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bhouston

21,068 karma · joined April 15, 2013

https://ben3d.ca/about
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bhouston··on Rune: A native GPU-rendered Rust UI framework for macOS, Windows, Linux and web
I am not sure about that.

Which gate is easier to maintain?

1. Check issues for malicious intent

2. Check PR for malicious intent.

I think in PR requests it is easier to introduce purposeful bugs or obfuscated code than it is to hide them in issues.

So I think gating on issues is easier and more secure.

bhouston··on Rune: A native GPU-rendered Rust UI framework for macOS, Windows, Linux and web
The website for https://www.egui.rs sort of sucks, it took around 10 seconds to load and initialize for some reason.
bhouston··on Rune: A native GPU-rendered Rust UI framework for macOS, Windows, Linux and web
Wait, zero tests? It is super cheap to write tests these days. It is how you gate agent generated code from destroying production.
bhouston··on Rune: A native GPU-rendered Rust UI framework for macOS, Windows, Linux and web
Does this have:

- Accessibility? E.g. Screen reader support?

- Alternative inputs? Full keyboard support?

- Full internationalization, including right-to-left and diacritics?

What happens when no GPU is available?

Just curious as this matters for it to be a serious library and not a proof of concept.

bhouston··on Scaling Git at OpenAI
> This doesn't work if the pulls are happening in swarms of ephemeral sandboxes.

This is incorrect.

It actually will work if you mount a drive. Github mirrors can be on separate drives. Now I haven't fully tested it's safety in that situation yet, like I have with local dev on Windows and MacOS.

> Also, maybe FUD, but is there anything useful to learn from (p)npm other than cautionary tales?

This is also incorrect.

Denigrating pnpm's well regarded optimizations because NPM packages have vulnerabilities unrelated to NPM is missing the point.

bhouston··on Scaling Git at OpenAI
Another way to avoid having to maximize download speed is to use a global git cache per machine in a similar way that pnpm optimizes installing packages:

https://git-dedup.ben3d.ca

bhouston··on Valve "played capitalism so well they broke it" and now Steam can't be replaced
Once you have a sufficient good solution that you like, you will not switch to another sufficient good solution unless you are highly motivated to switch. It can not be just 5% better or 10% better, it needs to be meaningfully better so that you are motivated to undergo the switching cost.

Part of that switching cost is your purchased game library only works with the platforms you purchased it from. A fact that currently greatly benefits mostly Steam on desktop platforms.

So I do expect that a court case in the future will be Epic Games suing Steam in order to have "game portability" between game platforms.

bhouston··on Egoless Mathematics in the AI Era
> This is entirely ahistorical and a typical remote psychoanalysis.

I've been reading the posts on his blog (and I should be clear, many posts are guest posts, so it is a collective cognitive behavior therapy session):

Also did you notice he never posted more than 10 posts per month until September? These are definitely posts trying to come to terms with the new reality and searching for value in a field where humans are not pre-eminent:

https://terrytao.wordpress.com/2026/09/26/a-value-based-appr...

https://terrytao.wordpress.com/2026/09/19/why-do-we-need-hum...

https://terrytao.wordpress.com/2026/09/12/after-math/

I also see this post like this one that claims that mathematics will be needed as interpreters of complex AI generated proofs - I see this post as a form of denial in that this is just a current limitation of AI, and will likely be fixed soon:

https://terrytao.wordpress.com/2026/09/18/if-math-is-more-th...

> In any case: "reactionary"? Are we using Soviet language to single out perceived dissidents?

When new technology is introduced that is disruptive a lot of people fall into "reactionary" stances.

The first definition of reactionary that I found was this:

"A reactionary is a person or policy that opposes political, social, or economic change and seeks to reverse progress to restore an earlier, idealized state of society."

I think that fits with my usage.

bhouston··on US boy names that became girl names and vice versa
> the association you're describing has also reversed over time; i.e., pink was considered masculine and blue was considered feminine.

> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gendered_associations_of_pink_...

Yeah, so what if it changed a long time ago? If it was back then, when these were reversed, I would suggest the then current stereotype coloring.

This is like telling me you cannot pronounce sounds in modern English because prior to the Great Vowel Shift, they sounded different.

bhouston··on Egoless Mathematics in the AI Era
Following Terry Tao's blog he seems to be engaging in forced self-directed cognitive behaviorial therapy, he is trying to come to terms with loss while developing a new framework for himself and other as to where the value is. It is cool to see. It is better to engage than to be in denial and just fall into reactionary behavior.
bhouston··on US boy names that became girl names and vice versa
I think it says "Marlo"? Not "Mario". L, not I.
bhouston··on US boy names that became girl names and vice versa
Green to orange? Why not blue to pink? I know it is stereotypical, but it is the natural colouring.
bhouston··on Moving our warehouse off DuckDB
6 months from now: We are moving our warehouse off of Trino + HogLake to newer technology XXX.

This is ridiculous. Why can you not foresee such issues? Do you not do testing with mock data at the size you need? Migrating production between stacks so often means you are not getting new features in. This is pure churn.

bhouston··on AI agent swarms in Minecraft fail to build civilization, drown in bureaucracy
I think that is a common failure case. It isn't that different that agents getting stuck in other types of loops, distractions. There is this great short novel about it by Adrian Tchaikovsky, "Service Model":

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Service_Model

bhouston··on Cisco gives engineer unlimited AI tokens to rewrite legacy code
Yeah you can not deploy this to customers with the hardware already in production if it mass fixes bugs and improves behavior because those are likely breaking changes.

They have to modernize the code while keeping all weird edge case behaviour. I think this can be done. And I suspect that is probably the request.

The issue is deciding what is weird edge case behavior and what are bugs. It can be a fine line.

bhouston··on Cloudflare Turnstile solver library (no headless browser required)
yt-dlp works when ever I try it. I do not use it much but ever few weeks when I need to download a streamed youth ringette game, it works great. So while it may be in a constant race, it seems reliable to periodic end users like me.
bhouston··on Backdoor in Claude Code for VS Code extension on the Cursor Marketplace
I realized this earlier this year and dumped Cursor for just vscode along with 20x subs to Claude and OpenAI. Much cheaper and nothing of value was lost.
bhouston··on MacBook Pro with PROLED XDR Display and Touch
> Apple never drops prices, never. It will go straight into their margin.

They have dropped the price of the MacBook Air a few years ago and the Mac Mini as well. So your statement is categorically false.

That said, with cpu, ram and storage prices the way they are right now, prices won't be dropping soon. But there is hope long term.

bhouston··on Solar power is becoming bigger than nuclear
This is a ridiculous demand to make of an early teen in the pre-internet era. You know how hard it was to get information on arbitrary subjects back then like this?
bhouston··on Solar power is becoming bigger than nuclear
SimCity 2000 with Fusion plants was released in 1993. To predict that solar would do this back then is asking a lot - this graph doesn't even start in 1993:

https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/installed-solar-pv-capaci...

bhouston··on 'It's offensively cheap': Solar power is quietly becoming bigger than nuclear
The nature of disruptive solutions is that they can be adopted easily at the bottom of the market - which means in this case people like you rather than at the centrally planned utility.
bhouston··on Solar power is becoming bigger than nuclear
Yeah, Nuclear is one of those solutions where in an ideal world it makes sense, but in the real world it is just too complex all around make it work.
bhouston··on Solar power is becoming bigger than nuclear
I am not saying that SimCity predicts the future, rather I had assumptions growing up in that period, probably similar to everyone else at the time, that Nuclear and Fusion were the future of energy. It is cool to see that shift so soundly to solar in just two decades.
bhouston··on Meta Ignores Brazilian Court Order to End Bolsonaro Favoritism
Large multi-nationals like CNN can literally never promote eating the rich because their owners must be, by requirement, multi-billionaires. A lowly plebe could not own a multi-national media conglomerate, they are not wealthy enough.
bhouston··on Solar power is becoming bigger than nuclear
It is amazing that solar, a ridiculous cheap and easy to install solution is winning the energy future. In the past, based mostly on playing SimCity, I would have thought that Nuclear and then Fusion was the future, but solar does seem to be winning and pretty thoroughly.

I guess this is in part because it only needs amazing factories and not complex deployed and maintained infrastructure that is at risk of blowing up.

Solar seems to fix the mould of a disruptive technology to a T.

bhouston··on Meta Ignores Brazilian Court Order to End Bolsonaro Favoritism
> And hard left content is promoted everywhere else. What’s the point?

I guess it depends on what you consider to be "hard left".

If you consider anything to the left of Elon Musk's anti-immigrant, pro-White positions, unrestrained capitalism for him (although he is pro-tariffs on foreign EVs), to be "hard left", then yes, it is pretty prevalent, but I would argue that is actually representative of reality.

bhouston··on Meta Ignores Brazilian Court Order to End Bolsonaro Favoritism
This is the future of elections if Big Tech isn't reined in. The first experiment/test case was X:

- https://www.nytimes.com/2022/10/28/technology/twitter-far-ri...

- https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2024/10/29/elon-mu...

- https://www.vanityfair.com/news/story/x-has-disproportionate...

- https://www.nbcnews.com/tech/social-media/elon-musk-turned-x...

We forget this but hard right content is still highly promoted on X, especially related to white supremacy and anti-immigrant, and it is also protected from content violations.

bhouston··on Plex laid off the whole player team
How is that related to this story? Are you commenting on the wrong Hacker News post?
bhouston··on The No Kings Takedown Is Why You Shouldn't Rent Your Megaphone from Zuck
The post is so vague that it isn't clear what this is about. I would suggest just creating a new reddit account under a different email? Are not the main limits to reddit accounts is 3 months age and 1000 Karma? That is super easy to achieve, no need to wait years to restore your old account. Just make a new one. You are also allowed to have multiple reddit accounts, just do not double vote on things.
bhouston··on The No Kings Takedown Is Why You Shouldn't Rent Your Megaphone from Zuck
It got less media play but the founder of the Hind Foundation (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hind_Rajab_Foundation) that is going after IDF soldiers for war crimes that happened in Gaza got his Instagram account taking down at the same time, but it wasn't restored:

https://www.instagram.com/Aboujahjah/

They also removed the account of slain Palestinian journalists, this time including Pulitzer winning Al Jazeera's Anas Al-Sharif - although it seems it is back now: https://www.youtube.com/post/Ugkx0kN5mUZDFsw7OgRiY3ElLx9DgjM...

It seems that there are repeated waves of account deletions affecting those not in power and only if you raise a huge stink is it undone but only on a per-account basis. And each of these waves slowly erodes those voices. It sort of feels like a strategy.

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