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OrderlyTiamat

896 karma · joined July 5, 2017

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OrderlyTiamat··on The age of average (2023)
> Maybe the market is telling us that we don't need so many cuisines.

I think that's exactly what's happening.

The Market has identified a more costly and less universally appreciated method, and is trying to eliminate it. The Market knows better. The Market knows that the lowest common denominator should be served at the expense of everything else.

And thus the Market eats another bit of joy, sacrificed at the altar of greater efficiency, of more money, at the altar of Moloch.

OrderlyTiamat··on Git-crypt – transparent file encryption in Git
> > That type of pedantry is why people make fun of the free software movement.

> "source code free to see and to modify (and redistribute, if applicable)"

You have to see the humor in putting both of these in the same comment, right? That's a prime example of what they're talking about!

OrderlyTiamat··on We're Leaving Kubernetes
What was the point of microservice architecture if you can't develop each service individually in the first place? Sounds to me like the architecture you're talking about isn't an actual microservice, and it's just ball 'o mud over TCP instead of as a single monolith.

At a previous place of work I worked with a monolith structure, and it was actually perfectly fine. Development got done separately on several large substructures in the monolith, and devs could install the whole project locally and run it just fine.

I'm really wondering why we're all using microservice architecture if we're all convinced that to actually develop on them, devs need to reproduce 50odd of those services locally for debugging. Then what was the point?

OrderlyTiamat··on How I animate 3Blue1Brown [video]
I'm assuming Numberphile indeed, as that's the most likely for a Brady Haran channel with 3b3b as a guest.
OrderlyTiamat··on Automating processes with software is hard
This is an awesome example of what I've seen denoted as a Do-Nothing script: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29083367

Was it hard to achieve buy in from all parties? I'd guess that would be the hardest part, to get everyone to join in on working on the automation.

OrderlyTiamat··on Postzegelcode
With a million requests per month (~1k a minute average, non uniform distribution ofc), why not just use something like sqlite? I wouldn't want to work with csv files, and development time is the same.

It's a more standard setup, and enables better logging and later changes.

OrderlyTiamat··on Why not parse `ls` and what to do instead
You might enjoy a variety of `find` based commands, e.g. `find -maxdepth 1 -iregex ".*\.(wav|draft)" | xargs echo "found file:"`

This uses regex to match files ending in .wav or .draft (which is what I interpreted you to want). Xargs then processes the file. You could use flags to have xargs pass the file names in a specific place in the command, which can even be a one liner shell call or some script.

So the "find <regex> - xarg <command>" pattern is almost fully generally applicable to any problem where you want to execute a oneliner on a number of files with regular names. (I think gnu find has no extended regex, which is just as well- thats not a "regular expression" at that point)

OrderlyTiamat··on Companies with return-to-office mandates face losing their most valuable workers
I think many people did actually read that element into your original comment. I tried to highlight that here from a different perspective, so maybe you'd see what that could come across like if you were on the other side.

For full transparency I use the noise cancelling headphones same as you, I think it's very logical and it does help me in the same way. I don't think that would be a reasonable thing to say to you. But the framing and emotionally loaded tone comes across as comparable to your original comment.

E: and just in case: You will think those are very different scenarios, and your preference makes sense given the context. That's a valid perspective! But the people you were talking about in your original comment feel the same way!

OrderlyTiamat··on Companies with return-to-office mandates face losing their most valuable workers
> Admittedly, when at the office I also needed noise-cancelling headphones - along with every single other programmer employed there because of the constant distraction of people talking, managers making personal phone calls, sales high-fiving each other, and so on.

Don't you think someone could say to you that those headphones are expensive and unneccesary, and that this problem simply reflects your lack of work focus? Wouldn't that be offputting and annoying if someone were to say that to you?

OrderlyTiamat··on I'm Bearish OpenAI
> As far as I'm concerned the gold standard of understanding something is being able to construct a program that replicates it which is exactly what we can do with LLMs.

But we actually can't! We can build a program that can build a program that is the LLM, which is not the same! I'd argue that you're right insofar as training is concerned. We understand training very well. But the actual model, how it operates, what it actually knows, we don't know how to build that, we don't know what weights to put where.

OrderlyTiamat··on Claude 3 catches researchers testing it
I've seen plenty of badly argued Chinese room debates- there is certainly a lot of bad arguments in those styles. You seem to interpret them as saying all of those arguments are bad, which is a fair interpretation, but I think their point stands if it refers to the nonsense versions of those arguments, which are everywhere on social media (hn, reddit, X, etc).

By the way, I think referring to the burden of proof in discussions like this is likely never to improve the debate. All sides will simply claim the burden is on others for one reason or another, most of those reasons will be flawed- requiring discussions on those flaws and now we're even further from the actual points we want to discuss. I've just never seen it produce a fruitful discussion.

OrderlyTiamat··on A steep rise of Hacker News in Google rankings
Agreed, I've had a similar experience. So I'd be fine with limited public visibility, and I think my experience won't even change if google loses access. However if it's done with robots.txt, does tha tmean algolias crawler will also lose access? That would be a shame, but even then it might be worth it on balance.
OrderlyTiamat··on A steep rise of Hacker News in Google rankings
There is already an excellent search site for hn [0], so if appearing in google turns out to cause problems, for many users nothing much will change. (I already use that one over google with "site:.." in the query- it's just a good search experience)

[0] https://hn.algolia.com/

OrderlyTiamat··on How I got scammed out of $50k
A weird point to make, because in the context of a measure specifically constructed to have a normal distribution (IQ), the median definitely is equal to the mean. You are right in the general sense, and wrong in this instance.
OrderlyTiamat··on Linux has reached 4% for the partial Feburary 2024 data on StatCounter
Could someone explain what I'm looking at? I think this is from `https://statcounter.com/` (?), but that site doesn't load for me at the moment, and there's no readme or description on that (1 star) repo, or its associated account.

That partial data is very likely to regress to the mean over the rest of the month- though it's good to see high linux usage (on whatever metric this is tracking).

OrderlyTiamat··on Google is killing third-party cookies – advertisers still aren't ready
This looks great!

I'd also like to know some more details. Is this akin to archive.org, or more akin to archive.today? Those have different use cases. I'd like more information than is present in the FAQ, for example, will this archive block users of cloudflare DNS?

I'd love to use an archive like archive.today, which is more dependable and less idiosyncratic in what users it allows, so this looks promising.

OrderlyTiamat··on Cross-platform Rust rewrite of the GNU coreutils
There are more (much more) examples of young projects dying than old projects. This is called the Lindy effect: that which has survived tends to survive. Taleb first used the term Lindy effect but it has been noted before.

Taleb suggested that if something non-perishable has survived for a long time its expected remaining survival is just as long, for example if a book has been in print for 40 years it is expected that it wil remain in print for another 40 years.

The point is that projects, books, and other non perishables don't have a life expectancy like biological organisms, they're actually more likely to live on if they've endured a long time.

OrderlyTiamat··on There is a misconception that if something's on the internet it'll last for
Are you deliberately withholding the name of this mysterious extension for some reason? If so, it does produce the desired suspense!

Where do they get stored, locally? and what kind of snapshot is it, are they screenshots or saved html pages?

OrderlyTiamat··on Playstation is erasing seasons of Discovery shows from customer libraries
That's fair. My server setup is very small (pi with a harddrive) so I'm deleting stuff I don't watch anymore after it's seeded. And it is a hassle to set up. However I've also found now that it is setup, it takes basically no effort to maintain it, and I'd want the pi for other stuff anyway.
OrderlyTiamat··on Show HN: How did your computer reach my server?
> Programming isn't like music or math where there is a natural order underlying the man-made rules.

I'd like to reinforce your point by disagreeing on two counts: programming (in so far as it's related to computer science) is like music and math in that there is loads of underlying natural order that can be independently derived (think about the lambda calculus vs Turing machines which are proven to be identical, for one example). That underlying beauty is there, and I think it's there because computer science is a part of (or at the very least akin to) mathematics.

Secondly, both math and music are, like programming, not really that devoid from arbitrary rules nerdy white guys came up with 30(0)+ years ago. When you're tuning an instrument, you'll likely tune it to the western chromatic scale- but that's just a convention, there are more scales! Just as much of a convention is to tune that scale to concert pitch, where A is tuned to 440 Hz. But that's not required- concerts will tune to 422.5 Hz when playing Handel.

There are all kinds of conventions all around us which are invisible because we're accepting them as a given of the world, more so if we have a traditional education in that field. That's why it's enjoyable to see stuff like this, what intel-VISA called self-directed exploration, it deepens your understanding and is just fun!

OrderlyTiamat··on Playstation is erasing seasons of Discovery shows from customer libraries
I'm just out of uni and still don't have a lot of money, so still pirating. However-

>the only thing I pirate is the occasional movie I want to watch that isn’t on Hulu, Netflix, Disney+, HBO Max or Amazon Prime Video.

You maintain 5 subscriptions and still have to pirate every now and again? I just watch whatever I want on plex+radarr/sonarr. That sounds exhausting.

I don't think I'll want to follow in your footsteps. Maybe I'll take out subscriptions for the things I really like, but I'm probably going to keep using pirated content for my actual consumption - its just a better experience at this point.

OrderlyTiamat··on The camel, the rope, and the needle's eye
The other comment mentions dutch- As a dutchie I'm not entirely sure they're correct that "kult" is less negatively charged than "sekte". They both take on negative connotations depending on context- "sekte" is definitely religious, while "kult" isn't necessarily, based on the van Dale dictionary. I'd say "cult" isn't always negative in english either, the term "cult classic" comes to mind.

For that matter, would you use "sect" in english and be confident it would not be seen as pejorative term? I feel it's all context dependent.

I also don't think looking through google translate with a single phrase is the right method to figure this out- for one thing I've heard the european languages are usually heavily based on legislature (eu legislature is published in all eu languages, so an excellent source of translations). In my experience google translate can be stilted and formal, so which implications and connotations a phrase or term has in different languages can definitely be literally "lost in translation".

OrderlyTiamat··on How to Read a Paper [pdf]
It's not the default everywhere- in fact the journal Science actually prefers docx, to the point of asking latex submitters to convert to docx before submitting!

https://www.science.org/content/page/science-information-aut...

OrderlyTiamat··on Writing and linting Python at scale
I don't know either. Since the alternative interpretation is a contradiction in terms, you'd think this name would cover the intended meaning.

Maybe something like "unknown length tuple"? chatgpt suggested "arbitrary-length" or "undetermined-length" as synonyms, that could be a more easily understood expression perhaps.

OrderlyTiamat··on Writing and linting Python at scale
I think they've interpreted "variable length tuple" as "a tuple whose length can change", not "a tuple whose length could be one of multiple options".

The former is of course not possible with tuples being immutable, which is why they're talking about lists.

OrderlyTiamat··on Writing and linting Python at scale
Could you enlighten me as to how a type system is not part of a language?

For example, in your own words, what is the main difference between typescript and javascript?

OrderlyTiamat··on You shouldn't be driving over 100 MPH-and your car shouldn't let you
In Germany the speed limit is frequently much lower that that, and driving faster than about 80 mph (130 kmph, called richtgeschwindigkeit) incurs increased liability even on the autobahn without any speed limits.

In my experience not many drivers cruise at speeds of 100 mph (160 kmph). The richtgeschwindigkeit is much more common.

OrderlyTiamat··on Why American manufacturing is becoming less efficient
It's not just Cloudflare anymore, there was a recent post on hn that more people are getting infinite captchas. I've had intermittent problems over the last couple of months, and I'm not on Cloudflare.
OrderlyTiamat··on What If Google Wasn't the Default?
I just rediscovered the difference between the two this morning.

I was trying to find some half-remembered meme images to share with a friend, and I couldn't find it in ddg. appending "!g" and... first 10 results are correct. It's remarkable how good google is when searching for things that are popular, and how far it's fallen for non-popular specific technical queries.

OrderlyTiamat··on PyPI has completed its first security audit
Which can also execute arbitrary code according to the slides above.
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