or_am_i (u/or_am_i) - Readit News

or_am_i commented on iPhone Typos? It's Not Just You – The iOS Keyboard Is Broken [video] youtube.com/watch?v=hksVv... · Posted by u/walterbell

grsmvg · 5 days ago

I’m using a 12 mini and I’m running into so many typos since the new iOS. Maybe the combination of buggy software with their smallest screen is making it even worse.

or_am_i · 5 days ago

Wish it was only the keyboard enshittified. Literally everything became worse with the update, I had to google how to turn off the silly transparency (Accessibility Settings -> Display -> Reduce Transparency) so that the battery that used to happily last for the entire day on iOS 18 does not die in a matter of some 4 hours. And don't even get me started on now-always-lagging home screen swipes and the Safari overhaul madness! Wanna close the active tab? That will be three taps, thank you very much. Oh, you want them taps to register _every time_, too? This basic phone UX used to be Apple's major USP over Android, now fewer and fewer reasons to stick to this ecosystem.

or_am_i commented on Cognitive and mental health correlates of short-form video use psycnet.apa.org/fulltext/... · Posted by u/smartmic

nverba · a month ago

As someone who pays for YouTube, I don't understand why I can't disable shorts fully. They already have my money. What more do they want?

or_am_i · a month ago

The subscription revenues is a decent chunk of your lifetime value (LTV) as a customer, but it's not all of it. The goal here is to squeeze as much value from you aside from that as possible, measured mostly by two things, really: the direct ad revenue, measured by dollars that go on the balance sheet, and the indirect "engagement" value measured by the KPIs (think daily, weekly, monthly active users) that go into the quarterlies. The more time you spend on the platform, the more "things" you have got used to interacting with (aka day-to-day, week-to-week "retention"), the more they can potentially "sell" to you -- and it's not just ads / youtube subscription upsells, it can be and often is other "products" on the same platform: their music streaming, their search, their documents and emails, maps, drive, etc. etc. And it just so happens that the short format is _really, really_ engaging for many folks.

The more time you spend in the mall, the fuller are the bags on the way out, be it out of chance, habit, or convenience.

or_am_i commented on Video games can alter reality particle.scitech.org.au/t... · Posted by u/PaulHoule

or_am_i · a month ago

Jonathan Blow's The Witness is a notable example (minor spoiler alert)! Past a certain point in the game, it becomes REALLY challenging to just walk through the IRL woods without over-concentrating on things.

or_am_i commented on John Carmack on mutable variables twitter.com/id_aa_carmack... · Posted by u/azhenley

or_am_i · 2 months ago

In JetBrains editors it's possible to highlight mutable variables, at least in the languages where the distinction exists. My go to setting in Kotlin is to underscore all `var`'s, for two reasons:

- this makes them really stand out, much easier to track the mutation visually,

- the underscore effect is intrusive just-enough to nudge you to think twice when adding a new `var`.

Nothing like diving into a >3k lines PR peppered with underscores.

or_am_i commented on A coin flip by any other name (2023) cgad.ski/blog/a-coin-flip... · Posted by u/lawrenceyan

hackernewds · 3 months ago

A bit unrelated, what sort of roles in tech would benefit from this kind of competency?

it would seem to be data science, although this complexity is not what is demanded of tech employees and these skill sets are rarely used

or_am_i · 3 months ago

Mathematics trains a lot of skills that are generally applicable in engineering. Decomposing complex problems into non-trivial sequences of manageable steps, being able to prove that the design works, spotting appropriate invariants to build type hierarchies/abstractions around, communicating it all in an intentional and comprehensible way where each of the next steps follows from some of the previous, etc., etc.

or_am_i commented on Red meat consumption within high-quality diets may support mental health medicalxpress.com/news/20... · Posted by u/PaulHoule

flr03 · 4 months ago

Extra context: - Still under review (unpublished) - Funding Sources: National Cattlemen's Beef Association.

or_am_i · 4 months ago

Yes, and the press release makes no mention of this extra context -- hardly good journalism.

or_am_i commented on Left to Right Programming graic.net/p/left-to-right... · Posted by u/graic

mkl · 4 months ago

I agree with the main ideas of this article. Context-first left-to-right seems like it would be easier for LLMs to write and autocomplete well too.

This line, though, seems like it's using the wrong tools for the job:

  len(list(filter(lambda line: all([abs(x) >= 1 and abs(x) <= 3 for x in line]) and (all([x > 0 for x in line]) or all([x < 0 for x in line])), diffs)))

To me it's crying out for the lines to be NumPy arrays:

  sum(1 for line in diffs
      if ((np.abs(line) >= 1) & (np.abs(line) <= 3)).all()
         and ((line > 0).all() or (line < 0).all()))

There's no need to construct the list in memory if you're just counting, and dealing with whole lines at once is much nicer than going element by element. On top of that, this version is much more left-to-right.

or_am_i · 4 months ago

Yeah, the `numpy` version still looks relatively cryptic (like, "line > 0" is still fine, but the numpy arrays broadcasting rules can quickly get out of hand) compared to the author's Javascript example, or any decent collections API in a typed "enterprise" language like C#/Java/Scala for that matter. Here's my personal favorite, a Kotlin version:

  diffs.countIf { line -> 
      line.all { abs(it) in 1..3 } and ( 
          line.all { it > 0} or
          line.all { it < 0}
      )
  }

or_am_i commented on The Enterprise Experience churchofturing.github.io/... · Posted by u/_p2zi

i_love_retros · 4 months ago

Also if your preferred method of non urgent communication is message based such as slack, good luck in an enterprise.

Sure you'll get messages, but every one will be "quick call?"

or_am_i · 4 months ago

It sucks when your communication preferences are overridden! To be fair though, many valid reasons to prefer a quick call over a message (a potentially infinite sequence of messages, really). Even on the receiving end of a request: perhaps I want to poke around the context behind their non-urgent ask, like what they are _actually_ trying to achieve, why not do X instead etc. -- often easier to call and solve all the follow-up questions interactively on the spot.

or_am_i commented on Terence Tao on the suspension of UCLA grants mathstodon.xyz/@tao/11495... · Posted by u/dargscisyhp

ekianjo · 4 months ago

thats why they should refrain from engaging in politics in the first place. the day the wind changes you lose.

or_am_i · 4 months ago

“If you would escape moral and physical assassination, do nothing, say nothing, be nothing — court obscurity, for only in oblivion does safety lie.” E. Hubbard, ca. 1989

or_am_i commented on Everything Else newleftreview.org/sidecar... · Posted by u/speckx

Noumenon72 · 5 months ago

When I got to "There are hells on earth and Dubai is one" I scrolled back, thinking I had missed where they described that. Either it was left out of this book excerpt or the author has a prior revulsion at people being employed for tourism that makes their examples seem self-evidently awful to them only.

or_am_i · 5 months ago

> If you try to humanise the place you will lose your mind. If you ask yourself what the woman at the hair-braiding stand left behind to be here, and why, you will lose your mind. If you accept the kindness of the staff with whom you make a paltry effort to speak each morning as they clear your dirty breakfast plate, you will lose your mind, because your tip is the only kindness you can meaningfully offer in return. Trying to attend to your own towel by the pool might cause the man who stands for hours in the ferocious sun to do so for you to lose his job. Being served makes us cruel infants. It demeans us all.

I understand this passage and can relate, "self-evidently awful to them only" seems a bit of a stretch. There are places on Earth where "being employed for tourism" means job security, worker rights and social protections, where staff is treated with respect and are allowed dignity.