I'm ready for their follow up product.
Readit Newsdiffxx commented on DiffX – Next-Generation Extensible Diff Format diffx.org/... · Posted by u/todsacerdoti
diffxx commented on My imaginary children aren't using your streaming service shkspr.mobi/blog/2021/04/... · Posted by u/edent
I can sympathise with the author, would be nice to get a more streamlined experience for those without kids, but:
> The world doesn't revolve around children.
Well, that’s the thing. It kind of does. And these days there’s an argument to be made that the world doesn’t value children enough. As long as fertility is below 2.1 that’s objectively true. It means we’re dying out.
If the author wants to be able to retire, there needs to be kids, and the industrialised world has made that too undesirable.
Honestly this feels like a trifle compared to the many UX atrocities out there. Sometimes you have to make the UI more inconvenient for some to make it more convenient for others
The instantaneous fertility rate dipping below replacement level does not mean humanity dying out. It might mean that this particular civilization with this particular population level is. Infinite growth ad infinitum leads to an inevitable (and likely catastrophic) collapse. No one can say with certainty what the "correct" fertility rate is. That being said, if a society is set up as a pyramid scheme, it must have infinite growth to sustain itself so I won't argue that this way of life is likely dying.
diffxx commented on She Worked in a Harvard Lab to Reverse Aging, Until ICE Jailed Her nytimes.com/2025/04/11/sc... · Posted by u/xnx
The CIA director - excessively biased as he may be - testified last week that Signal is a CIA-approved application that was preloaded onto the device he was issued on his first day. He said this practice extends back to at least the Biden Administration.
Given this, and assuming it’s true, I wonder to what degree a controversy can be predicated on usage of an approved application on an approved Government device. I’m sure there is plenty to nitpick around the edges (“classified vs. top secret,” “managed device vs. personal device,” “expiring messages,” etc.), but the fundamental transgression cannot be “using Signal.”
More importantly, I just don’t think people care — beyond pearl-clutching, tribal narratives and palace intrigue — about the safety of “classified data.” And the sad part is that it’s obfuscating the real story, which is the federal government’s seemingly indiscriminate bombing of Yemeni residences in an attempt to execute a mildly infamous terrorist. It’s the banal tone with which the government officials discuss it – like it’s a new product launch or a weekly check-in meeting – that we should find disturbing. Nobody cares about the communication medium; if anything, we should wish for _more_ transparency and visibility into discussions like this…
(Also, it’s quite an endorsement of Signal.)
Yes, though don't forget about the incompetence of adding the wrong person to the chat which goes part and parcel with the embarrassingly superficial/cynical discourse.
diffxx commented on Ask HN: How do you make a living contributing to and/or creating OSS projects? · Posted by u/Brysonbw
As a good friend who is the maintainer of a widely used oss tool likes to quip: the two hardest problems in computer science are naming things and making money in open source.
diffxx commented on Why a plane turned around when a passenger lost a phone midflight washingtonpost.com/travel... · Posted by u/bookofjoe
I strongly advise buying and always using a "phone lanyard" to tether your phone to your belt loop. A well-working example is ASIN B07ZSDFY85. With it, your phone won't get lost or get left behind. Even if the risk of losing the phone is just once in ten years, it still is worth it. If it drops with the tether, you can just lift the tether cable to get it back. If you're tall, you may need two, or something longer. Note that the tether works only with a compatible phone case to hold it in place.
Here's my countervailing advice for keeping your phone safe: don't use a case or any protection at all. This trains you to take care of it.
A good heuristic test of correlation vs causation in headlines: flip the dependent and independent variable and see which explanation sounds more reasonable.
Heavy llm chat usage leads to loneliness | or | Loneliness leads to heavy chat usage.
To my eye the second seems far more likely than the first.
I don't think correlation vs causation is the right question. Loneliness was clearly rampant long before chatgpt showed up. The question is whether chatbots are capable of reducing people's loneliness. To me it feels self-evident that in the long run, they are far more likely to increase feelings of loneliness than reduce them.
For me, the only thing that can reduce loneliness is conversation with another conscious entity. Many, if not most, people are barely conscious so this is hard to find in the physical world. But I don't believe llms are conscious, so for me they are a complete dead end for reducing loneliness whatever other virtues the may have.
Working nights and weekends got me a close to ten figure exit at a now publicly traded fintech. So yeah, I don't mind.
Rather than retiring on that money, I'm back at it again, and I'm working even harder.
I know what mediocrity and complacency is. I've worked surrounded by it, and I'll do anything to avoid it. I don't want that bullshit where coworkers strive to do the minimum and everybody plays hot potato to see who will take responsibility.
I'll take responsibility. And I'll take the high comp that comes with it. Not have some union pencil in my salary band according to arbitrary rules that don't directly map to solving customer problems.
Imagine putting your time and energy into something other than building a bigger imaginary pile for yourself.
diffxx commented on An epic treatise on error models for systems programming languages typesanitizer.com/blog/er... · Posted by u/transpute
It sometimes feels like there is a strange resistance to defining ad hoc sum types. If your language has good pattern matching capabilities and an expressive syntax for declaring data types, then this scales very well.
For example in a pseudolanguage:
data FooResult = Number | Error
def foo(n: Number): FooResult = ...
foo(42) match {
case n: Number => print(n + 1)
case e: Error => // handle error case
}
Granted in many languages the above cannot be expressed succinctly and is often avoided for this reason.
diffxx commented on Startup Winter: Hacker News Lost Its Faith vincentschmalbach.com/sta... · Posted by u/vincent_s
>Dodgy accounting & staff retention meant that actually you don't get fuckyou money.
What is fuckyou money at this point? Take the Mega Millions lottery jackpot, it's default is $20 million nominal. You get cash payout instead of annuity, now it's about $10 million. Maybe you live in a state without income tax (I do), but the feds get their cut, now it's $5 millionish. You look for a nicer house (been living in an apartment)... and, since you don't want to lose it to property tax arrears all that quickly, you budget for that too for the next 20 years. How much house can you afford? Turns out, you're getting at most some upper middle class home in a second class city. Maybe with a nice car in the garage too. No live-in maids and chefs, no 40,000sqft mansions with indoor Olympic swimming pools and gold-plated toilets.
Hardly seems like fuckyou money at all. I think while we weren't looking, inflation snuck in and changed what fuckyou money actually was. You basically need to not just be a multimillionaire anymore, but a sub-billionaire.
My definition is very different. It is about my ability to have control over my life in the areas that matter most to me. I value my time and personal development above material wealth (to a point). I don't need a giant house. I don't need regular fancy vacations or to own a car. I personally have been not working and living comfortably on much much less than 5mm in a high cost of living city for over five years. I do have to make many tradeoffs but I am happier than working a soul sucking job. It's not a path for everyone.