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Octoth0rpe

2,465 karma · joined November 17, 2018

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Octoth0rpe··on Please just try HTMX
> Resume-driven development should not be a thing.

Pretend this is not about library choice, but rather about language choice. One language has 2 jobs, and the other language 13k jobs. I doubt you'd think for more than a second.

Octoth0rpe··on The Walt Disney Company and OpenAI Partner on Sora
I wonder if the next gen ad blocking strategy will involve convincing ad generators that I respond _really_ well to plain text ads with a font color of #FEFEFE on a #FFFFFF background.
Octoth0rpe··on The Walt Disney Company and OpenAI Partner on Sora
I think 90% of the McDonald's backlash was specifically related to the tone/content of the ad (anti-holiday, you're better off in McDonald's _than with your family_!), not the actual quality of the video.
Octoth0rpe··on Australia begins enforcing world-first teen social media ban
> I think what's killing Dems is that they don't understand the medium.

Generally agree, but

> Him and Trump had a grand old time at the whitehouse

Yeah, but that wasn't entirely positively received, despite his earlier social media success. Him buddying up with Trump was a huuuuge turn off for me.

> Newsom has been trolling lately and his approval ratings are only going up.

Newsom's content is also a huge turn off for me, and I am not convinced that his supposed approval ratings are not simply more CTR type machinations from the DNC. Maybe there's some segment of the population that genuinely wants whatever the hell Newsom is pushing content-wise, I certainly don't have #s on my side. Mamdani's efforts - Trump buddying aside - were much better.

> Dems being a million years old is killing the dems.

Yes, but I think age is simply a proxy for a number of other highly correlated behaviors and positions. Most progressives can name a couple of >70yo dems for whom these complaints do not apply.

Octoth0rpe··on Amazon EC2 M9g Instances
Inversely, I think it's siloed things in somewhat unhealthy ways. We now have a number of vendors that sell/rent you machines that are not generally purchasable. I don't think we've seen too many negative consequences yet, but if things continue in this direction then choosing a cloud provider for a high performance application (eg, something you'll want to compile to machine code and is therefore architecture specific in some way as opposed to a python flask app or something), one may have to make decisions that lock one into a particular cloud vendor. Or at least, it will further increase the cost of changing vendors if you have to significantly tweak your application for some oddities between diff arm implementations at different hosting providers, etc.

I would much rather see some kind of mandatory open market sale of all cpu lines so that in theory you can run graviton procs in rackspace, apple m5 servers in azure, etc.

Octoth0rpe··on America Has Become a Digital Narco-State
I think we treat the maximization of liberty (in my mind a primary function of government/society, with reasonable limits) as the same goal for both corporations and people, which ultimately is a side effect of treating corporations like people. But these are entirely oppositional goals: Maximizing personal liberty of actual people requires significant binding restrictions on corporations.

In the US we have this overly simplistic narrative of pro-liberty GOP versus anti-liberty DNC which I think badly needs to be separated into pro _personal_ liberty positions (healthcare, including abortion, quality public education), versus anti _corporate_ liberty (environmental regulation, financial transparency, etc).

Octoth0rpe··on Java Hello World, LLVM Edition
Thank you! this looks pretty helpful
Octoth0rpe··on Java Hello World, LLVM Edition
I can appreciate this answer, but I don't think it's really what I'm asking.

I think I'm more looking for some kind of standardized struct definition that translates easily to llvm IR and is flexible enough for a wide variety of languages to target.

Something like this: https://gist.github.com/thomaswp/8c8ef19bd5203ce8b6cd4d6df5e... (Which doesn't meet my criteria because AFAICT isn't used by anything, but is reasonably close to what I want) or this: https://docs.rs/sap-ast/latest/src/ast/lib.rs.html#1-83 (which seems specific to SAP, I would like something more general)

Octoth0rpe··on Java Hello World, LLVM Edition
I've been playing with a very basic compiler for a language that looks a bit like go -> llvm ir, but I'm finding myself constantly revising my AST implementation as I progressively add more things that it needs to represent. Is anyone aware of any kind of vaguely standardized AST implementation used by more than one project? I've been searching this morning for one and am coming up empty. My thinking is that if I can find some reasonably widely used implementation, then hopefully that implementation has thought out lots of the corner cases that I haven't gotten to yet.
Octoth0rpe··on Bikeshedding, or why I want to build a laptop
> I think they could do away with the plug modules and just go all in on usb-c. I don't mind the occasional dongle for HDMI.

Strong agree. After all, their plug modules are really just dongles that are integrated into the body, which makes them worse IMO. More expensive, model-specific, etc.

Octoth0rpe··on It’s time to free JavaScript (2024)
> Yes, this is our circus, and these are our monkeys.

In this case, it's Oracle's circus and we are the monkeys.

Octoth0rpe··on Zig quits GitHub, says Microsoft's AI obsession has ruined the service
> The only reason we ever cared about this person is because they were loud and wrong about everything

Except we cared about Andrew Kelley because he was right about quite a lot of things (eg the zig design).

Octoth0rpe··on The Junior Hiring Crisis
> It's been downhill ever since.

I agree, but to say that it's 'downhill' implies (correctly IMO) that since that period and until today there still _is_ some notion of a social contract that has been decaying, not that the day that the new deal period ended that the social contract went away instantly. We now appear to be entering some kind of terminal phase.

Octoth0rpe··on IBM CEO says there is 'no way' spending on AI data centers will pay off
Thanks for the numbers! Isn't it more likely that the amount of power/heat generated per rack will stay constant over each upgrade cycle, and the upgrade simply unlocks a higher amount of service revenue per rack?
Octoth0rpe··on The Junior Hiring Crisis
It is not socialism to note that in the past, some companies have believed that their optimal relationship with their employees required recognizing their value and awarding them accordingly, thusly allowing them to attract/retain the best employees as well as maximizing the quality of the output from those employees. There has always been such a spectrum, that's not socialism. The trend to notice is that the spectrum is so strongly weighted towards the merciless, cutthroat end of things that may actually not be optimal for long term survivability of those companies whilst also as I noted, be breaking the social contract that workers have assumed for decades, which is also not socialism.

Socialism has a specific meaning, it's not just a label we get to put on behaviors that we - or rather, specifically you in this case - don't like.

Octoth0rpe··on The Junior Hiring Crisis
> The social contract between large companies and employees has been broken for years now. US companies are optimized for quarterly earnings, not long term investment in their employees.

Going to throw out another anecdote here. At a company that a number of my friends work for (a fortune 50), they are currently making record profits that they loudly brag about during employee townhalls. They also are in the process of gutting multiple departments as fast as possible with little regard for the long term consequences. This is not the only company that I know of acting in this way (acting like they're about to go bankrupt when in fact they are seeing record profits).

To me the societal risk is that an entire generation of employees becomes extremely jaded and unmotivated, and fairly so. We used to work under the assumption that if our company is successful, then the employees would be successful. Record profits == raises for all, bonuses for all. And while we know that that connection was never that strong, it was strong enough to let us at least pretend that it was a law of universe.

That fundamental social contract is now at its breaking point for so many workers. Who can really blame people for putting in minimal effort when they have so much evidence that it will not be rewarded?

Octoth0rpe··on Anthropic acquires Bun
Oops, thank you :)

regardless, it's certainly not MS.

Octoth0rpe··on IBM CEO says there is 'no way' spending on AI data centers will pay off
Sure, assuming the power cost reduction or capability increase justifies the expenditure. It's not clear that that will be the case. That's one of the shaky assumptions I'm referring to. It may be that the 2030 nvidia accelerators will save you $2000 in electricity per month per rack, and you can upgrade the whole rack for the low, low price of $800,000! That may not be worth it at all. If it saves you $200k/per rack or unlocks some additional capability that a 2025 accelerator is incapable of and customers are willing to pay for, then that's a different story. There are a ton of assumptions in these scenarios, and his logic doesn't seem to justify the confidence level.
Octoth0rpe··on IBM CEO says there is 'no way' spending on AI data centers will pay off
> Krishna also referenced the depreciation of the AI chips inside data centers as another factor: "You've got to use it all in five years because at that point, you've got to throw it away and refill it," he said

This doesn't seem correct to me, or at least is built on several shaky assumptions. One would have to 'refill' your hardware if:

- AI accelerator cards all start dying around the 5 year mark, which is possible given the heat density/cooling needs, but doesn't seem all that likely.

- Technology advances such that only the absolute newest cards can be used to run _any_ model profitably, which only seems likely if we see some pretty radical advances in efficiency. Otherwise, it seems like assuming your hardware is stable after 5 years of burn in, you could continue to run older models on that hardware at only the cost of the floorspace/power. Maybe you need new cards for new models for some reason (maybe a new fp format that only new cards support? some magic amount of ram? etc), but it seems like there may be room for revenue via older/less capable models at a discounted rate.

Octoth0rpe··on Anthropic acquires Bun
Are you referring to node? MS doesn't own that. It's maintained by Joyent, who in turn is owned by Samsung.
Octoth0rpe··on It’s been a very hard year
> Everyone wants everything with the AI.

All the _investors_ want everything with AI. Lots of people - non-tech workers even - just want a product that works and often doesn't work differently than it did last year. That goal is often at odds with the ai-everywhere approach du jour.

Octoth0rpe··on Windows drive letters are not limited to A-Z
> Windows is still stuck in a weird directory naming structure inherited from the 80's that no longer make sense when nobody has floppy drives.

I think you could make this same statement about *nix, except it's 10 years _worse_ (1970s). I strongly prefer the fhs over whatever MS thinks it's doing, but let's not pretend that the fhs isn't a pile of cruft (/usr/bin vs /bin, /etc for config, /media vs /mnt, etc)

Octoth0rpe··on Seagate achieves 6.9TB storage capacity per platter
Apologies, I believe I paid $189 for the 20tb. Black friday sale at either microcenter or newegg. WD usb external, not some off brand. That was definitely not the normal price though, and the price looks a lot higher this year :/

There are still deals to be found that are closish.

Microcenter has a 24tb external for $249 right now: https://www.microcenter.com/product/679395/seagate-24tb-expa...

amazon has a 22tb for $229 right now: https://www.amazon.com/Seagate-Expansion-22TB-External-Drive...

Those and my $189 price - which is definitely higher than I originally claimed, apologies - are all around $10/tb.

Octoth0rpe··on AI CEO – Replace your boss before they replace you
> Capitalism requires that capital is owned and controlled by specific people.

That is an overly simplistic description. One can imagine a board of directors voting on which AI-CEO-as-a-service vendor to use for the next year. The 'capital' of the company is owned by company, the company is owned by the shareholders. This is not incompatible with capitalism in principle, but wouldn't surprise me if it were incompatible with some forms of incorporation.

Octoth0rpe··on Seagate achieves 6.9TB storage capacity per platter
Sure. And you paid, what, maybe $120? so, $60/tb. When seagate commercializes these, it'll be around $10/tb. My last seagate spinning disks for my nas were 20tb for $150.

SSDs have a valuable place in the world, but so do spinning disks. Physical size isn't a concern for my nas (I mean, assuming we're talking < 300cm^3 for the whole setup..), but $/tb is.

Octoth0rpe··on Choosing a hash function for 2030 and beyond: SHA-2 vs. SHA-3 vs. BLAKE3
Could someone explain the differences between these two points? They seem identical to me.

> [The hash function] also should be second-preimage resistant: For a given message M1, it must be virtually impossible to find a second message M2 where M1 != M2 that produces the same hash hash(M1) == hash(M2).

> These functions should be also collision resistant: it must be virtually impossible to find two messages M1 and M2 where hash(M1) == hash(M2).

Octoth0rpe··on PHP 8.5
php has kept around a lot of functionality that can be misused, but PDO has had parameterization since forever and is the go to method if you want to connect to a database. Beyond that though, most PHP projects at this point are likely using a query builder/orm like eloquent.

So I guess it depends on what you mean by unhelpful. PHP as a language makes it pretty easy to do bad stuff. PHP as a community makes it easy to Do The Right Thing.

Octoth0rpe··on AI is a front for consolidation of resources and power
That is true, but not evenly distributed. Oracle for example: https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2025/11/oracl...

Also, it may be true that these companies theoretically have the cash flow to cover to spending, but that doesn't mean that they will be comfortable with that risk, especially as that risk becomes more likely in some kind of mass extinction event amongst AI startups. To concretize that a bit, the remote possibility of having to give up all your profits for 2 years to payoff DC investment is fine at 1% chance of happening, but maybe not so ok at a 40% chance.

Octoth0rpe··on Google boss says AI investment boom has 'elements of irrationality'
> Can someone explain to me the rationale of investing in a product, marketing it, seeing that it drives consumers away from your product and erodes trust, and then you continue to invest at an accelerating rate?

I'll take a stab at this. It's not 100% clear to me which product you're referring to, so I'll try to answer as if the product is something that already has customers, and the maker of the product is shoving AI into it. The rationale is that the group you're trying to convince that you're doing a good job is your shareholders or investors, not your actual customers. You can justify some limited customer attrition by noting that your competitors are doing the same thing, and that maybe if you shove the _right_ AI features into the product, you'll win those customers back.

I'm not saying it's a _good_ rationale, but that seems to be what's at play in many cases.

Octoth0rpe··on Living my best Sun Microsystems ecosystem life in 2025
> All of those use the same nVidia chip and the same nVidia provided Linux distro

The system76 one uses an ampere chip, but a discrete nvidia card; so not quite the same.

Generally I agree, I do not mix nvidia/linux. The point is that arm workstations are clearly being produced by many different vendors at this point.

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