bccdee

8 ms·

31.
by bccdee 5mo ago
> There are huge environmental and societal issues in today's computing, and permacomputing specifically wants to challenge them in the same way as permaculture has challenged industrial agriculture. Permacomputing seems like a body
32.
by bccdee 5mo ago
I'm honestly very impressed. You read these passages multiple times across composing two HN replies and did not, at any point, realize that curiosity is not an inherently positive emotion. Curiosity is a "desire to know." W
33.
by bccdee 5mo ago
And then how do you uncover bias in your chatbot? Do you ask it to analyze its own analysis? For that matter, what about the bias in your prompt, which LLMs tend to accept uncritically? Do your own preconceived opinions bias you against the
34.
by bccdee 5mo ago
I think there's a big difference between "your drawing skills will atrophy if you use CAD to draw for you" and "your brain will atrophy if you ask an LLM to think for you." Personally I don't judge people for b
35.
by bccdee 6mo ago
Simpler tools are a forcing function for simplicity. If you don't have code search, you'll need to write code that is legible without searching. If you don't have auto-refactoring utils, you'll have to be stricter about
36.
by bccdee 6mo ago
Writ very small, though. You can easily fit a dozen bikes into the space of one parking spot, if not more (double-decker racks exist!), and it is a lot easier to contrive a spot for your bike in the absence of bike racks than it is to par
37.
by bccdee 6mo ago
That's a common narrative in popular culture (especially since the publication of Jonathan Haidt's The Anxious Generation ), but it doesn't really bear out in data. Smartphones don't really have a discernible impact on
38.
by bccdee 6mo ago
Everyone wants a scheme for organizing notes, and let me say: Just do it chronologically. It's fine. Taking notes is more important than reviewing them, and the older a note is, the less likely you are to need it. You can add a layer o
39.
by bccdee 6mo ago
I actually might want to subscribe to your newsletter, provided I read & enjoy your article. So why does the pop-up always interrupt me before the page has even finished loading? If you inset an unobtrusive newsletter button 60% of th
40.
by bccdee 6mo ago
It feels like the type of infrastructure envy that leads engineers to spin up a k8s cluster to serve a static website. If you're a publishing academic who needs to ingest a lot of material across a variety of subject areas with an eye
41.
by bccdee 6mo ago
"Can't" means it would be bad for business. I think consumers are a lot less turned off by the idea of a OneDrive subscription than a Windows subscription. Better to stitch little services like OneDrive and Copilot into every
42.
by bccdee 6mo ago
I'm not taking a "zero technical debt" stance. Every successful startup eventually ends up treating their 1.0 codebase as a legacy burden. That's the cost of doing business, but it is a real cost. If Anthropic could have
43.
by bccdee 6mo ago
It bothered me in theory, but when I started writing lua it quickly became clear that it really doesn't matter. It's just another quirk, like significant whitespace: I don't prefer it, but it's so far down my list of lan
44.
by bccdee 6mo ago
I wouldn't expect so. These machines have been trained on natural language, after all. They see the world through an anthropomorphic lens. IME & from what I've heard, they struggle with inexpressive code in much the same way h
45.
by bccdee 6mo ago
One truism about coding agents is that they struggle to work with bad code. Code quality matters as much as always, the experts say, and AI agents (left unfettered) produce bad code at an unprecedented rate. That's why good practices m
46.
by bccdee 6mo ago
That's actually a good point, haha. The worst-case scenario of computers being thin clients for other people's servers dissolves when you realize that chromium/electron IS, nominally, a thin client for HTTP servers, and it&#x
47.
by bccdee 7mo ago
I think "design by committee" is a better target for criticism than collaboration in general. If you get a bunch of people in a room and ask them for a design, one person is going to write the design while everyone else gets in th
48.
by bccdee 7mo ago
"It's UNFAIR!" is the anthem of whiny children. If these people would benefit from access to Youtube, and we can provide it to them trivially, then by all means, let them have it. If it upsets you when people are given things
49.
by bccdee 7mo ago
Yeah well Google owns my Gmail address, but they'd sure ruin my life if they gave it to someone else. It's not acceptable.
50.
by bccdee 7mo ago
Squatting is something you do to someone else's property. It implies that there is someone else out there with a more legitimate claim to the @hac handle, which there isn't. It's not as if we're talking about @google or
51.
by bccdee 7mo ago
The onset of the pandemic in 2020 left me more isolated than I'd even been before in my life. I was single, I was working remotely, and the lock-downs finally killed what was left of my preexisting friend group. I have a naturally soli
52.
by bccdee 7mo ago
> You've got to die of something; so you might as well die for something It's very easy to die "for something" when you're already dying. The question is how much of your life you're willing to give up for s
53.
by bccdee 7mo ago
Sounds like you're looking for the scratch file extension [1] [1]: https://github.com/orbitalquark/textadept-scratch
54.
by bccdee 7mo ago
I'm reminded of a talk I enjoyed about "extreme rewriting" [1] — how rewriting the same code many times (in certain contexts) can help uncover powerful underlying abstractions. It makes intuitive sense to me that this would b
55.
by bccdee 7mo ago
Syncthing has worked flawlessly for me.
56.
by bccdee 7mo ago
Slop. The illustrations are bad, the article is way too long, and none of it has a clear point.
57.
by bccdee 7mo ago
So elderly that they can't walk to the bus? I suspect your data mean retirement age, i.e. 60-65+. They don't all need paratransit.
58.
by bccdee 7mo ago
You're being downvoted because you misunderstood the post you're replying to. They aren't referring to profit margins, but marginal utility—i.e. incremental improvements to stop spacing (purportedly) would not be enough to fi
59.
by bccdee 7mo ago
> as primary means of transportation and arguably more importantly as a backup means of transportation One bus route can't wear two hats. Faster, sparser routes are typically complemented by slow, meandering collector routes which p
60.
by bccdee 7mo ago
You've got a point, but the article's thesis is still correct. The article points to case studies where reducing stops increased ridership: clearly this does make a difference But I agree that truly good bus service requires commi

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