tptacek

11 ms·

271.
by tptacek 2mo ago
There's a bunch of different chrome extensions that do this, and you can do it yourself from the Chrome console with `$0.playbackRate = 3` or whatever.
272.
by tptacek 2mo ago
I'm not sure if this is snark or not, but yes, there is something fundamentally interesting about the fact that "personal finance tracker" is now a project with the same craft valence as a todo list, the "hello world&quo
273.
by tptacek 2mo ago
All things equal you're always better off ruthlessly killing complexity. Cook (I know you're not rebutting him) is focused on the problem of unavoidably complex systems. A big server running a single instance of Postgres is grea
274.
by tptacek 2mo ago
Problems managing a complex system? Why not consider adding another complex system!
275.
by tptacek 2mo ago
Cook doesn't object to postmortems and to using hard failures as opportunities to spot interventions (though, remember, all practitioner actions are gambles). The issue is in attempting to identify a single privileged root cause.
276.
by tptacek 2mo ago
I originally learned linear algebra from Gilbert Strang's OCW videos, and I was only able to stick with them by 2x'ing the playback rate; at this point, hearing Strang at his normal speaking rate sounds to me like hearing him afte
277.
by tptacek 2mo ago
Literally the first item in the list addresses the necessity of complexity in the systems it's discussing.
278.
by tptacek 2mo ago
I am also a broken record about Grug-brainedness, but I don't need to be so repetitive about it because so many other people are too.
279.
by tptacek 2mo ago
Like I said, I don't love it.
280.
by tptacek 2mo ago
Richard Cook was a UChicago anaesthesiologist who took up safety systems research after studying patient safety; some of his work is rooted in Three Mile Island, and some of it comes from aviation safety.
281.
by tptacek 2mo ago
I'm a broken record on how important I think this document is, and that it's hard to appreciate it until you've had extended experience with complex systems actually failing. The most commonly cited subtext or thrust of it is
282.
by tptacek 2mo ago
You're right. It's merely the writer of the 404 story, discussing their story.
283.
by tptacek 2mo ago
I don't love it, but I have to acknowledge that a frontier model building a feature that uses cryptography is going to have a better track record than the median human developer. The immediate practical problem with cryptography engine
284.
by tptacek 2mo ago
You didn't know it was happening at all just a few hours ago; you believed libraries had archivists on staff trained to preserve all the donations. You're in kind of an odd rhetorical position to be saying [citation needed].
285.
by tptacek 2mo ago
If you weren't complaining about libraries doing it last year, I'm going to have a very hard time taking you seriously when you complain about AI companies doing it at a much smaller scale. You don't care about what's ac
286.
by tptacek 2mo ago
Ratatui is such great work. The New Terminal, the complete break from VT100, is I think the most powerful rebuttal to what I'm saying about TUIs. My take is that the Morlocks should pack everything that is great about TUIs (and there a
287.
by tptacek 2mo ago
No?
288.
by tptacek 2mo ago
I don't like TUIs. And, having built several, and then having the experience of building meaningfully complex native UI for the first time in my career, I couldn't help noticing how much of the tedious work of putting a TUI togeth
289.
by tptacek 2mo ago
https://www.npr.org/2026/08/19/nx-s1-5936438/why-tech-compan...
290.
by tptacek 2mo ago
So far as I can tell --- and someone challenged me on this recently, saying they'd been in court over a case related to it, so take this with a small grain of salt --- this "too high IQ" thing happened once, in New London C
291.
by tptacek 2mo ago
Paywalled articles with no workaround are actually off topic on HN, for whatever that's worth to you.
292.
by tptacek 2mo ago
Yes, I brought public libraries into this conversation, because they daily destroy hundreds of thousands of books, most of them without any professional evaluation whatsoever. I don't have a problem with this, because I understand a li
293.
by tptacek 2mo ago
Right: the scale matters, which is why it's very weird to take AI companies to task for something the public library system does on a far greater scale. And, in fact, the AI companies do have to do this: they're required by law
294.
by tptacek 2mo ago
Right, and what happens to those boxes from old estates are that they get put into dumpsters. The only difference here are: * It's happening on a much smaller scale * They're actually digitizing the books before they destroy them
295.
by tptacek 2mo ago
I don't even think ownership rights are the principal component of this situation. It's true that in a different copyright regime, Anthropic could simply publish an archive of every book they scanned (and I think they likely would
296.
by tptacek 2mo ago
I'd love to see the cite for people experiencing cognitive atrophy and measured IQ loss from using AI.
297.
by tptacek 2mo ago
What comparison? I'm talking about libraries as they actually exist and you're talking about what you think libraries should be doing. I'm arguing positively, and you're arguing normatively. I'm not "anti-acade
298.
by tptacek 2mo ago
At this point I believe you're just sort of making up a fantasy of what you think a public library should do, not what they actually do.
299.
by tptacek 2mo ago
Obviously that's not true. Newark is literally telling people to talk all their old rare books to thrift stores, which will immediately throw them in dumpsters.
300.
by tptacek 2mo ago
It's in the 404 story.

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