Be sure to drink your Ovaltine!
Readit Newsmirrorlake commented on Tell HN: I'm 60 years old. Claude Code has re-ignited a passion · Posted by u/shannoncc
Ironically this post comes across to me as written by an LLM. The em-dashes, the prepositions, the "not this, that" lines. As a college instructor, I can usually tell. I put it through GPTZero and it said it's 96% LLM written. GPTZero is not full-proof but I think it's likely right on this one and I find it very ironic.
I feel like I'm being rickrolled over and over again by infomercial-grade slop.
Isn't this just Shorts already?
It's also TV in 1950.
mirrorlake commented on Andrej Karpathy: Software in the era of AI [video] youtube.com/watch?v=LCEmi... · Posted by u/sandslash
On the other hand, posts like this are like watching someone writing ask jeeves search queries into google 20 years ago and then gesturing how google sucks while everyone else in the room has figured out how to be productive with it and cringes at his "boomer" queries.
If you're still struggling to make LLMs useful for you by now, you should probably ask someone. Don't let other noobs on HN +1'ing you hold you back.
Perhaps consider making some tutorials, then, and share your wealth of knowledge rather than calling people stupid.
But is "I asked chatgpt" assigning any authority to it? I use precisely that sentence as a shorthand for "I didn't know, looked it up in the most convenient way, and it sounded plausible enough to pass on".
It's a social-media-level of fact checking, that is to say, you feel something is right but have no clue if it actually is. If you had a better source for a fact, you'd quote that source rather than the LLM.
Just do the research, and you don't have to qualify it. "GPT said that Don Knuth said..." Just verify that Don said it, and report the real fact! And if something turns out to be too difficult to fact check, that's still valuable information.
mirrorlake commented on Someone at YouTube needs glasses jayd.ml/2025/04/30/someon... · Posted by u/jaydenmilne
It's 1.5x3 if you have a 21:9 screen. It's so bad.
Yeah, the Steam HW survey shows that 16:9 resolutions form a majority (60%+) of their users with 1080p + 4K, so it makes sense as a default design choice for a company that only wants to target one ratio.
As a former user of 16:10, I feel your pain, though.
mirrorlake commented on Someone at YouTube needs glasses jayd.ml/2025/04/30/someon... · Posted by u/jaydenmilne
I quite like the 2x3 grid of videos. No complaints, actually.
mirrorlake commented on Show HN: I built a tool to find devs based on code, not LinkedIn titles gitmatcher.com/... · Posted by u/NabilChiheb
I saw profiles across different searches which had no contact info listed, seems like it isn't really designed to be a hiring tool.
I'm very skeptical of the claim that you'll be able to identify people by "usefulness of code", whatever that means.
mirrorlake commented on Spaced repetition can allow for infinite recall (2022) efavdb.com/memory%20recal... · Posted by u/rzk
I don't want to rain on anyone's parade, but: of all the really brilliant people I've ever met, interacted with or learned from, I haven't heard of anyone that used techniques like this. Like, the way they learn things and become brilliant is the exact same way every brilliant person has done it for thousands of years: they read books, they discuss and debate with other brilliant people, they study their subjects and work hard. Like, true intelligence is very rarely about rote memorization of facts, it's about making new connections, being creative, and working really hard. There are no shortcuts, you have to put in the work. Aristotle, Leibniz, Einstein or whatever brilliant person you can think of didn't become who they are using cue-cards.
Spaced repetition always seemed like those schemes to get you fit or slim in 30 days that never work. There is exactly one way to get physically healthy, and it's super-unfun: diet and exercise. Same thing with your mind, you have to exercise it and feed it appropriately for months and years. Spend the time you would spend on spaced repetition reading books or watching lectures and doing exercises instead.
"There are no shortcuts, you have to put in the work." Spoken like someone who doesn't use an SRS system, then. They're actually extremely hard to use, because the focus is on feeding you the toughest possible version of every recalled card. Part of why people quit using them is because it's mentally exhausting!
AI writing detectors are snake oil
Anecdotally, English/History/Communications professors are confirming cheaters with them because they find it easy to identify false information. The red flags are so obvious that the checker tools are just a formality: student papers now have fake URLs and fake citations. Students will boldly submit college papers which have paragraphs about nonexistent characters, or make false claims about what characters did in a story.
The e-mail correspondence goes like this: "Hello Professor, I'd like to meet to discuss my failing grade. I didn't know that using ChatGPT was bad, can I have some points back or rewrite my essay?"