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AtlasBarfed

5,182 karma · joined June 5, 2018

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AtlasBarfed··on Most people prefer traditional architecture
Am I hot or not architecture edition?

Nonetheless, I think it is a failure of architecture that modern design is ugly. It shouldn't be impossible to make good looking, practical, cost-effective buildings with all the options of materials and engineering that is available.

So let's start as the baseline of these 77 to 23 blowout victories by traditional architecture.

Now gradually substitute other modern designs until you can get more of a 50/50 agreement at least, and hopefully 60/40 in favor of modernism.

You could be right. Some of these might be cherry picked bad modern designs. From the article one of them looked like it should have the wicked witch of the West telling her pretties to fly out from their caves to go attack Dorothy. Another one looks like a massive collection of missile launch tubes.

Some designs I almost have to laugh at, when almost similarly disjointed mcmansion hell type monstrosities are snootily dismissed.

AtlasBarfed··on 25 years of mass surveillance is enough
Wasn't carnivore in the 1990s?
AtlasBarfed··on Flock Wants a Closely Surveilled World with No Exit
Once flick gets its way it's basically game over for democracy.

Unless our judiciary gets serious about what started with 9/11, authoritarianism is inevitable.

This actually is my primary candidate for the great filter.

AtlasBarfed··on Tim Cook Sold Out Steve Jobs
The man, the myth, the legend.

That phrase gets bandied about quite casually in my experience. Usually is an ironic light joke about somebody in your peer group on talking to other people or near your peer group.

As such, it's been sort of semantically watered down quite a lot in our popular cult.

But it's perfect for people like Steve Jobs.

AtlasBarfed··on TurboKV: Insanely fast Rust key-value store
Aphyr or gtfo
AtlasBarfed··on I were 17, I'd learn how to build LLMs from scratch
You're not 18 so you can steal as much of media as you want for training and not face real legal consequences
AtlasBarfed··on Xiaomi: New CPU matches Apple cores single threaded, much faster multithreaded
Any country that competently adopts Ukrainian drone technology cannot effectively be invaded currently. And that's for a continental invasion.

Taiwan? All surface ships are sitting ducks. Troop transport ships would get absolutely decimated, and then the landing troops would get swarmed by drones all over again, and then they have to maintain logistics to the small minority that land (good luck with that). And that's without naval drones.

With naval drones? I have no idea how China gets anything across the strait.

And all the above is true for a competently organized Chinese invasion. Which it won't be.

AtlasBarfed··on Felony charges for citizen deleting phone data at US Border
What is the path to those truly lawless countries?

The one we're walking right now

AtlasBarfed··on Over 5,200 Ebola cases recorded in Congo
Viral transmission.... Can change........
AtlasBarfed··on The National Park Service Is Using Flock. Rangers Are Pissed
It's totalitarianism really that difficult to concept for you to grasp?

Personal data is okay. Authoritarian government data is very very very bad

AtlasBarfed··on Ask HN: Does anyone else feel like nothing matters anymore?
Software was a mirror of human science. It was a gradual accumulation of conserved code and useful components of software and architecture.

With AI, everything is one-off code, and removes the impetus to make software as a whole easier for future coding.

This is in an age when improving things should be monumentally easier.

But there's no open source reputation to be obtained now. No monetary gain from consulting on open source projects. No reason to open source closed source code because it might be useful to other programmers.

That means software stops improving

AtlasBarfed··on As Wisconsin cities flee Flock, its shared camera network loses value
Have you lived in a truly, totalitarian system? Have we really all forgotten from 1984? I get no one reads but come on.

I don't see anyone moving to Russia, Iran, Saudi Arabia, China, etc from the United States of America.

Just like I don't see libertarians flocking to Somalia.

Of course, white Americans don't think the cameras will be used against them. It's just for all those other people.

AtlasBarfed··on Tracking down the 16-year-old WAL-reset SQLite bug
We used it for dozens of things back at my old job. Send each other passwords. Informal credentials store fo one off projects and non production. Sensitive project documentation
AtlasBarfed··on Ask HN: Alternatives to GitHub
I'd like a self-hosted primary option as the source code repository, but I'd like to mirror the code in one of the usual external options, anyone done anything like that?
AtlasBarfed··on The weekend is 100 years old
You know all that shit you feel compelled to buy? You know that house that's about 2000 to 3,000 square feet more than you need? And all that excess food you eat that turned you into a fat ass? That car you drive that is three feet too long and 15-50k more than you need to spend?

But yes, being anti consumerist, even to a mild extent, is "radical". In particular, alas, to the vast vast vast majority of mates

AtlasBarfed··on The weekend is 100 years old
It, like democracy and world trade, is probably a temporary blip.

Once the "elite"realize that drones, AI, and total information awareness provide the tools for complete totalitarian rule, we will pray for 1984

AtlasBarfed··on St Lucie Nuclear Reactor Unit 1 manually shutdown, 3 control rods drop into core
The Elon buttlicker types praise llms as the new knowledge gods.

The general public distrusts them cuz they know that they're coming for their jobs. But they will use them out of convenience

AtlasBarfed··on Tracking down the 16-year-old WAL-reset SQLite bug
I wish they'd buy the carcass of Keybase from Zoom.

It seems very similar to Tailscale: immense utility from a free-tier product for the general public, which leads to trust and a large enterprise market.

AtlasBarfed··on Atomarine: Nuclear Data Centers at Sea
U-233: is this inaccurate?

https://www.quora.com/Why-do-so-many-people-claim-thorium-br...

I'm no expert on U enrichment, but if there's even just a little U-232 that mixes in with the U-233 then the gamma rays get pretty hard to handle? I guess the breeding process might produce a lot of pure U-233, but again to the point of the quora response... not a lot of U-233 was used in "real" weapons.

I've never heard of MSRs being "large". The ORNL one fit in a closet, but that wasn't a breeder from thorium AFAIK. The penetration doesn't matter much if you have a blanket of Thorium to intercept neutrons.

AtlasBarfed··on Bumble gives up on women making the first move
The primary goal of women on these apps is to get attention.

Even those two piddly characters are that dopamine jolt that is the main thing women want.

But the shut-in social engineering and ragebait gender wars being actively fomented on social networks -- because believe me that's probably the most universally engaged ragebait -- no one ever actually goes on dates because of impossible expectations and seething resentment.

The bigger news on bumble would have been if they weren't doing pay to match, whichallthematch.com and bumble all participate in in order to extract money primarily from men but apparently also from women.

AtlasBarfed··on Georgia police officers fired after Flock camera misuse
FOR NOW. People, police states are about two classes of people: the police, and you.

What is remarkable about this story is that something happened to them. Now were they prosecuted for any of a hundred laws they probably broke?

No.

AtlasBarfed··on The Hacker's Renaissance (2025)
What is striking to me now that we are three years into the LLM revolution is ... there is no foundational software that has resulted. I keep asking where the good software is now that the miracle of LLM programming has entered the firmament.

Companies were always huge piles of proprietary custom code. Slowly what would emerge from those would occasionally be foundational software like ERPs, better databases, better message queues.

What I suspect will happen now is that everyone will simply construct their own distinct stacks of code, or just pile onto the existing proprietary ones inside companies. The "export" of code for general use will functionally disappear.

It's all throwaway, to be wastefully recomputed/rerendered by armies of H100s and only apathetically checked for utility.

I could be proven wrong, I'll know if Linux starts to miraculously close functionality and usability gaps with Windows/OSX, which would be the most visible example of LLM acceleration of development, but it so far has not.

AtlasBarfed··on São Paulo resident transforms degraded area into urban forest
Mars has lots of open land

Of course with libertarians, it's never about the purity of thought, just the convenience to their pocketbook

AtlasBarfed··on The session you cannot take with you
At this point you should realize there are now tech executives that have 30 to 35 years of experience in all the dark patterns.

Anything new is going to be an extremely rapid race to the bottom.

AtlasBarfed··on Atomarine: Nuclear Data Centers at Sea
Proliferation resistant reactors should probably be used.

Like.... LFTR

Basically, the normal operation of the reactor doesn't allow the production of weapons-useful nuclear isotopes.

You'll probably also need a smaller footprint reactor

Like.... LFTR

And you'll want something that can be turned on, shut off, and has natural anti-meltdown abilities in case hurricanes or other disasters threaten the ractor

Like ... LFTR

AtlasBarfed··on GrapheneOS Defends Data-Wiping Function That Blocked US Border Search
I passed the law that your existence is illegal. Follow it
AtlasBarfed··on I'd not buy a LG monitor
Poor Microsoft, what have they possibly done to deserve such lack of faith??
AtlasBarfed··on If coding has been solved, why does software keep getting worse?
There were a lot of amoral programmers. I'm not saying programmers as a whole are morally untouchable.

But I would say the engineering barrier and the nerd barrier did provide some amount of sociopathic resistance in the world.

Llms are going to enable the absolutely immoral business people to do whatever they want. And that's going to mean enshittification on a massive scale

AtlasBarfed··on Nobody knows what a used GPU cluster is worth
Well it certainly doesn't appreciate.

And I feel that AI hardware is going to rapidly depreciate faster than even typical PC hardware

AtlasBarfed··on British runner Josh Kerr breaks world record for mile which stood for 27 years
Probably a lot more EPO
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