bcoates (u/bcoates) - Readit News

bcoates commented on CRISPR fungus: Protein-packed, sustainable, and tastes like meat isaaa.org/kc/cropbiotechu... · Posted by u/rguiscard

notepad0x90 · 8 days ago

meet tastes great and all, but I wonder where science is at (if at all) on making original food that tastes good. How about food that doesn't taste like any natural food we've had, but still tastes really good?

Jell-o (gello?) is a good example, nothing tastes like it naturally. Why aren't there tasty food that are original in terms of taste and texture but good for health and the environment? I suppose part of the struggle is that food is entrenched into culture so much. burgers and bbq are inextricable from july 4th and memorial day for example.

bcoates · 8 days ago

The taste/texture of jello is just collagen (roughly, "meat stew flavor"), fruit juice, and (tons of) sugar. It’s just an extremely heightened version of natural flavors. There is nothing new under the sun.

bcoates commented on Bring bathroom doors back to hotels bringbackdoors.com/... · Posted by u/bariumbitmap

tohnjitor · 23 days ago

The worst aspect of the TWA Hotel at JFK Airport was the sliding bathroom door. Almost everything else about the place was really great but the bathroom door wae 1/2" from the face of the wall and bounced off the end of the slider track.

bcoates · 23 days ago

I think it's an unavoidable consequence of the space constraints they're working with.

On the plus side, when I dayroomed there it was dead silent and the room had blackout curtains.

bcoates commented on The fall of Labubus and the mush of modern internet trends michigandaily.com/arts/di... · Posted by u/gnabgib

randerson · 24 days ago

And yet, Sony Pictures is working on a Labubu movie. The meme-fuelled peak may be over, but the final death of the labubu is a long way in the future.

bcoates · 24 days ago

Sony released an angry birds movie more than 5 years after peak interest, they're a trailing indicator

bcoates commented on Ask HN: Scheduling stateful nodes when MMAP makes memory accounting a lie · Posted by u/leo_e

bcoates · 25 days ago

Memory pressure (and a lot of other overload conditions) usually makes latency worse--does that show up in your system? Latency backpressure is a pretty conventional thing to do. You're going to want some way to close the loop back to your load balancer, if you're doing open-loop control (sending a "fair share" of traffic to each node and assuming it can handle it) issues like you describe will keep coming up.

This is a Hard Problem and you might be trying to get away with an unrealistically small amount of overprovisioning.

bcoates commented on X's new country-of-origin feature reveals many 'US' accounts to be foreign-run hindustantimes.com/world-... · Posted by u/ourmandave

jiggawatts · a month ago

To a billionaire, hiring a few hundred Nigerians to upvote and share their propaganda is so cheap that it’s like you buying a cup of coffee.

They use professional paid services from these low labour cost countries all the time for publicity or to control the narrative.

By some estimates 20-60% of everything you see on social media is generated by a bot farm, depending on the forum in question. An analysis of Reddit showed some subreddits are 80% AI generated.

bcoates · a month ago

It doesn’t have to be and almost certainly isn't some billionaire. Formulaic spicy political nonsense is reliable engagement bait and it's easy to churn eyeballs into (small amounts of) money. It's not even unique, there are similar grinds about sports, religion, cute animals, subculture jokes, etc.

The "control the narrative" stuff is mostly a PR campaign by social media intelligence companies trying to make their services seem more valuable than they are.

bcoates commented on Fran Sans – font inspired by San Francisco light rail displays emilysneddon.com/fran-san... · Posted by u/ChrisArchitect

bcoates · a month ago

"Unlike New York, Chicago or L.A., which each have one, maybe two, San Francisco and the greater Bay Area have over two dozen"

Whaaa...? Los Angeles has a whole rat's nest of overlapping agencies, (mostly different cities and like 4 kinds of train for some reason)

bcoates commented on Agentic pelican on a bicycle robert-glaser.de/agentic-... · Posted by u/todsacerdoti

lubujackson · a month ago

What I take from this is that LLMs are somewhat miraculous in generation but terrible at revision. Especially with images, they are very resistant to adjusting initial approaches.

I wonder if there is a consistent way to force structural revisions. I have found Nano Banana particularly terrible at revisions, even something like "change the image dimensions to..." it will confidently claim success but do nothing.

bcoates · a month ago

A thing I've been noticing across the board is that current generative AI systems are horrible at composition. It’s most obvious in image generation models where the composition and blocking tend to be jarringly simple and on point (hyper-symmetry, all-middleground, or one of like three canned "artistic" compositions) no matter how you prompt them, but you see it in things like text output as well once you notice it.

I suspect this is either a training data issue, or an issue with the people building these things not recognizing the problem, but it's weird how persistent and cross-model the issue is, even in model releases that specifically call out better/more steerable composition behavior.

bcoates commented on Agentic pelican on a bicycle robert-glaser.de/agentic-... · Posted by u/todsacerdoti

kfarr · a month ago

I mean at some point you have to evaluate the content on its merit and they have a point — a chain is functional not just decorative in its precise placement.

bcoates · a month ago

That phrase template isn’t just overdone—it's something some text models are obsessed with. The em-dashes, the contrastive language—these are signs of LLMs being asked to summarize or expand a compelling blog post.

bcoates commented on I was right about dishwasher pods and now I can prove it [video] youtube.com/watch?v=DAX2_... · Posted by u/hnaccount_rng

olyjohn · a month ago

Is that the point of the air gap? I can't even get a straight answer from plumbers on what it's for. I don't see how that could possibly help with a clogged drain, just seems like a secondary point for the drain water to come out.

bcoates · a month ago

Pumped out water has to go somewhere . With the airgap, it will either back out your garbage disposal or pour out your airgap into the sink basin, depending on the location of the blockage.

The airgap causes the pump to be physically incapable of backfeeding the drinking water supply with dishwasher waste

bcoates commented on I was right about dishwasher pods and now I can prove it [video] youtube.com/watch?v=DAX2_... · Posted by u/hnaccount_rng

dylan604 · a month ago

This plus the comment about sharing a circuit with an oven. If the oven is electric, even in the US it is 220v. If it is gas only, then it could be 120v as it only needs to run the igniter and other circuitry without running any heating elements.

bcoates · a month ago

I think he said sharing a circuit with a fridge, which are generally 110 in the US -- i think this is how my apartment is wired (2-phase 30A to oven dedicated, one 20A for the whole rest of kitchen)

Trying to run a resistive heater on the same circuit as a fridge compressor without tripping leans towards very conservative wattage