mieubrisse (u/mieubrisse)

mieubrisse commented on Pixel 10 Phones blog.google/products/pixe... · Posted by u/gotmedium

Fuzzwah · 9 days ago

This seems like a good place to randomly drop my thoughts on switching from a Samsung s20+ to a Pixel 9 Pro. The hardware is excellent in the hand. The display is great, battery life excellent, the UI is snappy, does all the basic things I expect from a quality device. Over all, no huge regrets..... but...

The scrolling in every app is just "different" from the Samsung, and in a "not as good" way. I moved to Pixel with the (as I now realise) very out dated idea that a Pixel phone would allow me MORE customisation and configurability than the Samsung/Galaxy environment. Oh boy, how wrong I was. Turns out there's a whole stack of Samsung bundled apps or ones available through their Galaxy store for free that I'd gotten so used to I thought it was default Android stuff.

I miss:

  - per app volume control  
  - nav bar customisation  
  - lock screen config  
  - many of the good lock apps  
  - shake for torch  
  - the samsung camera app  
  - control of what apps CAN run in the background (the pixel murders everything)  
  - subtle ways that Nova Launcher has problems

So yeah, next time I'm in the market for a phone I think I'm going back to Samsung.

I want Google to be better...

mieubrisse · 9 days ago

Re. what apps can run in the background - have you checked out the "allow background battery usage"? This has worked so far for me.

mieubrisse commented on Show HN: I built an app to block Shorts and Reels scrollguard.app/... · Posted by u/adrianhacar

Terr_ · 11 days ago

> I had an epiphany that faulting myself, and my self-control, is exactly what these sites want you to do.

Yeah, this kind of realization can be surprisingly empowering, because it takes something that seemed like unavoidable natural law and reveals it as an adversarial relationship.

To offer a boring but lower-tech version: Shopping centers which are deliberately designed to make people enter/exit through stores, and the companies that pay to rent that space in particular. So there's nothing awkward about tracking in some water on a rainy day, the company chose that tradeoff.

mieubrisse · 11 days ago

Yes, exactly! We generally treat spaces with the benefit of the doubt, which I think is smart for mental health. A conference center which doesn't have the bathrooms close to where you'd expect probably is just badly designed rather than actively trying to mess with you. But this breaks down for certain spaces: shopping malls, airports, etc.

mieubrisse commented on White House in Talks with Intel for 10% U.S. Government Stake wsj.com/tech/intel-us-gov... · Posted by u/sugarpimpdorsey

tick_tock_tick · 12 days ago

When Trump says "America First" he means whatever is needed for America to "win". Lots of major tech leaders and people around him think the AI race with China is going to define the next 25-50 years some think this is "the race" as in whoever wins is going to be The Superpower full stop not for the next 50 year just forever.

With that on the line a lot of principles are just plain unimportant.

Hell even Democrats are falling inline behind him on China. D.C. seems to think this is a make or break moment for the long term success of the country.

mieubrisse · 11 days ago

I appreciated this comment. I really dislike Trump, but I try to steelman the opposing side to not fall into the "other party bad!" nonsense. But his recent actions have made it very hard to find a steelman, and it's been hard to resist feeling "the dude is a power-hungry narcissist". Your explanation makes a lot of sense as a steelman; thank you!

mieubrisse commented on Show HN: I built an app to block Shorts and Reels scrollguard.app/... · Posted by u/adrianhacar

madamelic · 12 days ago

It's also not some "oopsie". It's almost certainly not news but these sites want these 'one more' behaviors.

Years ago, I designed a minimalist YouTube player that removed video suggestions and autoplays but used their player, didn't evade ads, etc. I got banned by Google because they disallow any alternative site for YouTube, only embeds are allowed.

Pretty sure I am still banned on all Google APIs too.

mieubrisse · 12 days ago

In case you want that same functionality now, I use the following three extensions to tame Youtube dark patterns:

- https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/df-utube-distractio...

- https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/clickbait-remover-f...

- https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/blocktube/bbeaicapb...

mieubrisse commented on Show HN: I built an app to block Shorts and Reels scrollguard.app/... · Posted by u/adrianhacar

coffeecoders · 12 days ago

This is one of those things that should be unnecessary if we all had perfect self-control, but the reality is these apps are engineered explicitly to bypass that.

It feels a bit silly to need guardrails for something as trivial as scrolling.

Shameless personal plug: I wrote about it here. https://nabraj.com/blog/swipe-scroll-repeat-addiction/

mieubrisse · 12 days ago

I had an epiphany that faulting myself, and my self-control, is exactly what these sites want you to do. "Oh, it's just your bad self-discipline"

No, this is full-on war for control of your mind. And the adversary spends millions to hire teams of the world's best psychologists and engineers to deploy technology that never sleeps with the sole purpose of grabbing and keeping your attention.

Once I realized this, I started treating doomscrolling and Youtube rabbit holes not as personal insufficiencies, but as systemic failures in my psychological defense system. I started installing my own tech to keep me safe, and I am much, much happier.

Predictably, companies like Google try to disable the defenses (e.g. with Manifest v3, which was a garbage excuse to disable many defensive extensions). And so the war goes.

mieubrisse commented on Show HN: I built an app to block Shorts and Reels scrollguard.app/... · Posted by u/adrianhacar

NalNezumi · 12 days ago

I would love it.

I'm currently using DFInstagram, which removes home feed. Only downside I see is that is also removes Instagram stories which I do like to check, but I can do that from PC if I want.

As for YouTube I can already remove 99% of the distraction by just putting things to private and completely remove recommendations on home page, but reddit / Twitter / Facebook would be great.

For the social medias I'd love to just have "old mode" where I'm only ever shown stuff posted by people I explicitly follow. Everything went to total garbage when "engagement" became the goodhearts metric, and news feed either throw you astroturf, ads, and rage-bait posts by people I haven't even followed

[1] https://www.distractionfreeapps.com/

mieubrisse · 12 days ago

I also use DFInstagram. You can keep stories; I have mine configured to kill the feed & cancerous search page grid but allow me to see stories. Works great.

mieubrisse commented on IQ tests results for AI trackingai.org/home... · Posted by u/stared

thechao · 13 days ago

My high school was right across from a branch of a university (UHD) where the PhD candidates developed IQ tests. We (the HS students) could take them for extra credit. My favorite example was a block-arranging test (there was a set of blocks & some pictures). Anyways, they printed the blocks "symmetrically"; once I figured that out, making the picture was limited only by how quickly I could move. (The test normally had you looking at all sides of the cube, repeatedly.) My "IQ" was well over 200 on that test. The candidate said that it was going to set their lab back bag years.

mieubrisse · 13 days ago

A similar thing happened to me.

I once took a timed test with a section that had me translating a string of symbols to letters using a cipher, response being multiple choice. If you read the string left to right, there were multiple answer options that started with the same sequence of letters (so ostensibly you had to translate the entire string).

But if you read the string right to left, there was often only one answer option that matched (the right one). So I got away with translating only the last ~4 symbols, regardless of how long the string was. I blew through the section, and surely scored high.

I always wondered: did they realize this? Or did it artificially inflate my results?

And looking at the highest-entropy section felt natural to me, but only because of countless hours as a software engineer where the highest-entropy bit is at the end (filepaths, certain IDs, etc).

Is it really accurate to say I'm "more intelligent" because I've seen that pattern a ton before, whereas someone who hasn't isn't? I suspect not.

mieubrisse commented on What does Palantir actually do? wired.com/story/palantir-... · Posted by u/mudil

jihadjihad · 16 days ago

Wasn't there a blog post on HN a while back from someone who worked there early on in their career, where they traveled around and built a bunch of tools to help manage data etc.? I thought it was an interesting lens to look through. Can't recall the post, though.

mieubrisse · 15 days ago

I think you're looking for this: https://nabeelqu.substack.com/p/reflections-on-palantir

I worked there for 7y, and can confirm Nabeel's post is very accurate.

The general public thinks Palantir's a bunch of moral-less folks grinning over godlike power & privacy violations but in actuality it's a mashup of smart Silicon Valley + military folks trying to make data pipelines & analysis work around the globe, often in achingly bureaucratic organizations.

mieubrisse commented on What does Palantir actually do? wired.com/story/palantir-... · Posted by u/mudil

radicaldreamer · 15 days ago

I don't think its all that sophisticated. The reason Palantir pairs up its services with consultants is that it's not that useful or sophisticated, the consultant's job is to spice it up so it seems like the data and tooling is more valuable than it actually is.

It's the same model as McKinsey etc, the value add is in feeling like you're getting value out of the money you're spending and half of that is being marketed to personally by the consultant and getting glossy presentations, reports, and dashboards.

mieubrisse · 15 days ago

The reason they pair it with consulting is because:

1. The products are powerful but complex, and were designed by smart, technical people for smart, technical people. They lack some random-person usability.

2. The average client employee isn't that technical.

Source: worked there for 7 years (my views are my own, of course)

mieubrisse commented on Face it: you're a crazy person experimental-history.com/... · Posted by u/surprisetalk

mieubrisse · a month ago

Reminds me of a quote from the Projection Lab success story that got posted a few weeks ago: https://projectionlab.com/blog/we-reached-1m-arr-with-zero-f...

> But luckily, success indexes less on IQ and more on consistency. The willingness to doggedly show up every single day can take you to some really suprising and amazing places.