renlo (u/renlo) - Readit News

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

baseballdork · 9 days ago

Switched from pixels to iphone in the last year or two and the keyboard is the biggest pain point by far. I tend to use swipe, so this particular issue isn't something I've come across. What I do run into is weird censorship issues where I'm trying to type "kill myself" or something similar and the phone will do anything to not provide that as an option. Then, when I try to manually change it, editing is a nightmare. Inevitably trying to change the ending of a word results in the entire word being deleted. It inserts spaces where I don't want them.

Is this some sort of psyop to get me to use siri to send texts?

renlo · 9 days ago

The key is to work around the text input. If you want to say "kill myself", you input "kill my" then complete the "self" portion by pressing delete (remove space), then s-e-l-f. I feel like most of my typing time is spent making these corrections, as it's very quick to swipe but corrections are almost always necessary and they are an order of magnitude slower. Yesterday for example I tried to swipe "succession" but it really wanted to output "secession", so I change my strategy to "success" (it really liked this word), then delete (remove space), i-o-n.

I think every time I swipe I need to do at least one correction like this, where I type one similarly spelled word with as minimum an edit distance as I can think of in the moment, then do a manual correction.

renlo commented on PSF has withdrawn $1.5M proposal to US Government grant program pyfound.blogspot.com/2025... · Posted by u/lumpa

epistasis · 2 months ago

> "this quarter, we only have headcount for 'diverse' candidates",

Such a statement from those with hiring authority is highly illegal. Any HR department that would let this message be delivered, either explicitly or implicitly, would open the company to massive lawsuits, such as the one you linked to. It's as bad as allowing sexual harassment.

Linking the term DEI to illegal hiring practices is like linking having a male manager to sexual harassment. The entire point of DEI was to eliminate illegal biases.

renlo · 2 months ago

Most eye opening experience in my personal development was attending HR conferences (we sold an HR product but I am an engineer), where speakers were openly saying this out loud. I know you won’t believe me given your statement, but using codewords they said they were trying to hire “diverse candidates”, retain “diverse candidates”, explicitly mark “non-diverse candidates” leaving as non-regrettable churn, filtering and searching for diverse employees within the company to fast track for promotion, etc. I was in shock how brazenly they were saying the quiet part out loud, and breaking the law. This was 10 years ago, there were no repercussions for it, in fact they were all lauded.

renlo commented on Leaving serverless led to performance improvement and a simplified architecture unkey.com/blog/serverless... · Posted by u/vednig

wredcoll · 2 months ago

Let me tell you about all the fun I'm having trying to execute my amazon lambda app locally so I can test before deploying...

renlo · 2 months ago

Localstack makes that pretty easy. Before Localstack I had a pre-staging environment (dev) target I would deploy to. Their free/community offering includes a Lambda environment; you deploy your dev "Lambda" locally to docker, using the same terraform / deploy flow you'd normally use but pointed at a Localstack server which mimics the AWS API instead. Some of their other offerings require you to pay though (Cloudfront, ECS, others) and I don't use those, yet at least.

renlo commented on Fast catherinejue.com/fast... · Posted by u/gaplong

9rx · 5 months ago

The trouble is that "fast" doesn't mean anything without a point of comparison. If all you have is a slow web app, you have to assume that the web app is necessarily slow — already as fast as it can be. We like to give people the benefit of the doubt, so there is no reason to think that someone would make something slower than is necessary.

"Fast" is the feature people always wanted, but absent better information, they have to assume that is what they already got. That is why "fast" marketing works so well. It reveals that what they thought was pretty good actually wasn't. Adding the missing kitchen sink doesn't offer the same emotional reaction.

renlo · 5 months ago

> The trouble is that "fast" doesn't mean anything without a point of comparison.

This is what people are missing. Even those "slow" apps are faster than their alternatives. People demand and seek out "fast", and I think the OP article misses this.

Even the "slow" applications are faster than their alternatives or have an edge in terms of speed for why people use them. In other words, people here say "well wait a second, I see people using slow apps all the time! People don't care about speed!", without realizing that the user has already optimized for speed for their use case. Maybe they use app A which is 50% as fast as app B, but app A is available on their toolbar right now, and to even know that app B exists and to install it and learn how to use it would require numerous hours of ramp up time. If the user was presented with app A and app B side by side, all things equal, they will choose B every time. There's proficiency and familiarity; if B is only 5% faster than A, but switching to B has an upfront cost in days to able to utilize that speed, well that is a hidden speed cost and why the user will choose A until B makes it worth it.

Speed is almost always the universal characteristic people select for, all things equal. Just because something faster exists, and it's niche, and hard to use (not equal for comparison to the common "slow" option people are familiar with), it doesn't mean that people reject speed, they just don't want to spend time learning the new thing, because it is _slower_ to learn how to use the new thing at first.

renlo commented on NIST ion clock sets new record for most accurate clock nist.gov/news-events/news... · Posted by u/voxadam

renlo · 5 months ago

as a layman, wouldn't you need a more-accurate clock to measure the accuracy of a clock? How is clock accuracy measured when the clock is the most accurate clock?

renlo commented on Who wrote the Bible? A pioneering new algorithm may shatter scholarly certitude timesofisrael.com/who-wro... · Posted by u/names_are_hard

renlo · 6 months ago

felt more like an article legitimizing an origin myth than authorship

renlo commented on I Built a Mechanical Calculator [video] youtube.com/watch?v=E0pJS... · Posted by u/lispybanana

renlo · 9 months ago

Great video, I really enjoyed how down to earth it was. It reminded me of The Secret Life of Machines [1], where we get to peek behind the curtain and see how seemingly "magical" machines (in your case a digital computer) emerges from simple fundamental concepts.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Secret_Life_of_Machines

renlo commented on Add "fucking" to your Google searches to neutralize AI summaries gizmodo.com/add-fcking-to... · Posted by u/jsheard

braza · a year ago

I work with ML and I am bullish with AI in general; said that, I would pay between 5 to 10 USD a feature or toggle called “No AI” for several services.

For myself I noticed 2 bad effects in my daily usage:

- Search: impossible to reach any original content in the first positions. Almost everything sounds like AIsh. The punctuation, the commas, the semicolon, the narro vocabulary, and the derivative nature of the recent internet pages.

- Discovery: (looking directly to you Spotify and Instagram) here I would add in the “No AI” feature another one “Forget the past…” and then set the time. I personally like to listen some orthogonal genres seasonally. But once that you listen 2 songs in a very spontaneous manner Spotify will recommend that for a long time. I listened out of curiosity some math rock, and the “Discovery Weekly” took 9 weeks to not recommend that anymore.

renlo · a year ago

Spotify used to have a "dislike" button for their Discover Weekly which helped with pruning music you don't like, but with the natural law of tech enshitification they removed that feature a month ago.