chaorace (u/chaorace)

chaorace commented on Examples are the best documentation rakhim.exotext.com/exampl... · Posted by u/Bogdanp

inetknght · 5 months ago

I haven't had that problem. I just code something up, and poke around to understand some of the terms that it's talking about. Then I start reading about error return codes, why them happen, what kinds of parameters actually mean, etc. No examples are usually needed as long as documentation is complete

The most frustrating things are things that are undocumented at all and only have examples. What the hell kind of shitty documentation is just examples with no idea what parameters could or shouldn't be?!

chaorace · 5 months ago

Sometimes, I just wanna remind myself how to use xargs for some command text replacement in a random one-liner on the terminal.

If I tried to do that with man... I'd have to read (in alphabetical order) the documentation for 6 different command flags. That's how far I'd go to read about the flag -- to actually use it, I'd have to experiment with the command flag until I figured out the actual syntax using my imagination.

Let's say instead that I am in a rush... so I'm skipping that time-consuming process and instead scrolling furhter down for some practical examples... one full page later I find a bunch! ... Except there's only 4 and none of them demonstrate what I need (the syntax is completely different). The docs wasted my time exactly when I most needed it NOT to do that. If I'd instead just googled "xargs replacement example", I would have gotten something I can copy/paste in seconds and could have gotten on with my life!

The moral of the story is this: Don't tell without showing. Don't show without telling. Do both if your goal is to be understood.

chaorace commented on AccuWeather to discontinue free access to Core Weather API developer.accuweather.com... · Posted by u/TerribleTurnout

_heimdall · 8 months ago

Aren't the problems you point to just business justification for companies offering this service for a fee rather than subsidizing the fees with federal debt?

chaorace · 8 months ago

Yes, of course. We're all reasonable adults who are capable of acknowledging that services of value cost money.

It just so happens that weather is a phenomenon which affects all people and requires large, distributed, passive infrastructure to effectively manage. It's a classic case where the public option is bound to be more efficient in terms of absolute resource allocation.

On what basis do I assert that it's "bound" to be more efficient? Simple: weather affects the production, transportation, and logistics of virtually all goods. The costs of weather are therefore distributed equally across society regardless of government policy. Government is very good at delivering this specific type of centralized basic infrastructure in a cost-effective way (see also: roads), so if we're all paying for it together regardless this is a no-brainer policy.

chaorace commented on Pope Francis has died reuters.com/world/pope-fr... · Posted by u/phillipharris

jimmcslim · a year ago

The Vatican published an interesting document on AI [1], which attributes a number of quotes to Pope Francis:

* As Pope Francis noted, the machine “makes a technical choice among several possibilities based either on well-defined criteria or on statistical inferences. Human beings, however, not only choose, but in their hearts are capable of deciding."

* In light of this, the use of AI, as Pope Francis said, must be “accompanied by an ethic inspired by a vision of the common good, an ethic of freedom, responsibility, and fraternity, capable of fostering the full development of people in relation to others and to the whole of creation.”

* As Pope Francis observes, “in this age of artificial intelligence, we cannot forget that poetry and love are necessary to save our humanity.”

* As Pope Francis observes, “the very use of the word ‘intelligence’” in connection with AI “can prove misleading”

[1] https://www.vatican.va/roman_curia/congregations/cfaith/docu...

chaorace · a year ago

I rarely feel this way about someone of Pope Francis' age and social position, but I've genuinely admired Francis as a thinker. He was a bona fide Jesuit, through and through. The next pope has big shoes to fill.

chaorace commented on The Llama 4 herd ai.meta.com/blog/llama-4-... · Posted by u/georgehill

InvOfSmallC · a year ago

For a super ignorant person:

Both Llama 4 Scout and Llama 4 Maverick use a Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) design with 17B active parameters each

Those experts are LLM trained on specific tasks or what?

chaorace · a year ago

The "Experts" in MoE is less like a panel of doctors and more like having different brain regions with interlinked yet specialized functions.

The models get trained largely the same way as non-MoE models, except with specific parts of the model silo'd apart past a certain layer. The shared part of the model, prior to the splitting, is the "router". The router learns how to route as an AI would, so it's basically a black-box in terms of whatever internal structure emerges from this.

chaorace commented on GIMP 3.0 testing.gimp.org/news/202... · Posted by u/wicket

phire · a year ago

You know how YouTubers are always talking about how "the algorithm" didn't like this video, or loves that video. Or that "the algorithm" is a huge black block which nobody knows how it works.

Youtube's "the algorithm" will make or break both videos and channels.

But "the algorithm" isn't really a mystery. At a basic level, it just shows a bunch of video recommendations to viewers, and measures if they click it or not (watch time, comments, likes also factor into the algorithm, but none of that matters if they don't click first). The higher the click-through rate, the more the video is pushed in recommendations.

And the only things a viewer sees is the thumbnail, channel name, and video title. They have to decide which video they are going to watch based on just that.

So really, a large chunk of "the algorithm" is just how appealing your thumbnail is to potential views.

chaorace · a year ago

There actually is an outcome worse than a missed click: if too many viewers are abandoning your video within the first few minutes (i.e. before midrolls), you'll experience substantial downranking.

More or less, the art of making a successful video requires:

* An attention-grabbing thumbnail

* A curiosity-provoking title & premise

* A strong hook which convinces the viewer to put the screen down and let it run

* Editing which delivers the information at an engaging (yet monetizable) pace

* Packaging said information so that it is intelligibly balanced across the mediums (audio/text/video)

* ^^^ Doing this all in a style which still retains enough uniqueness to establish a repeat viewerbase

"The algorithm" is a system for efficiently delivering novel videos with these qualities to the audiences who will most eagerly consume them, which is an essential function for a platform with 2 billion monthly users. For every video on lowest-common-denominator celebrity junk, there's a dozen niche videos tailored to some ravenous subculture or other. Not all magazines are tabloids... but just about anyone can kill time with a tabloid, so that's what leads.

Unlike magazine stands, however, the platform will eventually learn to only show you the thumbnails for videos you'll want to finish watching. It's almost embarassing to share... but here's an example batch of 12 recommendations, almost all of which I'm likely to (eventually) click on and fully watch: https://i.imgur.com/dygfXXb.png

chaorace commented on Revolt: Open-Source Alternative to Discord revolt.chat... · Posted by u/OuterVale

metalliqaz · a year ago

Teamspeak and others were so well entrenched at the time. Wouldn't players of WoW, CS, etc. have brought those tools to FFXIV? What made that special?

chaorace · a year ago

Gaming was becoming less and less the domain of the tech-savvy crowd, strongly curbing the public's appetite for such host-it-yourself services. Teamspeak/Mumble were already dying at the hands of (inferior) free/easy chat platforms like Steam & Skype, so it's really no wonder that Discord was able to swoop in and clobber all of them by simply being free and featureful.

chaorace commented on Modernist Cuisine: The Art and Science of Cooking modernistcuisine.com/book... · Posted by u/tyleo

scarby2 · a year ago

> Sous vide is still used quietly because it's a very practical technique with good results for certain protein preparations, and there are plenty of other useful bits of craft through the book. Similarly I guess mayo didn't exactly disappear from american cooking.

I was reading the first part of your response and my mind was immediately going "but sous-vide is everywhere" It's one of those things that's just really useful. However it has fallen off slightly, i didn't think anyone is cooking eggs sous vide anymore.

chaorace · a year ago

It's funny that you mention eggs because there's actually been a recent paper regarding sous vide, soft-boiling, and achieving the "ideal" egg texture through a novel boiling process (novel to me, anyway) which they've opted to call "periodic cooking": https://www.nature.com/articles/s44172-024-00334-w

There's a lot of cool diagrams which I'd encourage skimming that link for, but here's the basic rundown: the goal of the described process is to achieve a creamy yolk like what would be produced via sous vide whilst eliminating the unpleasant jammy eggwhite texture characteristic of that process. The recipe involves 30 minutes of carefully transferring an egg back and forth between two vessels repeatedly: one boiling, one room-temperature. You do that 16 times in exact two-minute intervals in order to achieve the "perfect" egg -- very simple and convenient for the modern home-cook in a hurry!

Anyway... you can watch this guy on youtube make it so that you may eat some other, more sufferable meal more vicariously: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ahGGanfPDJw

chaorace commented on Resigning as Asahi Linux project lead marcan.st/2025/02/resigni... · Posted by u/Shank

akudha · a year ago

One thing that I notice often - people just do not take 5 minutes to appreciate someone or send 5 dollars to a project that they use daily etc. Not just in the software world, but life in general. Someone I know works full time, takes care of her two kids, takes care of her husband. Kids are almost teens now, but she gets zero support from them or her husband. Or even an occasional thanks. I see this everywhere, this is just one example.

Are we so busy or egoistic or ignorant that we can't stop and say thanks? What is even more worse is the entitlement. People who wouldn't lift a finger to help anyone (even their own families) are usually the loudest and the most entitled ones.

I don't know if this is the case around the world (probably is?) and I don't know what the solution is. It just sucks

chaorace · a year ago

> Kids are almost teens now, but she gets zero support from them or her husband

This is a good analogy. Children are the people who they've been raised to become, so it stands to reason that people will give money and appreciation in the same ways that these things are originally given to them. These things are social constructs; we are inevitably taught how to use them by way of social dynamics. This is all to say that people love to support their darlings... but they've been socially conditioned to expect reciprocity in all transactions. That's how the sausage is made in content-based monetization -- you produce the actual product at a loss and then try to claw it back selling high-margin merchandise that nobody'd ever buy otherwise. The merch acts as social permission to finally do your part and pay the creators.

To risk stating the obvious: this is not a good thing and I think the majority of people would likewise agree. People should be fairly rewarded for their work and we should desire a culture which openly and freely encourages doing so. Culture, however, reflects society. The society we've created is transactional, so that's how people frame the spending of their money and efforts -- indeed, "spending" and "transaction" are practically interchangeable in our collective lexicon. Effort isn't strictly scarce in the same way eggs are, however, so we fail to value it.

> I don't know if this is the case around the world (probably is?) and I don't know what the solution is. It just sucks

It's not a total disaster... so we'll undoubtedly continue to ignore the cracks in the foundation. Martin still got paid good money for his efforts and it was good for him for a time. That podcast you like will sell enough t-shirts and get the rent paid on time, at least for a little while longer. This seems to be about as good as we've collectively agreed to make the world for the time being. A local maxima, so to speak: we've gotten stuck asking for more when less might do better. With a bit of luck and effort, however, we can still catch that pendulum when it eventually begins swinging in the other direction. That's my hope, anyway! For the time being I try to do the things I'd like to see become normal in a more decent world -- sharing generously, paying for the things I like, etc. -- because hopeless accelerationism is for chumps.

chaorace commented on Perma.cc – Permanent Link Service perma.cc/... · Posted by u/brianzelip

true_religion · a year ago

You can’t actually create a contractual right without consideration and they appear to be a free service.

They can only promise to do their best.

chaorace · a year ago

Not what people are asking for. What you're ruling out is the equivalent of expecting cryostasis subscribers to sue if there's ever a service interruption.

Conventional business models as currently implemented are fundamentally misaligned to the timescales associated with this product category. Products like these need a level of stability that can only be accomplished at the charter level of the corporation -- it needs to be fundamentally incapable of reneging on promises made.

Without that kind of reassurance, why should anyone trust this service with their links? The exchange is incredibly unequal. They receive full, permanent control of the content, access, and monetization of all things which I cite. I receive... a promise that my links will do what they already do, but maybe last longer.