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Ntrails

4,881 karma · joined August 16, 2012

I like Matlab. Sad really, isn't it?
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Ntrails··on Binance-hacker-1029 – $5.6B stolen from Binance
> if they print some more stablecoins to make whole both the DeFi lender and Binance

Oh absolutely agree - they cannot make both parties whole and I do not know which, if either, they are likely to do.

Ntrails··on Binance-hacker-1029 – $5.6B stolen from Binance
I guess the point is simply that "blacklisted" coin is no longer a liability. They wouldn't be "printing free cash" they'd be cash neutral.

The alternative is the stablecoin providers effectively keep the money for themselves. At that point the justification for the blacklisting seems like little more than self enrichment?

Ntrails··on Binance-hacker-1029 – $5.6B stolen from Binance
I'm not clear whether the stablecoin providers will then be "creating" new coin to make binance whole - without which you've still fucked binance
Ntrails··on Zillow to pay $212.5M to settle class action for real estate venture
Back when they came out a guy I knew bought a new mini every 6 months, selling the previous one to cover the cost and indeed profit. Essentially there was scarcity + excess demand so the car now was worth more money vs than one after the 12 month waiting list or whatever.

Of course it stopped working after a few rounds, but it wasn't a bad play whilst it worked!

Ntrails··on The EPA Is Quietly Killing Its Web Archive
> Wouldn't you say this archive represents good value for the money?

Yes, that's the point. Not "this is so cheap it's irrelevant" but "this is an important resource worth funding".

Ntrails··on The EPA Is Quietly Killing Its Web Archive
And yet the number of projects with similarly insignificant costs is large, and they do add up.

The argument cannot be "this money doesn't matter", it has to be "this represents good value for money" (imo)

Ntrails··on GPT-6.1 Terra
> important details would be obfuscated from end users.

I don't expect the vast majority of your users care. I would guess they want a rough proxy for "cost" and will assume cost=>capability are roughly linked in a linear fashion.

it is very possible that the users weighted by spend do, and I'm therefore simply wrong. But, 2c

Ntrails··on Amazon’s “digital pacifier” for toddlers
It's really funny how inevitable it is to end up being the person who says, effectively "In My Day".

Of course it is true. I went to restaurants, cafes, recitals et al and I was expected to sit and be quiet without so much as a toy or a colouring-in book. Did it make me a better child, who grew into a better adult? No idea. Does my penchant for daydreaming and drifting out of the moment stem from it? Again, no idea.

I don't mind the choices that parents make, I do tend to object to the narrative of there being no other way.

Ntrails··on Disney Raising Prices Days After Confirming Ads Will Now Show Up on Every Tier
My TV doesn't have a camera?

(but yes... https://encrypted-tbn0.gstatic.com/images?q=tbn:ANd9GcTlYlSF... )

Ntrails··on The 1.5°C goal of the Paris Agreement is no longer viable
> We could all try and do a bit with our daily choices:

Or our annual choices - a transatlantic flight is 1000kg vs a steak which looks to be more like 20kg (depending on your source).

A hundred axes we can spin on

Ntrails··on Muse Spark Open
Likely I'm an idiot - but I'm struggling with understanding what people are arguing for with western open model being "safer" or "more secure" or whatever.

Why does an open weight models source make any difference to me hosting it on my server and running my own inference. It's not gonna be phoning home or misusing my data. Is it purely the different alignments or biases?

Ntrails··on Suicide rates highest ever among middle-aged men
> a Contented Doting Father would emerge

Unsolicited pov. Don't do this to yourself. I don't doubt that there exists such a person, but it's not the norm and when it is observed I reckon it is as often someone feigning as it is anything else.

Love your kids and raise them as best you know how. That's the deal. That's enough. You are allowed space to miss aspects of your life before, and that may or may not fade.

Ntrails··on Suicide rates highest ever among middle-aged men
I don't dismiss or discount your perspective but based on my social circle: Your experience of fatherhood is not the median. The variance is pretty high too.
Ntrails··on Denmark set to allow return of 'physical force' in school
> Many schools now have zero contact policies, and this has resulted in pupils harming other students in front of teachers, while teachers stood back for fear of losing their jobs, lawsuits, or even potential prosecution.

Teachers can still lose their jobs for failing to control (with zero contact) said child and prevent the assault.

Ntrails··on Hackers activate automatic defrosting in supermarket fridges across Europe
The threat model of an insider is wildly different to an externally facing vulnerability. That doesn't mean there is no risk - but removing a class of attacker is an extremely useful outcome
Ntrails··on Living in the Weimar Era of Ruby
> Sure, if you need help from the AI for something too difficult, time consuming or tedious, that makes sense

First, I offloaded the tedious. There was no real joy there. Then I offloaded the merely time consuming - after all I could have more fun on interesting problems.

But suddenly everything is too difficult, and I am not going to get any better at those pieces by glancing over ai prs. Still, this is what I do

Ntrails··on A city-building game in which the city would prefer you didn't
Bat tunnel is real, it cost millions. The others riffs on the theme I expect
Ntrails··on OpenAI fires three safety researchers for "mishandling research information"
Sam started wearing an earring lately - some wearable tech prototype. I'm told it is never wrong.
Ntrails··on Man discovers his parents' coffee machine used 1TB of data in 10 days
I toast, therefore I am.
Ntrails··on We ported the original Doom to SQL
> There are very few things I would want to do less than complicated logic in SQL.

Would you change your mind if I told you it would be giant strings with a bunch of `+ @database_name +` scattered around? Syntax highlighting is a crutch imo

(yes I refactored it to be parameterised yada, but for years those 2000 lines had grown and grown)

Ntrails··on Infidel goes wild
The risk, I imagine, is that they open up unintended avenues of gameplay as they generously interpret options
Ntrails··on How Singapore's government-run dating service works
I think it still had a lot of fairly abhorrent experiences for female users, and suffered from the inability to screen messages at all.
Ntrails··on September 2026: The world today, as seen by one Polish guy
Oh yes, I was primarily referring to the metaphorical - hundreds of abhorrent non nuclear "wrath of god" options exist.
Ntrails··on September 2026: The world today, as seen by one Polish guy
> And the problem with the current US president is he won't accept a loss.

At least he hasn't yet gone nuclear (metaphorically but also literally)

Ntrails··on Owed a billion dollars in Nvidia stock
I still don't think I understand the actual events. Is it that he got 1/4 of the shares as he expected after a year and did not chase for years 2/3/4 (and they never offered them)?
Ntrails··on SpaceX's Starship launching to orbit for first time ever today
> This is ballistics weapons technology

It's like a thousand different technologies, some ancient some relatively new. I don't precisely delight in my new space overlords, but I can still wonder at the enormous object being launched into space!

Ntrails··on What even is an OS now?
> you should be able to write the scripts and programs by yourself if you want to do it that way

Having chat gpt one write me a powershell script took a 3 hour manual task using software and made it a 10 minute task which I can repeat any time I fancy should I need to.

Writing something similar would've taken me an hour+ just to dig out the key pieces of information I needed to start in a language I am proficient in. Why would I waste my time?

Ntrails··on Plan mode is dead
> planning had become interactive and iterative

I find myself endlessly ctrl+c ing claude now as it flies off doing deep first principles analysis to work out how to find a thing it isn't sure about but I know the answer. Being able to give it that answer without needing to ctrl c would be a massive improvement

Ntrails··on An open source roguelike adventure through dungeons
Most people I've spoken to, even players who long since ditched the game, describe food and hunger as tedium. All sorts of tedious gameplay has been targeted for a variety of reasons - but i freely concede it cost something in terms of story/worldbuilding/etc.

Mummies are still miserable to play, only now they have no upsides at all... xD

Ntrails··on An open source roguelike adventure through dungeons
I started playing (from a thread on HN) ~7 years ago. The changes are both broad and deep - devs are not afraid to rework something three times until happy with the outcome. I missed food/hunger entirely but very few players speak highly of it.

There is no difficulty playing previous versions, changing and compiling your own etc etc. Devs are changing the game to be better (in their own view), more fun, more engaging. They should do that! It is a living piece of art imo

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