manifoldgeo (u/manifoldgeo)

manifoldgeo commented on A monopoly ISP refuses to fix upstream infrastructure sacbear.com/xfinity-wont-... · Posted by u/vedmed

joelthelion · a month ago

(not from the US) If xfinity sucks so much, could you try switching to a different provider?

manifoldgeo · a month ago

Xfinity has a massive market share and is often the only game in town or one of only two. The only alternatives are often smaller resellers of the exact same infrastructure under a different company name. Or, there's also satellite Internet, but it's an order of magnitude slower, has a low data cap, and costs at least as much as the others.

Sometimes, the situation is so bad that people start their own ISP rather than suffer the exorbitant prices and lackluster support:

https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2021/01/jared...

manifoldgeo commented on Blender 5.0 blender.org/download/rele... · Posted by u/FrostKiwi

jsheard · a month ago

Let's not get ahead of ourselves, Blender has done far better than most open source software but Maya is still very much the industry standard. I don't think we can realistically say that Maya is beaten until Blender is battle-proven to the same degree, on the most demanding real-world production workloads (think Pixar/Weta), which for now it hasn't been.

manifoldgeo · a month ago

The studio that makes Evangelion moved from 3DS Max to Blender as their primary 3D software according to this article:

https://www.blender.org/user-stories/japanese-anime-studio-k...

manifoldgeo commented on EA Announces Agreement to be Acquired by PIF, Silver Lake, and Affinity Partners ir.ea.com/press-releases/... · Posted by u/rf15

manifoldgeo · 3 months ago

There's a recent book called "Plunder: Private Equity's Plan to Pillage America", and seeing this news makes me want to revisit it. The author outlines the usual tactics used by private equity firms to turn a functioning business into their own short-term profit factory, often driving the business into bankruptcy in the process. EA already has a reputation as a semi-broken company, but things can probably get a lot worse.

One method they use is the consolidation of a bunch of small, related businesses. For example, PE firms buy out all of the local veterinary offices in a tri-city area, cut costs, lay off the most qualified vets and replace with less-qualified ones, increase prices for services, and operate a local monopoly.

Clearly, that particular tactic is much harder to pull on the massive oligopoly that is the gaming industry, but it was the one that stuck with me from the book. There are more baffling ones like selling off all the company's real estate, making them rent it back at a much higher rate than their current mortgages (which may already have been paid off), and then filter revenues out of the company via "consulting fees" paid to themselves and their friends for this bad advice.

The book is a little bit repetitive, and some of the tactics are beyond my grasp, but I'm excited to make a personal bingo card of them and see which ones get used on EA as they drive it into the ground.

manifoldgeo commented on Ask HN: Why Did Mercurial Die?:( · Posted by u/sergiotapia

manifoldgeo · 5 months ago

Mozilla still uses Mercurial for Firefox development [0]. They're in the process of moving to git and GitHub [1]. I don't know the status of the move, but I contributed a bit to Firefox's build system via Mercurial, and I am glad to see they're moving to git since it's the industry standard. Mercurial felt so alien when I was using it. Git has its own share of UX problems, but finding support for Mercurial was much harder for me, precisely because nobody really uses it anymore.

References:

0: https://hg-edge.mozilla.org/

1: https://groups.google.com/a/mozilla.org/g/firefox-dev/c/Qnfy...

manifoldgeo commented on Show HN: Cogitator – A Python Toolkit for Chain-of-Thought Prompting github.com/habedi/cogitat... · Posted by u/habedi0

manifoldgeo · 7 months ago

Will there be a follow-up toolkit for Artificial General Intelligence called Agitator?

Dumb jokes aside, I took a look at your GitHub page, and this is exactly what I've been looking for when I do local LLM work. Cogitator seems like a nice, pythonic approach vs. using the raw `ollama run` command, esp. given the focus on chain of thought. I think I'll start using this tool. Nice work!

manifoldgeo commented on Tell Mozilla: it's time to ditch Google mozillapetition.com/... · Posted by u/notpushkin

mightybyte · 9 months ago

My default uninformed assumption would be that Google is paying Mozilla for making Google the default search engine for Firefox. Does anyone know if this is the case, and if so, what the likely magnitudes are? Because it seems like Google can throw quantities of money at Mozilla that would easily overwhelm whatever pressure this petition might put on them.

manifoldgeo · 9 months ago

Yes, this is correct. Google pays Mozilla hundreds of millions of dollars annually to be the default search engine. This makes up the vast majority of Mozilla Corporation's revenue. It's somewhere in the ballpark of 85% of all their annual revenue last I heard.

They've tried hard in recent years to get out from under Google by diversifying into other areas. For example, they have a VPN service that is a wrapper around Mullvad, and they've made some privacy tools that you can pay to use, also largely wrappers around other companies' tools.

I was an employee of Mozilla Corporation and saw first-hand the effort they were making. In my opinion, it's been a pretty abysmal failure so far. Pulling Google funding would effectively hamstring Mozilla Corp.

manifoldgeo commented on Washington Post editor resigns after accusing CEO of killing column nbcnews.com/news/us-news/... · Posted by u/ceejayoz

byearthithatius · 10 months ago

Over 100 people upvoted this but nobody has any thoughts? I will share one. It is a negative side effect of capitalism that monetary power controls information flow.

manifoldgeo · 10 months ago

I upvoted this post and would not have commented if not for yours, so maybe my reason for (almost) abstaining is similar as other people who upvoted. What follows might be a ramble and is just my anecdotal experience on HN:

I've been an HN user for years, and I've found it somewhat hard to comment on anything related to economics or non-technical / pop-cultural topics. Many HN users are experts in their technical fields, and they seem to think this automatically translates to expertise in political science, sociology, psychology, and all the other fields of endeavor where we can't just point to source code to justify our positions. I mostly find that HN commenters are a thoughtful bunch. But, there's a small, noisy group of armchair experts waiting to swoop in and correct your grammar or disagree on some technicality over social issues like this.

Since HN is tech-focused, even posting something not directly related to technology can get your post flagged and taken down as irrelevant. So in a way, discussing these things is disincentivized by the site's purpose. I get that WaPo is an online platform and therefore in-scope, but it's "scarier" to comment on because it's more social than technical.

In part, the act of being a thoughtful commenter also means steering well clear of any flame wars (that aren't related to NixOS, Rust, or LLMs). I.e., it's like jazz in that it's about the notes you don't play— it's the comments you don't make that foster a good online experience.

This is also a US-specific article, and lots of American people are overwhelmed by the onslaught of post-election political news; so, this might be a cultural thing in that people are not commening as much because they're dealing with a big inbox of emotions to sort through.

I still take active interest in political posts like this and personally think Bezos is a modern-day robber baron in the new Gilded Age. But, I'll seldom say so, opting instead to upvote so others can see the post and then move on silently.

manifoldgeo commented on OpenWrt One openwrt.org/toh/openwrt/o... · Posted by u/kristianpaul

manifoldgeo · a year ago

It's exciting to see a an OpenWRT router where compatibility is guaranteed! I've been running OpenWRT at home for years, and whenever it comes time to upgrade, it's always a deep dive into their Table of Hardware [1]. Many of the newest routers with an absurd number of antennae that you might see at big-box stores like Costco have incompatible chipsets, so usually I have to buy something a bit older.

Most recently I bought a couple of Belkin AX3200 routers because they support WiFi6 and are only about $50 USD. The annoying part is that they're a Walmart exclusive, but they have worked flawlessly so far. Still, I'd rather have the new, officially-endorsed one.

References: 1: https://openwrt.org/toh/start

manifoldgeo commented on The Slow, Painful Death of Agile and Jira ehandbook.com/the-slow-pa... · Posted by u/thecosas

taylodl · a year ago

Agile isn't agile when it becomes a proscribed methodology complete with tooling as it violates the final point of the Agile Manifesto:

Responding to change over following a plan

The whole point was to be agile enough to work in a manner that's most effective your team and organization - and even that may change on a project-by-project bases if different stakeholders are involved.

manifoldgeo · a year ago

I don't mean this in a snarky way, more just to inform: proscribed actually means forbidden unlike the word prescribed, which means recommended.

manifoldgeo commented on The 30-Year-Old Problem Still Haunting Developers thinkbigcodesmall.io/p/th... · Posted by u/rbanffy

manifoldgeo · a year ago

Once I saw that the headline image was AI-generated, I skimmed the first paragraph and didn't find a lot of meaning in it. The dearth of content combined with an AI image made me suspect that the article itself might be AI-generated.

As a litmus test, I decided to check for the word "delve" to see whether it appeared in the text. According to an article I read in The Guardian[1], this word is more likely to appear in AI-generated responses to prompts. Sure enough, "delve" was right there in the second paragraph.

Of course, these two things combined aren't exactly a "smoking gun" proving that the whole thing is AI blog-spam, but I would bet it is (as first mentioned in another comment here). It's pretty wild to be living in a time where we have to be so wary of an entire article being prompt-engineered into existence by a lazy "author" eager for clicks.

References: 1: https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2024/apr/16/techscape...