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BryantD

4,834 karma · joined November 30, 2011

I take care of servers and customers.
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BryantD··on Claude Duet is the first personal-assistant-type harness that feels useful
FWIW, my biggest use case for agents like this is ongoing research. I.e.: check Humble Bundle weekly and tell me if there’s a book bundle I might be interested in. Has the Music Box announced a film series I might want to visit Chicago for? That sort of thing; I want filters for the firehose.
BryantD··on How Google determines the names for bodies of water in Google Earth (2008)
"It only shows Gulf of America if you’re in the US." I didn't say it didn't show both if you're in another country.
BryantD··on How Google determines the names for bodies of water in Google Earth (2008)
I don’t think there’s a right or wrong about whether or not the asker is parroting MAGA propaganda; the Denali false equivalence is absolutely something that comes up all the time in right-wing circles. Possibly the asker didn’t intend to parrot MAGA propaganda. If so, well, perhaps there’s a lesson here for them about reading carefully before posting. I don’t think it’s unresonable to ask HN posters to read the article with some care and again, Denali is in no way an equivalent situation.
BryantD··on How Google determines the names for bodies of water in Google Earth
Please re-read the policy. You will notice that it refers to “bodies of water” and “international geopolitical disputes.” Denali is neither a body of water or the subject of any international disagreement, given that it’s contained within the borders of the US. I believe Google just changed it, but you can see why the question is not in fact relevant to the current discussion.
BryantD··on How Google determines the names for bodies of water in Google Earth (2008)
The name of the mountain was changed. Note that mountains aren’t bodies of water, so the link is not relevant to this question, and Denali isn’t bordered by multiple countries, so Google presumably feels that the US has the right to name it.

And you’re getting downvoted because, as per the above, it’s an irrelevant question.

But I’ll indulge you just a bit more. The principle here is not “renaming things is bad!” The principle is that indulging an authoritarian who’s trying to unilaterally rename territory his country doesn’t own is bad, particularly when he’s doing so in a fit of pique (Lake Ontario).

As you may or may not be aware (I wasn’t), the Alaskan state legislature passed a bill in 1975 requesting that the mountain be renamed. Trump didn’t even try to get Congress to pass any bills before renaming things.

Hope this all helps clarify and gives you some reason to rethink the MAGA propaganda that tries to equate Denali and the Gulf of Mexico.

BryantD··on How Google determines the names for bodies of water in Google Earth (2008)
It only shows Gulf of America if you’re in the US. It should, according to this policy, show both no matter where you are.
BryantD··on A Mole Infiltrated the Highest Ranks of American Militias (2025)
Operation Gladio is one of those pieces of history that people ought to know, so don’t feel bad. It’s appreciated.

And as I’m sure you know, the answer to your second question is Operation Condor, at least if you take “America” to mean South America as well.

BryantD··on The Fatal Flaw of 911
The Eugene CAHOOTS team has existed since 1989 until it was shut down recently. Dispatchers make the call as to whether or not to send police officers along with CAHOOTS responders on a per call basis.

Quoting vera.org: “ Of the estimated 24,000 calls CAHOOTS responded to in 2019, only 311 required police backup, and in Eugene, CAHOOTS teams resolved almost 20 percent of all calls coming through the city’s public safety communications center.”

To the best of my knowledge, no CAHOOTS staff have died or been seriously injured on the job. I’m not sure the evidence shows that finding the right balance is dangerous. Hard for sure, CAHOOTS put a lot of effort into building the right relationship with the police, but the risk to responders is overstated.

BryantD··on Anthropic's Scion is heavily inspired by Mononoke
From the Anthropic announcement:

“Source control for huge monorepos has prior art, notably Google’s Piper and Meta’s Sapling, so we were able to build Scion with their hard-won lessons in mind.”

Mononoke is a component of Sapling, as I understand it. In fact, the repo link provided in this article links to a subdirectory of the Sapling repo. I’m not totally sure I understand the complaint.

BryantD··on Publishers Killed the Paperback, Then Blamed Readers
This article asks a bunch of questions without ever bothering to try and answer them. That makes it less than useless; it’s mostly insinuations.

There’s also a lack of historical knowledge. Sure, mass market paperbacks were a new format — but not completely new in 1939. Cheap paperbacks date back to the previous century. The author of this piece would have done well to spend some time with Wikipedia.

For that matter, showing some curiosity about reading habits in general would have helped. Reading wasn’t a new habit: dime novels and pulp magazines were deeply popular in the early 20th century. The jump to mass market paperbacks was not particularly long.

BryantD··on AI is now capable of developing its own inference hardware
You’re assuming the “listening in” aspect, which as far as I know is not proven (even in the less loaded “the model was trained on sessions including the ones in question” form of the claim.

Plausible? Absolutely. Did OpenAI behave badly in other ways regarding this issue? Yes. Does it help to assume unproven facts and then accuse people of reaching emotional decisions? Nope.

BryantD··on What on Earth are you dooming about?
Oh, shut up, DHH. Or take the time to notice that you spend time dooming about immigration in a fairly unpleasant way. This is nothing more than an attempt to shut up people you don’t like.
BryantD··on I quit OpenAI because its culture is broken
So… like the Therac-25 radiation accidents? Software bugs do sometimes have physical consequences.
BryantD··on I quit OpenAI because its culture is broken
Given that he’s citing the need to learn from safety in other fields, I’d say the former.
BryantD··on Apple Pass Designer
Huh. Doesn't remind me of those at all. For example, I used the other new Apple Wallet functionality yesterday to put my local library card into Apple Wallet and now I've got one less thing to carry around. Worked perfectly for checking out a book today.
BryantD··on An agent used DNS to reach an external chatbot
They’re testing rather different capabilities, to be fair. This is a bit like saying people test combustion engines without connecting them to WiFi.
BryantD··on OpenAI agents carried out an undisclosed attack on RubyGems
What makes you say that? We haven’t seen similar attacks prior to 2026, even from OpenAI and Anthropic. Is your argument that those two companies became more irresponsible this year?
BryantD··on Oracle’s 6am layoff emails hit staff amid new wave of cuts
The usual way companies handle this is to set the actual layoff date as 60 days from when the email goes out. If you hear about a mass layoff including two months of salary for everyone affected, that’s what’s going on. Typically system access is revoked but the paychecks keep coming as usual and vacation keeps accruing, because you’ve got that extra two months of “employment.” The company also gets the benefit of being able to call you back in if it turns out there was something vital you were doing that never got documented.

This, the company stays compliant with all the regulations but they don’t have to worry about disaffected employees during those 60 days.

BryantD··on Volkswagen Just Built an EV That Can Go Nearly 900 Miles on a Charge
True, but as an EV driver I feel more comfortable when there are a couple of chargers available in an area — I run into too many chargers which aren’t working to enjoy relying on a single option.
BryantD··on OpenAI agents carried out an undisclosed attack on RubyGems
Not really. They’re a couple of months behind OpenAI and Anthropic, although arguably ahead of the Chinese labs. And these attacks seem to require leading edge models.

I worry that when and if Grok gets there, we’ll find out that SpaceXAI is too casual about security, though.

BryantD··on iPhone Duo
I'm not getting a first generation of these things but if I could replace my iPad and my iPhone with this, the economics start to make more sense. Not for everyone, of course, but it'd be within my budget for replacing both devices.

I'm not sure the unfolded version will be big enough to truly replace my iPad Pro, though.

BryantD··on METR and Redwood Offer Holy %^ Postmortem of the HuggingFace Hack
I’d bet a small amount of money on 4) the people who noticed had been conditioned by prior experience to believe that their management/escalation channels would react negatively or not at all to anything which might slow down the training process.
BryantD··on Autistici/Inventati's main .org domain goes dark after US terrorism designation
Although I certainly don't blame anyone for thinking of right-wing terrorism as primarily domestic, some degree of research will demonstrate the multi-national nature of the problem.

We can start with The Base, founded by Rinaldo Nazzaro in 2018, the year after he moved to Russia and obtained Russian citizenship. Nazzaro is a longtime advocate of Harold Covington's Northwest Front concept -- an all-white state in the Pacific Northwest. Nazzaro purchased properties in Washington state for training purposes. The Base was active in Canada, the US, and Europe -- members were arrested for planning a mass shooting in Virginia at a gun rights rally in 2020, for planning to vandalize synagogues in Wisconsin and Michigan, and the Ukranian Base cell claimed responsibility for assassinating an intelligence officer in Ukraine's Security Service. Nazzaro remains in Russia, safe from prosecution.

In 2020, Robert Rundo started the Active club network, which promotes mixed martial arts as preparation for a race war. Rundo also moved to Europe to avoid US prosecution. (He has since been extradited from Romania.) These clubs have absorbed a number of former Atomwaffen Division members. Active clubs have not gone as far into terrorism as The Base, but have played a role in a number of racially-motivated riots in the British Isles and there's some evidence of terrorist-flavored plotting among specific Active club instances.

(It's worth noting that these clubs are decentralized in a similar fashion to antifa groups; Rundo is not a central authority, although he's more of a central figure than anyone who considers themselves antifa. But I want to be consistent.)

Speaking of Atomwaffen -- I don't consider them as much of a threat as they were prior to 2020. However, since we're talking about foreign coordination and support, it's worth noting that they emerged from the Iron March website, which was run by Alisher Mukhitdinov, who is believed to be an Uzbek living in Russia. Mukhitdinov claims he was recruited by Aleksandr Dugin. In any case, Atomwaffen was tightly coordinating with Sonnenkrieg Division in the UK and Feuerkrieg Division in Europe. And as it faded, some members went to Europe, seeing the Ukraine (and the Azov Brigade) as a potential training ground/sanctuary.

The accelerationist white supremacist movement is fundamentally international.

BryantD··on US sanctions Italian hosting provider Autistici Inventati
It’s the rubric the government is using here: Trump designated the mythical centralized organization as a terrorist threat.
BryantD··on US sanctions Italian hosting provider Autistici Inventati
No, they did not. Jerry Nadler is often cited as an example here and that’s wrong; what he actually said is that it was a myth that Antifa provocateurs were behind the ongoing violent protests in Portland. Not the same thing.

Don’t make vague accusations. If you have real cites, provide them. And your claim is “quite a few” so pointing at one candidate somewhere isn’t gonna do it.

As far as your second paragraph goes, I didn’t say that anyone should be protected from the consequences of their actions so that portion of your comment is irrelevant.

BryantD··on US sanctions Italian hosting provider for encrypted email to Antifa and PKK
Parent comment was flagged but fair point. There’s nobody calling the global shots. I wouldn’t say “little to no coordination” but I think I’m splitting hairs.
BryantD··on US sanctions Italian hosting provider Autistici Inventati
Ha ha, but no, you weren’t. You were told that there’s no such thing as an organized centralized group called Antifa. You were told that it’s an ideological approach to fighting fascism, not a terrorist organization. You were told that labeling antifa as a terrorist organization was going to be an excuse for bringing sanctions against anyone Trump’s administration happens to dislike.

And all of that is true.

BryantD··on CIA funding helped keep NeXT afloat in the 80s
Wasn’t even that — Black Rifle was founded in 2014 and the Starbucks announcement was in 2017. Note that as of 2025, they only have 500 total employees. Which I think only proves your moral harder.

(I don’t have this at my fingertips, I just happen to be driving through Montana and my wife asked me about the Black Rifle Coffee billboards so I literally just read the Wikipedia article a couple of hours ago.)

BryantD··on Cursor launches Origin, GitHub alternative
I agree: the stated steps are what I’d expect.

I still don’t trust the company that made the decisions that led to that code being shipped in the first place.

BryantD··on Companies promote incompetent employees to management to limit damage they do
The section marked “Examples” has no examples. Not even anecdotes. This is impressively lazy.
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