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wswope commented on Ask HN: Should "I asked $AI, and it said" replies be forbidden in HN guidelines?    · Posted by u/embedding-shape
zoomablemind · 9 days ago
There's hardly a standard for a 'quality' contribution to discussion. Many styles, many opinions, many ways to react and support one's statements.

If anything, it had been quite customary to supply references for some important facts. Thus letting readers to explore further and interpret the facts.

With AI in the mix the references become even more important, in the view of hallucinations and fact poisoning.

Otherwise, it's a forum. Voting, flagging, ignoring are the usual tools.

wswope · 9 days ago
> There's hardly a standard for a 'quality' contribution to discussion. Many styles, many opinions, many ways to react and support one's statements.

My brain-based LLM would like you to know there’s a set of standard guidelines for contribution linked on the footer of this page.

wswope commented on How to Attend Meetings   docs.google.com/presentat... · Posted by u/spagoop
arjie · 17 days ago
I wonder if the (AFAIK original to) Bridgewater technique of recording all meetings will spread. One thing I think that would have helped me quite a bit is to have a transcript (with speakers annotated) of a meeting. With a sufficiently advanced LLM summarizing, I could probably a handle a much larger volume of meetings where I needed to know what was going on just as a tail-risk capturer.

e.g. if someone has a meeting on which task queue to use, then even as an engineering manager (let alone some of my later roles) that is a thing where I just need to know if the decision-making process was sane. I don't need to interject, or pick one tech or the other. I do need to know that the group picked something and that they did so for good reasons.

In the past, teams I worked on would try to formalize the discussion into a decision document, which is nice but I think we could capture a lot more decisions this way if we had an automatic way of handling them.

I'm sure the natural pushback against this will be that people dislike being recorded in general, but I think with the kind of team that doesn't mind it or that has it as part of its explicit culture, it would be an interesting exercise in organizational transparency. Maybe I'll give it a crack if I'm ever in such a position again.

wswope · 17 days ago
Whisper-X does speaker-annotated transcripts nicely. I’ve used it for running multi-hour TTRPG sessions with friends and it worked hassle-free after setup.

https://github.com/m-bain/whisperX

wswope commented on After 15 years, I use Outlook as my build pipeline   iwriteaboutcode.blogspot.... · Posted by u/birdculture
afavour · 22 days ago
Memories of waiting for months to get access to a MS SQL database and ending up putting an Access database on a network share for multiple user access instead. A horrible, horrible hack solution. But it worked!
wswope · 22 days ago
I volunteered at an archaeology lab run by the state govt a few months ago.

Knowing I was a data engineer, one of the archaeologists asked me to take a look at the cataloging system he’d cobbled together on his own: a shared-drive Access database with a full-featured CRUD interface that the whole office had been using for years.

I was able to clean up one stray bug he had, and confirm his suspicion that one particular action was running slow because it had to touch multiple files by necessity (he’d rolled his own sharding) — but generally speaking, it was a work of art more effective than anything I could’ve ever come up with. Sometimes the “dirty hacks” are the best solutions.

wswope commented on New Dan Carlin – Common Sense   dancarlin.com/product/com... · Posted by u/pomian
wswope · 24 days ago
Speaking as a Dan stan, this one suffered from too much common sense.

Turns out making the president making death threats against elected US representatives for well-precedented, completely legal speech is a bad thing — who knew?

wswope commented on Widespread distribution of bacteria containing PETases across global oceans   academic.oup.com/ismej/ar... · Posted by u/PaulHoule
perlgeek · a month ago
It's no surprise that microorganisms evolve quicker to adapt to environmental changes. (At least for evolutionary / genetic changes).

That makes me wonder if we'll soon see mammals with gut microbiomes that can digest microplastics.

wswope · a month ago
Yeah, I really look forward to seeing more research on the ability of these PETase genes to spread. The article touched on it briefly, but it’d be great to have more insight on how much of this is due to HGT vs. something likely to originate de novo across species.

> That makes me wonder if we'll soon see mammals with gut microbiomes that can digest microplastics.

On a less serious note, my cat is deadset on this accomplishment.

wswope commented on Beets: The music geek’s media organizer   beets.io/... · Posted by u/hyperific
echelon_musk · a month ago
I've tried to use beets a number of times and given up each time.

- beets can't delete transcoded files which have been deleted at source.

- beets can't re transcode existing transcoded files when the source has been modified.

- It's impossible to preserve the original directory structure when transcoding because it strips all path separators for "security".

I use a Bash script I've been maintaining for a number of years instead.

wswope · a month ago
Having hit those first two pain points, I changed my transcode config to 1) run every time, and 2) use a custom bash script as the transcode command. The bash script keeps a plaintext list of files + their modtime and disk size, then only transcodes files it hasn’t seen before. Because it’s a plaintext list and relatively small, there’s not a terrible performance hit since it’s paged into memory.

Not at all saying this to dismiss your criticism though; absolutely would be great to have better OOTB options. Just putting it out for anyone who wants a workaround :).

wswope commented on Removing XSLT for a more secure browser   developer.chrome.com/docs... · Posted by u/justin-reeves
bawolff · a month ago
Didn't this come pretty directly after someone found some security vulns? I think the logic was, this is a huge chunk of code that is really complex which almost nobody uses outside of toy examples (and rss feeds). Sure, we fixed the issue just reported, but who knows what else is lurking here, it doesn't seem worth it.

As a general rule, simplifying and removing code is one of the best things you can do for security. Sure you have to balance that with doing useful things. The most secure computer is an unplugged computer but it wouldn't be a very useful one; security is about tradeoffs. There is a reason though that security is almost always cited - to some degree or another, deleting code is always good for security.

wswope · a month ago
> As a general rule, simplifying and removing code is one of the best things you can do for security.

Sure, but that’s not what they’re doing in the big picture. XSLT is a tiny drop in the bucket compared to all the surface area of the niche, non-standard APIs tacked onto Chromium. It’s classic EEE.

https://developer.chrome.com/docs/web-platform/

wswope commented on FDA described as a "clown show" amid latest scandal; top drug regulator is out   arstechnica.com/health/20... · Posted by u/duxup
pstuart · a month ago
My ex works in QA for a biotech company and FDA audits are a regular thing and are taken very seriously.

There's plenty to criticize of the org (as with almost all others) but the rank and file are doing good work to help try to keep us safe.

wswope · a month ago
I work in biotech and the FDA is openly reviewing our submissions with LLMs now. The shark has been jumped.

https://www.fda.gov/news-events/press-announcements/fda-anno...

wswope commented on Who needs Graphviz when you can build it yourself?   spidermonkey.dev/blog/202... · Posted by u/pdubroy
Someone · 2 months ago
> Each engine has its own DSL, basically.

Does it? There are slightly different DSLs for directed and non-directed graphs, some features only work with some output formats, but AFAIK, everything in the DSL in independent of the layout engine.

wswope · 2 months ago
Looking at the docs again with fresh eyes, I think you and fulafel are on the money.

The specific engine syntaxes are by & large mutually incompatible, but DOT does seem to be the label used for the overall lang as well as the dot-engine-compatible dialect.

wswope commented on Who needs Graphviz when you can build it yourself?   spidermonkey.dev/blog/202... · Posted by u/pdubroy
fulafel · 2 months ago
It's a bit confusing. Dot apparently is both the language name [1] for the Graphviz syntax, and one of the layout engines [2], possibly with different capitalizations.

[1] https://graphviz.org/doc/info/lang.html [2] https://graphviz.org/docs/layouts/dot/

wswope · 2 months ago
I can see how you got that impression and don’t fault you for it in the slightest, but that’s not accurate.

It’s not the language name for all Graphviz syntax; it’s only the syntax for renderings made with the dot engine. Each engine has its own DSL, basically.

u/wswope

KarmaCake day988October 30, 2018View Original