sequoia (u/sequoia) - Readit News

sequoia commented on Fix the iOS keyboard before the timer hits zero or I'm switching back to Android ios-countdown.win/... · Posted by u/ozzyphantom

sequoia · 2 days ago

I have a lot of issues with dictation as well which I feel has gotten much worse as it gets "smarter." It used to take literal dictation & I could say "comma" "period" etc. to insert punctuation. Now it tries to guess when commas or full stops should be added and it's horrible. If I pause to take a breath it puts a comma or period, sometimes entirely changing the meaning of the sentence.

Recently I said "I ran into this too earlier on the project" and it wrote "I run into this tube earlier on the project." So now I'm running into a tube... because this makes more sense than "too"? And it can never write the names of immediately family members I text about every single day, and it has 5th grade vocabulary so if I said I demurred or that something was germane or any other word beyond the 500 most common words it butchers it.

What I want: 1. let me handle the punctuation manually 2. assume a broader vocabulary 3. let me specify how people's names are pronounced!! How are we this many years in and it still misinterprets my wife's name on a daily basis?

sequoia commented on France dumps Zoom and Teams as Europe seeks digital autonomy from the US apnews.com/article/europe... · Posted by u/AareyBaba

paulfitz · 12 days ago

I work at Grist, the "tableur collaboratif" (collaborative spreadsheet) listed on the La Suite homepage. We're in the interesting situation of being both a NYC-based company, and open source software the French gov has adopted and is helping to develop. Grist is mostly a node backend. So it is a complicated story. The key is having code the gov can review and trust and run it on sovereign infrastructure.

Grist https://www.getgrist.com/

A write-up of how the French gov uses it https://interoperable-europe.ec.europa.eu/collection/open-so...

sequoia · 12 days ago

wow it reminds me of Microsoft Access, a great piece of software in terms of rapidly building an application!

Does grist have forms?

sequoia commented on 25 Years of Wikipedia wikipedia25.org... · Posted by u/easton

richardfeynman · a month ago

This whole affair should get much more attention. If one topic on Wikipedia can be so manipulated, any topic on Wikipedia can, and it's no longer a reliable source of knowledge.

I hope The Wikimedia Foundation can get its act together, and I admire the courage of Jimmy Wales for speaking up about this, but I've also stopped donating. I want no part of this.

sequoia · a month ago

I also have stopped donating. I replied to a WM Foundation email explaining why and they said they don't have editorial control over wikipedia, i.e. their hands are tied. Well OK, but I'm not giving money to fund the promulgation of Jew hatred and blood libel. Sad state of affairs! I've given for years.

sequoia commented on 25 Years of Wikipedia wikipedia25.org... · Posted by u/easton

amiga386 · a month ago

Wikipedia itself knows how much shit it's in. Every ongoing conflict and culture-war issue is a "contentious topic", which is Wikipedia code for "editors are at each others' throats"

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Contentious_topics#L...

They have a giant pile of editors banned from topics until they can play nice.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Editing_restrictions...

But you do give a great tip: at minimum, check the talk page. If it's longer than the article itself, run away.

Some articles are so far gone, even the talk page is locked down like Fort Knox. For example: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:Gaza_genocide

That page even has an FAQ!

> Q1: Why does this article state that Israel has committed genocide in Gaza, even though this is heavily contested and neither the ICJ nor the ICC have issued a final judgment?

> A1: A September 2025 request for comment (RfC) decided to state, in Wikipedia's own voice, that it is a genocide. The current lead is the result of later discussion on the specific wording.

sequoia · a month ago

this is so crazy. How does this accord with wikipedia's NOR & NPV stances?

This is a case of "if you abandon your convictions when it's inconvenient, you never really had convictions in the first place."

sequoia commented on 25 Years of Wikipedia wikipedia25.org... · Posted by u/easton

FiveOhThree · a month ago

I can't be the only one who feels that Wikipedia's quality has really started to go downhill over the past 5 or so years. I've noticed more and more articles which read as ridiculously partisan, usually around subjects with any link to politics or current events.

That's probably linked to the increasing polarisation in the US, but I get the impression that the sites neutrality policies have gradually been chipped away by introducing concepts like "false balance" as an excuse to pick a side on an issue. I could easily see that causing the site to slowly decline like StackOverflow did, most people don't want to deal with agenda pushing.

Fortunately articles related to topics like science and history haven't been significantly damaged by this yet. Something to watch carefully.

sequoia · a month ago

Some of this has to do with concerted and long-running campaigns of coordinated editing (against wikipedia rules) to push a one-sided political narrative. Most notably this happened and continues to be done by Israel-eliminationists[0]. Wikipedia eventually acknowledged the problem and banned a couple of the worst offenders[1] but that's a drop in the bucket as far as I'm concerned. I read it less and less these days and don't consult it at all for anything controversial ("controversial" meaning "topics that leftists have strong opinions about").

Sadly, a system like Wikipedia is hard to defend against persistent coordinated attacks by people who have lots of time.

0: https://aish.com/weaponizing-wikipedia-against-israel/ 1: https://www.jpost.com/business-and-innovation/article-833180

sequoia commented on Pebble Index 01 – External memory for your brain repebble.com/blog/meet-pe... · Posted by u/freshrap6

daenney · 2 months ago

> We want to help people in the EU, but with laws like replaceable batteries, it's going to push us further and further away from being able to do that.

We want to help people, but only if and when it’s profitable for us to do so on terms we decide for you.

sequoia · 2 months ago

> We want to help people, but only if and when it’s profitable for us

If s/he is running a company and not a charity, this is responsible, understandable, and predictable.

sequoia commented on Show HN: Onlyrecipe 2.0 – I added all features HN requested – 4 years later onlyrecipeapp.com/?url=ht... · Posted by u/AwkwardPanda

sequoia · 2 months ago

No one requested "highlight the ingredient names in the recipe steps"? That's a top request from me.

sequoia commented on An official atlas of North Korea cartographerstale.com/p/a... · Posted by u/speckx

sequoia · 3 months ago

What's the source of the particular singling out of Israel here? Is it because they're a US ally, or is there some other history between the countries?

It looks like a singular designation in their atlas that Israel is referred to not as an enemy, but as "nonexistent." Anti-Israeli sentiment certainly creates strange bedfellows.

sequoia · 3 months ago

I looked into it a bit (another commenter called it "not that complicated" which is not a phrase I usually hear in relation to Israeli/Palestinian politics!) and it's pretty interesting: https://www.timesofisrael.com/the-curious-tale-of-israels-sh... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Israel%E2%80%93North_Korea_rel...

Apparently at times some in Israel worked to establish relations with NK, in hopes of improving economic ties & bringing them in the fold I guess, but their efforts were thwarted by others in Israel (intelligence services) and pressure from the USA. And eventually (according to the article) it became clear that "stop selling our enemies weapons to use on us & in return we'll invest and establish ties" was a non-starter, so they gave up.

Also in an interesting reversal of tropes common in US politics, it sounds like the Isaeli government felt they were being unfairly controlled by the US, by being prevented from trying to establish friendly relations with a country the US considered off limits.

It's interesting to think of the counterfactual where Israel invested in NK, NK stopped participating in or arming attacks on Israel, and who knows what else would have happened. Oh well!

sequoia commented on An official atlas of North Korea cartographerstale.com/p/a... · Posted by u/speckx

sequoia · 3 months ago

What's the source of the particular singling out of Israel here? Is it because they're a US ally, or is there some other history between the countries?

It looks like a singular designation in their atlas that Israel is referred to not as an enemy, but as "nonexistent." Anti-Israeli sentiment certainly creates strange bedfellows.

sequoia commented on The internet is no longer a safe haven brainbaking.com/post/2025... · Posted by u/akyuu

arbol · 3 months ago

You need to terminate the TLS connection yourself so this prevents people from using DNS proxy, e.g. Cloudflare. Then you have to run a server that has a module that computes the ja3/ja4, e.g. nginx. Even then, it's possible to set your client hello in python/curl/etc. to exactly mirror the JA4 of your chosen browser like Chrome. So ja4 stops basic bots but most seasoned scrapers already implement valid ja4s/ja3s

sequoia · 3 months ago

I thought it wasn't just a matter of valid but of identicalness. Multiple clients with identical JA4 which comprises if I'm not mistaken useragent but also other aspects of the host machine indicate that they are in fact a single user agent.