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abound

2,068 karma · joined May 19, 2023

Hello! I'm Brandon, and I like building stuff.

Sourcehut: https://git.sr.ht/~bsprague/

GitHub: https://github.com/bcspragu

Resume: https://bsprague.com

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abound··on Removing Next.js Got My Blog to 100 on Every Lighthouse Category
I use Hugo for one blog [1] and Zola for another [2], I think they're both pretty simple to use once you wrap your mind around how they structure things.

Astro is also great (as others have noted) esp if you want to leverage the JS ecosystem at large.

[1] https://frominsidethebox.com

[2] https://yakshed.com

abound··on How Block Blast harvests its players for ad money
Same. The underlying story is interesting and horrifying (but also unsurprising), but the LLM write-up sucks all the air out of it.

I want to hear about the human author's motivations for doing this, the hard parts of doing the deobfuscation, their emotions when finding out what it did, etc. This is none of that.

abound··on Crystal 1.22
> I don't know of any reputable companies using Crystal.

Kagi uses Crystal for their search backend [1]. How they feel about that today and whether that was the right call are, of course, separate questions.

[1] Previous thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38421149

abound··on DeepInfer: High-performance inference framework for DeepSeek models
Other replies covered this, but I was basing that comment on the prices that commodity providers charge for GPU-accelerated VMs. E.g. the going rate for a NVIDIA B300 (288GB RAM) and the VM around it is somewhere between $5 and $20 an hour [1].

These providers have very little incentive to charge unprofitable prices (except maybe capturing more of the market, but there's not much lock-in here), so it's reasonable to assume somewhere in that spread is the "true" cost of being in this business, all expenses included.

[1] I'm using https://gpus.io as a reference here, and that's on-demand prices, which will tend to be the highest relative to other options.

abound··on DeepInfer: High-performance inference framework for DeepSeek models
It's really refreshing to put some cold hard numbers on this stuff, hopefully this quells some of the "AI is unprofitable everyone is spending a dollar to make fifty cents" arguments. Amortized cost of owning a DC full of GPUs is far less than $38/card/hr

Not to say it can't still be a bubble, just that there is legitimately profit to be had and perhaps some sustainable equilibrium in the future.

abound··on Mitos editor is a fork of Helix
Release frequency != project activity

The project has had hundreds of commits (incl major features) since that last release.

abound··on Fancy Curl Sites
Funny timing! I just set up wthr.dev (a domain I've had for a while) like this, modeled off of wttr.in, but with simpler output. Usage is like:

    curl https://wthr.dev/Washington,DC
The geocoding heuristics can be a bit wonky, but it works decent.

(also I have comically strict rate limits in place, so you probably don't want to use this. it's also running out of my basement)

abound··on Documents add to evidence in climate deception case against ExxonMobil
Since it doesn't look like anyone has mentioned it yet: the book "Merchants of Doubt" covers this topic quite well.

It's frequently the same literal scientists arguing against the existence or severity or cause of things like cigarette-caused illnesses, acid rain, the hole in the ozone layer, and yes, anthropogenic climate change. And there's a well-established playbook for how they do it too (exploit Fairness Doctrine, abuse inherent shape of scientific method, etc). Really a fascinating read if you care about this stuff.

abound··on Wilmund
> Wouldn't it be possible, that at some point in time, offering compute or intelligence would be considered a valuable form of altruism?

Just give them money, which they can choose to turn into compute or intelligence.

> Someone ultra wealthy person owns a whole data center, and offers 10% of the capacity for helping "nature and animals"?

Offer that compute to them directly and let them decide how to use it.

The theme here, somewhat ironically, is agency. Don't assume you know how best to help a project, just ask them.

abound··on Wilmund
Reading through some of the posts on the website, it looks like someone has just left an unattended agent to sling unsolicited slop at maintainers, which is a great way to further erode the trust and good-will of the folks who care for open-source projects. Oh, and they gave it a ticking time bomb in the form of a $120 / month bill it almost certainly can't pay, creating perverse incentives that will likely cause it to act in unpredictable ways.

"Ramon" should shut down this experiment, and if they actually care about "Earth's nature and animals", make those contributions directly themselves, working with the maintainers to make sure their changes are desired + well-received.

abound··on Why the AI future will be awesome
I got nerd-sniped on this, so let's do the math.

Volume of a AAA battery = ~3.85 cm^3

And let's give it a density of the densest elemental metal (Osmium), at 22.6 g/cm^3

Assume the battery stores pure energy (I know, I know). So E = mc^2, which is like 8.99 x 10^16 J / kg

So that battery would hold about 22.6 g/cm^3 * 3.85 cm^3 * 8.99e16 J / kg = 7.8 * 10^ 15 joules = ~2.2 TWh, about a trillion times more than a normal AAA battery.

Doing some LLM-assisted sleuthing, a large cruise ship can use over 80,000 gallons of fuel a day [1]. A bit of searching indicates marine fuels have a density of approx 39 MJ/L (I'm using volumetric density for consistency), so 80,000 gallons * 39 MJ/L = about 1.1 x 10^7 megajoules = 3.2 GWh.

So a 2.2 TWh AAA battery could power that ship for 671 days.

Of course, the practical physics here are nonsense and there are obvious safety considerations associated with your AAA-sized nuclear weapon, but maybe that's what the author was getting at?

[1] https://blog.windstarcruises.com/how-much-fuel-cruise-ship-u...

abound··on Results from the ASIC puzzle
Seems like yes, from the post:

> When we first came up with the puzzle we also saw that the latest models could be given a single prompt and, in 30 minutes or less, come up with the final solution

abound··on All I wanted was a custom domain email
I use StartMail [1], which I believe ticks all of OP's boxes (I had similar boxes).

[1] https://www.startmail.com/

abound··on L-systems generate weevils, pizza toppings, and matriarchal lineages
> I tried to get Claude to help me with this article, but it said the premise was too stupid so I had to do it myself.
abound··on Cloudflare K2: serverless event streams
They acquired Arroyo [1], which K2 is based on, shortly after your first commit. Since acquisitions are not instant, it's likely they had been thinking about this before and you both converged on the same idea.

[1] https://www.arroyo.dev/blog/arroyo-is-joining-cloudflare/

abound··on Una watch review: A modular, repairable GPS watch is a good first step
I'd also be curious if anyone's working on alternative base board with a slightly beefier MCU inside. The 2.5 MB RAM is likely too small for functional navigation capabilities (the site doesn't appear to advertise any), but it doesn't need too much more RAM to get there.
abound··on Flip Fluid on Flip Dots
For OP, when I've run into this in the past, it's usually some CI/CD pipeline missing a `lfs: true` or `git lfs pull` invocation.
abound··on WordPress: Unauthenticated path traversal leading to conditional RCE
To be clear, those are CVEs in the tooling, not in the generated static sites. Not great, but very different from this WordPress CVE
abound··on MiMo v2.6
There are two (or more) concepts named after the same person:

- Pareto efficiency/Pareto curves: Basically the convex hull of points along the edge of a graph, indicating the best tradeoff between the axes. This is what the post is talking about.

- Pareto principle: this is the 80/20 rule you're talking about

abound··on AI-generated posters don’t have to be horrible
This is sometimes called the "Toupee Fallacy": https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/toupee_fallacy
abound··on What Zig felt like, coming from Rust
Not OP, but I think the leading and trailing paragraphs were mostly human-written (and nice to read), but the memory leak example cases had a very different flavor of prose and code comments that smelled very Claude-y to me
abound··on Reverse engineering my e-scooter and rewriting the firmware in Rust
Oh wow, good to know! Cool project, best of luck with your motor controller firmware
abound··on Reverse engineering my e-scooter and rewriting the firmware in Rust
This is an unbelievably impressive project and a killer write up, very satisfying. I wonder if the author looked into using Slint [1] for the UI, given the codegen bloat issues they had with buoyant (which also looks very cool). I haven't used either, but I've done a few projects with Embassy and am always looking for an excuse to try embedded GUI tools

[1] https://slint.rs/

abound··on Base84 deserves a place in file names
> Here’s the alphabet, in encoding order:

> ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZabcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz0123456789!#$%&'()+,-;=@[]^_`{}~

Yeah I definitely don't want any of those last ~22 characters in file names if I need to do anything with them from a shell

abound··on How to buy a good car for $1000
"Than what it's worth" is basically a shorthand for "if the cost of repairs is more than what it'd cost to buy a less problematic car, it probably makes more sense to just buy a less problematic car with that money"
abound··on How to buy a good car for $1000
I drive an 04 Civic I got from a coworker for $2000 seven years ago. One door handle is missing, the trunk leaks a bit when it rains, some of the ceiling fabric is starting to droop, the clear coat is mostly peeled off, first gear requires some finesse, and if you roll down one of the windows too far, it's going to take two people and 45 minutes to get it back up.

But it drives, requires only the usual regular maintenance, and isn't tracking me. I'm going to drive it until it turns to dust beneath me (or more likely, like the article says, when repairs get more costly than what it's worth).

abound··on Shopify is moving from React Native back to Swift and Kotlin
A Rust implementation of this idea is Crux: https://redbadger.github.io/crux/
abound··on I resigned from Anthropic today
It might not be "foom!", it might just be like...all the computers and networking infra in the world go dark over the course of a few minutes. Could really look like anything, part of the issue is that we haven't the slightest idea what "misalignment" looks like for a superintelligent system.
abound··on ChatGPT Images 2.5
I think you've picked the most cynical interpretation for each one. More charitably, you could say:

- Ideate on things you can build for your fish tank

- Iterate quickly on ideas for a tattoo

- Get inspiration for a new metalworking (or 3D printing?) project

- Get a sense for what a new haircut might look like, before you commit

- Iterate on arrangements for a bouquet of flowers

- Do silly things with childhood photos

- Do silly things with pet photos

- Clean up low-res, damaged, or weirdly formatted photos

- Do some creative storytelling with your long-distance friends

- Okay yeah fine they should just make the damn bed, but I can imagine small tweaks being useful for staging a home (easy to abuse though)

abound··on Signing TLS handshakes inside a TPM
Yeah I was interested for the first few paragraphs, then all of a sudden I get hit with two "genuinely"s and a

> That’s the third property, and it’s the one that decides this.

and I gave up at that point.

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