clejack (u/clejack) - Readit News

clejack commented on Word documents will be saved to the cloud automatically on Windows going forward ghacks.net/2025/08/27/you... · Posted by u/speckx

yodon · 5 days ago

More than anything, Microsoft is incompetent at messaging and communications.

This is a feature that has been among the most loved aspects of its main competitor for more than a decade.

Somehow, Microsoft managed to make the same feature sound and feel and be creepy.

clejack · 5 days ago

While incompetence might be an issue, I think the greater problem is that Microsoft is rolling back control and generally sucks at UX.

Why does this app that's been working just fine as desktop software need to save anything to the cloud by default? It's conceptually odd.

I've used Google docs from the beginning, but I actively choose what docs I want on that platform.

All MS had to do was add "save to cloud" as an additional save option along with "save" and "save as" (maybe renamed as "save to desktop") then auto save could activate where your last save location was. This would be good design.

clejack commented on Why They Hate Education – Robert Reich robertreich.substack.com/... · Posted by u/rbanffy

incomingpain · 2 months ago

>That’s why slave owners prohibited enslaved people from learning to read, fascists burn books, and tyrants close universities. In their quest to destroy democracy, Trump, Vance, and their cronies are intent on shutting the American mind.

Obviously Reich cant prove any of these things have happened. Only seeking to demonize the republicans.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demonizing_the_enemy

This is a propaganda technique.

clejack · 2 months ago

Reich can't prove what happened? Slaves being prohibited from education? Books being burned?

Reich can't prove the internal working of the president's mind, so statements of intent are speculative to a degree, but if you interacted with a person in such a way that you projected feelings of animosity and hatred towards him, I wouldn't need your explicit admission to determine that you hate him or that you are consistently behaving in ways that appear hateful.

The president's actions have certainly shown a disdain for the education system. Vance has explicitly expressed taking issue with universities and wanting to implement government control. Trump has mandated that universities allow review for their curriculum if they want to receive funding.

This article isn't alarmist, because the actions that anyone would need to be alarmed about have already happened. The only question at this point is whether or not you like the results.

clejack commented on Few Americans pay for news when they encounter paywalls pewresearch.org/short-rea... · Posted by u/mooreds

graemep · 2 months ago

I think people might pay for micro-transactions, but a lot of news has no real value.

The news mostly reports facts that are available from other sources. Pre-internet a lot of their content was rewrites of stuff pulled off news wires. The front few pages of a newspaper and opinion bits were genuinely their own content - but a lot of the former was available from the (many) sources that sent people to cover major events.

People paid because they had limited choices. If you wanted to read the news it had to be a newspaper. Otherwise you could watch a limited number of TV channels or listen to the radio.

Reporting was often inaccurate, and thanks to changes of ethos and cost pressures is probably worse (I am judging that bit from a UK perspective though)

On top of that I doubt the value of keeping up with the news at all. Look at a news source you read regularly from an year ago and see how much of it you remember. Something more in-depth (a book, a blog post, a good analytical video) gives you a much better understanding of the world and those are also far more available.

There are a very few places that have unique content that is worth reading, but these are not the typical news websites that replaced newspapers.

clejack · 2 months ago

Not only does a lot of news have no real value a lot of news does not generate value of any kind (real or otherwise) until someone reads it.

For example, an opinion piece is meaningless unless someone reads it, so writers find themselves in the same situation as every other artist, even if their writing isn't artistic in nature.

Attention is a finite resource. This might be unpleasant to hear, but just because you're working on something, doesn't mean it has intrinsic monetary value.

clejack commented on Welcome to the next phase of the Alzheimer’s fight gatesnotes.com/home/home-... · Posted by u/MilnerRoute

clejack · 2 months ago

What twisted agenda? The kicked article is about his hopes for new Alzheimer's treatments. The article after that is about his goal to give away his money.

clejack commented on Ask HN: Data engineers, What suck when working on exploratory data-related task? · Posted by u/robz75

clejack · 2 months ago

The main issues for problems like this fall into 3 categories

- Things that prevent you from starting the job. Org silos, security, and permissions

- Things that prevent you from doing the job. This is primarily data cleaning.

- Things that make the job more difficult. This involves poor tooling, and you'll struggle to break the stranglehold that SQL and python-pandas have in this area. I'll also add plotting libraries to this. Many of them suck in a seemingly unavoidable way.

On the second and third points llms will most likely own these soon enough, though maybe there's room to build something small and local that's more efficient if the scope of the agent is reduced?

The first point is organizational generally, and it's very difficult to solve outside of integrating your system into an environment which is the strategy pursued by companies like snowflake and databricks.

clejack commented on Walmart and Amazon Are Exploring Issuing Their Own Stablecoins wsj.com/finance/banking/w... · Posted by u/samuel246

sjsdaiuasgdia · 3 months ago

The "stablecoin" part makes little sense. Walmart and Amazon could, with less effort, give customers store currency balances in a database. That would also let them bypass the existing payment processing industry.

It's almost as if "stablecoin" is a term included to make it sound fancier, cooler, more modern, or maybe just to push it a little further away from being called "company scrip".

clejack · 3 months ago

Honestly, it does make me wonder what they're thinking. Given the nature of what they're doing, the stable coin reference doesn't seem like it's necessary. Even for purposes of hype.

Telling investors you're going to make your own currency to bypass transactions fees from financial institutions seems like a fairly straightforward way to boost investor interest.

Wouldn't adding crypto mechanics to a virtual credit system just make for a costlier system due to mining?

If the transactions are maintained within an Amazon or Walmart ecosystem, there's no need for trustless verification, because you own the ecosystem. What's the point?

clejack commented on Show HN: I build an Astrology AI, Which can expose people personality in detail horochan.com/ai... · Posted by u/viknesh_x

clejack · 3 months ago

"cosmic sidekick for navigating life with the power of the stars...with a fresh, no-BS approach."

There's a great deal of humor here. Astrology is conceptually interesting, in the same way that me summoning a Greek, Norse, or Hindu deity in old school final fantasy is interesting. I get the feeling this place isn't filled with your target audience though.

Anyway, consider allowing users to type in their birth day in addition to (or maybe even entirely replacing) the day widgets. It's not immediately obvious where to click to navigate to a year only selection for instance.

And even though it may seem obvious, a prompt that says "enter your birthdate" or something similar oriented around the entry fields would be a good idea for the uninitiated but curious.

clejack commented on Danish Ministry Replaces Windows and Microsoft Office with Linux and LibreOffice heise.de/en/news/From-Wor... · Posted by u/jlpcsl

basisword · 3 months ago

>> It seems like you could throw a fraction of that money at open source software, actually make it good

As much as I love OSS I don't think throwing money at it is what's going to make it rival large closed-source software projects. You need clear direction and goals which won't happen when building by committee.

clejack · 3 months ago

That's a fair point, but I think it primarily depends on the nature of the committee. I could be wrong because I don't operate in oss spaces, so I'm not sure about their structure.

The first acknowledgement is that ui and design is just as important as technical functionality because a good idea that no one can use is a bad idea.

If we can have a technical team collaborate to design oss code, why can't we have a design team as well that's focused purely on themes, UX, and design philosophy?

Of course this is all prefaced on the idea that the money is there to support such a team. I suspect good designers are less likely to be on the "working for free" bandwagon.

Financial support can bring in better talent, then the oss teams need to structure them selves properly so intransigence doesn't set in.

clejack commented on Danish Ministry Replaces Windows and Microsoft Office with Linux and LibreOffice heise.de/en/news/From-Wor... · Posted by u/jlpcsl

clejack · 3 months ago

I was recently wondering why something of this nature hasn't happened long ago. Governments have to be spending so much money on licensing fees.

It seems like you could throw a fraction of that money at open source software, actually make it good and then not be beholden to corporations like Microsoft or Google. Combine this sort push between multiple governments and the world gets good (at least relatively) software for all of the major office and design concerns.

CAD software is the same. I tried freecad recently after a long hiatus and came back to immediately crashing after trying to make a cube from a sketch and also finding out that there's no midpoint constraint (wtf) if I remember correctly.

clejack commented on What happens when people don't understand how AI works theatlantic.com/culture/a... · Posted by u/rmason

clejack · 3 months ago

Are people still experiencing llms getting stuck in knowledge and comprehension loops? I used them but not excessively, and I'm not heavily tracking their performance either.

For example, if you ask an llm a question, and it produces a hallucination then you try to correct it or explain to it that it is incorrect; and it produces a near identical hallucination while implying that it has produced a new, correct result, this suggests that it does not understand its own understanding (or pseudo-understanding if you like).

Without this level of introspection, directing any notion of true understanding, intelligence, or anything similar seems premature.

Llms need to be able to consistently and accurately say, some variation on the phrase "I don't know," or "I'm uncertain." This indicates knowledge of self. It's like a mirror test for minds.