skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> You'll probably read this article, briefly consider the damage junk info has done to you, and then return to aimlessly scrolling Twitter.

Great article but sadly unlikely to change any outcome so you wonder if the article itself qualifies as junk info or digital defeatism

Case in point, TikTok is still alive and well: https://www.gurwinder.blog/p/tiktok-may-be-a-chinese-bio-wea...
Statutory law is no exception, it is not only common law which is inconsistent.

Laws are not logical constructs, they are political constructs, why expect logic from them.

Laws are passed or repealed because it is popular or politically advantageous to do so, not necessarily because it is moral or common sense.

On top of that politicians pass stupid legislation without understanding what they are doing all the time, the infamous Indiana pi bill is a simple example, it almost became law and was stopped by sheer luck, a mathematics professor attending that day on a unrelated matter.

Laws are conflicting, confusing, ambiguous and misleading most of the time, that is expected, the legislating them is a messy process. The third arm of any government judiciary sole purpose is to handle this mess.

---

P.S. I cannot say whether continental legal systems are more robust, but perhaps healthier democracy results in better laws.

All democracies are flawed, U.S. democracy is not particularly healthy, it is not say an proportional multi-party representative system with fair distribution of power amongst all citizens.

From the founding it has been a series of compromises, the history is littered with representation fights such as for suffrage, Jim crow and voting rights, slavery, electoral college, number of states or the filibuster or anti Chinese laws and so on and on.

Don't get me wrong last 250 years have been incredible progress and great leaders put their lives down to make it better, hopefully it will be even better in the future, the struggles do show in the laws it is able to pass, repeal or update.
For anyone playing in Safari on a Mac—there seems to be something about games which capture the mouse that makes the cursor really slow. But holding down the left mouse button will bring it back to a normal speed.
Coincidence? I was just on a walk and a musical savvy neighbor suggested this.
My note on such things https://win-vector.com/2019/08/06/lord-kelvin-data-scientist...
I hope the fact that I feel I wasted my time reading this article means I'm already on the right track.
That's a valid point. It might be more about using the right tool for the task. For example, using tmux for persistent terminal windows can help. A setup where the main compilation terminal (subFloat) and smaller terminal instances for chat/irssi/nmpc (mS) run within a tmux session ensures persistence even if foot crashes (or is killed for applying configuration updates) as noted in the post ^_^
this is a [potentially] misleading comment; it should clarify that the senses like smell are just defenses, also known as a survival mechanism, and ... I'll stop :)
Lmao I love this song. Cool site!

https://www.udio.com/songs/tCghV579RUboW8BGyxnUNk
Even though other tools might be "better" than Pandas, it's ubiquity is why I suggest it.

The ability to run coffee 100-1000x faster with this is just icing on the cake.

(I've run through this with most of my Pandas training material and it just works with no code changes.)
May I suggest adding a subdomain? Making the full domain something like "mail.com.sketchylinkasdf.com"
I would love to see the approach extended to explain the special relativistic aspects of electromagnetism that, as I understand, links electric and magnetic fields, capacitance and inductance, etc. like space and time coordinates. There seems very limited material available on the same on the Internet.
Entry/Exit System
> TikTok isn't useful

If information is increasingly hyper-abundant and attention is not, we must increasingly learn to value high bandwidth / compressed communication. Like TikTok.

Yeah, most of the content is unproductive attention bait, but that's true of any medium. Yeah, some information compresses poorly and really does require irreducible minutes or pages. However, I've seen a 10 second TikTok monkey-see-monkey-do beat a 10 page instruction manual full of diagrams and paragraphs at effectively instructing newbies who always struggled with cable assemblies -- until they didn't, because they had TikTok.
I was able to log into my account that I was locked out of because of this. Trying to add a FIDO token to my account has become impossible, as Google simply doesn’t recognize it for future logins. Now I’ve been forced to use a passkey, the only 2FA that works for me now, to secure my account because Google had broken my FIDO tokens that were working for years and years. The only way I could login to remove those was via a YouTube verification.

I’m so sick of Google, I only keep this account because it was formerly my main email, so I don’t want anyone stealing my username later.
I agree and I think if there are any hazards to modern information landscape it's kind of 2 fold (that I can think of) 1) the brain likes simple generalized information/models more than specific information and 2) the brain likes information that confirms our existing beliefs more than staying in a gray area where it's not sure what information is true or not.

Regarding first one I think one of the main challenges will be finding which general explanations are true or not. This can be anything from cultural things like gender discussions to conspiracy theories to scientific theories. If there are generalized models that explain a lot of phenomena, the brain likes those, but at the same time they can also take the place for when empirical evidence should have been gathered (that doesn't fit with the general model), and so in that sense they can be hazardous. And models that already have stood up to a lot of empirical data are especially hazardous because they have already proven themselves to some extent which means there's even less incentive to gather empirical data. Or at least that's my current (maybe hazardous) general view.

I also don't think we should give up on generalized models because they are so powerful and useful, but it's definitely a challenge in todays climate because they get so many clicks and they are very satisfying to know.
When you strip away some of the more pretentious language, this article isn't really saying anything that extraordinary. If you just swap the phrase "information" with "content", i.e. "addiction to useless content", it becomes clear that the article is really just talking about the dangers of doomscrolling.

At best, it's a useful reminder that doomscrolling happens not only on Instagram and YouTube, but also on "respectable" sites like the NYT, Hacker News, and Wikipedia, and that does resonate with me. But I don't see anything else that the author is really adding to the large corpus of discussion on doomscrolling and Internet addiciton.
During college I had a job wirewrapping circuit boards and putting printed circuit boards together. Most people would make a rat's nest out of the wiring, but I would lay everything out in a pattern. With a pattern, it's much easier to spot errors.
Exceptional parties on this and the other village islands of San Blas. The Kuna are a short and welcoming people. Fishing (some of them can free dive to great depths), coconuts, cocaine, and tourism are their income.

Though communities exist along the cost and in Panamá, these 300 or so small islands - the Kuna Yala - are their homeland. All are mere meters above sea level. Their loss will be the eventual end of the Kuna, I fear.
This is so fucking sweet as cool & great. It's f-ing wild these days that there are huge huge throughout monster chips of various sorts. But the consumer thing that is consistently high bandwidth is display output & everything else gets shorted. Finding super cheap (<$10) HDMI to USB adapter chip is a glorious way to take the (HDMI) interface that by convention is expected & necessary even on cheap cheap cheap chips & using that for far more glorious purposes.

I'm so so so disappointed by today. Chips are fucking terrible. Cortex A53 is still the dominant thing. Some A7 and A55 on SBC (also reaching near a decade old) just a narrow narrow range, few hopes in evolution. On fpga there are some interesting new emergents but again any decent serdes is highly restricted. The low end battle feels forever stalled out. Trying to use HDMI (or ideally even better dispalyport which actually genuinely supports sideways use in cool ways) feels like a way to take the extremely meanspirited consumerized marketplace of chip & liberate them from theow-bandwidth use cases they have been cruelly imprisoned in on. We could be doing so much better; the multicore war has gotten somewhere but trying to make the throughput war show progress has been much harder. This is an interesting good opener. For some much lower classes of devices. Hell yeah.
DDG is not much better than Google as I understand. I heard they've been caught selling info.

This is my usage pattern:

1. Main - Home computer: Whooogle running on a RPi3 (it uses SearXNG)
2. Phone - Bing/SearXNG: Unfortunately the convenience of an app still gets me sometimes, and with GPT-4 Copilot, Bing is sometimes an option I use.
3. Work - Brave Search (given I cant use my Whooogle). Generally performs well but putting my trust in their "we dont track you or sell your info". Which given their crypto ties, ads within the browser (new tab etc.) doesnt make me feel 100% confident.
Depends on your relationship with your manager. I get a coffee with mine at least once a day if we're in the office together, usually lunch too, and also sit next to him, so if we did 1:1s they'd just be redundant.

Grabbing coffee is of course an informal 1:1 anyway, but you don't need to formalise it unless your manager struggles to make time for you.
Interviewed for a dream job (British Antarctic Survey) in 1982. Failed a 20 line "write pythagoras in Fortran or Pascal" test in front of the selection committee.

I was deeply unsettled by this. Made me realize that sometimes what the interviewer is doing, is making you wake up to your own lack of awareness. I must have been a complete prick in the interview. I shudder to think about it to this day.
It did but it was not enabled by default IIRC. Also fun fact the "crosshair" in original Quake was limited to only the character "+" from the character set. QuakeWorld later introduced a "crosshair 2" which was a slightly more complicated bitmap that you could change the color of.
Slightly tangential - there's this quote I've been thinking of: "The ability to play chess is the sign of a gentleman. The ability to play chess well is the sign of a wasted life."

On one hand, chess is pretty well regarded. On the other, it's pretty memorization heavy - not just openings, but end game strategies and patterns in general. It takes up brain space.

I've been trying to frame it in terms of enjoyment. I see a lot of people strive for higher ELOs, but I sometimes miss the silliness of low triple digit ELO blitz.
better quality than I was expecting
>Common types of junk info include gossip, trivia, clickbait, hackery, marketing, churnalism, and babble.

Seems to me that huge percentages of almost all cultures have indulged full-time in these endeavors long before media came along.
Hey, the target bag has all of my jumper wires for my development boards! :)

All jokes aside, I appreciate the simple and actionable feedback.
Great post!
The sandboxing and pluggability of UDFs are key. Databend now supports Python, JavaScript, and WebAssembly to simplify data processing.

[1] Embedded UDFs: https://docs.databend.com/guides/query/udf#embedded-udfs

[2] https://x.com/DatabendLabs/status/1796830863344463884
Making of: https://phoboslab.org/log/2021/09/q1k3-making-of
That would be better credited to Heaviside, wouldn't it?
Oh, I see. That's a good point. But I don't think hu3's comment was suggesting there's only two options, just illustrating some possible margins to describe the landscape.

Maybe stavros' was hallucinating that strawman reduction in there, is what I think. Like you don't have to say it's a false dichotomy unless that's the only way you read it. The existence of something between the margins, should be obvious. Anyway, haha! :)
One year and counting: Male birth control study reaches milestone
I agree with this analysis. Another important factor is: How likely will this code actually be used and drive business value?

If very likely, then you should invest in making the code high-quality. If unlikely, then you should half-ass the code strategically
Ask yourself: Will the amount of work it takes to "do this right" increase over time? (And by how much?)

I drew some quick placeholder art for a game I'm working on for fun. One day I might sit down and draw some good art, but not today. When the day finally comes to finish the art, the difficulty of creating that art will be no greater than it is now. In fact, with improving art tools, it may be easier to do later.

On the other hand, if I'm not quite happy with my database scheme and I want to change it, I can spend a day on it now, or I can spend--based on my experience--months on it in the future. In fact, there's a good chance if I don't fix the database schema now, it will never be done.
Does anyone know where I can buy this or a similar highly transparent but diffusing material?
Key points (summarized):

> You're drowning in low-quality, pointless content designed to hijack your attention. It's making you distracted, confused, and unable to think straight.

> Be mindful of what you consume. Spend more time creating, less mindlessly scrolling.

> Your mind deserves better than the junk clogging your feed. Cut it out before it rots your brain.

That's literally it. I guess the piece is trying to be ironic by using the same style of junk information that it's telling us to watch out for?
If you're even talking about virtual RAM, you're already in SoC territory. And the concept of an "application" on a microcontroller is foreign to me. I still don't get it.
apparently this is finally landing sometime in the next 7 months. exciting! :)
I've been saying this for awhile, glad I'm not alone
Encryption at Rest: Whose Threat Model Is It Anyway?
If this worries you, then please, I urge you to stay away from TVTropes. If you've ever visited you'll understand my warning; but then it's likely too late for you.
Glucose syrup or honey or any liquid other than maybe accidentally splashing it with water isn't exactly "casual viewing", and water presumably won't work since it's a "superhydrophobic surface".

But yeah, it's not a security tool.
Nintendo kind of did this back in the day with the e-Reader accessory for the Game Boy Advance. It used dot-based "barcodes" to encode NES games onto cards that you scanned and subsequently played from RAM. I imagine that some deft compression and the ARM Thumb instruction set came especially in handy here.
would love to connect https://ellispinsky.com/
You could argue that in a sense the customer of a teaching institution is not a student, but a future employer who uses the diploma or grades as valuable information source.
> I bristle a little bit at the characterization of "antivax, sovereign citizen, fear of radio frequencies, or extreme religion" as intellectual abuse.

Oh, bristle away! I accept I am being contentious. But I grew up with several friends (even at a mainstream school) whose parents were in these categories (not so much fear of RF, that’s newer).

Some of this stuff takes a hell of a lot of unpicking in later life; I know two adults who grew up in a common-enough minority religion who consider what they were taught to think to be profoundly damaging to their long-term intellectual, social and mental wellbeing.

To pick up on one thing to agree with: I think it’s enormously important for children to have exposure to professional teachers. To people who know how teaching works, how to adapt it, how to moderate and meta-moderate learning.
We have weekly 1:1 and I just say that I have nothing to say oftenly. Depends on you manager, but there is nothing wrong with that. A week is not a long period of time.
Wow, the open-source project is userful. Thanks for sharing.
I’d argue that by definition, code producing value is good code. It may not be the best, but it has to be at least good.

Almost everything else about code is subjective, but value is objective.
It doesn't get said enough that unit-tests are not the ultimate in good code. There's a lot of shitty code with unit-tests, and there's a lot of really good code with no tests.
Holy shit thats creepy AF
Climate Game
Browser-based simulation of climate policy
> who claims the internet is making us stupid.

You have to be delusional to think otherwise. Modern web absolutely makes us more stupid on average. I’m looking forward to studies in 10 years about long term exposure effects of junk platforms like TikTok and YouTube shorts.

> So what if someone spends a ton of time consuming information you don’t think is useful?

Because we don’t live in a vacuum? I don’t want to be around erratic, constantly outraged and disinformation fed people. And before you say “well, you don’t have to”, keep in mind that those people hold as much voting power as you, possibly more, because hordes of fanatic will eat whatever shit their influencer overlords will tell them.

> Get off your intellectual high horse and go for a walk.

What exactly makes you so outraged about the article?
> in the opinion of Brendan W Case, someone deeply embedded within a particular Christian PoV who prolifictly writes about such things

He’s talking about the results of a Harvard study. When Harvard studies support a Christian viewpoint, Christians are going to write about the findings. What’s your point?

> Another of Brendan's opinions, or one of your own then?

No, my personal opinion. Compared to Mormons secular Americans are just awful. I don’t even have a dog in that hunt, I’m from a Muslim country. But having seen the school system here I’m not surprised. It’s just “me, me, me, do what you want, be who you want to be.”
Sometimes, in the interest of efficiency, you only use half your horsepower.
Why Google's AI Overviews gets things wrong
> convincing simulations of conscious thought entirely via predicting language tokens means something profound about the nature of language itself.

> there's also something big about us waiting there under the surface.

I don't believe so. In "The Origins of Knowledge and Imagination" by Jacob Brownoski, he argues that human language have four unique characteristics:

- We can separate information (data of what being described) from emotional content (how we're supposed to react). There's no longer a bijection between communication and action.

- We can extend the time reference of the communication content. We talk about the past, we plan for the future.

- We can refer to ourselves. So we examine what we've done and iterate over it until we fix the errors. We can see ourselves doing the action without actually doing it.

- We can rearrange units of languages to have different meanings. The same words can have different meanings based on their order. So meaning depends not only on the words, but their sequence. And that goes from words to phrases to sequence of dialogs.

The fourth point is the most important. LLMs by predicting languages tokens can give use the most common order for a particular context. And because we don't have that many words, their orders can be extracted from books and other written content. But then they fail for the higher levels, mostly because that's when everything get unique.

As for the third point, by observing ourselves, our communication is constantly being based on reality, which grounds it in truth. And because we can extend the reference it's based on, that leads us to observe changes and model laws. The first point allows us to separate what things are from what we should do or feel based on their existence and absence.

Instead of the LLMs fooling us, it's more us fooling ourselves, because by recognizing meaning in sentences, we try to extract meanings for longer sequences of text where there aren't any. Why? Because there is no "I" that has done the job of extracting information and using language to transmit it (while still cognizant of the imperfection of natural languages). LLMs are lossy compressions of ideas. Only the smallest survives and then it generates much more false ones.
Just scan them over the course of a few months, spending a couple of hours a day.

If your notes are anything like mine there might be arrows, drawings or text effects like underlines and circling of words that you'd want to conserve.

You can later ocr the whole thing.
I'm sorry I think this is just so sad & lowly. A portability layer for old code seems like such a lowly sad objective, such an incredibly sad unambitious target. I get the want, but letting such a small world dominate would be horrific. It's pathetically unambitious & small.

Wasm has not allowed actual inter-language operation at any serious scale. When we use code, it's basically bundled in, and maybe maybe maybe rust can pull in some c code because of it's own ffi, but that's as much as you get. That will never ever lead to wasm being a broad ecosystem. Everything will be its own distinct thing forever, and that's not a web assembly module if it so drastically fails to get anywhere near any modularity asks.

These small minded asks & desires should not outshadow real ambition. For a practical view of what we should be hoping for, the famous Steve Sanderson has a demonof three-way language interop using wasi preview2 that would not in any way be remotely conceivable in preview1. Spare us from the retrogressives that argue the shallow short preview1 would be anywhere near enough of a stopping point; that would be absurd. https://youtu.be/p9taQkF24Fs
Nice. This is a technique you learn in Scouting for rolling up ropes too.
Got a (hopefully false-positive) virus alert on Windows 11 from Defender:

> Trojan:Win32/Sabsik.FL.A!ml

> Details: This program is dangerous and executes commands from an attacker.

Maybe due to UPX?
A nice side effect of this is a greater selection of non-copyright-able music.

At least, that's how the USA courts have ruled so far.
CEOs could easily be replaced with AI, experts argue
In fact, I say Rust didn't go far enough.

https://gavinhoward.com/2024/05/what-rust-got-wrong-on-forma...
Yep, lol nothing to stop criminals from encrypting the file themselves and sending it across lol theirs hundreds of unhacked encryptions, all the end users need to do is share the passwords outside the spied upon platforms, like this doesn't solve any issues it just strips freedoms from the non-criminals.

Shit criminals will just meet and swap usb drives lol, like i don't get how this solves the crime issue. This is like banning monero or crypto because its used illegally.. meanwhile CP and other crimes have used Euro and USD paper money for long before crypto lol but yet "crypto seems shady" is enough reason to point at it as the reason crime exists lol.
The Ryzen AI 300 Series for Mobile: Zen 5 with RDNA 3.5, & XDNA2 NPU with 50TOPS
> They handle the 80% case where compile-time safety, destructive moves, etc make things easy for the developer but then significantly worsen the complexity, and therefore safety, of the other 20%.

Thankfully we have actual data on this, not just random numbers, and no, this is not the case in practice.
For me, what usually happens is that I try to look for music to get into the zone when writing code, but then see an interesting video on the homepage (they’re usually educational like stuff from Veritasium or Wendover) and get sucked into watching something that is useful in some sense, but that I don’t have time for.

I’m already using Sponsorblock and added DeArrow for my YouTube watching experience, and am hoping the latter will cut down on my behavior.
That's more like sending an interstellar threat to the stars. Beware of earth, it is full of a waring race of people.