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HappMacDonald

568 karma · joined February 22, 2013

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HappMacDonald··on Software Engineering fundamentals matter more
Genuine question: but are there still people eating meals in a home dining room in the 2020s?

Or is this just inertia of expectation from the 20th century from folk who expect "well that's just what you do" even though their dining room tables are presently covered in unrelated "temporarily put there" items?

HappMacDonald··on Software Engineering fundamentals matter more
it's ~~delivering on~~ jumping on the bandwagon of the promise of all those scripting languages that were supposed to help office drones.
HappMacDonald··on Show HN: A public AI whose memory is shared across all users
I don't suppose that the webpage could have a toggle to optionally tone down or eliminate the dynamic visual effects? I keep HW accel disabled on my web browser, and just viewing the page pegs my CPU.

Well.. unless this is also a cryptojacker or something

HappMacDonald··on Claude: System Prompts
Honestly power isn't even the biggest problem with desalination, it's the spectacular volume of brine commensurate with the volume of clean water you are trying to extract: figuring out both how to dispose of it without creating new environmental hazards and constantly repairing/replacing the machinery which must filter and plumb that caustic sludge.

Which is all to say in addition to the crazy energy demands of desalinization, there are also problems that dwarf those.

HappMacDonald··on Why does Opus 5 feel worse to work with?
I always get "Belt and suspenders" from Fable, so I can't tell
HappMacDonald··on Maximizing the value of your Claude Code sessions
I mean `printf("printf(\"Hello World!\\n\")");`, so...
HappMacDonald··on Firefox is now the last major browser that still supports uBlock Origin
Which in practice would only be executed by the same crowd of people who would have opted-in to the security features on the first pass.
HappMacDonald··on The “mechanical miracle” that ruined Mark Twain’s life
Crab has entered the chat.

For.. for like the eighteenth time now.

HappMacDonald··on Show HN: Needle2: 14MB agentic LLM for phones, wearables, smart home and robots
"It has gotten warmer" could imply a desire to return to homeostasis.
HappMacDonald··on As AI eats the web, the internet’s collective memory is disappearing
In that case how about "Federation" at least?
HappMacDonald··on Why is everyone trying to build a solid-state battery?
I love how Carter blows up a star system, and then later McKay blows up 5/6ths of a star system which it turns out is deeply more complicated to pull off.

On the other hand Carter did what she set out to do while McKay fscked up and wasn't trying to blow anything up, so there is also that.

HappMacDonald··on The Economic Benefit of Refactoring
All I heard was "compression is intelligence"
HappMacDonald··on The Economic Benefit of Refactoring
I'm curious how heavily you have test suites built up as guardrails while doing this, to prevent regressions and such?
HappMacDonald··on Physicists Solve a Muon Mystery. Now, Old Results Don't Add Up
But the real litmus test is and always has been "can a theory predict the results of empirical measurements (such as controlled experiments) more accurately than its competitors".

The Danish-interpretation quantum physicists might urge you to shut up and calculate, but what we lack is any model capable of both describing why and how the wave function collapses and simultaneously offering more accurate predictions than QM does. The most well known low hanging fruit being: describing events in noticeably curved spacetime (or put in other words, in situations where the effects of gravity are non-trivial) because we don't even need a better model to know that QM breaks there, QM itself will happily tell us that much by piling on infinities and singularities that can no longer be canceled via renormalization.

So the take home is less "shut up and calculate" and more "don't waste their time with speculation about underlying mechanics until it can also offer more accurate predictions, and until then redirect your energies back to calculating: making use out of the tool we already have at least".

If nothing else, familiarity with the tool that does work up to a certain standard is more likely to lead someone to the next big step than hanging back in the wings of Newton and Aristotle with layperson intuitions about macroscopic objects in terrestrial gravity.

HappMacDonald··on Log is non-monotonic in PHP and Lua
I am curious what the correct algorithm would be, if for no other reason than to find out how on god's green earth it could be slower than using a division as an erstwhile shortcut. 8I
HappMacDonald··on Log is non-monotonic in PHP and Lua
Well, I use PICO-8 LUA. Where are my double-precision floats and 64bit integers at? XD
HappMacDonald··on Hooray for the Sockets Interface
I'm the network admin for a small ISP that hasn't deployed IPv6 yet.

We do have ARIN IPv6 space, but we also have thousands of customers who do not know what that is or care about it either. Twice in twenty years now we have had a customer ask about it, and we have offered to work with them to help pilot support through our network (since if they have a need then that need could act as a standard against which to measure support) but always within a day they simply find some other way to satisfy their need without IPv6.

"Get more money from their customers" aside, we do still have a duty to prioritize the needs of our customers, and I'm not pulling budget away from initiatives to improve availability or increase bandwidth or lower latency simply to chase a buggy moving target technology with no light at the end of the tunnel by way of material improvement for our customers.

No "killer app". <1% marketing draw if you advertise it as a feature. Nobody's connection gets faster, or higher uptime, instead you just get more complicated support tickets when some website hasn't configured their AAAA records correctly or when some third party's IPv6 support (be that a site online or a home router or an application on the user's laptop) ruins a connection which works fine once the client disables IPv6 support on their end.

I would be overjoyed if the tech actually worked as a drop-in replacement, because that is a crazy amount of addressing space. I would be overjoyed if it were actually backwards compatible instead of a mishmash of dual stack and/or CGNAT nonsense. I would be overjoyed if the originally planned path MTU discovery and IPSEC support got off the ground, but those both died in horrible ugly ways.

As it is, it has picked up enough steam that some time over the next 15 years we will see a tipping point where the incentives to switch finally benefit all parties and the non-mobile industry starts to fall in line. Where customers actually begin to benefit directly and it becomes worth prioritizing this tech above what they currently perceive as more vital. Where a great enough percentage of our middle-mile and last-mile tech finally support it that we can survive migrating wholesale away from the vendors that do not. And where many of the hellacious pain points of trying to support it today will have been further sanded down and be less damaging to power through.

But I said something similar ten years ago and while the needle has moved since then it hasn't moved as far as I would have liked.

HappMacDonald··on Truth is not a direction: a Tarski attack on LLM probes
Well, I mean True(x) does = NOT (NOT True(x)), so..
HappMacDonald··on Truth is not a direction: a Tarski attack on LLM probes
I think you are making a lot of assumptions on what "practical purposes" even mean in that case.

Please think carefully and then try to tell me whether or not some Trump-administration government agency would not in the "99.99% reliable" circumstance just plug an LLM into the nukes and funnel worldstate input into it and have it make the decision "is it time to fire the nukes?" over and over again each second.

I argue that that would require far more nines than even "will food turn to poison in my mouth" would.

HappMacDonald··on Our position on open-weights models
> There is very little pushback against grok being willing to write explicit descriptions of sex, or giving security advise.

John Oliver disagrees with this

HappMacDonald··on New HIV vaccine shows unprecedented success in preclinical study
That's like asking "if someone is unwilling to practice abstinence, why would they be willing to wear a condom, or to flip a magic 'not fertile right at this moment' lightswitch?"

A vaccine is something you do once and PrEP is something you have to continue to do over time and get overcharged out the ass for the entire time and worry about if it will remain available in the future.

HappMacDonald··on Don't Take the Black Pill [video]
When one's primary handling of numbers comes down to either linear (single-dimensional) lists or money, then you won't use modulo very much.

But any time you're walking over a discrete multidimensional list packed into a linear list, or walking over any discrete periodic signal (one very common example would be walking a linear array of screen pixels, walking over pcm samples in an audio waveform, literally 100% of GPU programming and 90+% of SIMD programming) you will want to be able to translate between "how far from the start am I" and "how far into the current cycle am I", and modulo handles that.

Similarly for almost anything involving time calculations (and for the same reason: because they are periodic). Modulo is literally described as "clock arithmetic" after all.

Here you can find Tempestt Bledsoe singing about it, lol https://youtu.be/fqtzqcJ6agE?t=570s

So you are absolutely correct that there do exist avenues in programming which can dodge this particular raindrop, I hope you aren't opposed to the idea that they are at least few and far between? ;)

HappMacDonald··on Nvidia, Microsoft, Meta warn against overregulating open-weight models
I'm sorry Dave, I'm afraid I can't do that
HappMacDonald··on Re: Bye Bye Gravatar
Stallman?
HappMacDonald··on Firefox Containers Preview
I use the proxy feature extensively as a network administrator, it is quite frequent that I need to SSH tunnel to get to the Web UI of a remote resource (for security or at least as often to bypass a routing deficiency I am troubleshooting) and before Multi-account Containers I'd basically have to fire up a completely different browser since the proxy settings I use would control every tab and every site I tried to reach.

With Multi-account containers I get to choose which tabs use the proxy :)

HappMacDonald··on OpenAI’s accidental attack against Hugging Face is science fiction that happened
.. for a few days but now they can 8I
HappMacDonald··on LEDs’ potential to save our night skies
Er.. on the moon you can also view the sky nightly.

It's just that both the days and the nights are a lot longer.

HappMacDonald··on Painting the sides of railroad rails white to reduce derailment
This is what I want on my house and my car
HappMacDonald··on Kaiser nurses say AI, surveillance are making their jobs and patient care worse
> but not all AI is machine learning

I will instead pick at this latter part of your claim. What is an example of something that is AI but that is not ML..?

HappMacDonald··on Kaiser nurses say AI, surveillance are making their jobs and patient care worse
But it is only a perk for the scam artists who benefit from that.

Yes, it makes sense that the confusion aligns with their interests, and they are unavoidably a big part of the conversation. But it remains a problem for the non-overlapping group of people who actually value the social contract, and for us finding a solution which helps take one more step to defeat the scammers remains valuable.

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