kovvy (u/kovvy) - Readit News

kovvy commented on How to complain (2024) outerproduct.net/trivial/... · Posted by u/ysangkok

I like the sleeping kitty thing.

There’s nothing wrong with the post. I basically agree, but I don’t see it as front page HN stuff.

kovvy · 3 months ago

The sleeping kitty is from, or perhaps descended from, https://webneko.net/

To the decorative text behind the kitty, I would add that it's almost always helpful to include some form of praise and redirect, for example, "The current approach of doing X has worked well, but aspect Y could be improved by doing Z."

kovvy commented on Texas is suing all of the big TV makers for spying on what you watch theverge.com/news/845400/... · Posted by u/tortilla

ortusdux · 3 months ago

I just want a somewhat trustworthy organization to develop a "DUMB" certification. I would pay extra for a DUMB TV.

I like the suggested "Don't Upload My Bits" backronym.

kovvy · 3 months ago

A related alternative would be that the listed tv price included the price of time spent viewing ads, and the sale price of your usage data (and that changing the price, say by showing more ads, required agreement).

A DUMB TV costs $x, while a badly behaved smart TV costs $y up front, plus $z per hour for the next few years, where y is potentially slightly less than x.

kovvy commented on Starship Flight 5: Launch and booster catch [video] twitter.com/SpaceX/status... · Posted by u/alecco

flaburgan · a year ago

So, reusable is supposed to reduce the cost. But the space shuttle was reusable and it has been shutdown because it was too expensive. What is the differences between the two?

kovvy · a year ago

Reusability increases costs if you don't reuse often enough.

The shuttle would have been much, much, cheaper per launch if it had flown more often. The expected costs for the shuttle included a range based on how often it flew which turned out to be reasonably accurate. They were much worse at predicting which end of the range they would be flying in. At the rate they ended up flying they had the extra costs of reusability without any of the benefits.

Starship is ludicrously expensive, but still much cheaper than even the best case for the Shuttle, and it has a guaranteed source of launches to help it benefit from resuability.

kovvy commented on Delving into ChatGPT usage in academic writing through excess vocabulary arxiv.org/abs/2406.07016... · Posted by u/zdw

hdhshdhshdjd · 2 years ago

I can’t trust any paper with y-axis labels that are all over the place paired next to each other. Figure 1 is a hot mess.

kovvy · 2 years ago

The figures are about the change rather than the absolute value, so it's not too terrible, but even given that, they could have been normalised by being relative to year 1. A quite warm mess, perhaps?

kovvy commented on Morrowind 20-year anniversary book mw.thenet.sk/... · Posted by u/todsacerdoti

thom · 4 years ago

I loved Morrowind, but I do still lament the loss of the 'Elite as fantasy' feel for the first two Elder Scrolls games. As much as they were sparsely populated and low on story, those felt more like truly Open World games to me (I was happy running errands and clothes shopping for the most part). Morrowind was a bit of a shock to the system when I first played it. It was very well done, but many orders of magnitude smaller than Arena and Daggerfall. I can't really make a strong case that it wasn't a better game (and I enjoyed Skyrim too), but I hope we're not far off returning to procedural worlds with a new eye, especially now AI is on the verge of being a core part of asset workflows.

kovvy · 4 years ago

I have high hopes for Daggerfall once they finish fixing the main bugs and it goes into beta.

kovvy commented on Google cancels Google Play publisher account and ends family’s source of income medium.com/@appsrentables... · Posted by u/heavyset_go

Beltalowda · 4 years ago

I suspect it's because a lot of these automated bans are done without any clear actual reason beyond "our machine learning model found something, but we can't really get a coherent picture of why".

Last week I created a brand new Facebook account as I recently moved to a new city and am somewhat desperate to meet people, and Facebook events can be useful for this (as much as I loathe Facebook, my mental health is a bit more important right now). I got banned after about 2 minutes. I didn't actually do anything on the platform. I managed to click to about 2 or 3 pages.

What set this off? Who knows. Maybe some browser settings? Previous user(s) of my IP address? Those pages I clicked on? Something else? It surely wasn't anything I actually did as I didn't really interact with the platform at all.

I suspect that if I asked some high-up Facebook engineer to look in to it they wouldn't be able to actually give me an answer either beyond "The Algorithm determined there were risk factors".

kovvy · 4 years ago

Was that a complete ban, or was it an attempt to get your phone number and other personal details?

Instagram has always banned my accounts for suspicious behaviour on whatever page is first used after the account is created - the only way they offer to progress is to give them a phone number. It's a pretty transparent grab for more info to sell.

kovvy commented on Countering threats from North Korea blog.google/threat-analys... · Posted by u/arkadiyt

wolverine876 · 4 years ago

> (Insert obligatory "wiki it's not always accurate etc etc"). Overall I'd take either one and personally don't care. Just trying to match what you're saying with what I'm reading and make sense of where the truth is.

Diving in (even if the parent doesn't care :) ):

The last sentence is the real challenge: Meanings depend 100% on writer and reader understandings. If two agree that 'homograph' means 'chicken poop', as long as they're the only ones communicating then 'chicken poop' it is; but if someone else reads it, our language subsystem fails.

Some dictionaries influence meaning by being prescriptive (e.g., American Heritage, IIRC); others report what has been understood by being descriptive (e.g., Oxford). The problem is, Wikipedia is neither: It represents the understandings of a few editors of unknown knowledge; it is neither descriptive nor prescriptive and we quickly get into chicken poop scenarios.

* Homograph, report Merriam-Webster and Oxford, means words with the same spelling but different meanings (or origin or pronunciation), e.g., the bow of a ship and a bow and arrow.

* Homoglyph doesn't appear in Oxford, Merriam-Webster, American Heritage, or any others (per Wordnik and OneLook), except Wiktionary. Wiktionary descriptively traces the word back to 1938 (though maybe with a different meaning in that case) and says it means a glyph with the same or similar appearance but different meaning. That still doesn't define a term for the entire string "ycornbinator.com", only the "rn", but close enough!

kovvy · 4 years ago

There is also 'homeograph' - "A word similar — but not identical — in spelling to another." That seems a better fit for your needs.

kovvy commented on Sumerian dog jokes, or the difficulty of translating dead languages twitter.com/LinManuelRwan... · Posted by u/jsnell

thaumasiotes · 4 years ago

There is a famous story about Zhuangzi [if you prefer, Chuang Tzu] that goes like this:

-----

Zhuangzi and Huizi were crossing a bridge over the river Hao.

Zhuangzi said: the fish have come out to play; this makes them happy.

Huizi said: You are not a fish. How do you know what makes fish happy?

Zhuangzi said: You are not me. How do you know that I don't know what makes fish happy?

Huizi said: I am not you. Of course I do not know you. [But] you are certainly not a fish. Your non-knowledge of what makes fish happy is total.

Zhuangzi said: Please stick to your original [question]. You asked how I know what makes fish happy. You already knew that I knew this and [still] you asked me. I know it over the Hao.

-----

"I know it over the Hao" makes sense because in the original language, the word "how", 安, is also the word "where".

The story comes down to us as part of a foundational text. Is it wisdom or a cheap joke?

kovvy · 4 years ago

A lot of humour consists of buildup followed by a twist - the humour is in the contrast between the expected and the actual. This is very similar to explaining a concept that is flawed or misunderstood by building up a scenario where the expected outcome can be contrasted with an actual outcome. A smaller set replaces 'actual' with 'nonsense'.

The text may present this as wisdom, but I would say it is both wisdom and humour.

kovvy commented on Show HN: A game that tests how well you know your local area backofyourhand.com/51.898... · Posted by u/adamlynch

et-al · 4 years ago

I love this!

One question, though: how are you calculating distance from a street? Here, I thought I was pretty spot on for a street, but it still said I was 56m away.

Screenshot: https://imgur.com/a/L4usV6W

kovvy · 4 years ago

On my map it seemed like the road consisted of a few points, rather than the points plus lines between them (or however it's described). Selecting intersections (maybe bends?) lowered the distance.

kovvy commented on Teaching is a slow process of becoming everything you hate dynomight.net/teaching/... · Posted by u/dynm

professoretc · 4 years ago

> it seems possible the teacher's instructions were confusing.

Yes; I've been on both sides. I've written assignments that I thought were clear and unambiguous, only to find that a significant number of students misunderstood what I meant. They weren't intentionally trying to make the problems easier, they just weren't sure what I wanted. (And, of course, who is going to interpret an ambiguous problem so as to make more work for themselves? A few students will do it both ways -- the easier interpretation and the harder one -- but most won't.)

And on the other side, I've taken continuing education classes taught by other teachers where the instructions were confusing, ambiguous, or sometimes just plain impossible to follow ("You'll find the answers to this quiz in the article you just read." but the article was revised and now uses different terminology from the quiz.)

kovvy · 4 years ago

I find that students talk to each other and spread interpretations of the assignment. They might be correct, they might not - either way the interpretation spreads (never through anything like 'official' course forums set up for students to ask about interpretations, of course). They've also gone through shared experiences in other courses beforehand and will often simply come up with the same incorrect interpretation. For 5 years the basic assignment was clear and easily understood, then the next year it's almost universally misinterpreted. Those shared misunderstandings have easily outnumbered creative interpretations to help grades in my experience.