn't great).