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• Post #4487102

  Over the last 13 years as a software dev at SaaS companies, I've developed a fondness for graphs. I spend a lot of time staring at them to answer questions (mostly boiling down to "Why is the website sad?" and "Wait, *is* the site sad?") and I've learned to configure and read them quite well. But there are still many mysteries. I think it might be fun (and educational) to present a series of graphs with interesting patterns to see what other people think. Sometimes,...

• Post #4279344

  Great piece on how broken Pangram is: https://freddiedeboer.substack.com/p/i-wouldnt-say-pangram-is-broken-but (The author says "fragile" but no, it just looks broken to me.) TL;DR: Pangram gives inconsistent results for different excerpts of the same text, but almost always claims "100%" AI or human authorship for the whole document.

• Post #4152435

  @gaditb@icosahedron.website Yeah, it was inevitable that we would eventually come to an encoding that would allow representing most/all characters from world languages, unambiguously. The previous situation is untenable. However, I wonder if you would call the following "a unicode": A container format for text where there is a prefix indicating the character set (and maybe some delimiters, runlength indicators, whatever). A multi-lingual plaintext document would have different parts i...

• Post #4052080

  Company description: "Helping Medicare brokers build the insurance business of their dreams" ...wait, is that supposed to *entice* me? Or is it supposed to be satire?

• Post #3915357

  Someone put a broken Zen clock out on the curb, and I'm pretty sure I can fix it wit some glue. (The solenoid broke off, probably due to the clock falling off something.) But I don't love the idea of having to deal with batteries. It takes 4 C-cell AA batteries. I wonder if I can just... wire the +5V/ground wires of a USB-A cord to the battery compartment contacts?!

• Post #3705000

  Dammit, I just realized that this card game is based on a clever math or information theory observation, and now I need to reverse engineer it to figure out how it works. ("What if you just played the g--" NO. Gotta understand it.)

• Post #3462666

  Any recommendations on an encrypted location-sharing app for smartphone? I'm looking for an app appropriate for someone to track the smartphone of a child or an adult in cognitive decline (with their consent!) but that doesn't leak geolocation info to the app provider and their 3672 closest vendors. So far I've found Paralino, which promises that it is e2e encrypted, but I haven't found an audit or anything. Has this one been audited? Recommendations for alternatives?

• Post #2195685

  I very much get a "we just discovered radium and want to put it in everything" vibe from this whole generative AI bubble. (Including the thing where companies used to slap the word "radium" on existing products even though they thankfully did not actually have any radioactive materials. Like "radium butter".)

• Post #1810332

  @Skabber You're looking for a highly skilled person and requiring them to use The Deskilling Engine? You may need to increase salary to compensate.

• Post #1810331

  Quantum computing is going great: https://github.com/GiancarloLelli/quantum/pull/1 The code submission that won 1 BTC for using a quantum computer to "crack" small ECC keys works exactly the same if you replace the quantum computer with /dev/urandom. This isn't about brute-forcing a small key. It's the other way around: The quantum computer was being *used as* an RNG! 😆

• Post #1521174

  If cannabis is so great, why don't they sell cannater?

• Post #1521173

  @yama @badkeys Out of curiosity, what year are you posting from?

• Post #128180

  Today I remembered @aphyr@woof.group's offhand quote about "far too much experience inferring system dynamics from timeseries graphs" and how much that hit home. A large part of my job as a software dev at a SaaS company is staring at graphs and telling stories about them. But his description sounds better. :-) (quote is from https://aphyr.com/posts/370-ecobee-settings-for-heat-pumps-with-resistive-aux-heat)