schwartzworld (u/schwartzworld)

schwartzworld commented on Control shopping cart wheels with your phone (2021) begaydocrime.com/... · Posted by u/mystraline

Freak_NL · 3 days ago

What makes this such a localised phenomenon? Locking shopping cart wheels just aren't a thing here in the Netherlands (or neighbouring countries). It used to be that most required a €1 coin inserted to unlock its link tethering it to the next car in the row, but then covid happened and a lot of shops simply disabled those locks and concluded that the system worked better without — probably driven in part by an increasing number of people who don't carry any cash.

Losing a cart is expensive, but it doesn't seem to happen at the scale that would make a full blown locking wheel solution cost effective.

schwartzworld · 2 days ago

Using a 1 pound coin is basically saying “it costs a pound to take this and not bring it back.” It works for lazy returners, but makes blatant theft quite easy.

schwartzworld commented on Where is the exponential growth part of AI? · Posted by u/anon191928

m463 · 3 days ago

I think of early voice recognition

at first everyone was going to talk to their computer

and there were programs that would let you do just that!

and then it all fizzled

except it didn't. Phone trees quietly started to use voice recognition, and some devices used it, and now it is pretty commonplace.... but it seeped into place, not a giant wave.

Funny thing - lots of computers are losing their jobs to AI. I think it has replaced search quite quickly.

and new computer jobs are being created. The AI summaries of amazon product reviews are pretty good.

schwartzworld · 3 days ago

> I think it has replaced search quite quickly.

I really don't get this one. Between the ludicrous energy waste and answers that are confidently wrong, I don't see why anybody would prefer to get their information from am LLM.

Voice recognition is an apt example though. It has it's place, like texting my wife from the car without having to look at my phone, and it's obviously a boon to accessibility, but I wouldn't want to have it needlessly jammed into every workflow. I don't get people's willingness to place so much trust in a statistical language model that does a pretty good job of pretending to know things.

schwartzworld commented on How to teach your kids to play poker: Start with one card bloomberg.com/news/articl... · Posted by u/ioblomov

orwin · 12 days ago

I think you have a middle point between no-information and full-information, and poker isn't that.

My issue with poker is the money component, especially in cash games (I don't mind it in MTT): I think it's manipulative, basically using dopamine highs to make the game seem more interesting.

schwartzworld · 12 days ago

It might depend a little on the poker variant. Holdem (the most popular variant) uses shared cards, which gives you a fair amount of information.

schwartzworld commented on How to teach your kids to play poker: Start with one card bloomberg.com/news/articl... · Posted by u/ioblomov

sans_souse · 13 days ago

I'm surprised at the general tone of response here towards the subject of poker overall (I didn't read the article yet so perhaps something more is in the context, but all the same); I understand there are many in the poker world even regarding the most successful of whom are regarded as living a degenerate lifestyle, but being that I was previously in that world myself and was not a degenerate type; I never gambled outside of "my game" that I had an edge in, I learned and implemented proper bankroll management and I studied the game on fundamental levels and on up, progressing into the meta-psyche game that is NL heads-up.

Which brings me to my point which is that while some forms of poker have proven "beatable" by ai, certain forms ie; short-handed tables of NL Holdem, increase in perpexlity to a point where, in heads-up, there are too many variables at play both "physically" (the cards and corresponding hand ranks) and metaphysically (the story being implied thru the route of actions taken at each street from preflop, flop, turn, to river) for there to exist some perfect approach against a skilled player.

NL Holdem poker is absolutely a game of skill with an element of variance aka luck/lack-there-of.

schwartzworld · 12 days ago

> NL Holdem poker is absolutely a game of skill with an element of variance aka luck/lack-there-of.

I’ve played a lot of Holdem, and I’m not sure I agree. A lot of what passes for skill is just an innate understanding of the odds.

John Scarne writes about gambling that a good bet isn’t one you are likely to win, but one where the payout is enough to be worth the risk. The best players know the odds of pulling a straight and can do math to figure out if it’s worth chasing one.

schwartzworld commented on Debounce developer.mozilla.org/en-... · Posted by u/aanthonymax

ndriscoll · 17 days ago

Why would e.g. saving after each keypress be janky from the UI perspective? These days disks can complete a write in 20 us. If you're typing at 0.1 seconds/character, you're going 5,000 times slower than the computer is capable of. If you have a 60 Hz monitor, it can block saving your work every frame and still be 99.9% idle. Even if you're making network requests each time, if the request finishes in 20 ms, you're still done 80 ms before the user presses the next button.

schwartzworld · 17 days ago

Local storage is a poor example because it updates in the background and wouldn’t necessarily change your UI much. But if a design calls for a search to be made while a user types that would get janky fast.

React in particular is data driven so in the above example, if you make the api call on each keypress, and save it into state or whatever, the UI will update automatically. I can type 70 words per minute. Nobody wants the search results to update that fast. (Should we be building searches that work this way? Often you have no choice.) A slow network + a short search string + a not top of the line device like a cheap phone means a really janky experience. And even if it’s not janky, its a waste of your users bandwidth (not everybody has unlimited) and an unnecessary drain on your server resources.

Even though we say “update as the user types” people type in bursts. There’s no reason not to debounce it, and if you can make the debounce function composable, you can reuse it all over the place. It’s a courtesy to the users and a good practice.

schwartzworld commented on Debounce developer.mozilla.org/en-... · Posted by u/aanthonymax

account42 · 17 days ago

> 250ms is still going to feel very snappy

WTF no it won't.

schwartzworld · 17 days ago

For the kind of behaviors they are describing it would. An extra 250ms waiting for an app to load is a lot, but for something like the described autosave behavior, waiting for a 250ms pause in typing before autosaving or making a fetch call is pretty snappy.

schwartzworld commented on 303Gen – 303 acid loops generator 303-gen-06a668.netlify.ap... · Posted by u/ankitg12

schwartzworld · 18 days ago

This is great and will be an excellent source of samples

schwartzworld commented on A Carnival Attraction That Saved Premature Babies (2016) smithsonianmag.com/histor... · Posted by u/pr337h4m

georgeecollins · 19 days ago

So many of the best programmers I have worked with are self taught! The key is if they keep learning as they go, because self education can skip some theory, and every changes too.

Somewhere along the way CS became really popular so you'd get people with nice credentials and zero passion to do the actual work. Let's fight that paper ceiling.

schwartzworld · 19 days ago

I’d go further and say that writing code for a living requires a great deal of self-teaching regardless of your background. CS degrees typically don’t teach you how to build software, and even if they did, the problem space is huge. There is a lifetime of self-teaching to do from the moment you take your first job.

I think that my being self-taught helped my career quite a bit. It did make it harder to get in the door, but that was just a one-time problem to solve.

schwartzworld commented on I asked four former friends why we stopped speaking (2023) vogue.com/article/reconne... · Posted by u/mooreds

netsharc · 20 days ago

The article starts with:

> On a warm July evening, I dove into bed and grabbed my phone, giddy and anxious. As I scrolled through TikTok, attempting to calm my nerves, a Google Calendar notification flashed on the screen: “VIDEO CALL WITH SIMONE.”

> Before I could swipe the reminder away, Simone FaceTimed me.

That makes me want to build a "Tinder" for rebooting relationships: select who of your friends you want to talk to, and after they do the same, the app will schedule a video call, and you'll be connected with... a mystery friend from your past! For people who don't like surprises, if both parties vote to reveal their names, you'll know who you're reconnecting with.

Or if you don't get any matches, the app will connect you to a mental health/relationship councillor...

schwartzworld · 20 days ago

They already built the app for rebooting relationships. A few times. A lot of the enthusiasm about web2.0 sites like MySpace and Facebook came from the ability to reconnect with people from your past. If they’d kept Facebook what it was in 2007 it would still be a useful tool.

schwartzworld commented on We may not like what we become if A.I. solves loneliness newyorker.com/magazine/20... · Posted by u/defo10

kylecazar · 22 days ago

AI is incapable of solving loneliness. It's a biological signal we have (thanks to evolution) to seek social connections with other humans, for things like reproduction and survival. Mentally healthy people will never be less lonely as long as they know they are talking to a model. All it can offer is a distraction and an illusion, because it has no humanity.

Note: I don't even think dogs solve loneliness. They can make you happy, less bored, and it's a meaningful relationship -- but they won't satisfy a yearning for human connection.

schwartzworld · 21 days ago

what you’re saying is on par as “kids can’t learn as well typing their work as they do with a pen and paper” or “video games bad”. I’m not saying I disagree with the idea that an AI can’t replace a real human connection, but it’s more complex than you state.

Loneliness is an umbrella term. You could have friends but be single and feel lonely. You can be married, surrounded by family and be lonely. It doesn’t necessarily mean the same thing as solitude, as many people are alone all day without feeling lonely.