virtue3 (u/virtue3) - Readit News

virtue3 commented on Claude says “You're absolutely right!” about everything github.com/anthropics/cla... · Posted by u/pr337h4m

klik99 · 11 days ago

Is that GPT5? Reddit users are freaking out about losing 4o and AFAICT it's because 5 doesn't stroke their ego as hard as 4o. I feel there are roughly two classes of heavy LLM users - one who use it like a tool, and the other like a therapist. The latter may be a bigger money maker for many LLM companies so I worry GPT5 will be seen as a mistake to them, despite being better for research/agent work.

virtue3 · 11 days ago

We should all be deeply worried about gpt being used as a therapist. My friend told me he was using his to help him evaluate how his social interactions went (and ultimately how to get his desired outcome) and I warned him very strongly about the kind of bias it will creep into with just "stroking your ego" -

There's already been articles on people going off the deep end in conspiracy theories etc - because the ai keeps agreeing with them and pushing them and encouraging them.

This is really a good start.

virtue3 commented on EverQuest filfre.net/2025/07/everqu... · Posted by u/dmazin

don_neufeld · 2 months ago

I was there.

My first pay stub had Verant on it, I joined shortly before the SOE transition.

One thing maybe not well known outside of the company was that the MMO subscription revenue enabled a hotbed of experimentation. There was an MMO RTS which never shipped, and several other takes on “can we make genre X an MMO?” that I can’t remember. And then SWG, obviously.

EQ2 had all kinds of interesting people on it as a result - Ken Perlin did the lip sync work (driving facial animations from dialog), Brian Hook worked on the rendered for a while. I’m sure there were others.

Then there’s all the things we didn’t do. I read the complete Harry Potter series specifically because we were in talks with JK Rowling to do a HP MMO, but negotiations failed.

Crazy times.

[addendum] Several of the people in the article are no longer with us (Brad McQuaid, and Kelly Flock at least)

The office park that SOE was located in on Terman Court was also demolished years ago. I remember standing at the door to my office on my last day, looking out the window at the eucalyptus trees and thinking I was never going to see the place again.

I was right.

virtue3 · 2 months ago

Thanks for the work you did on that! EQ really got me into gaming and "what we could make tech do". It was definitely transformative at the time!

virtue3 commented on I convinced HP's board to buy Palm and watched them kill it philmckinney.substack.com... · Posted by u/AndrewDucker

lukevp · 2 months ago

Windows phones were incredible, the OS was the most responsive at the time by far. No apps though. They were building in Android app support when they pulled the plug.

virtue3 · 2 months ago

I was a developer for Carrier apps. It was by far the best mobile developer experience by a landslide.

Really staked my career on it because of that. Whoops.

Wasn't until react launched that I felt there was finally a better system for frontend development.

virtue3 commented on Show HN: I built a knife steel comparison tool new.knife.day/blog/knife-... · Posted by u/p-s-v

adamgordonbell · 3 months ago

Anyone else like ceramic knives? I have a couple paring knives.

Super sharp but very brittle.

virtue3 · 3 months ago

Leans too far into disposable culture. Even a solid steel knife and a cheap electric sharpener will last longer.

And you can sharpen all your paring knives etc.

virtue3 commented on Inheritance was invented as a performance hack (2021) catern.com/inheritance.ht... · Posted by u/aquastorm

bitwize · 4 months ago

Simple inheritance makes the class hierarchy complicated through issues like the diamond inheritance problem, which C++ resolves in typical C++ fashion: attempt to satisfy everybody, actually satisfy nobody.

The designers of StarCraft ran into the pitfalls of designing a sensible inheritance hierarchy, as described here (C-f "Game engine architecture"): https://www.codeofhonor.com/blog/tough-times-on-the-road-to-...

virtue3 · 4 months ago

really amazing read thank you.

virtue3 commented on Driverless semis have started running regular longhaul routes cnn.com/2025/05/01/busine... · Posted by u/harambae

o11c · 4 months ago

The problem with railroad is exactly the other side of this: that you can't trivially and automatically detach a single car at any point. I know businesses that literally have an old railroad branch line right up to their door, but they can't actually order anything meaningful via rail.

The existing rail system has at least the following constraints:

* Uses steel-on-steel friction, rather than rubber-on-rock. Cars that can do both exist but are rare.

* Can only travel on the specially-prepared rails, not installed at the last-mile, related to the next point.

* Poor cornering and elevation changing.

* Difficulty in changing speeds (over a thousand meters and over a minute, compare to about a hundred meters and less than ten seconds for road vehicles)

* Very limited lanes, usually no passing. Track reservations will be voided if you aren't exactly on schedule.

* Almost all of the "intelligence" (both computer and human) is at one or both ends; the cars in the middle are all "dumb".

Which of these can reasonably be changed?

virtue3 · 4 months ago

railroad maintenance is also incredibly expensive.

Especially compared to when you can offload the road maintenance to the state / rest of the population.

virtue3 commented on GitDroid: A third party Android app manager for apps uploaded to GitHub releases github.com/TechnicJelle/G... · Posted by u/amadeuspagel

0xbadcafebee · 4 months ago

You know what I really want? No more "app stores" or "app managers". Just let me download and run an application, like on every non-mobile computer in the world.

I hate the constant updates. I hate the end-of-life OS forks. I hate the limited programming languages. I hate that there's this complicated gatekeeping, where you have to jump through a bunch of extra hoops to install a program if it hasn't been blessed by some specific official organization. And I hate that all the mobile phones come locked up (if not to a mobile carrier, then to an operating system, only able to be maintained by a specific 3rd party, and the device becomes a useless brick once that specific 3rd party stops supporting that specific operating system on that specific device).

Regular computers work much better. A common architecture. Run any OS built for that common architecture. Run any program that has executable machine code for that common architecture. You can install a different OS when the old one is unsupported. You can keep using the hardware until the hardware dies, not just until the company who made it drops that hardware's support. Common hardware components so every OS doesn't have to support every different individual model of computer. No gatekeeping of the programs you can install. No extra hoops. Just a machine that can run whatever you want it to.

I just want a computer in my pocket. I don't want all the extra bullshit.

virtue3 · 4 months ago

I agree... but also that computer in our pocket has our entire life wrapped in it.

The desktop has some mitigations against this. PWNing your mobile device could completely wreck you in a lot of ways.

I switched from android to iphone because someone 0-day'd me. I'm not saying it can't happen on iOS or something; just less likely - and mostly because of these restrictions.

virtue3 commented on I use zip bombs to protect my server idiallo.com/blog/zipbomb-... · Posted by u/foxfired

opan · 4 months ago

I had a ton of trouble opening a 10MB or so png a few weeks back. It was stitched together screenshots forming a map of some areas in a game, so it was quite large. Some stuff refused to open it at all as if the file was invalid, some would hang for minutes, some opened blurry. My first semi-success was Fossify Gallery on my phone from F-Droid. If I let it chug a bit, it'd show a blurry image, a while longer it'd focus. Then I'd try to zoom or pan and it'd blur for ages again. I guess it was aggressively lazy-loading. What worked in the end was GIMP. I had the thought that the image was probably made in an editor, so surely an editor could open it. The catch is that it took like 8GB of RAM, but then I could see clearly, zoom, and pan all I wanted. It made me wonder why there's not an image viewer that's just the viewer part of GIMP or something.

Among things that didn't work were qutebrowser, icecat, nsxiv, feh, imv, mpv. I did worry at first the file was corrupt, I was redownloading it, comparing hashes with a friend, etc. Makes for an interesting benchmark, I guess.

For others curious, here's the file: https://0x0.st/82Ap.png

I'd say just curl/wget it, don't expect it to load in a browser.

virtue3 · 4 months ago

I use honey view for reading comics etc. It can handle this.

Old school acdsee would have been fine too.

I think it's all the pixel processing on the modern image viewers (or they're just using system web views that isn't 100% just a straight render).

I suspect that the more native renderers are doing some extra magic here. Or just being significantly more OK with using up all your ram.

virtue3 commented on Waymos crash less than human drivers understandingai.org/p/hum... · Posted by u/rbanffy

ceejayoz · 5 months ago

> Route data never gets worse.

Construction? Parade? Giant tire-crunching pothole in the middle of the freeway?

virtue3 · 5 months ago

Oddly enough Waymo does a solid job of avoiding those.

virtue3 commented on Triforce – a beamformer for Apple Silicon laptops github.com/chadmed/trifor... · Posted by u/tosh

seanp2k2 · 5 months ago

This is also a great example counterpoint for the folks who constantly complain about Apple hardware being "overpriced". Most laptop mfgs are happy to just solder on whatever tiny $0.50 compatible MEMS mic and put a little toothpick-sized hole in the case and call it good enough, or add two and rely on whatever generic beam forming that isn't adapted to their specific mic choice, placement, case acoustics, etc the Realtek ALC262 or whatever gives them, and call it a day.

Apple puts a ton of R&D into making things work well. As another example: Macbooks have been, for 15+ years now, the only laptops that I can trust to actually sleep and conserve battery when I close the lid and slip into a backpack for a few-hr flight. Windows and Linux on laptops seem to have about a 70% chance of either not sleeping, not waking up right (esp with hybrid graphics), or trying to do forced Windows updates and killing the battery, then waking back up to 20+ minutes of waiting for updates to resume / finish with no meaningful progress indicator or way to cancel / delay.

Not everything they do is perfect, and I'm not some huge Apple fanboy, but they do offer a significantly better experience IMO and feel "worth" the premium. It's not as if modern gaming laptops are any cheaper than MBPs, but they certainly feel much jankier, with software and UX to match. As an example, the IEC plug on the power supply of my Asus Zephyrus Duo wiggles enough that it disconnects even with different IEC cables. I've had to wrap some electrical tape around the plug body to get it to be less flaky. Asus Armoury Crate is a terrible buggy and bloated piece of software that runs about a dozen background processes to deliver a "gamer" UI to...control fans, RGB lights, and usually fail to provide updates. They also have utilities like https://www.asus.com/us/content/screenxpert3/ and "ROG ScreenPad Optimizer" that are largely buggy garbage, but sometimes required to get their proprietary hardware to work properly.

Does Apple gouge users for extra RAM and SSD space? Absolutely, but you're paying for the R&D as much as the actual hardware. I wish they'd just price that into the base models and make upgrades cheaper, but their pricing strategy seems to be lowering the base entry point to something more appealing with "it barely works" levels of spec, while making increasingly ridiculous margins on higher specs -- an additional $4,600 to go from 1TB -> 16TB on the Mac Studio is pretty bold considering consumer QTY=1 pricing on a fast M.2 SSD is around $600 for 8TB, and I'm sure their BOM costs are around the same for 16TB worth of silicon in huge quantities.

virtue3 · 5 months ago

counter point; as a gamer I don't want to waste even a penny on a built in microphone on my laptop -> maybe nice to have as a last resort; but even then I could just discord on my phone.

I just want a heatset aux port and I'm GTG. I want my money put into the GPU/CPU/Display/Keyboard.

Now my macbook pro for work? Yeah; high expectations there for AV quality in terms of joining meetings etc.