throwaway77384 (u/throwaway77384)

throwaway77384 commented on European Alternatives european-alternatives.eu... · Posted by u/lijunhao

nalekberov · a year ago

my two cents:

Avoid using Tuta, I am talking as a person with more than 4 years experience using their product. Its search extremely bad, UI is so simple and everything is unnecessarily big, not event possibility to add any label.

They barely improved their product within my >4 years of usage. I have already migrated most stuff to another mail provider.

throwaway77384 · a year ago

I don't know if they are listed on the EU alternatives website, but for mail, I find Migadu to be excellent. I think they are Swiss.

throwaway77384 commented on Blackmagic Cine Immersive Capture for Vision Pro 8160x7200 Resolution per Eye newsshooter.com/2024/06/1... · Posted by u/oidar

imiric · a year ago

The problem with existing VR tech is that it's still too cumbersome to use. Nobody wants to wear a hefty computer strapped to their face for casual use, let alone for prolonged periods of time. The form factor needs to be much more lightweight and unobtrusive for the product to have a chance at mass adoption.

There are AR devices in the form of sunglasses now, but the displays and experience pale in comparison to VR headsets.

We're still a few more generations away from VR headsets shrinking and AR glasses improving for this experience to be universally enjoyable.

throwaway77384 · a year ago

I couldn't agree with you more. I love VR as a concept, but the giant headsets are just unusable. Hence, I research this frequently and someone appears to finally have realised this:

https://www.bigscreenvr.com/

Linus Tech Tips did a review of it, so it's real. I have high hopes.

throwaway77384 commented on Ask HN: I can no longer like React, do you? · Posted by u/techsin101

throwaway77384 · a year ago

I learned vanilla Javascript first. Spent a few years building various frontends / websites that way.

Then came React. I thought knowing Javascript meant I'd know React. Oh boy was I wrong.

I started around the time that class-based components were replaced with hooks and function-based components only.

That meant I had to work in the latter, while all the SO posts were about the former, so I couldn't find any solutions to problems I was facing.

About three years in, I still couldn't explain to you wtf a hook is. I've looked at countless tutorials, used countless hooks from various libraries, but I've never felt the need to make one. Which tells me that I still don't know what problem is fundamentally solved by using / making a hook specifically.

All I understand is writing a function that returns a value or a function that returns a bunch of JSX. I've never needed some sort of mystical third concept that somehow requires me to call it 'use'-something, before I'm allowed to call other things called 'use'-something within it. I wish I could somehow wrap my head around it.

Anyway, learning React, I felt I spent more time trying to work out why things sometimes got updated and sometimes not. It felt insanely arbitrary.

Then comes the joy of trying to force the incredibly non-deterministic rendering of the stack of components into something reasonably deterministic. If you have to call multiple endpoints and track the state of those calls and ensure a component only renders when that data is available in its correct form (which has to happen in a specific sequence), you will spend what seems like an insane amount of time forcing something that is inherently non-sequential into executing sequentially. Seems wild to me.

The amount of time some component tries to access 'undefined' is just astounding.

How about closures? It took me so long to finally understand that useEffect doesn't have access to updated state variables unless they are in the dependency array. So much time spent banging my head against the wall, wondering why my variable is always 'behind' by exactly one state update.

Let's assume you've managed to set all this up, you suddenly find out that React literally re-renders the ENTIRE tree of components sitting on top of any child component, every time anything changes.

Let's imagine a form with multiple inputs:

If I make a change to input2, the form and all the other inputs are re-rendered. Unless, of course, I wrap each and every input in React.Memo(). If I want my form to handle errors properly, for example by using react-hook-form, I then need to add a custom compare-function for each prop handed into the input, to ensure it updates correctly, but only when needed. What used to be a one-liner <input> has suddenly become 15 lines of code dedicated to working out when to re-render this one input instead of the entire form.

I still haven't used useCallback successfully anywhere in any of my applications, because I'm still not sure I understand what it does or how it works.

Suspense makes sense. Error boundaries are still elusive. I've tried implementing them, but most of the time the only error boundary that really triggers is the one all the way up the tree, which is only one step better than crashing the whole interface when a component encounters an error.

Anyway, so you've finished that whole journey, good job. Enter Next.js. Guess when I started using Next.js? Yup, right around when page-router became the app-router. Same story again, all SO issues are about page-router, so none of the problems I'm encountering have been addressed yet.

How about initialising a Next.JS app in dark-mode to start with? Not possible, because half your app is now server-based components that don't have access to cookies, so it always flashes white first before jumping to dark mode. I suppose I could build my app dark-mode first or save the user's preference in the DB.

Sometimes, it is nice to just store something in localStorage. But, persisting state with Zustand is suddenly hopelessly broken and no amount of hacks around delaying hydration have worked for me so far.

How about changing meta-data of pages, especially if the meta-data relies on a fetch call? How about the fact that the data from that fetch call can't be used in your components, meaning that the fetch call has to be repeated in your component? (But don't worry, Next.js includes black magic to deduplicate fetch calls, pinky-promise that we won't hit every endpoint twice, blowing up your free-tier quota on [insert platform here]).

Caching? Completely arbitrary. Some parts of your app will fetch new data from the server every time, other parts of the app will never update correctly. All depends on who's doing the fetching. If it's a 3rd party service (say, google firebase), then you have to force your api-routes into dynamic rendering before you actually see updated data coming back from fetch calls.

To this day, I haven't managed to get caching working predictably in my app. I literally have no idea when things will revalidate and when not. I've managed to force it into never caching, but a combination of caching when I need it to cache or revalidating every time seems to be impossible to achieve.

So now I am sitting on top of a framework, for a framework, for Javascript, where I neither know when components will update, nor when data will be cached, all because these things are hiding behind magic that is extremely poorly documented (and never seems to include real-world examples of sufficient complexity). It's quite a frustrating experience.

I wouldn't know what the solution to this is. Feels like we've arrived here through years of developer effort and I don't feel qualified to judge it. Therefore, I just put up with it and hope to learn more about it as I build more apps.

throwaway77384 commented on Pirate IPTV Co. & Seven Workers Fined After Raids Eight Years Ago torrentfreak.com/pirate-i... · Posted by u/gslin

throwaway77384 · a year ago

I wonder whether people who defend piracy also defend making money with it.

That tends to be where I draw the line (except for perhaps very extenuating circumstances). For me, piracy without profit motive is literally just knowledge / information sharing. I feel as though copyright basically shouldn't exist in cases where someone doesn't profit from reproducing / copying / distributing some kind of content.

As soon as someone starts making money with someone else's creation, it becomes a crime in my view.

I understand that there is nuance to this...what if someone runs a torrent site and needs funding to keep running the site, thus technically creating some kind of cash-flow / revenue stream. I don't really have the answer to that (except perhaps that we should all just use open-source DHT-based torrent searches, so no funding of centralised sites is needed?)

But yeah, in cases where someone is this blatantly operating an IPTV service, it's obvious why they got prosecuted.

throwaway77384 commented on Pg_vectorize: Vector search and RAG on Postgres github.com/tembo-io/pg_ve... · Posted by u/samaysharma

vmfunction · a year ago

given the context of vector db, it would be Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) [1]

1: https://medium.com/@mutahar789/optimizing-rag-a-guide-to-cho...

throwaway77384 · a year ago

Thanks for the information :)

throwaway77384 commented on Pg_vectorize: Vector search and RAG on Postgres github.com/tembo-io/pg_ve... · Posted by u/samaysharma

armanboyaci · a year ago

I found this explanation: https://www.promptingguide.ai/techniques/rag

> General-purpose language models can be fine-tuned to achieve several common tasks such as sentiment analysis and named entity recognition. These tasks generally don't require additional background knowledge.

> For more complex and knowledge-intensive tasks, it's possible to build a language model-based system that accesses external knowledge sources to complete tasks. This enables more factual consistency, improves reliability of the generated responses, and helps to mitigate the problem of "hallucination".

> Meta AI researchers introduced a method called Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG) to address such knowledge-intensive tasks. RAG combines an information retrieval component with a text generator model. RAG can be fine-tuned and its internal knowledge can be modified in an efficient manner and without needing retraining of the entire model.

throwaway77384 · a year ago

Thank you!

throwaway77384 commented on Pg_vectorize: Vector search and RAG on Postgres github.com/tembo-io/pg_ve... · Posted by u/samaysharma

throwaway77384 · a year ago

What is RAG in this context? I only know it as red, amber, green...

throwaway77384 commented on Remix Vite Is Now Stable remix.run/blog/remix-vite... · Posted by u/0xblinq

aniforprez · 2 years ago

Remix is a wonderful, sane framework that I highly recommend for React developers. No monkey patching, no global context imports, no undocumented functionality etc etc. Had a hell of a time trying to wrangle Next and it was terrible. Next still doesn't have a way to completely disable prefetches on hovering over Next links unless you use a plain anchor tag which is the kind of insidious, undocumented behaviour that makes for weird bugs (setting prefetch to false does not disable prefetch on hovers). Remix just sends you browser and node objects like a standard request object in all the arguments and just uses the platform with the framework extensions acting as a nice layer on top

throwaway77384 · 2 years ago

Very interesting. Another Next victim here. One of my anecdotes is the bonkers caching / fetch deduplication. Yes, set cache: no-store. But that only works for fetch requests. If you have a 3rd party lib doing the fetching (say, Google Firestore), then you have to declare export const dynamic = 'force-dynamic' at the top of your route segment: https://nextjs.org/docs/app/api-reference/file-conventions/r...

That behaviour wasn't documented when I got started with NextJS 13...imagine the fun I had trying to work out why I can't get updated data from the server. It was nuts.

throwaway77384 commented on Why You're Still Single (2023) thezvi.substack.com/p/dat... · Posted by u/walterbell

livinginfear · 2 years ago

> removing all incentive for the platform to function correctly in the user's interest, much like any big platform nowadays.

People keep saying this, but it's just not true. Tinder does function in many people's interest. I had a lot of success using Tinder, and eventually met my wife on there. People keep implying there's some kind of hidden algorithm at play that somehow pairs you up with people who are "Okay, but not great" to keep you hooked on the app. How the hell would it manage such an amazing feat?

throwaway77384 · 2 years ago

You are right, my statement was too extreme, borne from frustrations over the degradation of many online services by profit-motives. I'm sure online dating platforms, so long as they get user profiles in front of user eyeballs, are inevitably going to lead to people getting into relationships. Much like with Facebook or, say, news media, the algorithm has a specific purpose and, as we see rather often, that purpose is not "make the user happy", it is "keep the user engaged by any means". So, for a news media website, the purpose is no longer "deliver the best news", but "deliver the most engagement". And that process can be automated by changing content subtly and measuring again, until the content pulls the most attention.

I guess with Tinder, that's not necessarily how it works? Do they have ads on there? No idea. But again, I wouldn't be surprised if there is some kind of data collection / trading going on. But who knows, I have no evidence of this and wouldn't want to badmouth Tinder just because it's trendy to bash big platforms. Please consider this an attempt at making a more balanced comment :)