harles (u/harles) - Readit News

harles commented on Xfinity using WiFi signals in your house to detect motion xfinity.com/support/artic... · Posted by u/bearsyankees

zeta0134 · 2 months ago

This practice, and fear of the exact sort of nonsense in this article, plus wanting to keep my wifi bandwidth free for the network I actually connect to, is why I'm still on AT&T DSL in my area, at 50 mbps. Comcast is available at up to gigabit, and they can keep it.

harles · 2 months ago

AT&T is pretty bad in its own way. They snoop DNS and to sell your info (including physical address) to advertisers - even if you switch your DNS providers. They used to had a paid opt out (~$20/mo IIRC) but I don’t see that option anymore.

harles commented on Launch HN: Issen (YC F24) – Personal AI language tutor · Posted by u/mariano54

mariano54 · 2 months ago

Yes we do have this issue, but it's improved a bit over chatgpt due to using multiple transcribers.

The models are improving though, and they are at a very good place for English at the moment. I expect by next year we will switch over to full voice to voice models.

harles · 2 months ago

This reply seems to miss the question, or at least doesn’t answer it clearly. Is this service overly tolerant of mispronunciations? Foundational models are becoming more tolerant, not less, over time which is the opposite of what I’d want in this case.

harles commented on Migrating away from Rust deadmoney.gg/news/article... · Posted by u/rc00

janalsncm · 4 months ago

> These crates also get "refactored" every few months, with breaking API changes

I am dealing with similar issues in npm now, as someone who is touching Node dev again. The number of deprecations drives me nuts. Seems like I’m on a treadmill of updating APIs just to have the same functionality as before.

harles · 4 months ago

I’ve found such changes can actually be a draw at first. “Hey look, progress and activity!”. Doubly so as a primarily C++ dev frustrated with legacy choices in stl. But as you and others point out, living with these changes is a huge pain.

harles commented on On loyalty to your employer (2018) medium.com/hackernoon/on-... · Posted by u/Peroni

kemayo · 4 months ago

You can think of mutual-loyalty as an extended transaction, if you prefer. If, in exchange for you not planning on leaving the company, the company actively does its best to treat you well and preserve your job long-term, that can be a good trade-off.

The mutuality is important. You absolutely shouldn't think of yourself as "loyal" to a company that won't stick up for you. (And many companies won't, to be clear. If asked to choose between cutting executive salaries by 2% and firing you, most companies won't think too hard about that. You shouldn't be loyal to those ones.)

harles · 4 months ago

It’s definitely not a transaction. Every time I’ve seen push come to shove, companies prioritize the folks they see as critical to their company’s success with loyalty not even being a small factor. And if it’s a moderate to large sized company, many of the decisions will be made by a consulting firm with 0 context (or care) for loyalty.

harles commented on TopoNets: High performing vision and language models with brain-like topography arxiv.org/abs/2501.16396... · Posted by u/mayukhdeb

vlovich123 · 7 months ago

Unless GPUs work markedly differently somehow or there’s been some fundamental shift in computer architecture I’m not aware of, spatial locality is still a factor in computers.

Aside from HW acceleration today, designs like Cebras would benefit heavily by reducing the amount of random access from accessing the weights (and thus freeing up cross-chip memory bandwidth for other things).

harles · 7 months ago

That could explain compute efficiency, but has nothing to do with the parameter efficiency pointed at in the paper.

harles commented on Molecule restores cognition, memory in Alzheimer's disease model mice uclahealth.org/news/relea... · Posted by u/amichail

harles · a year ago

I love that “in mice” is in the title (both on HN and in the original article). It seems like a promising result and I really appreciate them not over hyping it.

harles commented on Braid: Anniversary Edition "sold like dog s***", says creator Jonathan Blow eurogamer.net/braid-anniv... · Posted by u/amichail

tantalor · a year ago

Considering this is the first I'm hearing of it, and I'm going to guess many other people, I'm not surprised. Did they do any marketing?

harles · a year ago

I’m surprised as well. I start my day off with a half hour of video game news everyday (Spawn Wave + other sources) and hadn’t heard a peep about this.

harles commented on Braid: Anniversary Edition "sold like dog s***", says creator Jonathan Blow eurogamer.net/braid-anniv... · Posted by u/amichail

on_the_train · a year ago

> when asked how many of his development team are working on the compiler for programming language Jai, Blow replied: "None, because we can't afford to pay anyone because the sales are bad."

Context: jblow is a well known dev figure working on Jai, a programming language. He hasn't quite reached the fame level of carmack, but has a sizeable following

harles · a year ago

An indie studio building not only its own engine but its own language to make its own engine seems like a huge mistake.

harles commented on USPS shared customer postal addresses with Meta, LinkedIn and Snap techcrunch.com/2024/07/18... · Posted by u/leotravis10

SilasX · a year ago

Still, I'd expect the government's bean counters to ensure that any usage of third party analytics involves some ironclad agreement to the effect of, "If you fail to meet <Herculean privacy desiderata>, then we f---ing own you", so at least the government gets something when said third party inevitably violates the agreement.

harles · a year ago

Except it was the government agency that violated their agreements by providing this data. At least Facebook, based on their response, specifically put in the agreement that this sort of data should never be provided. It seems like the proposal of consequences flows the wrong way here.

harles commented on Jailbreaking RabbitOS da.vidbuchanan.co.uk/blog... · Posted by u/Retr0id

OsrsNeedsf2P · a year ago

> I could also build an entire custom kernel from source, but Rabbit Inc. has chosen to violate the GPL2 license and not make the sources available. Of particular note are their drivers for hall-effect scroll wheel sensing, and camera rotation stepper motor control, which are closed-source and yet statically linked into the GPL'd kernel image. Violations like this are hugely destructive to the free software ecosystem, from which companies like Rabbit Inc. benefit.

GPL requires you to disclose the license and source code on request, but Truth Social got away with not disclosing the license until someone realized they were using AGPL code, and only then released the source. I wonder if Rabbit will slip by doing the same.

harles · a year ago

GPL is tricky at the best of times to enforce. Onyx, makers of Boox, was called out on this years ago (sorry I couldn’t find a single concise source to link to) and hasn’t faced any consequences. I doubt Rabbit will get in trouble for this.