pilgrimfff's comments

pilgrimfff | 3 years ago | on: Content moderation is broken (2019)

It’s too bad there’s no way to use hybrid approaches or use some kind of learning, but for machines! No heuristics to rank and prioritize content.

We better tell every big tech company that what they’ve been doing forever is impossible to do if they don’t also de platform those deplorables.

pilgrimfff | 3 years ago | on: XCheck at Meta: Why it exists and how it works

> this has been done properly numerous times in the past

I'm genuinely curious if you have any examples of this. I'm not aware of any modern product at scale that doesn't suffer from these same issues.

pilgrimfff | 3 years ago | on: Gmail 2FA causes the homeless to permanently lose access 3 times a year

> it is possible to operate a Google account completely without a phone number

This is only true for a limited time. I've tried to use a couple Google accounts this way and inevitably I log in from a new IP and Google's 2FA system kicks in - forcing me to either furnish a phone number or lose access to the account.

It's similar to how Twitter forces phone numbers out of people - just not as immediate.

pilgrimfff | 3 years ago | on: Our domain and 700 non-profit sites got blocked by Meta

Buy a handful of alternative domains that redirect to your primary (you could stand up a minimal url shortener on each domain).

Even if you get unblocked this time, it could easily happen again. Until there’s systematic reform to this nonsense, you just have to work around it with redundancy.

If they’re going to treat you like a scammer, work around it like the scammers do.

pilgrimfff | 3 years ago | on: Google’s “million’s of search results” are not being served

I was expecting the number of search results here to be much higher - like who cares if Google only serves the first million results out of a billion?

Very interesting to see that Google will only serve a few hundred links when they claim to have hundreds of thousands of relevant results indexed.

I'm very curious where Google is getting that count and why the reality is so different. Systematic overcounting? Suppressing hundreds of thousands of results?

pilgrimfff | 3 years ago | on: Ask HN: As a dev, what made (or almost) you quit from a job?

I got an engineering manager who was a hardcore micromanager. He insisted on adding a lot of process, but refused to conform to any processes himself. He caused numerous false SEVs because he was picking around in ancient logs, assuming every error message was actually a production outage.

He was like having -2 engineers on the team. I'd been in the job half a decade. I quit 2 months after he joined.

pilgrimfff | 3 years ago | on: “Science must respect the dignity and rights of all humans”

> People keep asking about examples of work that exemplifies "potential harms [that] outweigh the benefit of publication." How about large scale human vivisection?

People are asking for example of something this particular set of rules would prevent.

An example that's already illegal in the most extreme sense of the word doesn't convince anyone.

This is a straw man. The only people who won't see it as such are those who already agree with you.

pilgrimfff | 3 years ago | on: IFixit: Self Repair Program makes M1 MacBooks less repairable

> iFixit praises the M1 MacBook Air service manuals by saying “they’re in-depth, mostly logical, and well worth an additional repairability point,”

This is the service manual you're referencing. The one they're complaining about it is the M1 MacBook Pro.

Here's the actual manual referenced: https://manuals.info.apple.com/MANUALS/2000/MA2085/en_US/mac...

And here's iFixIt's actual complaint:

> it’s not 162 pages because Apple has changed where batteries sit in the MacBook Pro. It’s that long because the manual says that to replace the battery, you’ve got to replace the entire top case. At the time of writing, Apple will not sell you a replacement MacBook Pro battery. They sell you a “Top Case with Battery and Keyboard.”

pilgrimfff | 3 years ago | on: You Shouldn't Use Manjaro

I don't use Manjaro anymore, but I really appreciated it as a user-friendly bridge I was able to use to cross the chasm from Ubuntu to Arch.

The i3 community Manjaro made me love tiling window managers. And Manjaro Architect was like a halfway point between the hand-holding installer and the minimal Arch installation experience. It helped me work out what I liked and get to the point where I could administer everything.

I wasn't aware of all the controversies. The only one that popped up on my radar was the treasurer thing. That's all too bad.

pilgrimfff | 3 years ago | on: NSA's Warrantless Wiretaps (2012)

> Because of attitudes like this.

I had no idea my attitude could magically make party elites care about this basic constitutional right! Thanks so so much for setting me straight.

> Political nihilism never won any battles.

Refusing to criticize politicians because they wear the tie color you like is the least effective thing you can possibly do.

I say it's nihilism to ignore this fact and vote these same people into office again and again.

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