InfinityByTen (u/InfinityByTen)

InfinityByTen commented on Streaming services are driving viewers back to piracy theguardian.com/film/2025... · Posted by u/nemoniac

InfinityByTen · 14 days ago

One thing that is becoming off-putting is not just the entshitification, but the price creep I've been feeling. I've been on Spotify for over 8 years now, and deliberately paying the cost in my resident country (while I could very well get a subscription in another, which is a lot of my peers actually do). But just today morning, I got the notification, that the price will increase by another 10% which is after a 10% increase only last year (or was it this year, I forget).

I get the inflation and all that, but honestly, I don't want to fund a business that is either squandering money or not growing, by paying more to it. And I have to admit, it is not getting any better either. The AI generated/ drone music slop is probably an industry issue, but the recommendation algorithm hasn't been able to work out that it isn't my taste.

InfinityByTen commented on The Rise of Ritual Features: Why Platforms Are Adding Daily Puzzle Games productpickle.online/2025... · Posted by u/pkancharla

InfinityByTen · 21 days ago

I would be curious to search up how did puzzles make it into newspapers and magazines back in the day. I have a hunch we are just repeating the same cycle again, only the platform changed :)

InfinityByTen · 21 days ago

And just like that, I decided to ask perplexity about this, since AI is the talk of the town

> For example, during wartime or economic uncertainty, puzzles like crosswords were promoted as a way to "escape the woes of the news pages," with editors explicitly noting that readers needed diversions during stressful times. This strategy proved effective: as readers grew to expect puzzles, newspapers benefited from increased sales and more consistent readership, which in turn attracted more advertisers.

We are escaping the woes of AI and radicalization, I guess..

InfinityByTen commented on The Rise of Ritual Features: Why Platforms Are Adding Daily Puzzle Games productpickle.online/2025... · Posted by u/pkancharla

InfinityByTen · 21 days ago

I would be curious to search up how did puzzles make it into newspapers and magazines back in the day. I have a hunch we are just repeating the same cycle again, only the platform changed :)

InfinityByTen commented on Things that helped me get out of the AI 10x engineer imposter syndrome colton.dev/blog/curing-yo... · Posted by u/coltonv

mgfist · 24 days ago

My biggest takeaway from using AI is that

(1) for my day job, it doesn't make me super productive with creation, but it does help with discovery, learning, getting myself unstuck, and writing tedious code.

(2) however, the biggest unlock is it makes working on side projects __immensely__ easier. Before AI I was always too tired to spend significant time on side projects. Now, I can see my ideas come to life (albeit with shittier code), with much less mental effort. I also get to improve my AI engineering skills without the constraint of deadlines, data privacy, tool constraints etc..

InfinityByTen · 23 days ago

If my work involves doing a bit of tooling and improve the testing and documenting them, I find myself having much lesser resistance and I'm rather happy to give it off to an AI agent.

I haven't begun doing side projects or projects for self, yet. But I did go down the road of finding out what would be needed to do something I wished existed. It was much easier to explore and understand the components and I might have a decent chance at a prototype.

The alternative to this would have been to ask people around or formulate extensively researched questions for online forums, where I'd expect to get half cryptic answers (and a jibe at my ignorance every now and then) at a pace that I would take years before I had something ready.

I see the point for AI as a prototyping and brainstorming tool. But I doubt we are at a point where I would be comfortable pushing changes to a production environment without giving 3x the effort in reviewing. Since there's a chance of the system hallucinating, I have a genuine fear that it would seem accurate, but what it would do is something really really stupid.

InfinityByTen commented on LLM Inevitabilism tomrenner.com/posts/llm-i... · Posted by u/SwoopsFromAbove

chadcmulligan · a month ago

There's an ISP in Australia that markets themselves as their call centre is in Australia, I imagine businesses will do the same with AI - we have real people you can talk to, the market will decide I suppose. Given the current state of AI, there's no way I'd deal with a company where I couldn't talk to a person.

InfinityByTen · a month ago

The issue I have with market drivers is that, it is heavily influenced by the politics of a region and how strong is the lobby/influence from the big corps to push for "cost efficient" solutions. And that it can continue, till something really really bad and catastrophic happens, an inflection point of sorts (and is not easily covered up).

InfinityByTen commented on LLM Inevitabilism tomrenner.com/posts/llm-i... · Posted by u/SwoopsFromAbove

teiferer · a month ago

As long as you view LLM as just a tool to do some mostly-mechanical changes to some codebase, you are missing the big picture which the article is about.

What do LLMs mean for your mom? For society? For the future world view of your kids? Nobody cares about library refactoring.

InfinityByTen · a month ago

A lot of people are missing this point. It's not about what it can do today. It's about what all you're promised it can do and then be sold to you like there's no alternative; and no one really knows if it will be able to do it or what all non-KPI functions are lost because AI is the only way ahead.

Having used a customer service, I just happen to know that a smarter and a better chat-bot for a bog-standard service request (like a road-side car breakdown) isn't the solution for a better experience.

But now, since a chat bot is cheaper to run, the discussion in the service provider HQ will be about which chat-bot technology to migrate to because user research says it provides for an overall better UX. No one remembers what it is to talk to a human.

InfinityByTen commented on New method for creating large 3D models of urban areas is faster and cheaper techxplore.com/news/2025-... · Posted by u/PaulHoule

rurban · 3 months ago

Paper for free at https://arxiv.org/abs/2405.11021

InfinityByTen · 3 months ago

I have to admit that I've not been in academia for nearly a decade, but it's my first seeing a CRediT authorship contribution statement in a paper. You learn everyday..

InfinityByTen commented on Notation as a Tool of Thought (1979) jsoftware.com/papers/tot.... · Posted by u/susam

tossandthrow · 4 months ago

This feels like the types programming vs. none typed programming.

There are efforts in math to build "enterprise" reasoning systems. For these it makes sense to have a universal notation system (Lean, Coq, the likes).

But for a personal exploration, it might be better to just jam in whatever.

My personal strife in this space is more on teaching: Taking algebra classes, etc. where the teacher is not consistent nor honest about the personal decision and preference they have on notation - I became significantly better at math when I started studying type theory and theory of mechanical proofs.

InfinityByTen · 4 months ago

I have to admit that consistency and clarity of thought are often not implied just by the choice of notation and have not seen many books and professors putting effort to emphasize on its importance or even introducing it formally. I've seen cases where people use fancy notation to document topics than how they think about it. It drives me nuts, because the way you tell the story, you hide a lot how you arrived there.

This is why I picked so well on the exposition by Terry Tao. It shows how much clarity of thought he has that he understands the importance of notation.

InfinityByTen commented on Notation as a Tool of Thought (1979) jsoftware.com/papers/tot.... · Posted by u/susam

InfinityByTen · 4 months ago

> Nevertheless, mathematical notation has serious deficiencies. In particular, it lacks universality, and must be interpreted differently according to the topic, according to the author, and even according to the immediate context.

I personally disagree to the premise of this paper.

I think notation that is separated from visualization and ergonomics of the problem has a high cost. Some academics prefer a notation that hides away a lot of the complexity which can potentially result in "Eureka" realizations, wild equivalences and the like. In some cases, however, it can be obfuscating and be prone to introducing errors. Yet, it's a important tool in communicating a train of thought.

In my opinion, having one standard notation for any domain/ closely related domains is quite stifling of creative, artistic or explorative side of reasoning and problem solving.

Also, here's an excellent exposition about notation by none other than Terry Tao https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23911903

InfinityByTen commented on Synology Lost the Plot with Hard Drive Locking Move servethehome.com/synology... · Posted by u/motiejus

asdswe · 4 months ago

I can hardly see the point for devices like this. If you are tech-savvy enough to host your own NAS locally, you might as well build your own NAS and install whatever user-friendly OS (Unraid, OpenMediaVault as an example) you wish. No vendor-lock in whatsoever that way. If you arent tech savvy enough, then you should probably use cloud storage anyway.

InfinityByTen · 4 months ago

Getting a machine and setting it up for local usage as storage accessible over your home network is very different from having to install bunch of duct taped software and hoping it reliably works all the time without fail are two very different things.

I'm a full time dev and even having my home assistant breaking every time I think of upgrading it, is annoyance enough. My home lights and what not are down for two hours and I'm mostly installing HA from scratch and recovering from the backup that I've started to take since the last collapse.

A NAS is a way more critical device and I don't want to lose my data or needing to spend 2 weeks recovering data under an anxiety attack because I hastily did one upgrade.