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SloopJon

2,613 karma · joined November 15, 2013

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SloopJon··on AI lab offers free plumbing and HVAC repairs across three cities to train robots
The interesting thing to me about this article is how the company tries to address AI/robot anxiety:

"Home-service technicians perform millions of highly technical tasks every day. We are creating a way for homeowners and service companies to benefit financially from the value of that expertise.

"We want to build the infrastructure that connects that knowledge with the companies building the next generation of intelligent machines while making sure the people creating the value participate in the economics."

While these technicians may be getting a bonus on top of what they usually charge, it's not like they're getting royalties or stock options for training their replacements. If you're a technician working or contracting for a service company that agrees to this, you might not even see any of that extra money.

It seems kind of silly with the current state of robotics, but in a way it's a kind of prisoner's dilemma: short-term gain of being paid to train the robots vs. long-term loss of being automated out of a job. Licensing is a barrier, but we let them drive cars in some cities.

SloopJon··on US federal budget deficit jumps 12% in one year to nearly $2 Trillion
It's overly simplistic to say that Clinton balanced the budget. While the 1993 bill raised taxes and reduced defense spending, there would not have been a surplus without further cuts driven by Republicans in 1997.

There was also the dot-com boom, which of course wouldn't have happened without Al Gore inventing the Internet.

SloopJon··on Is Liquid Metal Killing Our PCs? Scientific Analysis and a 2-Year Test [video]
It definitely slides around. The package I got included silicone oil to anchor it with a drop in the center.
SloopJon··on Is Liquid Metal Killing Our PCs? Scientific Analysis and a 2-Year Test [video]
This video is by the owner of Thermal Grizzly. They make thermal pastes and putties, but I think they're best known for their KryoSheet graphene pads.

Although I've never been conscious of pump out as a problem, and have never reapplied thermal paste, I did use a KryoSheet on a 9800X3D in my most recent build. So far, so good.

SloopJon··on Firefox Enterprise
I'm sure this is great for improving adoption on the admin side, but I'm also sure that I would hate using a locked-down Firefox.

My company has management software that nags me about the latest Firefox version, which is annoying, because I use the extended support release instead. Less frequent updates, and fewer sudden changes like the AI features people have been grumbling about.

Incidentally, 153.5.0esr was released today, with 140 reaching EoL.

SloopJon··on Beating the compiler (2024)
Previous discussion from 2024 (linked in the "Post-publication notes" section):

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40948353

SloopJon··on Apple introduces M6 and M5 Ultra
These Macs are reportedly shipping with macOS 27 Golden Gate. You'd have two incompatible constraints: Macs don't like to run a version older than what they shipped with, and Golden Gate doesn't support the Intel iMac.

You might be able to boot from the internal drive, install/upgrade the external drive, then boot from it.

SloopJon··on Apple introduces M6 and M5 Ultra
I happily booted and ran an Intel Mac mini using a 4TB drive in a Thunderbolt 3 enclosure, and I do the same for an M4 Max Mac Studio using an 8TB drive in a USB4v2 enclosure (OWC Express 1M2 80G).

You'll just have to be careful to match the enclosure to the ports on the system. The base-model M6 Mac mini still uses Thunderbolt 4, so a USB4v2 enclosure would be wasted.

SloopJon··on The Birth of the American 12-string Guitar (2013)
I'm probably preaching to the choir in a story about guitars, but if you're looking for some good 12-string music, Leo Kottke's 6 and 12 String Guitar is a good start.

If you haven't heard (or seen) Michael Hedges play a harp guitar, there's some background and links to videos here:

https://michaelhedges.com/michael-hedges-the-harp-guitar/

SloopJon··on Why does it take so long to release black fan versions?
I built a PC this year in a Meshroom S V2[1]. The NF-A14x25 G2 fans I used for the AIO didn't seem so expensive when I was spending $600 on RAM, and I was happy that they were available in black.

Not every quiet PC is built in a dense box. Good airflow with big, slow fans is working for me to cool a 9800X3D and a 5070 Ti quietly under load.

[1]: https://ssupd.co/products/cases-meshroom-s-v2

SloopJon··on RAM kits are now sold with one fake RAM stick alongside a real one
I held my nose and bought an RTX 5070 Ti for $100 over MSRP in January. The very next week the same model was up $200. It turns out that NVIDIA had been subsidizing retail graphics cards with its Open Pricing Program. Not the whole story, but it may help explain the relative flatness of the graph until the end of January.

The other part of it is that the MSRP already baked in a substantial increase from the previous generation. While RAM was near rock-bottom pricing when this hit, current-gen GPUs definitely were not.

SloopJon··on Ki Editor - an editor that operates on the AST
An editor that tries to be layout agnostic is almost certainly going to be a nightmare for people like me who set the layout in the keyboard itself. I downloaded the editor (I'm on Windows at the moment), and tried it with my keyboard set to Dvorak, which was plainly broken. I'm sure there's a way to fix the mapping, but when software thinks it's smarter than you, you end up feeling pretty dumb.
SloopJon··on 4x faster network file sync with rclone (vs rsync) (2025)
The article links to a YouTube mini-review of USB enclosures from UGreen and Acasis, neither of which he loves.[1] I've been happy with the OWC 1M2 as a boot drive on a Mac Studio with Thunderbolt 5 ports.[2] I just noticed that there is an OWC 1M2 80G, based on USB4 v2.[3] I didn't know that was a thing, but I guess it's the USB cousin to Thunderbolt 5.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gaV-O6NPWrI

[2] https://eshop.macsales.com/shop/owc-express-1m2

[3] https://eshop.macsales.com/item/OWC/US4V2EXP1M2/

SloopJon··on California issues fine over lawyer's ChatGPT fabrications
The article links to the opinion[1], which notes more than once that "the quoted language does not appear anywhere in the opinion," and "Goldstine appears to be a fabricated case." I don't know whether it's easy to get a copy of the complaint in question.

[1] https://www4.courts.ca.gov/opinions/documents/B331918.PDF

SloopJon··on Linux Ready to Upstream Support for Google's PSP Encryption for TCP Connections
The blog post announcing the PSP Security Protocol as open source:

https://cloud.google.com/blog/products/identity-security/ann...

HN discussion at the time:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31437033

SloopJon··on Pass: Unix Password Manager
I found the idea of a password generator appealing, mainly due to vault anxiety. I didn't (and still don't) like the idea that I can't access a resource without this precious vault. If I'm home with my tools, great. Otherwise, give me the right hash function, and I can MacGyver my way to PBKDF2 and generate my password.

However, once you introduce metadata (e.g., to deal with password rules), the idea loses most of its appeal. I wouldn't feel any more comfortable posting such a thing publicly than I would a vault.

SloopJon··on Stop writing CLI validation. Parse it right the first time
I don't see anything in the post or the linked tutorial that gives a flavor of the user experience when you supply an invalid option. I tried running the example, but I've forgotten too much about Node and TypeScript to make it work. (It can't resolve the @optique references.) What happens when you pass --foo, --target bar, or --port 3.14?
SloopJon··on Show HN: Petrichor – a free, open-source, offline music player for macOS
Gemini says: pressing Option on the Swinsian menu changes the "Check For Updates..." menu option to "Check For Updates (Beta)..."

I don't have specific complaints about the current version, but I'm going to give it a try. If nothing else, it's probably ARM native.

SloopJon··on Show HN: Petrichor – a free, open-source, offline music player for macOS
Petrichor shows my albums as a single track. CUE sheet support is a must.

I also have a hard time seeing myself using a desktop music player without an iTunes-style column-mode browser.

SloopJon··on SIMD.info – Reference tool for C intrinsics of all major SIMD engines
I don't think it's that it's not stripping "e.g.", but that the search criteria are empty. The empty result set is prefaced by "Search results for:".

I actually like that the example is a complete, standalone program that you can compile or send to Compiler Explorer.

SloopJon··on Institutional Books: A 242B token dataset from Harvard Library's collections
Although this is characterized as 1.0, it is governed by the Terms of Use for Early-Access, which are quite limiting, including: "You may use the Service solely for noncommercial purposes."
SloopJon··on PS5 shooter goes from 5 players to bestseller after devs defend game
The video on Steam shows both first- and third-person perspectives. Speaking of LLMs, Gemini says: "Hypercharge: Unboxed is both a first-person and third-person shooter. You can switch between perspectives based on your preference."
SloopJon··on “Bugs are 100x more expensive to fix in production” study might not exist (2021)
> The thesis is predicated on the idea that people claim this is the result of some study. I’ve never once heard it presented that way. It's a rule of thumb.

Code Complete cites eight sources to support the claim that the average cost to fix a defect introduced during requirements is 10-100x if it's not detected until after release. My qualm with Hillel's original assertion is that "They all use this chart from the 'IBM Systems Sciences Institute'" (emphasis added). I haven't personally vetted Steve McConnell's citations, but I am skeptical that they all share this common origin.

SloopJon··on How we made our OCR code more accurate
The product appears to be similar to Microsoft's embattled Recall feature. In order to remember your digital life it takes frequent screenshots.
SloopJon··on Webflow makes GSAP 100% free – plus more updates
The obvious question is, what does free mean? Here's the license:

https://gsap.com/community/standard-license/

Basically freeware with express prohibitions on competing with Webflow.

SloopJon··on Firefox tab groups are here
This is a better link for the actual feature, as opposed to the process that led to its prioritization:

https://blog.mozilla.org/en/firefox/firefox-tab-groups/

SloopJon··on Ask HN: Memory-Safe Low Level Languages
Personally, I don't know what you mean about Rust being too massive. One thing I am wary of is using a truly massive language like C++ on a multi-programmer project without consensus on which features to use and how to use them. Maybe you have in mind something like that?

If you want the simplicity of C with more safety, maybe tooling like Frama-C, a MISRA C conformance checker, or just aggressive use of static and dynamic analysis tools like ASAN and UBSAN. You can also disable certain optimizations (e.g., strict aliasing) to steer away from some of the major pitfalls of UB.

SloopJon··on Anatomy of a SQL Engine
When I read SQL for Dummies almost thirty years ago, it made a point of distinguishing "sequel" as a historical predecessor to standard "SQL." As I recall, the author even asserted that SQL is not an acronym/initialism for structured query language. I felt funny saying sequel for the next decade or so, because I wasn't an old timer experienced with this pre-SQL technology.

Now I usually say sequel because everyone else does. That and it rolls off the tongue better than S-Q-L.

SloopJon··on Native frame transposition coming to Emacs 31
For a while I used dired-sidebar-show-sidebar and dired-omit-mode to give me a list of files in a narrow window on the left. I kept messing it up with C-x 1, though.
SloopJon··on “A calculator app? Anyone could make that”
I played around with the calculator source code from the Android Open Source Project after a previous submission[1]. I think Google moved it from AOSP to the Google Play Services several years ago, but the old source is still available.

It does solve some real problems that I'd love to have available in a library. The discussion on the previous article links to some libraries, but my recollection is that the calculator code is more accessible to an innumerate person like myself.

Edit: the previous article under discussion doesn't seem to be available, but it's on archive.org[2].

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24700705

[2] https://web.archive.org/web/20250126130328/https://blog.acol...

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