Harley Hicks
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harley.hicks.house
Harley Hicks
@harley.hicks.house
73 followers 97 following 130 posts
Python/Django/Golang software engineer, wannabe music critic. Always working on a side project.

Keeps a curated list of absurd bug stories at https://500mile.email

Writes sometimes at https://harley.hicks.house
Posts Replies Media Videos
harley.hicks.house
Record Store Day really snuck up on me this year. Was already thinking of skipping (gotta save my money in this crazy economy), but that list is pretty bland this year. #musicsky
April 11, 2025 at 1:56 PM
harley.hicks.house
What I’m currently reading.

What are you all reading, #booksky?
April 11, 2025 at 1:12 PM
harley.hicks.house
Accidentally got myself blocked from psychologytoday.com. I'm looking for a new therapist, so I wrote a script to get therapist data and do better filtering than their current tools. Lesson learned, always rate limit. Hope it’s temporary lol
April 4, 2025 at 12:34 PM
harley.hicks.house
A few months ago I got frustrated with the YouTube Kids experience. If you're a parent, you know how terrible it can be. So I built a site where my kids can watch moderated videos that my wife and I can choose for them. We call it KidsTube. harley.hicks.house/introducing-...

#parenting #youtube
Introducing KidsTube
tl;dr - I built a YouTube proxy for my kids with parental controls and I'm thinking about how to distribute it for other families to use. YouTube Kids sucks A few months ago I grew very frustrated ...
harley.hicks.house
March 22, 2025 at 6:34 PM
Reposted by Harley Hicks
bardon.bsky.social
For some completely unknown and totally undiagnosed reason, I collect envelope security patterns. Today I found a new pattern for my collection so I celebrate by sharing my collection with you: 79 envelope liners for your viewing/art making pleasure.

www.are.na/brandon-alva...
envelope liners | Are.na
www.are.na
February 11, 2025 at 4:56 PM
Reposted by Harley Hicks
techmeme.com
In a January paper, three computer scientists presented a faster hash table, one of the oldest data structures, disproving a 40-year-old data science conjecture (Steve Nadis/Quanta Magazine)

Main Link | Techmeme Permalink
February 11, 2025 at 7:10 AM
Reposted by Harley Hicks
faineg.bsky.social
Ah, the millennial experience of “every time you get some measure of financial and career stability, the world decides to do something extraordinarily stupid again”
February 3, 2025 at 9:35 AM
harley.hicks.house
I love when someone tells me that some medical thing I have is due to stress. Yes, that solves everything! I’ll just have less stress!
January 5, 2025 at 3:44 PM
harley.hicks.house
Check in with your homies.

Just found out yesterday that a childhood friend passes away this week.

Addiction and mental health is challenging. Look out for yourselves and each other out there.
December 16, 2024 at 1:18 AM
harley.hicks.house
What band or artist do you find yourself obsessing over their discography every couple years? A couple of mine are Sufjan Stevens and Andrew Bird. They’re both so prolific not only in quantity but also in trying new sounds.

#musicsky
December 13, 2024 at 12:08 AM
Reposted by Harley Hicks
edzitron.com
December 10, 2024 at 7:41 PM
Reposted by Harley Hicks
harley.hicks.house
Yes, this is how you verify!

bsky.social/about/blog/4...
How to verify your Bluesky account - Bluesky
Here's how to verify your Bluesky account by setting your website as your username.
bsky.social
December 10, 2024 at 1:13 PM
harley.hicks.house
Choose 20 books that have stayed with you or influenced you. One book per day for 20 days in no particular order. No explanations, no reviews, just covers!

Day 20/20

💙📚👀

#BookSky
#Books
#BookChallenge
December 9, 2024 at 2:18 PM
harley.hicks.house
Choose 20 books that have stayed with you or influenced you. One book per day for 20 days in no particular order. No explanations, no reviews, just covers!

Day 19/20

💙📚👀

#BookSky
#Books
#BookChallenge
December 8, 2024 at 4:15 PM
harley.hicks.house
Just finished Linoleum and I haven’t cried during a movie for a long time. #moviesky
December 8, 2024 at 3:22 PM
harley.hicks.house
Choose 20 books that have stayed with you or influenced you. One book per day for 20 days in no particular order. No explanations, no reviews, just covers!

Day 18/20

💙📚👀

#BookSky
#Books
#BookChallenge
December 8, 2024 at 3:25 AM
harley.hicks.house
My comfort Christmas movie is objectively not a 10/10, but for some reason watching Jessica Biel call JTT a butthole never gets old.
December 7, 2024 at 12:56 AM
harley.hicks.house
Choose 20 books that have stayed with you or influenced you. One book per day for 20 days in no particular order. No explanations, no reviews, just covers!

Day 17/20

💙📚👀

#BookSky
#Books
#BookChallenge
December 6, 2024 at 9:27 PM
Reposted by Harley Hicks
edzitron.com
I can't stop thinking model collapse. Large language models do not typo. They're probabilistic. Why did they misspell these words? What else could this be?

I talked to the author of the paper on model collapse in April and he said it had already begun.

www.wheresyoured.at/bubble-troub...
AI models, when fed content from other AI models (or their own), begin to forget (for lack of a better word) the meaning and information derived from the original content, which two of the paper's authors describe as "absorbing the misunderstanding of the models that generated the data before them." In far simpler terms, these models infer rules from the content they're fed, identifying meaning and conventions as a result based on the commonalities of how humans structure things like code or language. As generative AI does not "know" anything, when fed reams of content generated by other models, they begin learning rules based on content generated by a machine guessing at what it should be writing rather than communicating meaning, making it somewhere between useless and actively harmful as training data. Sidebar: I spoke with Zakhar Shumaylov, PhD Student at the Department of Mathematics at the University of Cambridge, and one of the authors of the original model collapse paper. He believes that model collapse is already happening, and training with this generated data compounds existent biases in a model and, unfortunately, errors. One interesting note he made was that human-made training data, by the nature of it being written by a human, includes errors, and models need to be robust to such errors. So what do we do if models are trained with content created without them? Do we introduce errors ourselves? How many errors are there, and how do we introduce them all?
December 6, 2024 at 12:09 AM
harley.hicks.house
Choose 20 books that have stayed with you or influenced you. One book per day for 20 days in no particular order. No explanations, no reviews, just covers!

Day 16/20

💙📚👀

#BookSky
#Books
#BookChallenge
December 5, 2024 at 1:50 PM
harley.hicks.house
My 11yo: “This banana nut crunch cereal tastes like a banana that slipped on its own peel.”
December 5, 2024 at 1:49 PM
harley.hicks.house
Choose 20 books that have stayed with you or influenced you. One book per day for 20 days in no particular order. No explanations, no reviews, just covers!

Day 15/20

💙📚👀

#BookSky
#Books
#BookChallenge
December 4, 2024 at 12:52 PM
harley.hicks.house
Choose 20 books that have stayed with you or influenced you. One book per day for 20 days in no particular order. No explanations, no reviews, just covers!

Day 14/20

💙📚👀

#BookSky
#Books
#BookChallenge
December 3, 2024 at 11:01 PM
harley.hicks.house
Choose 20 books that have stayed with you or influenced you. One book per day for 20 days in no particular order. No explanations, no reviews, just covers!

Day 13/20

💙📚👀

#BookSky
#Books
#BookChallenge
December 3, 2024 at 3:32 AM
harley.hicks.house
I got really frustrated this week with how YouTube Kids works. Not only is YouTube Kids filled with trash, but there’s great educational content not on YouTube Kids as well.

I tried digging through settings to set “Approved Content Only.” But couldn’t figure it out for the life of me.
December 2, 2024 at 12:58 AM