This. As an interview question for my product managers, I often ask what Google search's product is. The ones who say ads move to the next round.
If Google's customers are the advertisers, maybe the correct answer is "attention".
Readit Newsvoussoir commented on Ask HN: Why is Gmail so incompetent at basic search? · Posted by u/sn9
voussoir commented on Show HN: Monkeys.zip – 3000 Monkeys on Typewriters monkeys.zip/... · Posted by u/yathern
This is beautiful man, congratulations. I love how much personality there is in the animations!
voussoir commented on Iconography of the PuTTY tools chiark.greenend.org.uk/~s... · Posted by u/Tomte
> I can’t remember why the lightning bolt was yellow. With hindsight that seems the strangest thing about it; cyan would have been a more obvious choice for electricity. Possibly it was just to contrast more with the blue screens of the computers.
I had to stop and consider this, because it seemed to me that yellow was "obviously" the correct color. And indeed a few image searches confirmed this: a yellow lightning bolt is by far the most universal symbol for electricity, along with the standard black-on-yellow danger icon. I'm not sure how far back in history that representation goes, or what its origins are, but I think it's been used ubiquitously in comics and cartoons for a long time.
It's funny, I was just thinking about this recently. I noticed that a lot of electric cars or PHEVs use cyan accents to signal that they are EVs, yet I also think yellow is the more obvious color for electricity.
I've been a Purelymail customer since July 2021. For the most part I have been very satisfied. However, in July 2024 I sent an email to Scott for support because I have been getting too much spam. He said that the spamassassin auto-learning filter was broken and he was working on a replacement. In the time since then, I think maybe it is doing a little better, but I still get quite a lot of spam.
But for $0.40/month I have not had any inclination to switch providers.
voussoir commented on New study shows: EV batteries last much longer than expected electrive.com/2024/11/24/... · Posted by u/kungfudoi
> This has always been true for anyone who knows anything
Not sure that's true. I have seen comments on HN multiple times over the years claiming batteries die in a few years and were almost never downvoted.
This might not be quite as strong a rebuttal as you were hoping for!
voussoir commented on Please do not write below the line bbctvlicence.com/Please%2... · Posted by u/dcminter
He also collects and displays all the previous letters he's got from the BBC: http://www.bbctvlicence.com/
They get increasingly threatening and aggressive. I'd guess that the OCR code scanning is to confirm that he's read the letter and adjust the hostility in the next letter appropriately.
Wow, these letters are extremely pathetic and unbecoming for a government agency. I would have expected the BBC to have more self respect than this mafia LARP.
voussoir commented on Why parenting makes you human josem.co/why-parenting-ma... · Posted by u/josem
A wizard?
Funny seeing these headlines come back around. Here's something from seven years ago with the same kind of problem:
[OSM-talk] Beware Pokemon users https://lists.openstreetmap.org/pipermail/talk/2016-December...
> since what they know about many individuals is incomplete
No, for most individuals it is complete. Most people don’t own stocks directly (only an estimated 21% do)[1], and the ones who don’t are not probable to deal with complexly taxable transactions as the norm.
[1] https://www.axios.com/2023/10/18/percentage-americans-own-st...
Your comment is phrased as a disagreement, but it's not. The GP post said the IRS can't do everyone's taxes, and you replied that they can do most. I think we're all on the same page that people would benefit from having available information autofilled while still having the opportunity to review and make corrections as needed.
voussoir commented on The question that no LLM can answer and why it is important mindprison.cc/p/the-quest... · Posted by u/13years
I feel like I'm seeing an effect where some people don't want to say the word "AI" because they don't want to look like a normie, so they stick to "LLM" which sounds smarter and more technically adept. Then they complain because the LLM lacks a knowledge graph or self reflection. It's no surprise that a language model models language, not facts, especially not trivia facts which can't be deduced from anything.
If you want something to have a worldly knowledge graph and the ability to answer "I'm not sure", you'll have to ask for an AI, not an LLM.