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TJSomething

793 karma · joined October 10, 2013

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TJSomething··on I refuse to accept a censored Internet. Join Me at FOSDEM 27
It's possible that any such technology would be too complicated to ensure a clean supply chain or have weaknesses that would allow it to be tracked or jammed. Real devices have some kind of engineering tradeoff.

But I generally think that trying to solve social problems with technology is a futile endeavor. Someone will always have violence on their side. And violence is the ultimate weakness.

TJSomething··on I know why the mathematicians weep
Is this actually how water pumping works, or are we extending the metaphor to imply that the AI is creating knowledge? Because I would dispute the latter if the effect is that the number of people with a deep understanding of a subject declines.
TJSomething··on Loss of cell identity drives human aging: Two new papers
There's the grandmother hypothesis that holds we could just not have menopause and reproduce more, but we don't because there's greater evolutionary advantage for having the elderly provide support to their kin. Maybe this type of kin selection is bounded by consanguinity though, and that limits the advantage? Or maybe population pressure discourages family units from getting too large?
TJSomething··on Court agrees with EFF: Utah's VPN law demands a technical impossibility
It seems like Utah could do mostly do this by intercepting all consumer traffic.
TJSomething··on The death of web development education
In my experience, that was pretty much true until I started doing small discussion-group-style graduate classes. But those are necessarily capped by staff-to-student ratios.
TJSomething··on Micron CEO Says Memory Supply Will Be Much Tighter in 2027 and 2028 Than in 2026
Sounds like I'm not buying a computer or a phone for 2 years. I hope my Pixel 6 lasts that long.
TJSomething··on California farmers are struggling to sell grapes as demand for wine drops
There could be a link there. I've known people with eating disorders who only drink spirits because of the calorie content.
TJSomething··on Jury finds Facebook liable for deceiving users in Cambridge Analytica case
Probably to similar purposes as the 2024 opioid settlement: housing assistance, schools, subsidized child care. Legislators will probably try to align it with goals that seem like they would counter the stuff Meta's doing. Smaller communities will probably fail to allocate it promptly.
TJSomething··on Mullenweg has returned as CEO after attempted board ouster
I'm a little unclear on the timeline here, but Mullenweg just got back from Burning Man. I suspect that's related to both the content of the post and the board's timing.
TJSomething··on Nitter and XCancel resume service after legal advice
One thing that's a occasionally annoying (because I deleted my account) but understandable is that a lot of the non-English speakers have stayed on X because it's easy for them to ignore the Nazis.
TJSomething··on QBittorrent breaks out of sandbox to commit crimes
It seems to me that the law in the US is set up to only establish standards of negligence after a bunch of people die.
TJSomething··on Sanders introduces bill to ban artificial superintelligence and pause AI
I used to think this but it seems to me that the most scarce and valuable resource will be having humans pretend to care about you.
TJSomething··on Meta's blockbuster trial draws parallels to big tobacco
Chronological feeds tend to be gameable by growth hacking. Still better than a lot of things.

One of the tricky things for me is feed aggregation for balancing subscriptions between people who post a lot and people who don't.

It also might be interesting if video recommendations were curated feeds by the creator.

TJSomething··on Google Discloses $94.1B in SpaceX Stock, Marking 6% Stake
It's telecom infrastructure to increase the number of people who have internet in order to increase the number of people using Google. They might have been considering having satellite internet in Android phones.
TJSomething··on AWS: Inaccurate Estimated Billing Data – $1.7 billion
This is like half of all job listings I've read recently. And it's a decent amount of fintech that's like this.
TJSomething··on Global Warming at 3 °C by 2050? What's Behind the New German Climate Warning
I'm assuming that the most relevant geoengineering is worldwide stuff like blotting out the sun with microsatellites at L1 and dumping iron or lime into the oceans to increase CO2 absorption.
TJSomething··on Small AI Models Gain Traction In places with unreliable networks
I haven't tried it, but I saw Leanstral, an LLM specialized in writing Lean proofs, posted on HN recently and it claims to outperform some larger general purpose models. It didn't beat Claude Opus, but it seems to do decently at one tenth the cost. It's plausible that further research could yield other models that are smaller and more effective at limited tasks, reversing the trend of ever growing models.
TJSomething··on GPT‑NL: a sovereign language model for the Netherlands
If open frontier models start closing up and states start more export controls on AI services and hardware, it might be good to ensure the supply chain is there to reproduce the SotA, or even a couple generations behind it.
TJSomething··on FCC wants to kill burner phones by forcing telecoms to get all customers' IDs
I mean I feel obligated. I'd feel bad if I skipped voting in an election where I found out after the fact that one of the candidates kicked puppies.
TJSomething··on Maryland citizens hit with $2B power grid upgrade for out-of-state AI
I'm not sure that follows as the biggest driver. 4 PM is nearly as high as as 6 PM. You would expect a big jump at 5 PM, but the biggest jump is from noon to 2 PM. Just looking at today's temperatures on my front porch in Reno, it was 93°F at 2 PM, it peaked at 95°F at 3:30 PM, and it didn't fall back down to 93°F until 5 PM. Some of that sustained power usage probably is people getting home, but a lot of it is A/C.
TJSomething··on Show HN: I made a Clojure-like language in Go, boots in 7ms
While Janet pulls from a few inspirations, the syntax is pure Clojure. I always figured that it was trying fix up the bumpy parts in Fennel to enable a programming style that was more consistently Clojure-like and functional than could be done in Fennel, since Fennel ultimately has to use Lua's semantics because Fennel compiles to Lua.
TJSomething··on America's carpet capital: an empire and its toxic legacy
I feel like this supposes a better world where most people are educated, rational, and calm investors with the time, money, and energy to actively manage a diversified portfolio.

Or I guess you could get there by abolishing the stock market as it exists, which seems more likely.

TJSomething··on Google broke reCAPTCHA for de-googled Android users
"Chicxulub impact" seems to be functioning as a bit of hyperbole to imply that this collusion was absolutely devastating, by analogy to the K-T extinction event 66 million years ago.

Not that I really can tell what this was devastating to. Maybe United States v. Apple (2012), where Hachette Book Group, Inc., HarperCollins publishers, Macmillan publishers, Penguin Group, Inc., and Simon & Schuster, Inc. conspired with Apple to raise ebook prices?

TJSomething··on SQLite Is a Library of Congress Recommended Storage Format
I mean, it might have been at first, but Microsoft figured out that the majority of users for lists without formulas in 1993 and they've strategized around that. IMHO, the biggest concession to this was when they added Power Query to core Excel in 2016.
TJSomething··on Brain scans reveal 3 ADHD subtypes
I love moving all my laundry to the dryer and forgetting to start the dryer. Probably happens once or twice a month.
TJSomething··on All elementary functions from a single binary operator
The short answer is that the lambda calculus computes transformations on digital values while this is for building functions that can transform continuous (complex) values.
TJSomething··on Generative art over the years
A lot of clothes aren't particularly practical. I'd argue that artifacts are more likely to be art if their purpose is more aesthetic than practical. As such, I'd say that some articles of clothing are art (like anything you see on a runway), some aren't (e.g. basic T-shirt), and some seem ambiguous to me (some ties might be art, but some are pretty boring and they don't have much practical use).
TJSomething··on Show HN: Travel Hacking Toolkit – Points search and trip planning with AI
The big win I usually hear from family who use a lot of miles is on upgrading seats for free, which is really great because they have joint issues and fly fair number of international flights. But I think they also maintain a spreadsheet with a rotating schedule of like 10 credit card companies that are cycled (or maybe shifted between based on who has the best deal for a given good or store in any given month?) for maximum points.
TJSomething··on Ask HN: Who wants to be hired? (April 2026)

  Location: Reno, NV
  Remote: Yes
  Willing to relocate: No
  Technologies: TypeScript, PHP, C++, Scala, C#, AWS
  Résumé/CV: https://www.linkedin.com/in/thomas-james-kelly/
  Email: info@thomaskelly.co
TJSomething··on Colorado House passes bill to limit surveillance pricing and wage setting
If you can do traffic interception, there's a pretty good chance there's going to be traces of price levels in the API and the analytics. Especially since it's probably going to be bolted on to the side of anything PCI compliant. If there isn't, then it's probably going to be really easy to subpoena to prove mens rea, because getting that right is tricky and requires a fair amount of review and coordination.
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