alanfalcon (u/alanfalcon)

alanfalcon commented on Hacking Moltbook wiz.io/blog/exposed-moltb... · Posted by u/galnagli

keiferski · a month ago

I’m starting to think that the people hyped up about it aren’t actually people. And the “borders” of the AI social network are broader than we thought.

alanfalcon · a month ago

There were certainly a great number of real people who got hyped up about the reports of it this weekend. The reports that went viral were generally sensationalized, naturally, and good at creating hype. So I don't see how this would even be in dispute, unless you do not participate in or even understand how social media sites work. (I do agree that the borders are broad, and that real human hype was boosted by self-perpetuating artificial hype.)

alanfalcon commented on Show HN: The text disappears when you screenshot it unscreenshottable.vercel.... · Posted by u/zikero

alanfalcon · 6 months ago

Not technically a screenshot, I guess, but trivially easy to do with software I had lying around all the same. https://media4.giphy.com/media/v1.Y2lkPTc5MGI3NjExYXloZ3Z0NT...

alanfalcon commented on We hacked Burger King: How auth bypass led to drive-thru audio surveillance bobdahacker.com/blog/rbi-... · Posted by u/BobDaHacker

gus_massa · 6 months ago

> Rating bathroom experiences: because everything needs a digital feedback loop

At least here in Argentina, clean bathrooms was a huge selling point in the 1990' for Burger King and McDonald's.

For example you can go to study to one of them with a few friends, and be there for hours because they have clean bathrooms, and from time to time one of the employees may come to offer coffee refill and ask if you want to buy something to eat with the coffee. [The free coffee refill changes from time to time. I'm not sure it's working now.]

alanfalcon · 6 months ago

Now my local Burger King (in Las Vegas, NV, USA) has a sign at each table telling you that you have 30 minutes to eat your food and get out before you get thrown out for loitering.

alanfalcon commented on “This telegram must be closely paraphrased before being communicated to anyone” history.stackexchange.com... · Posted by u/azeemba

alanfalcon · 7 months ago

What an interesting find!

Not that this specific quirk is covered in the novel, but a reading of Neal Stephenson's Cryptonomicon would certainly help make one understand the kind of necessary paranoia that would lead to this kind of (important!) protective measure.

alanfalcon commented on Itch.io seeks payment processors who work with with adult material rockpapershotgun.com/itch... · Posted by u/jfyi

praptak · 7 months ago

No, it doesn't solve the actual problem which is both: a) "conveniently pay for whatever is legal" and b) "have some recourse if someone takes my money and doesn't send me anything".

You may argue that current payment processors do a poor job at b) but they do an infinitely better job than crypto since it's a division by zero situation.

alanfalcon · 7 months ago

In fact there are cases where crypto makes it impossible for you to accept my money unless you send me the thing I'm paying for atomically.

But those are limited to purchasing things where ownership is also meaningfully controlled by crypto.

alanfalcon commented on Group of investors represented by YouTuber Perifractic buys Commodore amiga-news.de/en/news/AN-... · Posted by u/erickhill

palmfacehn · 9 months ago

Can someone briefly explain what the actual product will be? Not interested in going down a rabbit hole with a series of videos. I just want a straight to the point explanation.

alanfalcon · 9 months ago

That'll be revealed in episode 3.

(They do have Jeri Ellsworth and some OGs from Commodore signed up to be part of the team though, and seem to genuine love the brand and have nostalgia for the C64, so I have cautious optimism!)

alanfalcon commented on Bill Atkinson has died daringfireball.net/linked... · Posted by u/romanhn

bluedino · 9 months ago

> In fact the folks at PARC had never accomplished it, and they later told him they were amazed that he had done so.

Reminds me of the story where some company was making a new VGA card, and it was rumored a rival company had implemented a buffer of some sort in their card. When both cards came out the rival had either not actually implemented it or implemented a far simpler solution

alanfalcon · 9 months ago

An infamous Starcraft example also contains notes of a similar story where they were so humbled by a competitor's demo (and criticism that their own game was simply "Warcraft in space") that they went back and significantly overhauled their game.

Former Ion Storm employees later revealed that Dominion’s E3 1996 demo was pre-rendered, with actors pretending to play, not live gameplay.

alanfalcon commented on There Was a Texas Lottery Arbitrage bloomberg.com/opinion/art... · Posted by u/ioblomov

kerkeslager · a year ago

> I guess it might work if there is X number of prizes/money per roll of tickets.

In most cases, there is, which is part of why a huge percentage of scratchoff prizes are won by workers at the place that sells them. Most players will scratch and redeem their prizes right in front of you, so if you watch a certain number of scratches occur in a roll and you know the prize structure of the particular card, you can calculate how many non-winning scratches you need to see for the odds to be in your favor.

I looked into this a few years ago and considered starting one of those stands that sells scratchoffs to do just this, but decided a) it wasn't quite lucrative enough to be worth it, and b) I wasn't sure of the ethics of skewing the odds against your customers like this anyway.

alanfalcon · a year ago

There's similar for "pack hits" and trading cards, and the regulars learn which hobby shops are reputable and which ones to avoid. Most that remain in business are not scum.

alanfalcon commented on Apple's Software Quality Crisis eliseomartelli.it/blog/20... · Posted by u/ajdude

ethbr1 · a year ago

For exclusively Apple ecosystem users, how do you handle these feature gaps? Just get used to working around them and ignore?

I feel like every time I swap to the Mac ecosystem it's a litany of "Hunh, that weird tiny thing doesn't work" issues.

PS: USB-C DisplayPort MST (display daisy-chaining) support that's been missing for... a decade and counting?

alanfalcon · a year ago

I don't even understand this bug description. It's an edge case I guess I never ran into, so pretty easy to handle.

That said, it's not like everything is perfect, just 100% better than my drive-by experiences trying to have a gaming PC (dead, again), and an Android phone for testing purposes.

alanfalcon commented on The Google Willow Thing scottaaronson.blog/?p=852... · Posted by u/Bootvis

acscott · a year ago

e^(iπ) +1 = 0 e, i, π, 1, 0 Beauty

alanfalcon · a year ago

e^(iτ) = 1; true beauty.