diacritical (u/diacritical)

diacritical commented on Digg is gone again digg.com/... · Posted by u/hammerbrostime

mikeocool · 17 hours ago

Kinda seems like we’re rapidly headed for the complete collapse of the internet as we know it.

Every site that is driven by user posting seems to be headed towards being overrun by AI bots chatting with each other, either for sake of promoting something or farming karma.

And there’s really not much point in publishing good content anymore, since AI is just going slurp it up and regurgitate it without driving you any traffic.

Though it’ll be interesting to see what happens to ChatGPT and the like once the amount of quality content for them to consume slows to a trickle. Will people still use ChatGPT to get product recommendations without Reddit posts and Wirecutter providing good content for those recommendations?

diacritical · 14 hours ago

> And there’s really not much point in publishing good content anymore, since AI is just going slurp it up and regurgitate it without driving you any traffic.

You just published good content knowing AI will slurp it up and not give you any traffic in return. I'm now replying to you with more content with the same expectations about AI and traffic. Why care about AI or traffic or recognition? Isn't the content the thing that matters?

It's like answering technical questions in an anonymous/pseudonymous chat or forum, which I'm sure you've done, too. We do it to help others. If an AI can take my answer and spread it around without paying me or mentioning one of my random usernames I change every month or so, I would be happy. And if the AI gives me credit like "coffeecup543 originally posted that on IRC channel X 5 years ago", I couldn't care less. It would be noise to the reader. Even if the AI uses my real name, so what?

The people who cared about traffic and money from their posts rarely made good content, anyway. Listicles and affiliate marketing BS and SEO optimizations and making a video that could be 1 minute into 10 minutes, or text that could've been 5 articles into a long book - all existed from before AI. With AI I actually get less of this crap - either skip it or condense it.

diacritical commented on Show HN: s@: decentralized social networking over static sites satproto.org/... · Posted by u/remywang

pibaker · 2 days ago

> Right after initialization you'll be prompted to export the private key and store it somewhere safe, e.g. your password manager

Having seen enough story in the vein of "if only I still have my bitcoin wallet from 2014" and "our storage server failed and when we tried to restore from backup we found out our last working backup was from two years ago," I have to say I have a rather dim view of how competent people actually are when it comes to keeping backups working.

I am not saying cryptography isn't useful for safeguarding your data, I just think for perhaps 90% of the users out here the risk of being locked out of your data permanently is more realistic than your data being accessed by a bad actor.

> which I admit can be too much for family/friends so you might have to set it up for them (and I bet they'd be stoked to have a website of their own!)

From reading the website, I was under the impression this is a techie oriented project still looking for technically inclined early adopters instead of something you can readily tell grandma to hop on. I sincerely doubt the average friend and family member who needs other's help to set up a personal website knows what the protocol does or why should he or she use it instead of Instagram or Facebook, or Signal, if the point is just to keep in touch with people you already know.

diacritical · 2 days ago

The majority of users are not complete morons. If they understand the need to backup their private key (or wallet password, or whatever), they can do it. If they still don't do it, maybe they don't value their data. In 2026 even the proverbial grandma should know what a backup is, even if they don't understand exactly how a given private key or protocol works.

We shouldn't cater to such users and make our communication less secure because people put off making backups.

diacritical commented on I was interviewed by an AI bot for a job theverge.com/featured-vid... · Posted by u/speckx

encom · 2 days ago

  (X) Sorry dude, but I don't think it would work.

:)

diacritical · 2 days ago

Why, specifically?

Obviously there are lots of things to figure out, but I don't see how any one of those would be a deal breaker.

diacritical commented on Malus – Clean Room as a Service malus.sh... · Posted by u/microflash

cuu508 · 2 days ago

> We are all making a continual and ongoing grave error

> Blindly translating those centuries of laws into rigid, free enforcement is a terrible idea for everyone.

I understand your point that changing the enforcement changes how the law is "felt" even though on the paper the law has not changed. And I think it makes sense to review and potentially revise the laws when enforcement methods change. But in the specific case of the 55 mph limit, would the consequences really be grave and terrible if the enforcement was enforced by a robot, but the law remained the same?

diacritical · 2 days ago

> would the consequences really be grave and terrible if the enforcement was enforced by a robot

The potential consequences of mass surveillance come to mind.

diacritical commented on I was interviewed by an AI bot for a job theverge.com/featured-vid... · Posted by u/speckx

encom · 2 days ago

https://craphound.com/spamsolutions.txt

Check all that apply.

diacritical · 2 days ago

I forgot this existed. I filled it out for fun, even though I get your reply was more rhetorical.

Your post advocates a

(X) technical ( ) legislative (?) market-based ( ) vigilante

(X) Requires immediate total cooperation from everybody at once

- for the specific forums, jobs and other things that may use something like this

Specifically, your plan fails to account for

(X) Public reluctance to accept weird new forms of money

- if the credits are treated as money

(X) Armies of worm riddled broadband-connected Windows boxes

- that will always be an issue, but I doubt it's too relevant here

(X) Extreme profitability of spam

- if someone spends a credit for spam and they think it's worth it, it might be an issue. But most spam wouldn't be worth it, IMHO, especially if it will be deleted from a forum, anyway.

and the following philosophical objections may also apply:

(X) Ideas similar to yours are easy to come up with, yet none have ever been shown practical

- well, yeah :)

(X) Sending email should be free

- this isn't about email, but I don't necessarily like having to pay to post. However, lots of forums will remain free, as not everyone will use this idea if it's implemented. And some forums have paid accounts now, anyway.

(X) Why should we have to trust you and your servers?

- why should we trust the credit system - important question, as we haven't thought out how it could be gamed or abused.

diacritical commented on Show HN: Free audiobooks with synchronized text for language learning discovox.org/en/library... · Posted by u/floo

floo · 3 days ago

cool idea. haven't really explored dialects yet. gonna see if I can find any latin american recordings. thanks for the suggestion!

diacritical · 2 days ago

The pronunciation is different between countries. Not sure about other differences between dialects, but from what I remember from studying years ago, word pronunciation differences were quite predictable. There were a couple of online dictionaries with audio for Spain, Mexico and perhaps Argentina.

diacritical commented on I was interviewed by an AI bot for a job theverge.com/featured-vid... · Posted by u/speckx

fwipsy · 3 days ago

To avoid overhead for many small payments, start a platform where users can buy many credits at once by contributing larger amounts to charity. Then, you burn your credits to apply to companies (or cold message applicants) to show you're not just spraying and praying.

diacritical · 2 days ago

Some more thoughts before I go to bed.

This could also be used for combating spam elsewhere, like posting in forums, comment sections and so on. To preserve privacy, something like zero-knowledge proofs could be utilized. I don't know how the cryptography would work exactly, but if you can't double spend a credit and you can choose whether to keep it anonymous or not, it could work, too. It would be best if for a given credit spent, you could only disclose your identity to the entity you want access to, not the credit issuing entity.

For spam, it seems like the cost of maintaining a forum like the servers are much lower than the cost of the mods that deal with spam. So instead of paying the forum directly, we lower the need for human mods to spend their time. That way we lower resources to the forum indirectly. The credits could be per post or per account creation. I assume the HN mods' time is worth a lot more than the servers and power HN runs on.

Also, we won't have the issue that PoW and other proofs-of-X's have of being easier to do on some devices, but harder on others (like the power and time it takes to run PoW on a beefy desktop with AES-NI vs an on old phone).

But we'll still have the issue with different standards of living in different places making the credits more or less expensive for the user subjectively. Companies hiring worldwide could require different amounts of credits for applicants from different countries, but for forums this wouldn't work.

A solution to that could be issuers giving credits for local volunteering work. Clean up some garbage from the shore and get a credit regardless of whether you're in the USA or Bangladesh. But if you want to prevent credits from being traded (do we? idk) and, at the same time, have some amount of privacy, how would you do it?

But now you'd have to make sure that credit issuers all over the world only issue credits for real charity-like work. And who's to say how to value picking up garbage vs volunteering at an animal shelter vs donating 1$ to a charity.

It's interesting to think about this, even though I don't have any resource to implement anything like that.

diacritical commented on I was interviewed by an AI bot for a job theverge.com/featured-vid... · Posted by u/speckx

pedalpete · 3 days ago

I have a friend who was working in this space in 2019.

Their customers were hiring something like 10k jobs worldwide annually, which means 500k+ applications to go through.

AI was used for the first filter to get a person through to later rounds.

It makes sense at that scale, and not for "hiring" but just to make decisions as to who gets to the next round.

The alternative is that you end up having to hire so many people to go through the applicants and then those people get bored of asking the same initial questions again and again.

I remember hearing an anecdote, back in the days of paper resumes, that hiring managers would take the huge stack of resumes they got, divide them in half and throw half in the bin. That half would be considered unlucky, and you don't want to hire unlucky people.

But seriously, with the number of job applicants, for certain positions, what are the alternatives to getting AI to help?

diacritical · 3 days ago

If you have 10k jobs and 500k applications, that's 50 applications per job. Spending a few minutes on each application would mean a few hours for the initial screening for each job, but if that job is filled, you'll get a person who'll stay there for a few years. How is that not worth it? Why would you need to automate it? If you're interviewing for people to do some quick task and leave, sure, but companies want long-term hires.

diacritical commented on I was interviewed by an AI bot for a job theverge.com/featured-vid... · Posted by u/speckx

hunterpayne · 3 days ago

And why would this be the case? Maybe the solution is to ban AI from the hiring process. This seems like companies being hoisted by their own petard. This is because they are the ones who drove the hiring market to be this way. They are the ones who started using AI in the hiring process. They are the ones who decided to make applying so much work driving applicants to use AI to survive.

Also, if you are having trouble hiring right now, that is 1000% a skill issue. It is easier to hire good talent right now than ever before. So I have absolutely 0 sympathy for this POV. Go down to your HR department if you want to see who is at fault.

PS You fix it by charging $1 to apply for jobs. Took me all of 30 seconds to figure that one out.

diacritical · 3 days ago

I wouldn't pay anything to a company I'm applying to, but I would gladly send a small amount of money to a charity and show them the relevant bank or cryptocurrency proof if they explain why they need the micropayment. They could present me with a list of 10 or 10000 charities, I'd pick 1 and put "micropayment for applying to company X" in the comment of the payment.

That way I know I'm not giving money to some huge corporation and they know I think applying to their job should at least cost me Y amounts of currency.

And if they waste more than an hour of my time with the hiring process, they could similarly pay a charity some money per hour.

That was neither me nor the company will feel cheated and in the end, no matter how the hiring turns out, a charity will have benefited.

diacritical commented on New farm bill would condemn pigs to a lifetime in gestation crates twitter.com/Lewis_Bollard... · Posted by u/bilsbie

adrian_b · 4 days ago

Beans, lentils etc. may be inexpensive but you skip over the fact that they and any other kind of plant source contain too little protein in comparison with the amount of energy.

Being vegan is easy for someone who does hard physical work, so they have to eat more than 3000 kcal per day. In that case, eating enough proteins that come from plant sources will still leave enough in the energy budget to also eat other food, for a complete diet.

On the other hand, if you have a sedentary lifestyle, working in the front of a computer, it is impossible to eat enough protein without eating too many calories.

There are plant protein extracts, but those are at least 3 to 5 times more expensive than cheap animal protein, e.g. chicken breast.

I have eaten for 4 years only plant-based proteins, but to satisfy simultaneously 3 constraints, enough proteins, not so many calories as to cause weight gain and price no greater than when eating chicken meat, in Europe where I live there was only 1 solution, with no alternatives.

The solution was to extract at home gluten from wheat flour, to supplement the proteins provided by lentils or other legumes. Any plant-based product that I could buy for enough protein would have been more expensive than chicken meat.

Extracting gluten, which is done by washing dough with abundant water, works. However it requires much time and much water. Extracting pure gluten requires so much water and so much time that I never did this regularly. I was typically removing around 75% of the starch from wheat flour, and with the result I was baking a bread that had about 50% to 60% protein content.

Besides wasting a lot of water and time every day, this procedure had the additional disadvantage that the amount of calories provided by eating enough protein was still rather large. This limited severely the possible menus, e.g. any starchy vegetables, e.g. potatoes or sweet potatoes or rice, and any starchy fruits, e.g. bananas, had to be forbidden. I gain weight extremely easily if I exceed my allowable daily energy intake.

These inconveniences have made me eventually abandon this approach. While I still eat mostly vegan food, I also use in cooking some whey protein concentrate, which can increase enough the protein content of plant-based food.

There already exists a technology for making whey protein concentrate otherwise than by the filtration of milk, i.e. by extracting it from a culture of genetically-modified Trichoderma fungus. I hope that this technology will become viable commercially, because unlike with fake meat produced from cell cultures, it is certain that with such a fungal culture one can make proteins less costly than by growing chicken or other domestic animals.

The availability of such a protein powder would solve completely the problem of vegan food for me. I do not need fake meat.

diacritical · 4 days ago

> Being vegan is easy for someone who does hard physical work, so they have to eat more than 3000 kcal per day. In that case, eating enough proteins that come from plant sources will still leave enough in the energy budget to also eat other food, for a complete diet.

> On the other hand, if you have a sedentary lifestyle, working in the front of a computer, it is impossible to eat enough protein without eating too many calories.

Anecdotal counterpoint - I've done hard physical work for ~2 years. For ~10 years before that and for about 1.5 after I stopped the physical work I've been spending most of my days sitting in front of the computer with the occasional walk to the grocery store. No sport or hiking or fitness.

I don't eat TVP or other condensed protein food. I don't count calories or even consciously decide when to eat protein rich food. Sometimes I'll even just eat pasta or other food relatively low in protein and rich in carbs and calories. Yet, I'm in the same physical health as I've always been. Not athletic, but normal weight - the type of weight an annoying aunt would see and say "ooh, you gotta eat more". :) The first BMI calc I tried put me right in the middle of the green zone (yes, I know BMI is not that important). And I could return to the same physical work if I wanted to.

Besides my anecdotal counterpoint, there are many sources online you can find where people discuss their diet, how much it costs and their lifestyle.

> The solution was to extract at home gluten from wheat flour, to supplement the proteins provided by lentils or other legumes.

> any starchy vegetables, e.g. potatoes or sweet potatoes or rice, and any starchy fruits, e.g. bananas, had to be forbidden.

That seems very extreme to me. Were you trying to be a bodybuilder or maintain some low body fat or something while maintaining this sedentary lifestyle? I eat potatoes, sweet potatoes and bananas all the time.

> I gain weight extremely easily if I exceed my allowable daily energy intake.

If that's the case, why not spend some of the calories on exercise? Although I find it hard to believe that with my current and previous sedentary lifestyle I expend enough calories to not care what I eat on a vegan diet, but you gain weight "extremely easily". Do you have some rare disease, if you don't mind my asking? Cause the only fat people I know are the ones who overeat, regardless of diet. Even if they start blaming "slow metabolism" or something else, it's obvious when you see them eat.

> There are plant protein extracts, but those are at least 3 to 5 times more expensive than cheap animal protein, e.g. chicken breast.

Economy of scale and subsidies.

> There already exists a technology for making whey protein concentrate otherwise than by the filtration of milk, i.e. by extracting it from a culture of genetically-modified Trichoderma fungus.

Interesting. Although I don't see myself buying it, I'll look it up.

> fake meat

It's as real as you can get. "Fake meat" would be TVP prepared like meat. You wouldn't say "fake whey protein" if you extract it from genetically-modified Trichoderma fungus.