_thisdot (u/_thisdot)

_thisdot commented on Anna's Archive: An Update from the Team annas-archive.org/blog/an... · Posted by u/jerheinze

It is neither humorous nor strange because that formulation omits authors.

How many authors who write the books in Anna's archive are happy about it?

I personally am pro Anna's archive (and sci-hub, etc) because I believe it benefits society to have better-read citizens. That said, I have some misgivings, because under our current system, there are issues with law and remuneration.

_thisdot · 5 days ago

I know one popular author who doesn't care: Brandon Sanderson. In addition he makes it possible to buy DRM free ebooks from his website.

In his words: “My experience has been that readers want to support things they like … But if they are at a point in their lives where they can’t, then it’s better to let them read the stories they want … and let them support artists when they’re capable of it. So I am a big fan of giving away books for free.”

Source: https://www.jotdown.es/2016/12/brandon-sanderson-i-want-to-s...

_thisdot commented on Who has the fastest F1 website (2021) jakearchibald.com/2021/f1... · Posted by u/tosh

cybrjoe · a month ago

This seems reductionist. There's plenty of other reasons people are F1 fans: the spectacle, the wealth, the prestige. While speed is certainly a draw for a lot of fans, speed can be at odds with the some of these other traits. For instance I took my son to qualifying in Miami, and while we both thoroughly enjoyed it, qualifying is quite short, and not nearly as exciting as watching it on TV. My son's first comment was: they don't seem as fast in person.

We ended up kicking around the track for a few hours taking in all the sights and experiences and he enjoyed that a lot more.

I guess my comment is, speed is important, sure, but don't give me a plaintext website either. There's a balance between speed and entertainment value.

_thisdot · a month ago

I thought F1 was supposed to look a lot faster in person. The cars going at 300kmph don't look so fast on a screen because the camera stabilisation. Someone who makes drones on YouTube collaborated with RedBull to shoot Max Verstappen with a drone at those speeds. And Max was impressed by the perception of speed from the drone footage compared to regular TV broadcast

Link to YouTube video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9pEqyr_uT-k

_thisdot commented on Cmdk – CD anywhere and open anything in your terminal github.com/mieubrisse/cmd... · Posted by u/mieubrisse

fingerlocks · 2 months ago

> Then again, if you do work in the terminal, why do you navigate to the working directory via the UI Finder?

This right-click terminal complaint comes up all the time here and Reddit. Always thought it was so weird.

But then the other day I wasted an hour of my life digging through Microsoft Teams APIs trying to figure out if I could hack up a way to pipe a file directly to a chat and avoid using Finder.

And then it hit me: after I did the whole cumbersome drag-file-to-chat dance, I wanted to get the terminal path back to the file. and it would be really handy if that was a one or two click thing.

So yeah I guess if you’re forced to use some bullshit software like Teams, that feature makes sense.

_thisdot · 2 months ago

Not sure if this helps. But you can copy a file and paste it in your terminal for the path to appear.

_thisdot commented on The Rise of Whatever eev.ee/blog/2025/07/03/th... · Posted by u/cratermoon

Cthulhu_ · 2 months ago

You don't have to anyway, a syntax error will show up on your screen pretty much immediately.

_thisdot · 2 months ago

Which I'd like to avoid as early as possible

_thisdot commented on The Rise of Whatever eev.ee/blog/2025/07/03/th... · Posted by u/cratermoon

elric · 2 months ago

The cognitive load of typing two quotes? Golly. That term is starting to take on "whatever" meaning, apparently.

_thisdot · 2 months ago

The cognitive load of keeping track of all the open delimiters.

In my perceived experience, every time a delimiter is opened, it automatically closes, allowing you to move away from it without thinking.

Even in places where this is not available (Slack, comment boxes, etc.), I close the delimiter as soon as I open it

_thisdot commented on The Rise of Whatever eev.ee/blog/2025/07/03/th... · Posted by u/cratermoon

chrismorgan · 2 months ago

> Like, just to calibrate here: you know how some code editors will automatically fill in a right bracket or quote when you type a left one? You type " and the result is "|"? Yeah, that drives me up the wall. It saves no time whatsoever, and it’s wrong often enough that I waste time having to correct for it.

I have not yet figured out why anyone would choose this behaviour in a text editor. You have to press something to exit the delimited region anyway, whether that be an arrow key or the closing delimiter, so just… why did the first person even invent the idea, which just complicates things and also makes it harder to model the editor’s behaviour mentally? Were they a hunt-and-peck typist or something?

In theory, it helps keep your source valid syntax more of the time, which may help with syntax highlighting (especially of strings) and LSP/similar tooling. But it’s only more of the time: your source will still be invalid frequently, including when it gets things wrong and you have to relocate a delimiter. In practice, I don’t think it’s useful on that ground.

_thisdot · 2 months ago

I have this turned on in my code editors and Obsidian. The main advantage is reducing the cognitive load. You don’t have to double-check whether you remembered to close your string, bracket, or parenthesis — it’s just there.

_thisdot commented on Fakespot shuts down today after 9 years of detecting fake product reviews blog.truestar.pro/fakespo... · Posted by u/doppio19

varispeed · 2 months ago

Some company said they know where I live and they will pay me a visit if I don't remove the bad review (product was dangerous). That was on Amazon.

_thisdot · 2 months ago

Do they know where we live? Aren't orders fulfilled by Amazon?

_thisdot commented on Fakespot shuts down today after 9 years of detecting fake product reviews blog.truestar.pro/fakespo... · Posted by u/doppio19

dns_snek · 2 months ago

> At least for what I buy from aliexpress, it hasn’t been infiltrated by fake reviews.

Aliexpress just fake it themselves. Search for anything, sort by the number of orders, open the product page for the first result.

Next to the number of sales there's going to be a tooltip saying "Sales and ratings are calculated based on all identical products from the platform."

Under reviews there's going to be a message saying "The reviews displayed are from various sellers for similar product in AliExpress."

In other words, they might as well say that these numbers and reviews have absolutely no relation to the specific product you're thinking about buying, they're just there to increase your confidence.

_thisdot · 2 months ago

I’ve never bought from AliExpress, but I’m pretty sure everyone does this. Customers are mostly looking for product reviews, not reviews on sellers. For example, take a mouse from Logitech. Even if five sellers sell the product, it’s better to show product reviews for every item. Isn’t that so?

_thisdot commented on Left-Pad (2024) azerkoculu.com/posts/left... · Posted by u/oeitho

_thisdot · 2 months ago

Relevant discussion from the time left-pad incident happened

- https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11349870

_thisdot commented on Chatbots are replacing Google's search, devastating traffic for some publishers wsj.com/tech/ai/google-ai... · Posted by u/jaredwiener

dataviz1000 · 2 months ago

Take it to the next level, integrate the chatbot into a browser extension side panel. Let people navigate to websites that contain the information.

This will work. It will allow the chatbot to provide up to the minute data and information from the source. It will allow the user to maintain context -- like a popup dialog allows the user to maintain visual context. And, it will incentivize content creators to curate and provide information and data as people will be visiting their websites.

If anyone thinks this might be a good idea also, I've already laid down the foundation approaching a browser extension side panel as a framework like Electron or Playwright and did the grunt work. [0]

I put the VSCode IPC and other core libraries into this project. The IPC is important because a browser extension with this use case requires looking at a browser as a distributed system of javascript processes that communicate a a dozen different ways

> Environments: Node.js main process, Node.js child process, Node.js worker thread, browser main thread (window), iframe, dedicated Web Worker, Shared Worker, Service Worker, AudioWorklet.

> Communication: fetch/XMLHttpRequest, WebSocket, RTCDataChannel, EventSource, BroadcastChannel, SharedArrayBuffer + Atomics, localStorage storage events, MessageChannel/MessagePort, postMessage/onmessage, Worker.postMessage/worker.onmessage, parentPort.postMessage/parentPort.on('message'), ChildProcess.send/process.on('message'), stdin/stdout streams.

and VSCode provides a protocol interface with only `onMessage` and `send` so I can define my own that are not provided creating a consistent API for communication.

Regardless, I have it working but it needs to be completely rewritten.

[0]https://github.com/adam-s/doomberg-terminal

_thisdot · 2 months ago

This is already a thing with Gemini in Chrome[0].

The Browser Company’s new browser, Dia[1], is supposedly another similar product

[0] = https://gemini.google/overview/gemini-in-chrome/?hl=en

[1] = https://www.diabrowser.com/