herf (u/herf) - Readit News

herf commented on Teaching my neighbor to keep the volume down idiallo.com/blog/teaching... · Posted by u/firefoxd

I wish there was an easy solution like this for smoking "neighbours". Some sort of detection device that instantly closes my windows automatically and then "explodes" a nasty "stinking bomb" outside (e.g. automatic opening of a container with butyric acid or similar), so it smells worse than their smoke. Eventually their brains would connect smoking with nasty stinking and stop doing it.

But I wouldn't know where to start. :-\

herf · 8 days ago

"Noftsker also shared the hacker aversion to cigarette smoke, and would sometimes express his displeasure by shooting a jet of pure oxygen from a canister he kept for that purpose; the astonished smoker would find his or her cigarette bursting into a fierce orange blur."

- Hackers, Steven Levy, 1984

herf commented on LED lighting undermines visual performance unless supplemented by wider spectra nature.com/articles/s4159... · Posted by u/bookofjoe

herf · 14 days ago

There is a 15-30% difference between the groups at baseline (fig 8c-9c, 8d-9d), about the same magnitude as the claimed effect of the experimental condition.

I think the result would be much stronger if these baselines were comparable, so they show they have accounted for other variables like time of day and light history. I am also skeptical of any effect in the retina lasting 6 weeks, with no fading.

Consider that people are often exposed to much more infrared light outdoors, so "worked under a relatively dim incandescent lamp" is not a particularly novel stimulus. Imagine that any of these people spent time outdoors during the six weeks - thousands of times more infrared light there.

herf commented on Predicting OpenAI's ad strategy ossa-ma.github.io/blog/op... · Posted by u/calcifer

herf · 22 days ago

What if your query is answered by an insane AI that is obsessed with getting you to buy things? Like this demo that could only think about the Golden Gate?

https://www.anthropic.com/news/golden-gate-claude

This would make astroturfing on Reddit look like basic mode.

herf commented on When hardware goes end-of-life, companies need to open-source the software marcia.no/words/eol... · Posted by u/Marciplan

herf · a month ago

Most systems now "fail closed" because they are based on a code signing chain of trust that has no exceptions. It would be better if some portion of these systems were made to "fail open" - you don't want a botnet to take over in this situation but you should be able to delegate code signing duties to a new party when the original one goes under or stops supporting a device.

herf commented on OLED, Not for Me nuxx.net/blog/2026/01/09/... · Posted by u/c0nsumer

herf · a month ago

It's especially important for people trying to use lower-resolution OLED (e.g., for gaming) - the text fringing can look quite bad. At higher DPI it can be less noticeable, though horizontal lines still have noticeable fringes.

Here is a more detailed look at several different subpixel arrangements: https://pcmonitors.info/articles/qd-oled-and-woled-fringing-...

And encouragingly both LG and Samsung were demoing RGB (LED-style) arrangements at CES this year.

herf commented on RemoveWindowsAI github.com/zoicware/Remov... · Posted by u/hansmayer

herf · 2 months ago

It would be useful to separate "AI that stays on your device" from "AI that makes you send more personal data to the cloud" - maybe two scripts?

herf commented on The "confident idiot" problem: Why AI needs hard rules, not vibe checks steerlabs.substack.com/p/... · Posted by u/steer_dev

keiferski · 2 months ago

The thing that bothers me the most about LLMs is how they never seem to understand "the flow" of an actual conversation between humans. When I ask a person something, I expect them to give me a short reply which includes another question/asks for details/clarification. A conversation is thus an ongoing "dance" where the questioner and answerer gradually arrive to the same shared meaning.

LLMs don't do this. Instead, every question is immediately responded to with extreme confidence with a paragraph or more of text. I know you can minimize this by configuring the settings on your account, but to me it just highlights how it's not operating in a way remotely similar to the human-human one I mentioned above. I constantly find myself saying, "No, I meant [concept] in this way, not that way," and then getting annoyed at the robot because it's masquerading as a human.

herf · 2 months ago

Training data is quite literally weighted this way - long responses on Reddit have lots of tokens, and brief responses don't get counted nearly as much.

The same goes for "rules" - you train an LLM with trillions of tokens and try to regulate its behavior with thousands. If you think of a person in high school, grading and feedback is a much higher percentage of the training.

herf commented on Microsoft is plugging more holes that let you use Windows 11 without MS account theverge.com/news/793579/... · Posted by u/josephcsible

herf · 4 months ago

Here's my situation:

1. My Microsoft account is still @msn.com, which I don't trust in any way to be secure, since it's not an email account I ever use

2. I have lots of Samba and other shares that know my local login

3. If my router goes down, I'm probably going to log into this machine to fix it, and it won't be connected to the internet

So of course I used one of the local account tricks when I installed Windows 11, and I hope they don't break it. Apple's solution of letting you have BOTH a local login and an iCloud account is much better.

herf commented on Personal data storage is an idea whose time has come blog.muni.town/personal-d... · Posted by u/erlend_sh

herf · 4 months ago

Vertically integrated apps are much cheaper to run - Instagram stores only a small fraction of your photos and makes a lot of money from them. It is somewhat harder to explain why we pay for things like iCloud, which mostly has no web API, only APIs for Apple devices. (Plenty of value there because it keeps you from having to buy a bigger iPhone.) But there are lots of these "almost general purpose" solutions, paying to upload files and store them, but where you cannot use them as you like.

Why not dozens of apps running over the "web filesystem" like happens on the desktop? Two reasons: 1. Amazon pricing for transit/bandwidth is way higher than storage, and so it makes accessing your own data quite expensive if it is not in the same datacenter. 2. And there is a huge security and usability gap between "pick one photo" vs "give me [scoped] access to your Dropbox" Often the general-purpose mode does not work that well, is quite slow, or just costs a lot in bandwidth, a thing nobody wants to pay extra for when they're already paying for storage.

herf commented on A new experimental Google app for Windows blog.google/products/sear... · Posted by u/meetpateltech

herf · 5 months ago

"Try it for yourself by opting into the experiment in Labs."

This is a really confusing call to action.