mFixman

eergisterendiscuss

Lumon is currently hiring new candidates willing to undergo severance :-)

13 dagen geledendiscuss

I wouldn't be surprised if the EU and ISPs are funding fibre to remote locations _because_ of Starlink competition.

Taxis and minicabs all over the world were unreliable, expensive, and unsafe before Uber came along with some healthy competition. The same dynamic is happening here between Starlink and rural fibre.

mFixman

18 dagen geledendiscuss

The killer feature of Organic Maps and OSM is the POI markers for small things. If you are cycling, knowing where the nearest bike rack is to your location is crucial.

Google Maps is very good at showing car parking spaces, which is the requirement if you live in a suburb in California like its developers.

mFixman

vorige maanddiscuss

What's the status of banking apps, Google / Microsoft authenticator, and Google Wallet? Those were the things preventing me from abandoning stock Android.

mFixman

2 maanden geledendiscuss

Nobody in the chain of command thought this was a real emergency situation.

The point of turning Bluetooth off or having to turn around the aircraft was to follow the airline's rules on terrorism, which likely tell them to abort a flight route if there's any symbol that could be interpreted as a bomb.

The captains were risking their jobs if they didn't follow this stupid request. This is a good case for getting common-sense exceptions to checklist-style rules.

mFixman

2 maanden geledendiscuss

> Example: Point at a date in an email to instantly set up a meeting, find good spots to meet up, or draft a reply.

This is actually a good use case for AI. My university sends a lot of newsletters with several events in free text format; all I want is to be able to select one of them, have an LLM parse the title, date, location, and category, and put it in my calendar.

Still, I'm sceptical this will work. Samsung phones supposedly have this same feature, and it works 1/10 of the times. Pasting it to ChatGPT and tell it to add the events to my calendar works fine, but the bottleneck is always the project managers in charge of the UI. Of course, having a small local model and being able to choose my own right-click items like I could in 1995 would be an actual solution.

mFixman

3 maanden geledendiscuss

It was originally going to be scrapped by a Web 3.0 app-only proprietary events system, but we did a small campaign inside the university to keep the site on. As far as I know, the changes will now only be on the backend.

mFixman

4 maanden geledendiscuss

The Cambridge list of talks at https://talks.cam.ac.uk is unbeaten.

The site loads in less than a second, you can do anything intuitively with a single click, all pages have a lot of useful information with zero fluff or clickbait.

mFixman

4 maanden geledendiscuss

I used to slay with this in code golfing competitions from TopCoder, where you had to implement a function to solve a particular problem, thanks to C pointer maths and the gcc generally putting function arguments in order in the stack.

Turns out, these two are equivalent in practice (but UB in the C++ standard):

    double solve(double a, double b, double c, double d) {
      return a + b + c + d;
    }

    double solve(double a ...) {
      return a + 1[&a] + 2[&a] + 3[&a];
    }

mFixman

5 maanden geledendiscuss

My impression was that the EU did it to prevent people doing visa-free layovers from claiming asylum, while the UK did it to negotiate a dual exception with the EU in the future.

ETA is a visa to the entire world in all but name. I'm not looking forward to the future where every county implements is and visa-free travel becomes a thing of the past.

mFixman

5 maanden geledendiscuss

> We’re also adding a fill tolerance slider, giving you control over how precisely the Fill tool applies color. To get started, select the Fill tool and use the slider on the left side of the canvas to adjust the tolerance to your desired level. Experiment with different tolerance settings to achieve clean fills or creative effects.

This tool would have been so useful 25 years ago when I had to manually recolour every pixel in the contour of the cool photo I was editing for my new desktop background because the fill tool didn't recognise the background properly.

mFixman

5 maanden geledendiscuss

Is this the first type of sum-type option choosing statement present for C++ unions? I've been waiting for this feature since the year 1978.

Still, it's a wasted opportunity not to have a language-level overload to the `switch` statement that allows nice pattern matching. Even with std::is_within_lifetime C++ unions are prone to errors and hard to work with.

mFixman

6 maanden geledendiscuss

Why do we need a log viewer at all?

My browser can handle tens of thousands of lines of logs, and has Ctrl-F that's useful for 99% of the searches I need. A better runner could just dump the logs and let the user take care of them.

Why most web development devolved into a React-like "you can't search for what you can't see" is a mystery.

mFixman

6 maanden geledendiscuss

Good place to ask: I'm not comfortable with NPM-style `uses: randomAuthor/some-normal-action@1` for actions that should be included by default, like bumping version tags or uploading a file to the releases.

What's the accepted way to copy these into your own repo so you can make sure attackers won't update the script to leak my private repo and steal my `GITHUB_TOKEN`?

mFixman

6 maanden geledendiscuss

I found that "Agentic Search" is generally useless in most LLMs since sites with useful data tend to block AI models.

The answer to "when is it cheaper to buy two singles rather than one return between Cambridge to London?" is available in sites such as BRFares, but no LLM can scrape it so it just makes up a generic useless answer.

mFixman

6 maanden geledendiscuss

If you go to Settings -> Personalisation -> Memory, you have two separate toggles for "Reference saved memories" and "Reference chat history".

The first one refers to the "memory updated" pop-up and its bespoke list of memories; the second one likely refers to some RAG systems for ChatGPT to get relevant snippets of previous conversations.

mFixman

6 maanden geledendiscuss

I've been impressed by how good ChatGPT is at getting the right context old conversations.

When I ask simple programming questions in a new conversation it can generally figure out which project I'm going to apply it to, and write examples catered to those projects. I feel that it also makes the responses a bit more warm and personal.

mFixman

6 maanden geledendiscuss

You can tell that they consulted 0 scientists to verify the clearly AI-written draft of this video.

The target audience of this tool is not academics; it's OpenAI investors.

mFixman

7 maanden geledendiscuss

Because there is only so much programmers and companies will pay for AI coders. The big prizes is AI-generated TikTok.

The entertainment industry is by far the easiest way to tap into global discretionary income.

mFixman

7 maanden geledendiscuss

I was very disappointed with Supernova in the East. What started as a telling of the Pacific War from the point of view of the Japanese empire morphed into the usual "war is bad but American soldiers are heroes" that's very common for this period.

I tuned out when he spent 30 minutes describing a famous photo-op of General MacArthur going ashore to the Philippines. That is the complete opposite of the original promise of the podcast.

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