the_other (u/the_other)

the_other commented on Anthropic reverses privacy stance, will train on Claude chats perplexity.ai/page/anthro... · Posted by u/porridgeraisin

the_other · an hour ago

I didn't trust them much to begin with, so I generally avoid talking too much personal stuff with Claude. But I had plenty of chats with surface level discussion of topics I'm interested in and some of my relevant experience and history with those topics. So, I have deleted all my chats and am closing my Claude account (as soon as customer services get back to me; somehow the self-serve option is missing for my account, possibly because I once enabled API access).

I'll use Claude with my employer's Copilot account, but was I wasn't putting anything personal there anyway.

Time to learn how to do local models...

the_other commented on Researchers find evidence of ChatGPT buzzwords turning up in everyday speech news.fsu.edu/news/educati... · Posted by u/giuliomagnifico

lambda · 2 days ago

I would write it with Option-shift-hyphon when I used macOS.

On Linux, I use Compose-hyphen-hyphen-hyphen.

I don't use it as often as I used to; but when I was younger, I was enough of a nerd to use it in my writing all the time. And yes, always careful to use it correctly, and not confuse it with an en-dash. Also used to write out proper balanced curly quotes on macOS, before it was done automatically in many places.

the_other · a day ago

> I would write it with Option-shift-hyphon when I used macOS.

I'm gonna use it more thanks to this tip. Thanks!

I don't care if people or robots think I'm a robot.

the_other commented on I Am An AI Hater anthonymoser.github.io/wr... · Posted by u/BallsInIt

simianwords · 2 days ago

Don't try to argue using logic against a person who came to their position primarily through emotions!

All these points are just trying to forcefully legitimise his hatred.

the_other · 2 days ago

The article doesn’t say that. The article says the author wont do the work of explaining their position to the reader. It doesn’t say they havn’t done that work for themselves. I read it as saying they had done some undisclosed amount of work informing themselves such that they could reach to their position: thinking, reading articles, etc.

Also, I think their lean towards a political viewpoint is worth some attention. The point is a bit lost in the emotional ranting, which is a shame.

(To be fair, I liked the ranting. I appreciated their enjiyment of the position they have reached. I use LLMs but I worry about the energy usage and I’m still not convinced by the productivity argument. Their writing echoed my anxiety and then ran with it into glee, which I found endearing.)

the_other commented on Denmark summons top US diplomat over alleged Greenland influence operation bbc.com/news/articles/c0j... · Posted by u/vinni2

aurareturn · 2 days ago

  Mad rulers are also quite normal for much of human history, the theory was that Democracy would relieve us of that particular problem.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uqsBx58GxYY

This is one of the most insightful videos I've ever seen on society and governments. It describes Anacyclosis, where political systems evolve in a recurring sequence driven by corruption and decay.

Democracy will eventually decay. It's not permanent. You can see it now live where democracies elect more and more radical leaders.

the_other · 2 days ago

"Democracy" will exist (as an idea) for a long time. What's currently happening in a lot of countries is that entrenched powers are actively disrupting the use of democracy in those countries, and some subsets of the populations of those countries are also losing trust in it as a useful system.

Even this "decay" isn't inherently "bad" (assuming you are pro-democracy). There are numerous other decision mechanisms, and many of them are inclusive and transparent. Some of them might work for various levels of civil organisation, should The People want to give them a try. If a country replaced its democratic voting system with one of these others, you could still call that a "decay of democracy", but it might actually be good for the country.

(For the record, I don't think authoritarianism and its associated decision systems are good for large, general purpose bodies like countries.)

the_other commented on Show HN: JavaScript-free (X)HTML Includes github.com/Evidlo/xsl-web... · Posted by u/Evidlo

RebeccaTheDev · 7 days ago

Three jobs ago I worked for a company that did e-learning systems for industrial clients. This was roughly 2004. One of the company owner's many ideas was a technical documentation system based on XML and XSLT. The "idea" being that technical writers or SMEs would rather write XML than, you know, use a word processor.

Unsurprisingly the idea did not take off, but I did find the XML/XSLT combination to be very interesting.

the_other · 6 days ago

Between 2000 and 2003 I worked for a company that produced corporate training materials (initially on CDROM, later as learning-management-system units). We had a system which allowed the content authors to write in structured Word files. VBA would create XML of the Word files, and XSLT would create the HTML. I mostly worked in the XSLT and JS/CSS layers, not on the XML generation layer. It was my first job out of uni and I found XSLT fascinating and slightly psychedelic.

the_other commented on AI is propping up the US economy bloodinthemachine.com/p/t... · Posted by u/mempko

ryao · 23 days ago

> there is no empirical evidence for trickle down economy

I usually avoid responding to remarks like this because they risk forays into politics, which I avoid, but the temptation to ask was too great here. What do you consider computers, cellphones, air conditioners, flat screen TVs and refrigerators to be? The first ones had outrageous prices that only the exorbitantly wealthy could afford. Now almost everyone in the US has them. They seem to have trickled down to me.

the_other · 23 days ago

And yet the wealth gap has only widened over the period between their invention and distribution.

I ask hyperbolically: are they economic enablers or financial traps?

(My hunch is that fridges are net-enablers, but TVs are net-traps. I say this as someone with a TV habit I would like to kick.)

the_other commented on Cucumber lets you write automated tests in plain language cucumber.io/... · Posted by u/nateb2022

the_other · a month ago

Engineers should refuse to write Gherkin. It's not meant to be for them, it's meant to be for non-engineers to tell engineers (or the systems the engineers make) what they expect will happen. It looks like some flavour of user stories for this reason.

Engineers' responsibility begins at the "code behind" the gherkin layer. Someone needs to enforce this.

Sadly, IMO because gherkin looks like structured language (i.e "code"), and because that's what engineers do, they end up doing it. Either they tricked themselves into thinking they should, or the product team tacitly assumed it was a code thing.

If you're an engineer and you're writing gherkin, you should consider this a "code smell" and consider ditching it. Go for a spec tool one layer closer to your main domain. i.e. just write normal unit & integration tests.

I'm not saying "don't do BDD" or "don't do acceptance tests". You should do that! I'm saying "gherkin should allow product owners/managers to take ownership of reporting on how well the app meets their expectations". But most typically, they don't get it, or they don't want to do it.

I recently worked somewhere where we had dedicated devs-in-test. They wrote most of the e2e tests for the application. They wrote it in Gherkin, which meant that they _also_ wrote the JS/Selenium tests behind them. So they were basically writing two sets of scripts for each test. At some point they explored using a 3rd party cross-device testing platform (lambda test, maybe?) who had their own in-house test script that looked like Gherkin, so it needed a JS/TS code-behind to actually run the tests. So they did it all again!! Such a waste.

the_other commented on Wikimedia Foundation Challenges UK Online Safety Act Regulations wikimediafoundation.org/n... · Posted by u/Nurw

miohtama · a month ago

GDPR killed small and medium online advertising businesses and handed everything to Google and Facebook.

the_other · a month ago

Frankly, that's their fault for pursuing individually targeted advertising. The sad thing isn't that some small shitty businesses lost out, it's that some large shitty businesses didn't.

the_other commented on VPN use surges in UK as new online safety rules kick in ft.com/content/356674b0-9... · Posted by u/mmarian

scrollop · a month ago

"until you want to say something that is forbidden by the government."

Please give a few examples. I'm intrigued.

the_other · a month ago

You can write to several climate activists in prison if you would like first hand accounts. I means ones who held up placards, rather than the ones that climbed onto trains or glued themselves to roads.

Just weeks ago a couple of pop bands got hauled in front of judges or had police investigations aimed at them for voicing solidarity with Palestinians in Gaza. (Ok, so they used incediary language, but they’re 20-somethings at festivals and the Gaza situation is abhorrent).

Fairly recently, an activist group which uses tactics reminiscent of the anti-nuclear-proliferation movement and animal rights movements of the 70s-90s got proscribed a terrorist organisation. At present, the law around this and recent implementations of its enforcement are such that I can’t tell if I’ll be arrested for writing this paragraph. I’ve tried to stick to the facts, but interpretation can get you locked up.

the_other commented on Celebrating 20 Years of MDN developer.mozilla.org/en-... · Posted by u/soheilpro

the_other · a month ago

I've used MDN as my go-to web documentation for the majority of those 20 years. It's an essential resource: typically easier to read than the specs; practical info, cross-referenced, with examples (and some playgrounds).

Thanks for keeping it relevant all this time.