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barnacs

526 karma · joined December 29, 2014

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barnacs··on Binance-hacker-1029 – $5.6B stolen from Binance
It works for on-chain bearer assets (ie money), not your home.
barnacs··on Around a dozen banking apps began specifically permitting GrapheneOS
> banking apps began specifically permitting GrapheneOS

In my view, that's not any better than specifically permitting Google only. This should not be a whitelist at all. I assume my self-signed GrapheneOS would fail this test?

barnacs··on EuroBirdPortal – Live bird movements across Europe
This website wants to connect to Google, Amazon, Cloudflare and Twitter among others right off the bat. Great job with the data sovereignty, Europe!
barnacs··on AI financial advice is surprisingly good, especially if you ask right questions
The "AI" does not give "financial advice". It autocompletes your prompt. If you provide the right context and ask the right questions you will get the most likely consensus on such a widely discussed topic.
barnacs··on FDA approves new kind of cholesterol pill
It turns out LDL has different subfractions based on size. Normally, the liver produces large ones which shuttle fat around the bloodstream, lose their payload and shrink then the liver reabsorbs them and the cycle continues.

The problem appears to begin when these LDL molecules hang around for too long. They are damaged by external factors in the bloodstream (eg. glycation due to high blood glucose, oxidation due to fragile polyunsaturated fats) and not recognized anymore for recycling. That's when they can start forming macrophages.

tl;dr LDL by itself is an incorrect measure of cardiovascular risk. Big pharma still profits by selling everyone LDL reducing drugs.

one authentic source: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fVLZA0qp-wc

barnacs··on GPT-5.6 used a prompt to close a 30-year gap in convex optimization
Mathematics is a language. If anything, it's much more well defined and formal than most others. Train on enough examples and statistical autocomplete gets you places. I'm surprised how anyone would even consider this intelligence?
barnacs··on GPT-5.6 used a prompt to close a 30-year gap in convex optimization
I hold my stance that LLMs are stochastic parrots.

Making the parrots ever more complex and training on ever more data produced by intelligent, creative beings may make them more useful or convincing but does at no point give rise to intelligence or creativity.

barnacs··on Are we offloading too much of our thinking to AI?
Similar to your contractor example, I like to think of the useful way to use LLMs as doing "grep -C" (show lines surrounding the match).

You provide some context you are looking to expand on and let the LLM autocomplete provide you with relevant terms and concepts that have historically come up in that context and may or may not be actually useful. Then you do due diligence to learn about those related concepts, determine their applicability and distill it all down into a solution.

barnacs··on Are we offloading too much of our thinking to AI?
It will be interesting to see when ads and propaganda are seamlessly (but purposefully) integrated into the output of LLMs. Who will decide what you should want or think? Will you even notice?

As for now, autocomplete is only as good as the training data. Once humanity collectively stop being autonomous beings and generating novel ideas, it all comes to a halt. LLM suggested ideas and preferences are nothing more than some mashup/average of what came before. The ability to actually think may become a rare treasure.

barnacs··on Cloudflare Drop
I remember making a Qt app for a friend that would upload dropped files via ftp and copy the link to the clipboard. Good old days!
barnacs··on GPT‑Live
This is getting way too dystopian for my taste. People in the know need to stop pushing the narrative that this is somehow anything more than statistical autocomplete.
barnacs··on Online age verification is the hill to die on
I don't think most people have been inconvenienced enough yet. ID verification is invasive enough and should cause enough friction to push another bunch over the edge.
barnacs··on Online age verification is the hill to die on
Hopefully this will give yet another push towards decentralized, open source services. Platforms where noone and everyone is responsible and the state does not get to decide the rules.
barnacs··on AI overly affirms users asking for personal advice
Just a reminder: LLMs are statistical models that predict the next token based on preceeding tokens. They have no feelings, goals, relationships, life experience, understanding of the human condition and so on. Treat them accordingly.
barnacs··on Google details new 24-hour process to sideload unverified Android apps
Get with the newspeak, it's called "sideloading" now and your corporate overlords get to dictate the terms.
barnacs··on We do not think Anthropic should be designated as a supply chain risk
In the end, your newly renamed "department of war" is just going to waste a bunch of your taxpayer money to purchase some useless overpriced tech from their cronies. My symphaties to all citizens.
barnacs··on Leaving Google has actively improved my life
I highly recommend self-hosting a meta-search engine to get away from any single provider without losing the benefits of either. I have been using searx[0] happily for years.

[0]: https://github.com/searxng/searxng

barnacs··on The Missing Semester of Your CS Education – Revised for 2026
I don't think using git should necessarily be taught as a part of a CS education. Any self respecting engineer will be capable and have the curiosity and motivation to dig into it on their own. CS should give them the prereqs to do so, such as hashing, graphs, trees, etc.
barnacs··on Parse, Don't Validate and Type-Driven Design in Rust
If the fields of a structure or the string keys of an untyped map don't match then you don't have compatibility either way. The same is not true for restricting the set of valid values.

edit: To put it differently: To possibly be compatible with the nested "Circle" map, you need to know it is supposed to have a "Radius" key that is supposed to be a float. Type definitions just make this explicit. But just because your "Radius" can't be 0, you shouldn't make it incompatible with everything else operating on floats in general.

barnacs··on Parse, Don't Validate and Type-Driven Design in Rust
Every time you introduce a type for a "value invariant" you lose compatibility and force others to make cumbersome type conversions.

To me, invalid values are best expressed with optional error returns along with the value that are part of the function signature. Types are best used to only encode information about the hierarchy of structures composed of primitive types. They help define and navigate the representation of composite things as opposed to just having dynamic nested maps of arbitrary strings.

barnacs··on Amazon's Ring and Google's Nest reveal the severity of U.S. surveillance state
Agreed. "Be the change you want to see". In this case, both as a user and a professional.
barnacs··on Amazon's Ring and Google's Nest reveal the severity of U.S. surveillance state
> stop using Google, Amazon, Meta products

That's the easy part. What do you do about stuff like face recognition and cameras everywhere? Should you hide your face every time you go out? Should you not speak because there might be a mic around picking up your voice?

This is only going to get worse. We can't trust companies or governments to respect our privacy. We can't trust each other to keep the data recorded by our devices private.

It seems like the fight for privacy is a lost cause. What do we do?

barnacs··on Euro firms must ditch Uncle Sam's clouds and go EU-native
Pretty much every single country in the world has taken on more debt than they can serve. And the 2008 crisis wasn't triggered by Greece either. The private creditors should have taken the loss. And that holds true for the rest of the world.
barnacs··on Euro firms must ditch Uncle Sam's clouds and go EU-native
Right, but next time your data may be threatened by some European idiot rather than one from the US.

To quote from my other comment:

> In my view, data can only be protected by its rightful owner. And for that, we need education, not regulation.

barnacs··on Euro firms must ditch Uncle Sam's clouds and go EU-native
I happen to live in the EU so I may have a slight clue what I'm talking about.

But if you want an authority on the subject, look up Yanis Varoufakis and how sovereignty and democracy worked out for Greece when shit hit the fan.

barnacs··on Euro firms must ditch Uncle Sam's clouds and go EU-native
> other important aspects

like what?

barnacs··on Euro firms must ditch Uncle Sam's clouds and go EU-native
As a European citizen, I can assure you, my options are getting ever more limited. Several global companies have kicked me off their platforms recently due to all the regulations they can't be bothered with. Those that make an effort to comply are by default required to submit to the EU surveillance system. At the same time, I have no illusions that any of this would somehow protect my data from the NSA and the like.

In my view, data can only be protected by its rightful owner. And for that, we need education, not regulation.

barnacs··on Euro firms must ditch Uncle Sam's clouds and go EU-native
As if the surveillance and regulation by the unelected EU bureaucrats was any better for the European citizens...
barnacs··on There's a ridiculous amount of tech in a disposable vape
I remember the good old days when a "vape" was just a sturdy housing for a rechargable battery, some heating wire, cotton and juice. The power was determined by the resistance of the coils you built. Those things would last forever.
barnacs··on Show HN: B-IR – An LLM-optimized programming language
I'm looking for a language optimized for human use given the fundamental architectural changes in computing in the last 50 years. That way we could skip both the boilerplate and the LLMs generating boilerplate.
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