Nostr notes by Dan Luu

Commodore 64 version of Missile Command where the bottom of your ...

2024-11-22T22:41:22Z

Commodore 64 version of Missile Command where the bottom of your screen is the game state in memory and missiles cause memory corruption, which eventually causes you to lose: https://csdb.dk/release/?id=135463.

In the video below, a missile broke my controls and caused my cursor to move down and to the left so I couldn't stop other missiles.

How good can you be at Codenames without knowing any words? ...

2024-08-12T04:50:57Z

How good can you be at Codenames without knowing any words?

https://danluu.com/codenames/

Why wasn't Steve Yegge's YouTube channel more popular? ...

2024-07-22T07:04:39Z

Why wasn't Steve Yegge's YouTube channel more popular? There was a fairly long time period where he seemed to be widely read programming blogger, which you might think is a good springboard for doing video, but his median video has something like 2k views.

For people who haven't seen it, the first episode is https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C8332hz8c2s, and he talks a bit about why he ended up winding down the channel and taking a job in episode 49: https://youtu.be/sKE1S7PK1fY?si=2g2lcrR7Ls0IikVm&t=2977.

This is such a classic big company story: someone finds a ...

2024-06-12T18:44:38Z

This is such a classic big company story: someone finds a critical problem (in this case, the team manually labelling training data is mislabelling it), but the team that owns the issue doesn't care about it and no consumer of the team's product has the bandwidth/patience to go through the many months long process of getting the issue fixed, so the issue never gets fixed:

https://www.mihaileric.com/posts/how-alexa-dropped-the-ball-conversational-ai/

How web bloat impacts users with slow devices: ...

2024-03-16T19:57:17Z

How web bloat impacts users with slow devices:

https://danluu.com/slow-device/

The impossibility of agreement on what should be allowed: ...

2024-02-08T03:21:58Z

The impossibility of agreement on what should be allowed:

https://danluu.com/impossible-agree/

@npub1wfy…ahvr Interesting. It being an intentional softball ...

2024-01-26T22:57:16Z

In reply to nevent1q…g7n6
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npub1wfyyhywygzhtvhzydhyp7uemj2wd2z64q637r0w6qdccuask3y8smuahvr (npub1wfy…ahvr) Interesting. It being an intentional softball question is consistent with the previous "do you plan to keep Facebook free?" as well as with Hatch's not caring about the answer whatsoever and shuffling through his notes for the next question.

And, either way, laughing at a question from a Senator seems like a blunder. It seems a bit odd they didn't practice fielding off-the-wall questions to avoid having the exact reaction they did.

It's sort of a funny thought experiment, but what would the ...

2024-01-17T07:28:19Z

It's sort of a funny thought experiment, but what would the world look like with the modern internet but without medicine? Infant mortality rate is roughly 50%, life expectancy is something like 20-30 years, with people randomly and mysteriously dying from infections after getting a small cut, etc.

Inequality due to wealth would be reduced because rich people would suffer from all of the same causes of death since this presupposes that no one knows how to treat or prevent any illness.

I wonder why nearly every company is, as Patrick Mckenzie puts ...

2023-09-04T19:31:40Z

I wonder why nearly every company is, as Patrick Mckenzie puts it, "fundamentally unserious" about hiring.

I've done a lot of hiring for multiple companies and, even when the tech job market was the hottest it's ever been and tons of founders, managers, etc., were complaining that it was impossible to hire, I found it very easy to hire because every other company out there is doing such a bad job you'll do an outstanding job if you do anything remotely reasonable.

I don't understand why new furniture (coaches, kitchen ...

2023-07-18T19:28:56Z

I don't understand why new furniture (coaches, kitchen tables, etc.) costs as much as it does. I'm not saying that it should be cheaper or that you could make it cheaper, just that the cost isn't intuitive to me at all.

I've had this convo with many people IRL and no one who's thought it makes sense has had a remotely plausible reason that, for example, for the price of a cheap couch from IKEA, you can get an AMD Ryzen 7 7800X3D a 5 GHz (boost) processor with 11.2B transistors.

As an example, after training the Threads feed to get more tech ...

2023-07-07T04:28:26Z

In reply to nevent1q…ymr7
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As an example, after training the Threads feed to get more tech content, I end up with stuff like this, a comment on how Threads will win because it can out-iterate Twitter because it has a first-class codebase, which Twitter never had.

No techincal person or even non-technical person who has insight into Twitter and Meta engineering would ever make that comment, but that kind of tech influencer porn gets way more engagement and reach than comments from people who actually understand tech.