omnimike (u/omnimike)

omnimike commented on Laziness is the source of Innovation and Creativity backintyme.substack.com/p... · Posted by u/banzin

omnimike · a year ago

Necessity is the mother of invention (not laziness). The internet was invented for surviving nuclear war with Russia.

We say laziness motivates us to become more efficient, but I can’t agree. It’s people who want or need to get things done faster that find innovative and creative ways of doing so.

omnimike commented on We are a step closer to taxing the super-rich ft.com/content/1f1160e0-3... · Posted by u/paulpauper

spacemadness · a year ago

Why did I expect anything other than HN defending billionaires when reading the comments. In the most naive way at that. As if billionaires aren’t influencing policy directly.

omnimike · a year ago

Sorry, you misunderstand. I’m not defending billionaires, I’m condemning politicians.

Politicians and policy should not be for sale in the first place. The fact that they are means, yes, rich people have more power to control policy, but the solution isn’t to ban rich people from getting rich. We need to ban money from influencing policy. Instead, the Supreme Court decided that money is speech and political corruption is protected by the first amendment. We need to undo that.

The brain dead part are the people (apparently common on hacker news) who think that stopping people getting rich is a better solution than, for eg., campaign spending limits.

omnimike commented on We are a step closer to taxing the super-rich ft.com/content/1f1160e0-3... · Posted by u/paulpauper

JohnFen · a year ago

> Taxing the super-rich might be admirable from a jealousy point of view.

It has nothing to do with jealousy and everything to do with fairness and limiting the concentration of power.

omnimike · a year ago

Money only gets you things when you spend it. Real power is how much money you have to spend, not the market cap of the companies you own. There’s a tired meme that billionaires are somehow more powerful than the politicians in charge of all the money.

omnimike commented on CEO of data privacy company Onerep.com founded dozens of people-search firms krebsonsecurity.com/2024/... · Posted by u/todsacerdoti

omnimike · a year ago

I can’t give specifics, I know someone who had to deal with “delete me” requests from these “privacy” companies. The privacy company would literally take your personal info (name, email), and _email it to every company they could think of_ asking the company to delete your account _even if you didn’t have one_.

omnimike commented on Principles are products of practice, not the reverse alsado.ca/posts/principle... · Posted by u/majdalsado

adfgioninio · 2 years ago

It is a moral principle that websites should mostly use HTML. This is not because it's the easiest way to build websites and certainly not because it's the best way to make lots of money. It's because it ensures everyone can use the same web and gives the user agent as much power as possible to act on the user's behalf.

omnimike · 2 years ago

> It's because it ensures everyone can use the same web and gives the user agent as much power as possible to act on the user's behalf.

Those aren't the principles underlying HTML, and I doubt Tim Berners-Lee was thinking about that at all when he designed HTML. Instead, he was trying to design a format which could be read by both machines and humans, which is why "semantic" HTML elements were introduced. In the end, LLMs were what allowed machines to understand web pages, not semantic HTML elements.

If we do want to make this about accessibility, anyone who has worked with screen readers knows that semantic HTML has failed on that front too. Screen readers rarely understand fancy elements. Instead we often have to create obscene DOM structures to get the reader to say something reasonable, which is at complete odds with the ideals of the semantic web.

omnimike commented on Principles are products of practice, not the reverse alsado.ca/posts/principle... · Posted by u/majdalsado

jph · 2 years ago

The core thesis is "I believe principles should not stifle progress".

It turns out that people can have very different kind of principles in mind.

Some principles are primarily ethical, such as "Make our product work for people with disabilities, because it's the right thing to do".

Some principles are primarily legal, such as "Encrypt data at rest and in motion, because we don't want compliance problems".

Some principles are primarily practical, such as "Bias for action: if you're 80% sure, and you decision is easy to reverse, then proceed."

omnimike · 2 years ago

I interpreted this post completely differently. I think it is talking specifically about design principles for code/systems. The core thesis appears to be "principles should be based on what works in practice, not what sounds good in theory."

omnimike commented on Principles are products of practice, not the reverse alsado.ca/posts/principle... · Posted by u/majdalsado

GolDDranks · 2 years ago

The blog post would benefit greatly if it had some examples from the world of web dev. It's not very clear what kind of principles they are talking about.

omnimike · 2 years ago

The example given in the post was using <div>s rather than semantic HTML elements. The motivation for the principle of using "semantic HTML elements" comes from the lofty ideals of the Semantic Web[0]. However, these principles didn't come from best practice. Instead, someone (Tim Berners-Lee) thought that it was a cool idea and tried to convince everyone of it without demonstrating that it could actually deliver on any of the promises it made. The argument instead is that principles should be based on what is proven to work, rather than what sounds good in theory. I agree with the sentiment in the post.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Semantic_Web

omnimike commented on Leap: Neovim’s Answer to the Mouse github.com/ggandor/leap.n... · Posted by u/bpierre

omnimike · 3 years ago

The thing I don’t like about EasyMotion like plug-ins is that they require you to react to information which only appears on screen after you start to jump. With Leap it looks like it amortizes the cost of reacting by giving you the information you need one keystroke before you need to use it. I’m still not a fan of having to react though.

My ideal motion plugin would be Cursorless[0], except using the keyboard instead of voice commands. With Cursorless the markers you need to jump to are always visible, so there’s no need to react. Instead of jumping to characters you jump to tokens, so we do not need makers over every character (just above each token).

[0] https://github.com/cursorless-dev/cursorless

omnimike commented on A new speed milestone for Chrome blog.chromium.org/2022/03... · Posted by u/twapi

codedokode · 4 years ago

I think that browser developers are optimizing the wrong thing. Specifically: they optimize for execution speed while they better optimize for minimum memory usage instead. Let me explain why this is more important.

Let's say I am visiting a properly made website and it takes 10% of CPU to render. Even if browser devs make their browser twice faster, it will only save 5% of CPU time - and that would be completely unnoticeable. You might ask, what about modern websites, built with D*t compiled to webassembly, GPU acceleration, reactive frameworks, material design and capable to load the multi-core CPU at 100%? I am not using such sites so I don't care.

Now let's look at memory usage. Optimizing for speed usually causes increased memory consumption, and this increases the chance of invoking swapping. If the system starts swapping, it becomes orders of magnitude slower. No speed optimizations will matter in this case.

Therefore if you are targeting wide audience, and not only mac users, then you should be optimizing for memory usage. If the browser could use two times less memory while using twice amount of CPU time that would be perfect. Just think how many laptops with 2 or 4 Gb of RAM would become usable again.

omnimike · 4 years ago

The reason for the focus on CPU time is that it has the larger impact on battery life.

omnimike commented on How Facebook deals with PCIe faults to keep its data centers running reliably engineering.fb.com/2021/0... · Posted by u/rbanffy

jandrese · 4 years ago

Is anybody else frustrated that this somewhat lengthy article was relentlessly vague with the actual numbers? It was so consistent it felt like something you would present to a person allergic to technical detail.

omnimike · 4 years ago

This is likely very deliberate. Publishing error rates of vendor equipment could violate NDAs or just damage vendor relations. The number of units purchased can be used by stock market analysts to predict FB growth or vendor sales, so the PR/legal team might prevent the publishing of details which could be used to that effect. Those are my guesses as to why actual numbers would be left out.