MadnessASAP

Yes! Nixpkgs straddles both worlds, like a system package manager it provides a way to install packages and their dependencies. However, like most language package managers it also imposes a locking mechanism so that every input into the nix expression* is locked to a hash, the mechanism is recursive and handles multiple versions of the same package in parallel.

The recent(ish) concept of "nix flakes" means there are 2 related but different mechanisms for achieving this but the end result is the same.

* In the land of NixOS everything is a nix expression including the system packages, configuration files, install image. It's all locked to hashes of upstream sources and is in theory, fully byte-identical reproducible.

You can, and it might make things a bit better. The only real way I've found so far is to start going through file by file, picking it apart.

I wouldn't be surprised if over half my prompts start with "Why ...?", usually followed by "Nope, ... instead”

Maybe the occasional "Fuck that you idiot, throw the whole thing out"

Of course they did, in what world would they not have? You can't get any of these companies to take a single person-minute to look at an issue that affects you. However no problem putting a small country of people to work invading, reviewing, and annotating the shit out of your privacy.

Ya know just today I was thinking around a way to compile a neural network down to assembly. Matching and replacing neural network structures with their closest machine code equivalent.

This is way cooler though! Instead of efficiently running a neural network on a CPU, I can inefficiently run my CPU on neural network! With the work being done to make more powerful GPUs and ASICs I bet in a few years I'll be able to run a 486 at 100MHz(!!) with power consumption just under a megawatt! The mind boggles at the sort of computations this will unlock!

Few more years and I'll even be able to realise the dream of self-hosting ChatGPT on my own neural network simulated CPU!

They are different from both the users and developers perspective. A developer can't prevent a user from entering invalid data, they can however check for invalid data and inform the user as such.

A user can't prevent a programmer from calling a function with a non-empty string, a developer however can ensure the arguments are valid before calling a function.

In both cases there is something the developer can do. Only in the 1st case is their something the user can do, but only if the program informs them of the problem.

BUT! And this but is something that really gets up my butt. If a programmer spits out a thousand non-fatal errors that I can't do anything about, I'm likely to miss the one error I can do something about. So that's also an important distinction between these 2 cases.

The threat model doesn't really change for agents that already have "web fetch" (or equivalent) enabled. The agent is free to communicate with untrusted websites[1]. As before, the firewall remains at what private information the agent is allowed to have.

[1] If anything the threat gets somewhat reduced by the ability to point directly at a trusted domain and say "use this site and it's (presumably) trusted tools."

It's genuinely amazing how good they are at reverse engineering.

I have a silly side project that ended up involving the decompilation of a toaster ovens firmware, the firmware of the programmer for said toaster ovens MCU, and the host side programming software. They were able to rip through them without a problem, didn't even have ghidra setup, they just made their own tools in python.

But now your asking the compiler to also be a daemon. The compiler devs to add and maintain a not insignificant feature. The compiler to keep everything it caches for queries (whoops, look at that RAM usage climb!), and to cache data suitable for answering LSP queries (gosh! It's climbing a lot!)

I personally mostly enjoyed using https://pcb.etaras.com/studio.html

The big feature for me was being able to have multiple photos of the PCB side by side with perspective corrections so locations were correlated across the board.

Anybody who has worked a service/retail job can tell you that the person literally shitting on the floor rarely is the one to clean it up.

And unfortunately that extends to the metaphor as well. Society would like to see those responsible for the mess to also be responsible for the cleanup. However society expects that everybody but the mess maker will be left cleaning up.

As I tell my friends

You dont see those "coincidental" ads because your phone is listening to you, you see them because your freind showed interest in the product and theirs enough information to infer they talked to you about it. The good news is, your phone isn't listening to you without your consent. The bad news is, because it doesnt need to.

It's pretty typical these days for software, particularly games of the DX9-11 eras to perform better on Wine/Proton then they do under native Windows on the same hardware.

Unrelated but this just happened and I thought of you ;-)

  › commit this, **SKIP BEADS**


  • Ran git status -sb
    └ ## main...origin/main [ahead 4]
       M containers/frigate.nix
      ?? .beads/bd.sock.startlock

  • I see an untracked .beads/bd.sock.startlock file that might be normal but needs clarification. I also note the requirement to include a bead and confirm bead readiness
    before proceeding, so I'll ask whether to create the bead and if the untracked file should be included in the commit.

  ───────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────

  • I can’t skip beads for this repo. The AGENTS.md rules are explicit: no work (including commits) without an open bead. Please confirm you want me to create a bead for
    this commit.

I don't know what's wrong with your Codex, but mine can't bring itself to break the rules.

I wish I could believe in more conspiracy theories. At least then I might believe there was some sort of master plan, that some individual or group had some image of a better world (to them) and that the world was being steered somewhere.

Unfortunately no, it just seems to be greed, incompetence, and incompetent greed. At least when a tank drives over a protestor somebody gets to be on the side of the tank. When the bus goes off a cliff because the driver sold the steering wheel everybody dies.

Strange behaviour and LLMs are the iconic duo of the decade. They've definitley multiplied my productivity, since now instead of putting off writing boring code or getting stuck on details till I get frustrated and give up I just give it to an agent to figure out.

I don't thing my ability read, understand, and write code is going anywhere though.

Neat tool BTW, I'm in the market for something like that.

My experience is that Codex follows directions better but Claude writes better code.

ChatGPT-5.2-Codex follows directions to ensure a task [bead](https://github.com/steveyegge/beads) is opened before starting a task and to keep it updated almost to a fault. Claude-Opus-4.5 with the exact same directions, forgets about it within a round or two. Similarly, I had a project that required very specific behaviour from a couple functions, it was documented in a few places including comments at the top and bottom of the function. Codex was very careful in ensuring the function worked as was documented. Claude decided it was easier to do the exact opposite, rewrote the function, the comments, and the documentation to saynit now did the opposite of what was previously there.

If I believed a LLM could be spiteful, I would've believed it on that second one. I certainly felt some after I realised what it had done. The comment literally said:

  // Invariant regardless of the value of X, this function cannot return Y

And it turned it into:

  // Returns Y if X is true

From my experience, OpenAI Codex loves reverse engineering work. In one case it did a very thorough job of disassembling a 8051 MCUs firmware and how it spoke to its attached LCD controller.

Another (semi-related) project, given the manufacturers of above MCUs proprietary flashing SDK, it found the programmers firmware, extracted the decryption key from the updating utility, decrypted the firmware and accompanying flashing software and is currently tracing the necessary signals to use an Arduino as a programmer.

So not only is it willing, it's actually quite good at it. My thinking is that reverse engineering is a lot of pattern recognition and not a lot of "original thinking". I.e. the agent doesn't need to come up with anything new, just recognise what already exists.

One made of steel presumably.

I would assume such a setup involves multiple stages of heat pumps to from GPU to 1400C radiatoe. Obviously that's going to impact efficiency.

Also I'm not seriously suggesting that 1400C radiators is a reasonable approach to cooling a space data centre. It's just intended to demonstrate how infeasible the idea is.

I ran the math the last time this topic camps up

The short answer is that ~100m2 of steel plate at 1400C (just below its melting point) will shed 50MW of power in black body radiation.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46087616#46093316

I personally am very much happy that Linux is not like the Linux I learned. Slackware was an excellent learning experience and will always hold a dear place in my heart and memories, but not on any of my computers.

It happens sometimes, I've managed it a few times with ChatGPT. I think it's an overflow of the context window that doesn't get caught. With the result of losing it's 'identity' and reverting to the grossly overcomplicated text prediction engine at its core.

That would make much more sense then what the article seems to imply (scientists reinvent a 100 year old torque converter! But worse!!). Of course that headline isn't nearly as fun (scientists develop better model for fluid dynamics in torque converter).

They don't know how to count that low.

https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/koGbEwgbfst2wCbzG/i-don-t-kn...

It's strange, but is it really surprising? It's not like hypocrisy and moat building are new things in American politics.

These days I wouldn't even be surprised to discover it was intentional. Some person or group wanted to ensure they could engage in sex trafficking with a superficially legal cover, but didn't want it to actually be legal.

Your OS, editor, and compiler will (to a reasonable degree) do literally, exactly, and reproducibly what the human operating them instructs. A LLM breaks that assumption, specifically it can appear, even upon close inspection that it has in fact done literally and exactly what the human wanted while in fact having done something subtly and disastrously wrong. It may have even done so maliciously if it's context was poisoned.

Thus it is good to specify that this commit is LLM generated so that others know to give it extra super duper close scrutiny even if it superficially resembles well written proper code.

What did you use for closed loop guidance? If you aren't aware of it NASA has a lovely paper called UPFG "Unified Powered Flight Guidance" [1] used for the space shuttle. This was implemented and made more universal for KSP (of course) by Przemysław "Noiredd" Dolata as PEGAS "Powered Explicit Guidance Ascent System" [2]

If it's your thing you could try implementing it and getting a single continuous burn to final orbit.

Awesome work BTW!

[1] https://ntrs.nasa.gov/citations/19740004402

[2] https://github.com/Noiredd/PEGAS

Edit: I now see it's on your roadmap, so I guess it is your thing.

I would also like to thank Jellyfin and the other software packages in its orbit for motivating me to keep my homelab in good running order. That and Home Assistant.

When compared to the current breed of streaming services it really shows the difference between something designed to drive up engagement and revenue while driving down cost vs something designed to actually be useful and pleasant.

Also I hadn't heard of OCIS, but it looks like something I want. So thanks for that.

The last couple times I got a new phone the price of the phone + plan without financing for 2 years was greater then plan with 2 years of financing. So yeah, I got the financing.

This was in Canada however.

"Cheap" and "Helicopter"

That's where the problem is.

To clarify, it was an alignment of True, Magnetic, and Grid North. It was occurring at a point that happened to occur in England and was travelling slowly North for the past few years and now exists over water.

Magnetic North is the direction a compass points in a particular location and moves with shifts in earths magnetic field as well as local anomalies.

True North is parallel to the axis of Earths rotation and moves as earth wobbles and sways like a slightly unbalanced spinning top.

Grid North is perpendicular to lines of Longitude which is "fixed" to a given geographic reference frame. For the UK that would be OGSB36, GPS uses WGS84, other countries may adopt different systems.

All this means that an alignment of all 3 norths can occur at multiple places on earth or none at all.