notreallyauser (u/notreallyauser)

notreallyauser commented on Google is dead. Where do we go now? circusscientist.com/2025/... · Posted by u/tomjuggler

I still mourn G+. It was clearly put together by somebody who thought first and foremost about privacy. It made deciding who to share what with the central, most visible part of how it worked. And that's probably part of why it failed. Was it hard to choose? Nope. But I guarantee you that if Facebook added a little "hey, are you sure you want to share this post publicly with the whole world under your real name? Yes/No" popup, organic content would drop 50% overnight, and not because of the difficulty of clicking "Yes." G+ died in part because it looked like a ghost town to a visitor, and it looked like a ghost town because everything was being done in private. And that was a great thing!

Mind you, G+ also made some insane and boneheaded decisions. I think at one point they tried to make all Youtube comments also be G+ posts under your real name, or something like that? That was fucking stupid.

notreallyauser · 2 months ago

People will make frequent mistakes if you put the privacy decision at a per post level. (And not just average users: see stevey's Google Platforms rant)

Having different apps, chats (Discord servers), accounts (at-a-push) for each privacy circle is much clearer to average users. Migrating a whole group of any size to another platform is hard, hence many of us are stuck with Facebookk in case we get invited to something we don't want to miss on it, but new platforms will continue to emerge and some will succeed.

notreallyauser commented on Reminder to passengers ahead of move to 100% digital boarding passes corporate.ryanair.com/new... · Posted by u/teekert

sebastiennight · 4 months ago

> charging people to use toilets on-board

AFAIK this has never happened.

This is a PR stunt that is regularly used (like the idea of standing-room-only tickets) to generate a new round of press for the company and highlight how cost-efficient and ruthless they are, which aligns with their branding and keeps the story alive.

I understand the sentiment but as sibling comment points out, you're very light in the way of stating facts to back up these claims.

notreallyauser · 4 months ago

There's an interview with the CEO where he explains (claims) the idea of that policy is to reduce demand so they can leave out a couple of toilets and put in / sell more seats -- it's not about the charge for the toilet per se.

notreallyauser commented on Oxford loses top 3 university ranking in the UK hotminute.co.uk/2025/09/1... · Posted by u/ilamont

joosters · 6 months ago

Oxbridge have never had to 'let in dumber people'. They are always heavily over-subscribed, and give offers to a small fraction of the people who come for an interview, let alone apply.

The whole point of the interview process is to assess not just the applicant's past achievements, but what they might be able to achieve if they got their place at the uni. Part of that is looking at the applicant's background, and knowing that even if they aren't currently at some elite high-fee school, they might still have the ability and capability to do well.

I am all in favor of this style of selection. The dark old days of "this kid's dad went to our college, we should do them a favour and let them in" are long gone, thankfully.

Can you point to any kind of evidence that Oxbridge are dumbing down their teaching, or lowering their standards of teaching? I doubt it.

Full disclosure: cambridge alumni, from a state school!

notreallyauser · 6 months ago

On student evaluations, I wouldn't be surprised of Oxbridge do badly as so many pf the dons were at or near the top of their year at the university, weren't employed for their teaching abilities, and seemed unable to comprehend they were not teaching cohorts entirely full of clones of themselves.

Dumbed down it was not, in my experience. Dumbing down would be a way to up the score on these rankings, though.

notreallyauser commented on Oxford loses top 3 university ranking in the UK hotminute.co.uk/2025/09/1... · Posted by u/ilamont

patanegra · 6 months ago

This is extremely unfair framing.

Oxford University has been discriminating people from independent schools for a while now. To get in, you need 4 A* from an independent schools, or just 3 As from state schools.

That's not "letting in poor people" as you framed it. It's letting in dumber people, worse students. Lots of that is mainly based on classism (against people from middle class), racism (against white people).

Oikophobia is a cancer, and Oxford getting worse ratings is the direct result of that.

notreallyauser · 6 months ago

Contextual offers are just that -- contextual. Cite your sources if you're claiming all independent schools get one tariff and all state schools get another, because AFAIK that's not how these contextual offers work.

Oxford admissions have a heavy interview component: if they think you're really smart, have great potential, and then you'll be of the caliber to get 4 A* no question if you had rich parents and went to a top Public School (but don't, so may not), then -- yeah -- they can make you a lower offer. Their place, their rules.

It isn't dumbing down or taking worse students, it's easing out the rich types who will drink/play lacrosse or rugby/bore to at least Blues standard, are pretty bright but have been spoon-fed to get there so will turn out to be dumber and worse students that people whose potential hadn't been fully revealed by 17/18, even if the spoon-fed cohort get better A Level results.

notreallyauser commented on Oxford loses top 3 university ranking in the UK hotminute.co.uk/2025/09/1... · Posted by u/ilamont

DC-3 · 6 months ago

Given that this is Hacker News, I think it is worth pointing out that Durham's strong suit traditionally is the humanities. In my opinion a CS degree from Oxford, Cambridge, or ICL is considerably more impressive than one from Durham.

notreallyauser · 6 months ago

Given this is Hacker News, I think we should definitely encourage all Yes, Minister references.

notreallyauser commented on Internal emails reveal Ticketmaster helped scalpers jack up prices, FTC says arstechnica.com/tech-poli... · Posted by u/dthread3

thimabi · 6 months ago

I for one find it much, much more fair to have the queue or the lottery systems. If it can be paired with anti-scalper measures such as truly non-transferable tickets or banning resales at a profit, even better.

But of course the problem runs deeper when we consider what you and others have been saying: it’s just too convenient for artists to reap the profits of the current system and have Ticketmaster as their scapegoat.

notreallyauser · 6 months ago

Artists don't reap the profits of the current system -- they get the face value -- Tickmaster and the scalpers do.

My solution would be some kind of auction where people put in bids of what they're willing to pay for different seating types and allocation happens so same-type seats are either sold at their reserve price or sold out at the lowest price they'd sell out at exactly, while maximising revenue -- that would give the revenues to the artists, avoid queues and disincentive scalpers. Legislating for no resale above list price and fair fees would disincentivise TM supporting scalping. TM etc could always negotiate a cut of selling-price-above-reserve to encourage them to do the best for the artist from however the auction works.

notreallyauser commented on UK's Online Safety Act comes into force ofcom.org.uk/online-safet... · Posted by u/AndrewDucker

notreallyauser · a year ago

Do you have a citation for that? People may have said words to that effect in addition to inciting rioting, but no one has been send to jail for saying that.

notreallyauser commented on "Nvidia is so far ahead that all the 4090s are nerfed to half speed" twitter.com/realGeorgeHot... · Posted by u/BIackSwan

ryao · a year ago

What made Intel seem unbeatable was its process node advantage. Nvidia does not have fabrication plants, so it is able to get the best process node from whoever has it. Nvidia is therefore not vulnerable to what befell Intel.

What makes Nvidia seem unbeatable is that Nvidia does the best job on hardware design, does a good job on the software for the hardware and gets its designs out quickly such that they can charge a premium. By the time the competition makes a competitive design, Nvidia has the next generation ready to go. They seem to be trying to accelerate their pace to kill attempts to compete with them and so far, it is working.

Nvidia just does not do the same thing better in a new generation, but tries to fundamentally change the paradigm to obtain better than generational improvements across generations. That is how they introduced SIMT, tensor cores, FP8 and more recently FP4, just to name a few. While their competitors are still implementing the last round of improvements Nvidia made to the state of the art, Nvidia launches yet another round of improvements.

For example, Nvidia has had GPUs on the market with FP8 for two years. Intel just launched their B580 discrete GPUs and Lunar Lake CPUs with Xe2 cores. There is no FP8 support to be seen as far as I have been able to gather. Meanwhile, Nvidia will soon be launching its 50 series GPUs with FP4 support. AMD’s RDNA GPUs are not poised to gain FP8 until the yet to be released RDNA 4 and I have no idea when Intel’s ARC graphics will gain FP8. Apple’s recent M4 series does have FP8, but no FP4 support.

Things look look less bad for Nvidia’s competitors in the enterprise market, CDNA 3 launched with FP8 support last year. Intel had Gaudi 2 with FP8 support around the same time as Nvidia, and even launched Gaudi 3. Then there is tenstorrent with FP8 on the wormhole processors that they released 6 months ago. However, FP4 support is no where to be seen with any of them and they will likely not release it until well after Nvidia, just like nearly all of them did with FP8. This is only naming a few companies too. There are many others in this sector that have not even touched FP8 yet.

In any case, I am sure that in a generation or two after Blackwell, Nvidia will have some other bright idea for changing the paradigm and its competition will lag behind in adopting it.

So far, I have only discussed compute. I have not even touched on graphics, where Nvidia has had many more innovations, on top of some of the compute oriented changes being beneficial to graphics too. Off the top of my head, Nvidia has had variable rate shading to improve rendering performance, ray tracing cores to reinvent rendering, tensor cores to enable upscaling (I did mention overlap between compute and graphics), optical flow accelerators to enable frame generation and likely others that I do not recall offhand. These are some of the improvements of the past 10 years and I am sure that the next 10 years will have more.

We do not see Nvidia’s competition put forward nearly as many paradigm changing ideas. For example, AMD did “smart access memory” more than a decade after it had been standardized as resizeable bar, which was definitely a contribution, but not one they invented. For something that they actually did invent, we need to look at HBM. I am not sure if they or anyone else I mentioned has done much else. Beyond the companies I mentioned, there are Groq and Cerebras (maybe Google too, but I am not sure) with their SRAM architectures, but that is about it as far as I know of companies implementing paradigm changing ideas in the same space.

I do not expect Nvidia to stop being a juggernaut until they run out of fresh ideas. They have produced so many ideas that I would not bet on them running out of new ideas any time soon. If I were to bet against them, I would have expected them to run out of ideas years ago, yet here we are.

Going back to the discussion of Intel seeming to be unbeatable in the past, they largely did the same thing better in each generation (with occasional ISA extensions), which was enough when they had a process advantage, but it was not enough when they lost their process advantage. The last time Intel tried to do something innovative in its core market, they gave us Itanium, and it was such a flop that they kept doing the same thing incrementally better ever since then. Losing their process advantage took away what put them on top.

notreallyauser · a year ago

> What made Intel seem unbeatable was its process node advantage. Nvidia does not have fabrication plants, so it is able to get the best process node from whoever has it. Nvidia is therefore not vulnerable to what befell Intel.

It's able to get the best process node from /whoever is willing to sell it to Nvidia/: it's vulnerable (however unlikely) to something very similar -- a competitor with a process advantage.

notreallyauser commented on Wait Until 8th waituntil8th.org... · Posted by u/zeroonetwothree

doublerabbit · a year ago

In the UK ages 12-13 are typically Year 7 of secondary school.

notreallyauser · a year ago

Year 7's regular age range is 11-12: you're 11 going into the September that the school year starts and will be 12 by the end of the following August.

notreallyauser commented on Wait Until 8th waituntil8th.org... · Posted by u/zeroonetwothree

doublerabbit · a year ago

Year 7 in the UK, which is the right age.

notreallyauser · a year ago

Other way round -- 8th grade is UK Year 9.