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falsenapkin commented on Omegle 2009-2023   omegle.com/... · Posted by u/liamcottle
sugarpile · 2 years ago
Elsewhere in the thread this article with an embedded video was linked: https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-64618791

The video, showing a BBC “journalist” attempting to ambush Leif, is one of the most… existentially disgusting? videos I’ve seen in a long, long time.

It’s so utterly performative. Such a transparent attempt by the “journalist” at painting himself as a certain sort of person. Not a single genuine emotion, action, expression, or word. Absolutely soulless and desperate attempt to virtue signal in the even more desperate hope of furthering his career. This “man” is no better than someone selling themselves on onlyfans. Actually, I’d posit he’s worse: the entire schtick requires disingenuous postering.

I don’t know what to do when seeing stuff like this. It’s depressing. I hope one day there’s a return to a much smaller internet and these people deign to just leave us alone. He’s a sad man and the fact his doing this will may well advantage him is even sadder. I guess I’ll go take a walk.

falsenapkin · 2 years ago
In that video he asserts through the closed door that Omegle hasn't done anything "for the children" and then in the article they have one measly line about how Omegle actually has been productive on that front. The text now on the Omegle site seems to support that they did what they could as well. Of course they're not going to get a good conversation with him when that's how they're going to frame it compared to reality. Whether Omegle was doing enough or should exist to begin with are different arguments but the premise of "Omegle is doing nothing" appears very wrong and I imagine offensive to creator/employees.
falsenapkin commented on Tell HN: DuckDuckGo Search Results have jumped the shark    · Posted by u/laurex
JohnFen · 2 years ago
> with Kagi the only time I use !g is when the search results end in one page, which is rare and almost always the Google results are noisy trash

That might be because Google won't admit when it doesn't have results responsive to your query. It will just fill the results page with nonsense instead of saying "I couldn't find any results".

falsenapkin · 2 years ago
Definitely, and I'm ok with not getting results, Kagi is doing the right thing.
falsenapkin commented on Tell HN: DuckDuckGo Search Results have jumped the shark    · Posted by u/laurex
s_dev · 2 years ago
I use DDG but actively of thinking switching to Kagi: https://kagi.com/ -- it's a paid service but I can justify it based on the amount of search queries I run everyday. Has anyone switched and not looked back?
falsenapkin · 2 years ago
Like siblings, I switched and never looked back. I used !g with DDG often, more as the years went on tbh, but with Kagi the only time I use !g is when the search results end in one page, which is rare and almost always the Google results are noisy trash. Maybe 5% of searches I check Google and 10% of those actually return something useful that Kagi didn't. On balance with how much better the other 95% of queries are, first time I'm excited to search for things.

My biggest complaint with Kagi is sometimes when I search for something the top result is a pinned domain that maybe hit the right keywords but mentally to me it was unrelated to the search I was performing. That's a pretty good problem to have at the end of the day.

falsenapkin commented on Ask HN: Did any of you first encounter programming through Scratch?    · Posted by u/MarcScott
falsenapkin · 2 years ago
I had the privilege and good fortune to introduce a diverse group of highschoolers to Scratch as an intro to programming around 2013/2014, it was a lot of fun! A few of them seemed pretty hooked and were doing some wild things pretty quickly, I imagine at least a couple pursued it further. Reminded me a bit of like ~2005 Flash community.
falsenapkin commented on The Killer Use Case for LLMs Is Summarization   sebastianmellen.com/post/... · Posted by u/sebmellen
akiselev · 2 years ago
Not an NLP expert but the biggest difference in my experience is guided focus, so to speak. When summarizing something huge like the US Code, for example, you can tell the LLM to focus on specific topics and anything adjacent to them so that it ignores irrelevant details (which is usually >99.9% of the text in my use case). The word relationships encoded in the LLM are really good at identifying important adjacent topics and entities.

LLMs are also really good at the harder NLP problems like coreference resolution, dependency parsing, and relations which makes a huge difference when using recursive summarization on complex documents where something like "the Commisioner" might be defined at the beginning and used throughout a 100,000 token document. When instructed, the LLM can track the definitions in memory itself and even modify it live by calling OpenAI functions.

falsenapkin · 2 years ago
Interesting so maybe not my trivial "summarize an article" example but clearly the upper bound on what's possible is higher and more interesting.
falsenapkin commented on The Killer Use Case for LLMs Is Summarization   sebastianmellen.com/post/... · Posted by u/sebmellen
falsenapkin · 2 years ago
I'm not familiar with the summarization or NLP space really but I remember ~2011-2015 I signed up for a couple of daily email services that summarized a number of news articles and the summaries were fantastic. I don't even remember what they were called, they eventually sold out with ads and worse formatting/summaries to make money I guess. I often use them as an example of 1) why LLMs are a bit old news for the summary use case and 2) how various LLM use cases will probably also be ruined because for a lot of people tools like that seem novel and useful but all I can see is onboarding to more advertising.

So to someone who is actually knowledgeable in this space, are LLMs really that much better than whatever we had 10 years ago? Is this tech the key to some features we truly didn't have before?

falsenapkin commented on The iOS option to charge battery to "80% Limit" shouldn't just be for iPhone 15   keydiscussions.com/2023/1... · Posted by u/spenvo
falsenapkin · 2 years ago
Glancing at some comments here mentioning the overnight charging feature working for them, am I in the minority by charging randomly whenever it needs it? My charger isn't even in the bedroom. Curious how my random on/off habits compare to overnighters in long term battery health.

I try to take it off around 80% so I was interested in this feature and confused when the update didn't include it. I don't like that it's in my "pros" column for upgrading when it could be available to everyone, would rather not reward them for that.

falsenapkin commented on Canadian cannabis market struggles five years after legalisation   bbc.com/news/world-us-can... · Posted by u/Geekette
falsenapkin · 2 years ago
My US state has been legal for some years now and it's a similar story. Part of me wants the market to collapse a bit as it's kind of annoying how many businesses exist, in my city this one corner had 3 shops in a touristy part of town and no one ever in them. I would hate to see it collapse into like 2-3 mega brands owned by some global conglomerate that also owns mega beer/tobacco though.
falsenapkin commented on Canadian cannabis market struggles five years after legalisation   bbc.com/news/world-us-can... · Posted by u/Geekette
manishsharan · 2 years ago
I have a question for people who smoke marijuana: does the stench not bother you ? Our subways and buses reek with this stench. Our parks reek with this stench.
falsenapkin · 2 years ago
As someone who smoked/vaped daily for several years, it wouldn't bother me and if anything I would get excited like "where is that?" But after several months of voluntarily not using I actually did get to a point where I dislike the smell of it. Cigarettes, perfume, cologne, even strong laundry detergent still smell worse to me, but yeah weed is not a great smell.

It really hit me when I went to Manhattan for the first time since covid and the ratio of pee to cannabis stench had flipped rather strong to cannabis.

falsenapkin commented on Goldman Sachs reportedly said Apple Card savings account was a mistake   9to5mac.com/2023/10/16/ap... · Posted by u/ksec
jwells89 · 2 years ago
Travel cards haven’t been that restrictive in the time I’ve been using them (since around 2016). Chase Sapphire Preferred/Reserve and Amex Gold/Platinum don’t have any restrictions on what earns points, it just needs to code as travel (flights, rides, or hotels) or restaurants and while there’s some benefits from using the Chase/Amex portals to book even that’s not required. Similarly points can used towards anything that codes as travel.

Of course there are airline/hotel specific cards and those may be more restrictive but I’ve never seen the point in those.

falsenapkin · 2 years ago
> but I’ve never seen the point in those

The one points card I have actually is a Marriott card which obviously only works with Marriott, but Marriott is everywhere and doesn't restrict scheduling options so it was an easy choice at the time. I used to travel weekly for work and the hotel was on me for reimbursement whereas the airline was on company card, and Marriott was the preferred booking option by my company so it made a lot of sense to get the card. The math at the time for that was like 5-7% when spending the points at Marriott plus a free night for what was an $85/year card. Useful for personal travel.

u/falsenapkin

KarmaCake day299December 22, 2021View Original