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Because it's exactly relevant, and adds more to the discussion.

I have a PeriPage A6 Mini Bluetooth Portable Thermal Printer (https://www.peripageglobal.com/products/peripage-2-a6-mini-p...), the 304dpi option.

There are many similar models from other companies; however, while Bluetooth is advertised as its primary connection, this one also has a USB port, which works with Linux!

Bluetooth also works, but it was too unreliable for me. I ended up using Claude to write a small CLI tool which prints via raw USB: rock solid and simple.


You're downvoted, but correct. And I challenge anyone to dispute this. I'm sick and tired of people trying to justify piracy. If you want to read a book – the product of someone's hard work – pay for it (fairly).

That said, I also support Anna's Archive. We need access to books.


> I'm sick and tired of people trying to justify piracy

You will have a hard time adapting to the AI era.


There's an LLM for that too...

https://www.hypercubic.ai/hopper


What are the Claude "indications"?

Because there's a danger now that any writing (human or otherwise) can be labeled LLM-produced. So we need accurate heuristics, or none at all.


Looks like probably not Claude based on their privacy/terms:

>AI-powered feedback

>Storica uses artificial intelligence (OpenAI) to provide feedback on your writing. Your written content is sent to OpenAI's API to generate corrections and suggestions. We do not use your writing content to train AI models. Your writing is processed solely to provide you with immediate feedback.

It does look LLM-generated though.


The copy on the main page gives a first clue. "A daily reading club for language learners" available on 7 languages, on a .club domain...

Now, look at the number of books on each language. Does it sound reasonable that a no-name startup with no contact details (except an email to an aktivlang.com domain that redirects to storica.club) will invest in a serious effort to human-translate and adapt that many books to language learners, without anyone noticing?

I'm not going to argue about the writing style because we know it is an arms race. But look at the underlying business, that business would not exist without AI generated content.


Many (human) translators use DeepL (https://www.deepl.com) in their daily jobs. It employs deep learning (hence the name), but not necessarily LLMs. And it's way better than Google Translate for many languages.

So this offers an alternative, legitimate, route to exactly the website content you're suspicious of.


Staccato sentences, em dashes, word choice, the headings, "X is not Y. It's Z.":

> The legacy of the book has almost nothing to do with the satire. It has to do with the language.

Or this also reads very LLM like to me:

> None of the cruelty is gratuitous, exactly. It is dramatised exhaustion with the genre.


Interesting synchronicity: I've written a patent-drafting DSL which exactly parallels this – and which is now shaping up into an "IDE" for patent drafting...

Patent texts read as prose, but are actually precisely structured legal documents. The latest developments in this domain involve LLMs to create and modify patent documents, but even though the legal profession seems to have fallen all in on it, it's essentially rather fragile and error-prone.

I've gone the deterministic direction, which has opened up some very cool, previously unexplored, possibilities!


> Patent texts read as prose, but are actually precisely structured legal documents.

at that point why not just use something precise like a programming language? have there been efforts in that direction? genuine questions


I have no idea.

A few months ago, for the first time in my life, I had to write a patent document. It was very complicated – too complicated. Noting the structure, I searched for tools, but found only LLMs. So I wrote my own tool.

The amusing thing is, LLMs prefer the DSL-structured document!


Yes (not patents in particular).

The name is "law as code".

(My impression: various approaches; mostly academic; some small companies in the space; judging from a loose assessment wrt my career choices as a freelancer: no real business opportunity yet)


Interesting indeed! What have you learned from the patent space and what kinds of questions can you answer after perhaps solving that domain?


Patents are a much smaller space than the vast legal one in the article, so it's tractable for a human. The raw DSL spec length is roughly comparable to Lua or Go. It's a genuine grammar, with types and an AST; but no conditionals, control flow, expressions, etc. like a regular programming language.

A patent document can be represented in a graph. That opens it up to various transformations, refactoring, and validation – all mathematically rigorous! This is far more reliable than asking an LLM to check a document.

Using git enables not only regular diffs, but also structural diffs, which compare legal elements rather than just lines.

The LSP (yes, that too!) makes drafting much easier, with autocomplete and validation as I type.

I plan to open-source the DSL, and the tool that processes its files and outputs jurisdiction-aware, nicely formatted documents...


I went into this imagining something like Synfig Studio (https://www.synfig.org/) or Moho (https://moho.lostmarble.com/). "Studio" here is quite far from what it actually is: lip-syncing in static characters.

Also, Moho offers far more comprehensive (and comprehensible!) lip-sync: https://lostmarble.com/papagayo/

I get that you're using AI to boost capability with less effort, but at the moment, I think the more specialized tools are still a better avenue for this.

Lastly, I followed the link to Jellypod (https://www.jellypod.com/). It's pretty good, but falls into a vocal "uncanny valley". Even a human reading from a script wouldn't sound that perfect; the enunciations immediately come across as artificial.

Now, if this was an extension to Synfig (also open source!), it would be a much more interesting venture...


VHS video cassettes could be used as tape drives!

There was this, from the same era: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ArVid

And I have this for my Amiga, also same era: http://www.hugolyppens.com/VBS.html


How reliable did you find VBS?


Unfortunately, I never got around to using it! I bought it with high hopes, but my Zip disks turned out to be so convenient and spacious that the VHS-backup need never arose.

That said, it's not too late... I still have my Amiga system in storage, and a VHS recorder.


>I bought it with high hopes, but my Zip disks turned out to be so convenient and spacious that the VHS-backup need never arose.

It's good to hear, in retrospect, that you were able to use a storage medium that did not even exist when Amiga were discontinued. Which type of interface for the Zip drive works with it?

(It occurs to me that Zip disks presumably offer the great virtue, otherwise absent as I understand it for Amigans, of PC compatibility.)


An Amiga 4000T with a SCSI interface, and the SCSI Zip drive worked perfectly with it – I could even boot the Amiga from a Zip disk!

However, since the Zip disks were formatted with an Amiga file system – I used PFS3 (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Professional_File_System) – they couldn't be used with a PC.

I'm curious whether the data is still readable, after 30 years...


One feature missing from almost every mainstream word processor: REVEAL CODES! (https://kb.corel.com/en/127364)

This is a famous "killer" feature from WordPerfect: the ability to view and edit the low-level formatting for a document. It's invaluable for fixing weird bugs.

However, it works only because WP uses the "text-stream" paradigm, where a document comprises a linear stream of text with formatting codes (Bold, Font, Hard Return, etc.) embedded directly at the point at which they're applied.

In contrast, Word uses the "nested containers" model (characters inside words, words inside paragraphs, paragraphs inside sections, etc.), where this feature can't be replicated.

I didn't look closely at your code, but just thought to mention this feature.


I don't see why the "nested containers" model would prevent this feature to be replicated, it's just a tree of nodes. Not edit-this-as-plain-text-simple but almost.


The name gives it away:

UA 571-C remote gun sentry

Obviously developed in Ukraine ;-)


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