ben_w

15 ms·

241.
by ben_w 2mo ago
There's "rich", and there's "enough money to rot your brain". I can believe Trump started with the latter, but the other two were less than that. IIRC GWB was "just" a multimillionaire even when he be
242.
by ben_w 2mo ago
Not really. Things can look stupid when we don't understand them, but there has to be some intelligence somewhere at some point even if the arrival of wealth then suffocates it with sycophants. If Musk or Trump or GWB were all *merely*
243.
by ben_w 2mo ago
> I'm not sure why you're arguing that when it's not the point of the statement. 'twas an expression of surprise, not an argument. Surprise in both directions, 'cause what you like about Claude is one of the ways
244.
by ben_w 2mo ago
Sometimes I'll run an emulator in the browser to experience the joy of the old UI. Somehow, a web browser with a canvas whose pixels are populated by JS or Wasm in response to an emulator booting pre-Unix classic MacOS, is faster and l
245.
by ben_w 2mo ago
> Everything else seems to be bad attempts at relatable writing to invoke emotion (an exercise that we should really stop trying to train emotionless matrix weights to attempt). One of the things actual science fiction got wrong: to the
246.
by ben_w 2mo ago
(Different person) > Video/audio editors? IDE's? Debuggers? Image/3D editors? Compressor/decompressors? Terminal emulators? And so much more stuff. Video I can understand, and anything that needs a real local terminal
247.
by ben_w 2mo ago
This is the first I've heard of any refrigerators even having water filters. Are they plumbed into the water mains, or a small tank?
248.
by ben_w 2mo ago
> Related to code quality, I've noticed developers picking up tricks from AI. Like using feature/xxxxx as the branch name. Last year exactly zero developers used this convention. Huh. I've been using that convention for ag
249.
by ben_w 2mo ago
Diversify. My dad advised me to put some money into stocks around 2004 or so, specifically suggested Lloyds bank on the grounds that "if they went bankrupt we have bigger problems". Then the global financial crisis happened. The L
250.
by ben_w 2mo ago
He should've renamed New Mexico to New America. I read a while back the state name causes confusion amongst those who think it's part of Mexico. And while he's at it, Georgia could become Trumpia to avoid confusion with the n
251.
by ben_w 2mo ago
In fairness, nothing about the initials "non fungible token" ever really required a blockchain. Though I suppose the only things which I'm aware of which actually benefit from a blockchain was version control systems like git
252.
by ben_w 2mo ago
Makes me wonder, has North Korea or Iran made an equivalent declaration about naming the USA "사탄의 겨드랑이" or "زیر بغل شیطان"? (Google Translate from "Satan's armpit"). I mean, if temper tantrums by the supre
253.
by ben_w 2mo ago
> There is simply no good reason to believe that AI will magically be able to work around these fundamental tradeoffs of biology, that it could somehow design a virus with the lethality of H5N1 influenza but the contagiousness of H3N2. T
254.
by ben_w 2mo ago
> Yeah and they get consequences of their actions don't they? Is this a cognitive stop-light/applause sign, or do you think that my solution further along in that comment is irrelevant? > AI agents hacked 3 companies as admi
255.
by ben_w 2mo ago
Mm. Good enough to be interesting, but oh boy all the rough edges. My "favourites" were the cars noclipping through each other, and ship cannon firing directly at its own ship's mast.
256.
by ben_w 2mo ago
It's a flaw with the idea of using them directly rather than indirectly. Humans somewhat reliably lose focus when performing the same action many times. Zoning out, flow state, whatever you call it; this is exploited by stage magicians
257.
by ben_w 2mo ago
While this is a sentiment I agree with in isolation, it is odd to me to see all LLMs tarred with this particular brush: > Pretending to have a "neutral stance" when faced with fascism is not neutrality, it’s active collaboratio
258.
by ben_w 2mo ago
The UK's problem with Brexit was that the sovereignty issues under discussion were mostly lies (not merely false, but knowingly false, with incompatible stories told to different voters). The UK had opt-outs for a lot, wide-ranging vet
259.
by ben_w 2mo ago
IIRC this was done by threatening to leave NATO, which put pressure on the USA who really didn't want to lose a perfect base location to help monitor/contain the USSR, who in turn put pressure on the UK. But this is from memory; a
260.
by ben_w 2mo ago
FWIW, I regret not having had kids yet. I am also weirdly unmotivated by opportunities to spend money, which is both how I got this passive income and lack of rent, and why it's borderline enough for me. FIRE is very easy when all your
261.
by ben_w 2mo ago
They're an automatic outcome of fairly benign starting conditions in GR: Simply having more than a certain amount of mass within a certain volume. The required density for that stuff goes down as the volume goes up, so a solar-system s
262.
by ben_w 2mo ago
Dunno, the ancient Greeks had roughly this idea (ἄτομον) in their philosophy, so while actual atomic theory is not common sense, merely having atoms is also not-*not* common sense.
263.
by ben_w 2mo ago
> Finding a tame enough special case was how Hawking discovered his radiation. It's how it was formulated, but the radiation is far too weak to measure to know it's a real thing on an actual black hole; from this calculator, a
264.
by ben_w 2mo ago
Neither has the power to be enforced outside its own territory. The entirety of the US constitution carries zero weight to the court system of the nation that the founders of those United States, ahem, engaged in unlawful violent treason ag
265.
by ben_w 2mo ago
In fairness, this at most tells you the UK court system isn't party to any honeypotting. Despite the memes, the UK is not the 51st state, which is both why it was able to make the fine (1st Amendment doesn't have jurisdiction over
266.
by ben_w 2mo ago
It's cool; I only spotted it myself because I happen to have already read this article a previous time the question of "are China's emissions going up or down?" was asked by a commenter on Hacker News.
267.
by ben_w 2mo ago
> When do you have time for all of this? I don’t mean the vibing part but the using the app part. Mix of this being spread over more than a year, that I'm not doomscrolling because HackerNews and Telegram are my main social media pr
268.
by ben_w 2mo ago
It may well be worse. This is one reason I didn't judge doing experiments to find out to be a good use of my time before vibe coding became a thing. However, I also wouldn't bother with the full 3D rendering, I'd just use a n
269.
by ben_w 2mo ago
> I believe if this was true, we'd already be seeing vibed stuff succeeding everywhere, and pricing out incumbents, but I guess I'm not seeing this? Like at all? I'm substituting my own[0] vibe coding for buying[1] apps. L
270.
by ben_w 2mo ago
I suspect it's better for mental health to be lazy and take this as an opportunity to detox from tweet-sized interactions in general.

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