bcoughlan (u/bcoughlan)

bcoughlan commented on Richard Stallman on ChatGPT stallman.org/chatgpt.html... · Posted by u/colesantiago

bcoughlan · 14 days ago

Perhaps we are putting human intelligence on a pedestal. I have often caught myself having a supposedly original idea only to find I inherited it from something I read months before.

We are mostly autocomplete with a mild capacity to synthesise new ideas. It’s the network effect of communicating that creates the feedback loops which amplify our collective intelligence.

Also if you think intelligent life has to have a regard for truth, not just a regard for self, tune in to any news channel.

bcoughlan commented on 37signals Says Goodbye to AWS: Full S3 Migration and $10M in Projected Savings systemadministration.net/... · Posted by u/bluedino

bcoughlan · 8 months ago

Something an older and wiser programmer taught me, is to think of the infrastructure costs as a per-user cost. These numbers look enormous next to my bank balance, but if you save 500k per year to service 1 million users, it's nothing to your bottom line.

Meanwhile there's the opportunity cost of moving. All of the people who put effort into this migration, who could otherwise be building something revenue-generating. I think that's why in many companies cloud costs are a problem, but never enough to make it high up the backlog.

bcoughlan commented on TikTok is harming children at an industrial scale afterbabel.com/p/industri... · Posted by u/cwwc

nonethewiser · 8 months ago

>I considered doing the same but in the end decided I don’t want to use a platform I have to fight against, while still letting them build brand recognition to my kid.

>So I downloaded a bunch of the videos on our desktop and blocked the site.

Downloading videos from youtube and blocking the site seems more like fighting against the platform (and more work) than turning on a whitelist mode. Seems like the end result is the same but with more work.

bcoughlan · 8 months ago

I’m talking youtube-dl and VLC player. No YouTube logos, no concept of what YouTube even is.

Even the sidebar of recommendations is a dark pattern for a 3 year old. Unlike Netflix etc where you have to exit the video to browse something else.

bcoughlan commented on TikTok is harming children at an industrial scale afterbabel.com/p/industri... · Posted by u/cwwc

gpspake · 8 months ago

I took me a while but I finally figured this out. I think the difficulty is a dark ui pattern that hides the control behind an age selection. In the youtube kids admin settings, there's a part where you select your kids age 0-4, 4-9 etc... My kid is 4 so I never really looked at the later options but after probably 20 times on that screen, I noticed at the end (where my eyes glossed over the higher ages) there's something along the lines of "control content yourself". Once I selected it, I could whitelist channels and completely disable search and recommendations. This means the youtube kids app _only_ shows what I say it can. If I want to give him access to something like "smarter every day" or a specific video that's not on youtube kids, I can click share from my account and share with "kids" We've still pretty much banned youtube on all devices but, like you said, there's a lot of valuable stuff and I really miss the time when he would get in to "tornadoes" or "helicopters" or some other topic and we could watch a bunch of educational videos without being flooded with trash toy videos and subversive attention leeching ads. This at least opens the door back up for some of that good content without the garbage.

bcoughlan · 8 months ago

I considered doing the same but in the end decided I don’t want to use a platform I have to fight against, while still letting them build brand recognition to my kid.

So I downloaded a bunch of the videos on our desktop and blocked the site. Works for my 3.5 year old, not sure the plan when they outgrow it.

bcoughlan commented on The path to open-sourcing the DeepSeek inference engine github.com/deepseek-ai/op... · Posted by u/Palmik

avodonosov · 8 months ago

What motivates the commercial AI companies to share their research results and know-how?

Why did Google published the Transformer architecture instead of keeping it to themselves?

I understand that people may want to do good things for humanity, facilitate progress, etc. But if an action goes against commercial interest, how can the company management take it and not get objections from shareholders?

Or there is a commercial logic that motivates sharing of information and intellectual property? What logic is that?

bcoughlan · 8 months ago

I would guess it comes down to that the best researchers in the world want their work out in the open

bcoughlan commented on The ADHD body double: A unique tool for getting things done add.org/the-body-double/... · Posted by u/rzk

Xiol32 · 9 months ago

This article is clearly written to the word count and not the overall content. A painful read.

bcoughlan · 9 months ago

I'm nearly certain that the images and the text are AI generated from other sources and perhaps tweaked a bit. The headings are the giveaway. Low signal-to-noise ratio.

Google search results is full of this stuff, but first time seeing it at the top of HN

bcoughlan commented on The young, inexperienced engineers aiding DOGE wired.com/story/elon-musk... · Posted by u/medler

karthikk · a year ago

Non-American here, from the outside it seems like the Jan 6 thing was way overblown. It feels like similar things happen in other govt buildings in the USA all the time but the perpetrators were not targeted the same way. Not condoning either, but there seems to be selective govt retribution.

bcoughlan · a year ago

As a non-american I also thought the same. Reading a synopsis of evidence completely changed my mind [1]. Pipe bombs planted at party headquarters to divert the police, maps of tunnels under the Capitol building and so on. Not amateur stuff.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Planning_of_the_January_6_Unit...

bcoughlan commented on Show HN: App that asks ‘why?’ every time you unlock your phone play.google.com/store/app... · Posted by u/jarko27

throwaway519 · a year ago

Why have the brain rot apps installed at all?

bcoughlan · a year ago

Can't uninstall the browser, and occasionally it's needed for legit reasons. I quite literally can't resist drifting towards mindless scrolling apps, though I know that's hard to fathom for some people.

bcoughlan commented on Show HN: App that asks ‘why?’ every time you unlock your phone play.google.com/store/app... · Posted by u/jarko27

bcoughlan · a year ago

My approach for iPhone:

- Set time limits on apps. - Block App Store. - Set a Screen Time pin, then forget it.

Downside: if you need to install a new app, you need to do a iTunes backup, factory reset and restore the backup,. Also apps won't continue to update with this approach.

Worth it though. I don't miss wasting 10-20 hours a week on brain rot apps.