JD557 (u/JD557) - Readit News

JD557 commented on Coding Font Selection 'Tournament' daringfireball.net/linked... · Posted by u/tosh

iamkoch · 8 months ago

Fira Code, which I've been using for years anyway! I found disproportionate glee in picking my usual font

JD557 · 8 months ago

Same.

I was surprised that both Fira Code and Fira Mono were options, that was a bit cheeky.

JD557 commented on New York Times Tech Guild goes on strike washingtonpost.com/style/... · Posted by u/ChrisArchitect

corndoge · 10 months ago

They're striking against return to office? I work from home and value it but it never would occur to me to strike for that. I view it as a privilege and not a right. Almost everyone in the world has to go on location for their jobs. I am curious why it is so important to NYT workers in particular that they would strike over it - is there something particularly bad about the location?

JD557 · 10 months ago

> I work from home and value it but it never would occur to me to strike for that.

I believe that the value from WFH varies a lot from person to person.

If you were working from the office before and the company changed to a WFH policy, you might see it as a nice to have. You already made some life choices to accommodate going to the office. Maybe you even go to the office anyway.

But, if you were hired when the company already had WFH, you probably made some life choices based on that (buying a house far away from the city, having kids, not buying a car,...). In that case, mandatory RTO is a complete disaster (especially with the housing crisis) and you pretty much have no option other than resigning.

I assume NYT was doing WFH since ~2020, so a lot of employees probably took decisions based on WFH, therefore the strikes.

JD557 commented on Origin of 'Daemon' in Computing takeourword.com/TOW146/pa... · Posted by u/wizerno

JD557 · 10 months ago

Unrelated to the word "daemon", but related to the article, I was a bit surprised by this assertion:

> Eventually, though, the theory of quantum mechanics showed why it wouldn't work.

I was familiar with the information theory arguments (the same presented in Wikipedia[1]). Is that why they mean here by "quantum mechanics" or is there another counterargument to Maxwell's daemon?

1: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maxwell's_demon#Criticism_an...

JD557 commented on Two never-before-seen tools, from same group, infect air-gapped devices arstechnica.com/security/... · Posted by u/lisper

vifon · a year ago

AFAIK it only worked with optical drives, not pendrives. I've spent hours trying to get this functionality on my pendrives back in the day, to no avail (thankfully!). It was on Windows XP, and Windows 98 needed external drivers to even use pendrives at all, so if such an attack vector existed, it must have been on Windows 2000 or Me (i.e between XP and 98), so an arguably very short time frame (if at all!).

JD557 · a year ago

I recall Disk Knight (https://www.lucadamico.dev/papers/malware_analysis/DiskKnigh...) working on Windows XP

I don't remember the whole details, but I believe it installed an autorun.inf file on all USB drives so that inserting the drive on another PC would install it automatically.

JD557 commented on Comfy, the 2D rust game engine, is now archived github.com/darthdeus/comf... · Posted by u/ladyanita22

olivermuty · a year ago

Development time is my guess

JD557 · a year ago

This. I assume it's a similar argument as the one presented in https://loglog.games/blog/leaving-rust-gamedev/

Edit: I just noticed that this article is also writen in the archival reason. I'll leave it here anyway for those that miss it.

JD557 commented on Notris: A Tetris clone for the PlayStation 1 github.com/jbreckmckye/no... · Posted by u/jbreckmckye

rgbrgb · a year ago

> Last year I got my hands on a rare, black PlayStation 1. This is called a Net Yaroze and is a special console that can play homebrew games as well as ordinary PSX titles. It was part of a special Sony project to get hobbyists and students into the games industry.

I wonder what the post-mortem on this initiative was like. Seems like they didn't pursue it in future consoles but dang it would be pretty cool if there was a hobbyist section of the PS5 store that anyone could put small games in.

JD557 · a year ago

> Seems like they didn't pursue it in future consoles

I don't think this is entirely true.

Sure, there was nothing like the Net Yaroze, but the PS2 came with Yabasic[1] on the demo disk and had a Linux distro[2], and the PS3 also had a Unix support[3].

While some of this might have been for tax benefits, I still think it fits in the spirit of Net Yaroze.

1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yabasic#PlayStation_2

2: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linux_for_PlayStation_2

3: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OtherOS

JD557 commented on iTerm2 and AI Hype Overload xeiaso.net/notes/2024/ai-... · Posted by u/todsacerdoti

delichon · a year ago

Example from earlier today. I wanted to know how to format a date as "06/04/1947", just like that with leading zeros. I can never remember the details of the complex Ruby `strftime` method, so I usually have to spelunk in the docs for the details. Instead I prompted an LLM with "format a Ruby date like '06/04/1947'" and it gave me the correct answer, faster than I could have found the doc page let alone decoded it.

Why the heck not use AI when it's better?

JD557 · a year ago

> Why the heck not use AI when it's better?

I think that, in its current iteration, it is not that easy to know.

I haven't tried GPT 4 (which I've heard is much better), but my experiences with 3.5 have been extremely frustrating and underwhelming. I absolutely hate when it starts making stuff up and I have to fix it via the traditional way, it just wasted my time!

I guess this boils down to personal preference, but so far I just prefer a good old Google search.

I was quite happy with copilot auto complete, though. Mostly because of how low friction it was.

JD557 commented on PHP Doesn't Suck Anymore developerjoy.co/blog/php-... · Posted by u/falcon_

JD557 · a year ago

One of the issues I have with "languages that don't suck anymore" is that, even after the language gets all the cool new features, you'll still end up having to use some libraries targeting old versions.

So you end up having to choose between stable libraries in the old style or experimental modern libraries.

While some features can be retrofitted to work with old code (e.g. Java 8's SAMs were smart a way for old libraries to support the new lambdas), in a lot of situations you'll have to wait years for the stable libraries to support the new features.

Having said that, it's nice to see PHP catching up. I haven't used it in a long time, but I like to check the changelog once in a while.

JD557 commented on Japan will no longer require floppy disks for submitting some official documents engadget.com/japan-will-n... · Posted by u/thunderbong

lukan · 2 years ago

What legal battles do you have to fight, to move apartements?

I remember, I had to file one paper from the landlord and my ID and that was it. Took 5 minutes.

JD557 · 2 years ago

I think you just need the Wohnungsgeberbestätigung from the landlord and fill the registration paperwork at the Bürgeramt (which, depending on your city, might be a bit hard to get an appointment), you might also need to take care of the TV bill stuff.

While not awful, comparing to Portugal, where I just need to register in a website an then wait to get a confirmation code by mail, it feels like going back to the stone age.

JD557 commented on Ask HN: How are you using ChatGPT for yourself? · Posted by u/jeanlucas

jimsimmons · 2 years ago

Don't use it.

I tried using it for coding but it made up APIs constantly or had subtle errors. I don't know what people mean when they say it works for them. I can see it help as an icebreaker though. It just helps me get in the mood sometimes.

Other factual stuff ex nutrition questions, health stuff, historic events etc it's quite useless.

I am an LLM skeptic. I think there're a lot of people who're claiming that they find it valuable just like crypto was claimed to be valuable

JD557 · 2 years ago

> I tried using it for coding but it made up APIs constantly or had subtle errors.

This has been my experience so far as well. I also find it very tiring to have to review all the iterations of the code.

I do find GitHub Copilot quite valuable at work, especially when it recommends one liners (they are easy to review, so I just feel like I'm writing faster).

To be fair to ChatGPT, on one of my recent experiment it actually said something along the lines of "you need to integrate with the library/API yourself", and it only started spewing garbage after I insisted to write the code. I see a lot of people online complaining that GPT is getting lazy, but I would rather have it lazy than wrong.