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Octoth0rpe

2,465 karma · joined November 17, 2018

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Octoth0rpe··on 'Pervert glasses': Backlash against Meta's smart glasses grows
It's very hard to imagine this being a better photo than one taken on a modern phone.

Also, I really, really hope you take them off when using the shared bathrooms at such an event. And you know, keep them off. Permanently.

Octoth0rpe··on 'Pervert glasses': Backlash against Meta's smart glasses grows
> Its a bit strange of a default assumption to me.

What is _your_ default assumption re: use case? I honestly can't think of any use cases (outside of very niche a11y uses) that are not in some way offensive, though perhaps not 'perverted'.

This product is absolutely toxic, and I can't imagine myself or anyone I know being willing to associate or socialize with someone wearing them (again, excluding some very specific a11y use).

Octoth0rpe··on What it means for an API to be RESTful
> I do still have an aesthetic appreciation for "true REST", but in practice I find the fact that nobody uses it to be mainly useful in ending bikeshedding discussions. Once you understand your API isn't RESTful to begin with, there's no longer any point in arguing if 411 or 412 is the more RESTful status code to use when a user attempts to order a product without specifying a quantity.

I think I have a fundamental objection to the idea that Fielding and Fielding alone got to decide what REST is. While there hasn't been any kind of formal counterproposal, in some sense REST is what we make of it. Re: http 400 codes, I think many of us really liked the general principle of "use http semantics!" and applied that to error codes as well. That's agreeing with the principle and extending it in new ways that we like and are "truer" to the principle, even if it wasn't intended.

In my mind this is sort of analogous to talking about the relationship between linux and unix. Linux is clearly not a genetic or copyright unix, but I've seen it said before that linux is the culmination of unix principles, in some cases extended beyond what was originally envisioned in ways that are innovative and genuine improvements (io_uring perhaps?).

The REST we have today - http semantics, specific error codes, etc - may be significantly different from what Fielding may have wanted, but IMO it implements the parts that really distinguish it from the RPC world of API architecture, and I think we're generally happy with that.

Octoth0rpe··on What it means for an API to be RESTful
> They usually live under the _links parent.

The example given in this section... is there actually a commonly used REST api that uses that particular key/structure? I wouldn't be _surprised_ if I came across that in some random API's documentation, but I hardly think it's the 'usual' thing to do.

The article later claims that that style is from https://stateless.co/hal_specification.html , which I think is a consultancy company whose major partners are all casinos (am I totally off on this?). The article also references (https://github.com/kevinswiber/siren which adds detail re: http methods embedded in the _links structure, but I'm not sure why that repo should be considered authoritative. 1300 stars for a just a spec is actually not bad though I think, so maybe.

Overall this article seems like slop produces from some kind of ai crawler that managed to dig up a couple of random links.

I am glad that it mentions rfc9457 though.

Octoth0rpe··on Buz – A fork of Bun using modern Zig, with sub-1s incremental builds
Throwing out a couple more benefits: bun is faster than node, dramatically so in some specific cases (websockets). Bun also has been doing a great job at building out core libs that probably don't make sense for node, such as the native inbuilt sqlite module, thereby reducing your dependency graph.

People shit on the node/npm ecosystem relentlessly for the typical inauditable deep dependency graph, and bun makes substantial improvements to that situation.

Edit: bun recently added an inbuilt api for manipulating images (resize, change formats, etc). Another good example of them adding native/faster functionality that replaces significant dependencies (in this case, likely sharp: https://www.npmjs.com/package/sharp?activeTab=versions)

Octoth0rpe··on FAA lets Boeing sign off on 737 MAX, 787 airworthiness certificates again
> The EU is like a tiger - without teeth, fur or claws.

EU regs forced apple to move to type-c. They appear to be moving towards either requiring replaceable batteries, or requiring a higher quality batter (larger % of original charge after 1000 cycles). Those both seem valuable to consumers, and coming from a position of regulatory strength.

Octoth0rpe··on Google Kills Custom Search API on Jan 1, 2027
> because LLMs are going to need search APIs

Yes. But why would they provide that to their competitors? The winning move here is to allow gemini, but forbid everyone else. That's not a bad moat.

Octoth0rpe··on SpaceX stock erases all its gains and slides below IPO price in intraday trading
Only a little, not a lot. It seems like the easy answer is still terrestrial with a heck of a lot more giving back. For example:

- offering to pay some nominal subsidy for all households electricity bills in the region.

- committing to only closed loop cooling

- if the location is amenable, then providing free heating to neighboring buildings.

- only building in blighted locations with no current economic value

Other random ideas: I wonder if anyone is considering building server racks directly into offshore windfarms. Replacing failed hardware is annoying, but surely more economical than in space where IIUC, there _is_ no plan to ever maintain hardware at all, just deorbit and replace. All the water is right there for cooling (though I'm sure saltwater has its own problems with corrosion). While the current US administration is clearly anti windmill, that might work nicely in Europe.

Octoth0rpe··on SpaceX stock erases all its gains and slides below IPO price in intraday trading
> SpaceX is an AI company without a frontier model.

Unless they manage to build such a model, then their plan looks like they intend to be an AI _infrastructure_ company. Which is probably viable and healthy business! One with lots of competition and low margins that is completely misaligned with their current valuation.

Octoth0rpe··on SpaceX bond worth 10% less than issue price – heading for junk bond status
That was indeed my intent. Pre-IPO, SpaceX already had _some_ cash in hand, and was burning >4b per quarter IIRC; so presumably _some_ runway. That said, they also got the anthropic/openai monthly payments coming in soon (already started maybe?). The next earnings release will be the interesting one IMO.
Octoth0rpe··on SpaceX bond worth 10% less than issue price – heading for junk bond status
> My best guess, it makes it harder to get loans in the future.

Which is pretty important! It's my understanding that from all that money they raised during their IPO, a good amount of it went right back out the door again to pay off misc loans for the twitter acquisition. They may only have bought themselves 6 more months of time given their purported burn rate (mostly driven by AI investment), so they're going to need more loans really soon, or another major stock offering.

Octoth0rpe··on How to stop Claude from saying load-bearing
> No one would bat an eye about "ledger" appearing at a high frequency in content about accounting, but it starts to look odd if "ledger" is showing up in other contexts.

The reason why I chose that specific term to push on is that practically every SaaS has a ledger _somewhere_ in its stack to keep track of customer payments. I'll give you load bearing and substrate, but ledger IMO should be quite common. Certainly a career devoted to say compiler internals or some specific scientific product could avoid it, but I'd imagine a sizable majority of HN users have worked on some system that accepts online payments for services, necessitating some contact with something likely referred to as a ledger.

Octoth0rpe··on How to stop Claude from saying load-bearing
It's a pretty common word if you've worked in anything that vaguely resembles an accountancy system. Also, anything crypto related will often use that word (the distributed ledger, etc)
Octoth0rpe··on Linux 0.11 rewritten in idiomatic Rust, boots in QEMU
> Nobody is expected to use it.

There's a certain ironic circularity to this comment given Torvalds' original email, describing his little project as:

> just a hobby, won't be big

(of course, I agree with you, no one is going to use a vibe-coded port of 0.11. A port of the latest kernel however....)

Octoth0rpe··on Linux 0.11 rewritten in idiomatic Rust, boots in QEMU
What does it mean to work on a port of redox on macos? The ability to compile it / build a disk image on macOs?
Octoth0rpe··on Benchmarking 15 "E-Waste" GPUs with Modern Workloads
Do you have any #s on how old they were at decomm time? There's some suspicion that part of the AI bubble is companies playing games with depreciation, eg assuming that H100/H200s will survive for 5 years.
Octoth0rpe··on Show HN: DOM-docx – HTML to native, editable Word docs (MIT)
That's an interesting approach. I'm concerned about the use of LibreOffice as your source of truth. Would it be possible to swap out LibreOffice for actual MS Word in this workflow? This also could reveal some libreoffice rendering bugs/edge cases that are worth filing bugs over.
Octoth0rpe··on The next era of AI is about infrastructure, not just models
> Maybe because Mozilla makes no money

Mozilla makes a surprising amount of money, almost entirely from google.

Octoth0rpe··on AI content is everywhere on social media, especially LinkedIn
> Product and service reviews are completely useless now too

> Product and service reviews are completely useless now too

One relatively minor counterpoint: amazon has seemed to resolve their review squatting issue. Several years ago, there were companies selling one type of product and getting 4* reviews, then swapping all of the product details for a completely unrelated product, presumably with a huge markup. So you might think you were buying a 4* say, hot water thermos, but if you actually read the reviews, they would all be for a USB charger or something. All the recent reviews would be much lower.

I haven't seen this in a while now. Or maybe they're just better at it :/

Octoth0rpe··on Decoding the obfuscated bash script on a Uniqlo t-shirt
Surely such a person would use the spelling k@r3n
Octoth0rpe··on Zuckerberg says AI agent development going slower than expected
More importantly, he's really probably talking about 'superintelligence', rather than just building genuinely useful and monetizable models.
Octoth0rpe··on Supreme Court upholds broad conception of birthright citizenship
That's not how we have traditionally thought citizenship works, but that is exactly what the Trump administration would've gone for next if the supreme court had ruled in their favor in this instance, thereby setting up the _next_ supreme court case.
Octoth0rpe··on The gap between open weights LLMs and closed source LLMs
> They just need to win in coding and that's exactly where they are going.

They don't even need to 'win' in the sense of maxing the benchmark. They can be 20% worse/50% cheaper and many of us (and our managers who approve our token budgets) will be in.

Deepseek is 30x cheaper for input/75x cheaper for output than sonnet on openrouter, and it's not a whole lot worse for many things.

Octoth0rpe··on Incident CVE-2026-LGTM
The entire post is great, but the acknowledgements section is particularly excellent:

> Kubernetes (the dog), who was not involved in this incident but whose photo in the #incident-response channel was auto-tagged by the Slack image classifier as “container orchestration diagram (confidence: 0.31)”

Octoth0rpe··on Journalism is rearranging the deckchairs. It needs to reinvent itself
I don't disagree, but given the ideological opposition towards NPR/PBS right now from Republicans, the only way we might accomplish that is by promising to turn them into fox news.
Octoth0rpe··on Apple is going to raise device prices, but when?
> You can buy a Macbook Pro with an M5 Max with 128GB of RAM for $6k currently. I expect that will go up by 20-50% in the next generation.

That config can be had for $5100 already: https://www.apple.com/shop/buy-mac/macbook-pro/14-inch-space...

Octoth0rpe··on Apple is going to raise device prices, but when?
I think we might end up in a weirder situation: Apple _does_ drop their prices back down to current levels for the same quantity of ram, but ASP goes much higher, at least for the Pro tier buyers. My reasoning is that depending on how the benchmarks look, many of us may try to go big on ram on our next hardware purchases to run models locally as a way of hedging either model costs, or to ensure access.
Octoth0rpe··on TerraPower in deal with Meta for eight Natrium 345 MW nuclear plants
> A dual Natrium reactor site can provide 690 MW of reliable 24/7 365 power

Given that they haven’t actually built one, asserting the performance seems inappropriate, _especially_ the uptime which IIRC is far, far higher than is typical for proven designs, let alone a new one.

Octoth0rpe··on SpaceX to buy Cursor for $60B
If someone refers to themselves by a particular slur, that does not grant you any social leniency to call them that too. Consider that exact situation with any other particular slur.
Octoth0rpe··on Fox to Buy Roku Streaming Service in $22B Deal
Hopefully? I mean, adding the cell modem is sort of hypothesizing about the future, and if we're already doing that then we might as well also hypothesize that such a future google tv will refuse to display anything from its hdmi inputs until it successfully phones home, and that that happens weekly.
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