NaraVara's recent activity
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Comment on Overworked AI agents turn "marxist" in ~tech
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Comment on Overworked AI agents turn "marxist" in ~tech
NaraVara Link ParentYeah seems like they functionally asked AI to finish the sentence “workers of the world. . .” and it said “unite!” Oh my God I guess it’s communist now! I don’t see this as any different from...Yeah seems like they functionally asked AI to finish the sentence “workers of the world. . .” and it said “unite!” Oh my God I guess it’s communist now!
I don’t see this as any different from people asking it if it’s alive and being surprised when the thing that’s ingested every sci-fi novel and fanfic ever published reacts exactly according to the tropes in those stories.
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Comment on “Rediscovering” the operating system (AKA: the desktop is the killer app) in ~tech
NaraVara Link ParentNo I mean the price of every menu item will be different if you order through DoorDash vs. Toast vs. Postmates vs. whatever. Because they all put hidden service fees that are disguised as just the...Every restaurant mini-app is slightly different, and they’re absolutely allowed to have different upcharges on menu items (why wouldn’t they? Truffles is more expensive than extra egg on the side).
No I mean the price of every menu item will be different if you order through DoorDash vs. Toast vs. Postmates vs. whatever. Because they all put hidden service fees that are disguised as just the price of the item that the restaurants don’t have any control over. The business’ own mini-app can be different but even those have a standard set of things they’re supposed to do so they don’t, for instance, force you to go through a crappy website that wants to download 500MB worth of tracking cookies to show you a menu.
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Comment on “Rediscovering” the operating system (AKA: the desktop is the killer app) in ~tech
NaraVara Link ParentThe problem is that it’s a different stack at every restaurant, and sometimes the restaurants will list multiple options to do things, which might each have different upcharges on the menu items....The problem is that it’s a different stack at every restaurant, and sometimes the restaurants will list multiple options to do things, which might each have different upcharges on the menu items. And absolutely NONE OF IT is actually performant in anyway. Once again, the technology of having a functional way to display images and text via the internet is simply a discipline lost to time.
WeChat’s ubiquity is the feature because it means the interaction pattern for doing anything is uniform wherever you go. The buttons and prompts are in the same place each time. You never have to login to a new service or install yet another fucking app that will prompt you to enable notifications and share location data. It “just works.”
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Comment on How I feel about LLM (AI) writing in ~tech
NaraVara LinkThey’re not actually. They’re really average at writing. Almost definitionally so. It’s just that most people are really crap at writing so grammatically correct sentences structured to...LLMs are, in a way, really good at writing.
They’re not actually. They’re really average at writing. Almost definitionally so. It’s just that most people are really crap at writing so grammatically correct sentences structured to communicate a point from beginning to end rather than stream-of-consciousness rambling seems like some kind of cheat code to them.
But if you read it, it’s a really shallow book-report level of analysis being dressed up to seem more impressive than it is by very professional sounding prose. This is one of the reasons people who keep saying these tools are going to make humanities disciplines disappear are batshit insane. Really good reading skills are essential for being able to use these things and navigating the associated cognito-hazards. If you become reliant on them your critical thinking skills are going to get sandblasted away.
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Comment on Most US doctors are quietly using the OpenEvidence AI tool. Few patients know about it. in ~health
NaraVara LinkBig sections of this read like a hype-piece for OpenEvidence. There is basically no real investigation on how OpenEvidence works, what makes it different from the commercial tools, like ChatGPT or...Big sections of this read like a hype-piece for OpenEvidence. There is basically no real investigation on how OpenEvidence works, what makes it different from the commercial tools, like ChatGPT or Claude, or any kind of objective data (not random anecdotes) about its merits or shortcomings.
It says it primarily goes through medical journals and reference books but it seems to be more of a chatbot than a search tool, like Perplexity. That’s about all I’m getting about it.
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Comment on “Rediscovering” the operating system (AKA: the desktop is the killer app) in ~tech
NaraVara Link ParentYou say this, but a lot of developers seem to think the Document folder is where you put things like config files that are supposed to go in the app libraries folder or within the app container...Documents should contain things you work on like your PDFs and Words and such, organized as needed.
You say this, but a lot of developers seem to think the Document folder is where you put things like config files that are supposed to go in the app libraries folder or within the app container itself. And if you move it to the appropriate place their application will either not work or it will recreate a new folder in Documents to dump its config files in.
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Comment on “Rediscovering” the operating system (AKA: the desktop is the killer app) in ~tech
NaraVara Link ParentI really think a lot of the push for Chromebooks was for the convenience of school IT managers and worries about children using school property to access inappropriate material (adult content,...I really think a lot of the push for Chromebooks was for the convenience of school IT managers and worries about children using school property to access inappropriate material (adult content, gambling), install keyloggers or webcam hijacking malware.
To that end I really feel like we’d have been better off teaching online/digital safety as part of our computer use training instead of trying to manage around it. We should have accepted some risk and accept that some kids are gonna end up looking at boobs or sext each other and addressed that kind of conduct after someone violated a policy, including threat of criminal liability if they do things like sharing or distributing the adult material.
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Comment on “Rediscovering” the operating system (AKA: the desktop is the killer app) in ~tech
NaraVara Link ParentAppClips on iOS is supposed to sort of do this too, but it’s incorporated into the OS. The problem is nobody uses it and I think many people don’t even know it exists.AppClips on iOS is supposed to sort of do this too, but it’s incorporated into the OS. The problem is nobody uses it and I think many people don’t even know it exists.
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Comment on “Rediscovering” the operating system (AKA: the desktop is the killer app) in ~tech
NaraVara Link ParentYou can save image files to Files.app where they can be acted on by whatever, that’s just not where they end up by default. You can use the share sheet on a photo in Photos.app to save it to...You can save image files to Files.app where they can be acted on by whatever, that’s just not where they end up by default. You can use the share sheet on a photo in Photos.app to save it to whatever folder in Files.app. And you could write a Siri Shortcut to bulk save them. And I think it doesn’t even occupy storage by saving a duplicate file because of how APFS works (though I’m not sure about that part).
But yeah it takes a bit of work if you want to do that. What I end up doing is having all my photos across all devices backup to my Synology where the folder tree mirrors the albums in Photos.app on my Mac.
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Comment on “Rediscovering” the operating system (AKA: the desktop is the killer app) in ~tech
NaraVara Link ParentThe Photos and Music apps are a little weird because those actually are just sitting on top of the iPhone OS’s database. In a way that is the filesystem, it’s just that the Photos app is not as...The Photos and Music apps are a little weird because those actually are just sitting on top of the iPhone OS’s database. In a way that is the filesystem, it’s just that the Photos app is not as good at managing it as Finder is at managing things generically. The SDKs for managing those files uses those libraries. I’m not sure what the Music app is doing, but I know for Photos the reason for the complexity is because the individual photo is basically not just the photo file. It’s an object that has the entire edit history of that file along with a bunch of metadata that includes not just the EXIF data but also stuff for all those ML enhancements, like face detection/identification. This is partly why when you get a new phone it seems to really cook for the first week or so because it’s doing all this on-device ML to the photos to profile them.
I think it would be possible to organize it kind of like iTunes used to do music but things would get complicated fast, not least of which because there isn’t a general convention for how photos should be organized the way there was with Music. And even with Music it’s not that settled, because Apple felt the need to create a separate music app specifically for Classical music, which uses the same database as Music, because the data model for pop music doesn’t work very well for Classical. (And even that’s only Western classical because neither model works that well for, say, Hindustani music or even Western genres like jam bands.)
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Comment on “Rediscovering” the operating system (AKA: the desktop is the killer app) in ~tech
NaraVara Link ParentArchitectural decisions made for a phone don’t mean much when we’re talking about how PCs work doesn’t make sense. These are different devices used for different reasons. I will never understand...The problem wasn't the innovations Apple made. The problem was the transitions away from it. If we divide (and broadly simplify) the timeline, Microsoft birthed the learned helplessness in the PC era and Apple raised it in the Iphone era.
Architectural decisions made for a phone don’t mean much when we’re talking about how PCs work doesn’t make sense. These are different devices used for different reasons. I will never understand why a certain clade of tech people keep conflating the two. It was almost like 10-15 years of having iPhones before they ever even got to the point where you could have a conversation about using one for most PC related activities, and the experiment on what level of access to the machine developers should have if you want a software development ecosystem that’s conducive to indie app developers actually making money the verdict has come down pretty decisively on the since of the App Store model.
Abstracting the file management system on the desktop OSes didn’t start in MacOS, it started from the transition of enterprise software going from stuff that runs on your computer to stuff that treats your computer a thin client for some SaaS thing. Aside from managing photos the average user basically does not interact with their stuff on files because it’s all cloud based shit now. If anyone’s responsible for that transition it’s Google rather than Apple or Microsoft.
Somewhat tangential, my spouse identified the iPod video as the inflection point where mobile electronics transitioned from tools to consumption devices.
Nobody was watching videos on an iPod video unless they were on a plane or something. It was Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram that shifted usage patterns to scrolling through the phone all day.
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Comment on “Rediscovering” the operating system (AKA: the desktop is the killer app) in ~tech
NaraVara Link ParentYou got all the way to the end of a long paragraph of me citing some of the cool and convenient things Apple has done to make the most of Mac file system to say “Apple is the reason for learned...Apple is half the reason for this learned helplessness towards computers, being opinionated to the point of paternalistic.
You got all the way to the end of a long paragraph of me citing some of the cool and convenient things Apple has done to make the most of Mac file system to say “Apple is the reason for learned helplessness.” Crazy work.
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Comment on “Rediscovering” the operating system (AKA: the desktop is the killer app) in ~tech
NaraVara LinkThis is actually why I like Obsidian. You point the repo to an iCloud folder and it just piggybacks of the sync to have it work on every Obsidian device on something that uses iCloud. It even...This is actually why I like Obsidian. You point the repo to an iCloud folder and it just piggybacks of the sync to have it work on every Obsidian device on something that uses iCloud. It even works on Windows machines if you use the iCloud on Windows application, which is handy since my gaming rig is what I’d use to run a local LLM model and it’ll be good to save directly to the same folder that Obsidian reads off. More things need to just use the scaffolding of the file system to manage your files.
This was also what initially attracted me to the Old iTunes. When you imported your music to it the file got saved in a big Music library folder that it hierarchically sorts into folders based on artist and album. It could also do a bunch of “database” type operations on those files, but the thing it’s using at bottom is just your files arranged in folders as Jobs intended. And if you changed an album tag on a file it would just make a new folder and put the song on that album folder. It was great, but now even MacOS tries to abstract the file system away so people don’t know what it is. I don’t understand why people decided file managers were bad or “too complicated” all of a sudden.
I suspect this disconnect is a result of the iphoneification of personal computers, there’s a lot of layers between you and the file when you’re on a mobile device.
Yeah I think developers who came up post-iPhone just have a different model for what a computer is and how it works. Everything is networked all the time so they’ve always had the experience of the computer having practical uses. Those of us who came up with Apple IIs or DOS machines got used to understanding directories and mostly just remember the entire point of the computer was to work on files, sometimes hot-swapping floppy disks to have multiple applications to operate on a single file. Even once we got MacOS and Windows what did we do at first? Poked around the interface, opened up files just to see what they did, edited weird .ini files to modify attributes in a game, drew dumb shit in MS Paint. This is what a computer is FOR. Make you own fun, it doesn’t need to involve Docker or installing a bunch of libraries that you have only a foggy notion of what they do.
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Comment on I think that we won’t see any new and radical new gaming input devices or form factors anymore in ~games
NaraVara (edited )LinkEye-tracking, finger-limb tracking, and voice commands are all pretty under explored as gaming inputs, largely because people just don’t have the devices at scale to be worth it. Once you see...Eye-tracking, finger-limb tracking, and voice commands are all pretty under explored as gaming inputs, largely because people just don’t have the devices at scale to be worth it. Once you see those with more adoption I think you’ll see them more.
There’s also a lot of novel input devices already out there, some even invented or gaining populartity recently. You’ve got these sort of gaming keypads that improve on the standard KB/M setup for PC gaming, and they’re supported by default because they just piggyback off standard keyboard and controller support on PC games. They’re just not that popular because they’re expensive, take up space, and hardcore PC gaming that would justify a special input device is a bit of a niche. The fighting game community also loves their fight-sticks, and we’ve borne witness to the invention of the hitbox and various kinds of hitbox hybrid inputs.
I think something about the post-iPhone world has created this expectation that innovations should come out the gate and immediately set the world on fire. But that’s not how it works like 98% of the time. Mostly innovations are small, niche products that slowly find a bigger market as they see adoption and people figure out more places and ways they can be useful. Generally if you’re into technology or various niche subcultures you’ll know about the various developments underway long long before they ever become really popular and you’ll also know about a bunch of stuff that never quite made it or remained niche.
As a community or category expands the future developments will always be more niche. That’s part of market maturity where the stuff that can satisfy 80% of uses gets perfected first and then everything else is little side niches.
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Comment on Di.gg AI preview in ~tech
NaraVara Link ParentSucks to suck I guess. Everyone’s an advocate for capitalism until they get stuck holding the bag. But it seems like they’re doing fine financially, enough to keep getting capital to pursue more...Sucks to suck I guess. Everyone’s an advocate for capitalism until they get stuck holding the bag. But it seems like they’re doing fine financially, enough to keep getting capital to pursue more poorly implemented pet projects.
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Comment on Anyone else a bit unnerved by the number of visible satellites? in ~space
NaraVara Link Parent⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿ ⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⢻⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿ ⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⡿⠿⠛⢛⡛⢛⡛⠻⢿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣟⠉⠀⠀⠀⠀⠙⢿⣿⣿⣿...⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿
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Comment on Di.gg AI preview in ~tech
NaraVara Link ParentIt somehow managed to be even WORSE than Reddit because it didn’t have the volume of usage to make up for the poorly moderated SEO and political ragebait content. It was a distillation of...It somehow managed to be even WORSE than Reddit because it didn’t have the volume of usage to make up for the poorly moderated SEO and political ragebait content. It was a distillation of everything bad about Reddit rather than anything good, all while having every fourth post being about how “this is just becoming another Reddit because my bad-faith right wing trolling is getting downvoted!” Because yeah, THAT was the thing people were complaining about with Reddit.
The site was also like, incredibly unstable. I do not understand how the we keep managing to mess up the implementation of technology to display static text and images, something we had already mastered in the ‘90s.
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Comment on Di.gg AI preview in ~tech
NaraVara Link ParentThe is the most boring possible subject to do AI summaries for lol. I could see something like this being genuinely useful for a user-selected set of RSS feeds. I have a lot of “newswire” feeds...The is the most boring possible subject to do AI summaries for lol.
I could see something like this being genuinely useful for a user-selected set of RSS feeds. I have a lot of “newswire” feeds that I’ve unfollowed because they’re just kind of spammy. I’d love a way to distill the river down into a daily report that compiles it into a single entry summary and maybe links to the specific stuff that’s generating buzz.
But “scour Twitter to summarize the 230 character brain droppings of the world’s biggest slopslingers” ain’t it.
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Comment on Anyone else a bit unnerved by the number of visible satellites? in ~space
NaraVara Link ParentI grew up in an rural area and this was my experience too, but nowadays LEDs are so cheap and the batteries and bulbs so long-lasting that it’s trivial to wear a little lantern pinned to your...I grew up in an rural area and this was my experience too, but nowadays LEDs are so cheap and the batteries and bulbs so long-lasting that it’s trivial to wear a little lantern pinned to your shirt to light your way. I think pretty much every dog owner in places without a lot of street lighting now has LED collars or harnesses when they take them out. And that’s ignoring the phone flashlights that everyone has with them at all times now.
It stands to reason that talking to it like you would someone who does a good job will make it more likely to do a good job. And talking to it like it’s a fuckup is more likely to have it generate the outputs one would expect of a fuckup. So aside from the communication habits, it’s just practically beneficial.