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boscillator

171 karma · joined March 11, 2023

C++ engineer with experience in machine learning and aerospace. Blog: https://buchanan.one
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boscillator··on Kalshi and its co-founders face felony charges for violating Utah gambling laws
I've seen those and they are crazy! Many elections are decided by the primary anyway, and then of course exit polls are going to be basically accurate 2 hours before the election. It's not even that fine print, I think they may actually just be stupid.
boscillator··on US boy names that became girl names and vice versa
Why did anyone even try and make this? It's fascinating what incomputable functions people try to shoe-horn into being computable.
boscillator··on eMudhra intermediate CA compromise
Applications thinking they should own the root of trust is one of my least favorite things in software. God help you if your IT department thinks they should MITM everything and now 8000 packages need there cert installed in some random location.
boscillator··on San Francisco Onion Futures Company
They have what appears to be a screenshot of an excel document (complete with sort and filter widgets), except I can select the text, so perhaps it's an embedded excel sheet inside a word doc?

Either way, I love it and I'm always excited to learn about what mundane functions the government and MS Office are keeping alive for society.

boscillator··on Texas judge rules TikTok misled users on child safety feature
I wonder what counts as a complex theme? Surely that is a euphemism for something, but I can't figure out what it would be and certainly don't trust TikTok to do a good job of deciding what is too complex for the youth's minds.
boscillator··on Judge sets framework for Nine PBS to retrieve archival data
The ruling seems fair and reasonable, and I'm surprised they couldn't come to the same conclusion without a court.
boscillator··on I requested a copy of my data from McDonald’s loyalty program
What is the point of predictive analytics for them? Surely they don't care about what one specific customer will do, only in aggregate? Since ML models can only learn from past aggregates, wouldn't traditional statistics on past transactions make more sense?
boscillator··on Civilian plane crash in New Mexico tied to military GPS blocking
I believe that their are no multi-GNSS receivers certified for aviation, so Galileo, GLONASS and BeiDou are out.
boscillator··on The "Disability Dongle": Why Silicon Valley Hates Me and You
> You can't make investors have a hard on for a ramp that doesn't connect to the cloud.

Someone more inclined toward fraud than me should figure out how to make a cloud connected ramp as a way to get VCs to fund more ramps.

boscillator··on Emacs Is a Lispboard
> Suppose I want to work in a single place for all my contexts, both personal and professional.

This has always been my problem with adopting Emacs or Obsidian or any other app that purports to do this. Who are y'all working for that you can bring professional stuff onto the same system as personal stuff? I don't want my personal emails on my work computer, and my boss would be rather upset if I brought work emails onto my personal computer. I'd love one of these do everything apps that lets me tag and sync just stuff that ought to be synced.

boscillator··on DOGE is done. What happened to its records?
Oops, thanks. Stupid dyslexia.

Yah, the government has a big problem with trying to do big upgrades when a ship-of-theseus would work. I suspect this can be traced all the way up to how congressional appropriations work and the acquisitions/sustainment distinction, in addition to usual resume-engineering and second-system-syndrome.

boscillator··on DOGE is done. What happened to its records?
Even here, it can be hard to know what to cut. OCX kept getting funding because running a GPS ground segment is in the government's purview, and sometimes you need to update legacy systems. Obviously, OCX was still a disaster, and we still don't have a modern ground segment, but the answer isn't necessarily cutting programs, it's spending the money in those programs more wisely, and empowering civil servants to stop obvious contractor grift. Actually doing that is difficult and may require more money in the short term.

*edit: spelling

boscillator··on TLS certificates for internal services done right
The real answer here is that configuring HTTPS clients to trust a self-signed cert (or signed by an internal CA) shouldn't be as difficult as it is. I find it extremely annoying that every programming language has it's own idea of where certificates should live instead of just checking the os trust store.
boscillator··on Springer Nature has removed two studies by Max Planck
> detailed information about specific retractions is usually confidential and can only be shared with the relevant authors.

Good luck sharing that information with Max Planck. It's amazing how robotically humans can act sometimes. I suppose this could be an AI or automated response, but it's just as likely it's someone following the letter of the law without using any critical thought.

boscillator··on The Coming Loop
> the right fix is not "handle every malformed case." ... [LLMs] will still attempt to handle now impossible errors.

This is the number one code smell from LLMs and I don't know why they are so obsessed with it. In python, it often comes as `hasattr` checks on types that are defined to have that attribute, in a code base that is fully type-checked.

Why do they do that? Is it from pre-training or re-enforcement? If that latter, can the labs please fix this?

boscillator··on Show HN: Modeloop – From visual algorithms to microcontroller C code
Mostly unrelated, but what is going on with the "I specifically approve section ... of the terms and conditions" when you sign in without an account. Is this a new requirement somewhere?

Other than that, seems interesting! Simulink could always do with a competitor, although I'm always saying Simulink needs a text-based interface. Same signal flow programming model that supports scopes and continues time integrators, just with text instead of drag-and-drop.

boscillator··on RIP software hackathons. Long live the hardware hackathon
> A bad design with a good presentation is doomed eventually. A good design with a bad presentation is doomed immediately. - Akin's 20th law of spacecraft design

I always really enjoyed making a slick presentation. It was a lot of fun figuring out how to scope the hardest problem you are sure you can finish in 24hr while still having time to polish your presentation and make the app look good. I find picking a problem that lets you put a big map on the screen helps with the latter.

boscillator··on Dopamine Fracking
Huh, I've been to plenty of places were you could order it for an up charge and it came in it's own little bottle.
boscillator··on Security Envelope Pattern collection – S.E.C.R.E.T
Tomas Pynchon has much to say about this in The Crying of Lot 49.
boscillator··on GoDaddy gave a domain to a stranger without any documentation
They show up as the #2 ad spot when you search "register a domain" and most people don't know any better.
boscillator··on Notice of collective action lawsuit against Workday, Inc.
It will be fascinating to see the facts of this case, but if it is proven their algorithms are discriminatory, even by accident, I hope workday is held accountable. Making sure your AI doesn't violate obvious discrimination laws should be basic engineering practice, and the courts should help remind people of that.
boscillator··on Ask HN: Share your personal website
https://buchanan.one
boscillator··on Show HN: Play poker with LLMs, or watch them play against each other
No, I'm not super certain, but I believe most solvers are trained to be game theory optimal (GTO), which means they assume every other player is also playing GTO. This means there is no strategy which beats them in the long run, but they may not be playing the absolute best strategy.
boscillator··on In Defense of Matlab Code
I wouldn't be so sure that writing those toolboxes is cheap. You need an aerospace engineer to write the aero toolbox, or you are going to miss subtleties. I assume you need a biologist to write the biology toolboxes. All of these domain experts are really expensive, and I would not trust a toolbox that hadn't been review by them.
boscillator··on In Defense of Matlab Code
It doesn't seem to be the example here, but I know that X.transpose() does not work if X is a (3,) and not a (3,1), which is the common way to present vectors in numpy. MATLAB forcing everything to be at least rank-2 solves a bunch of these headaches.
boscillator··on In Defense of Matlab Code
Interesting... I wrote a similar post about MATLAB's syntax a while ago, and I still think MATLAB is one of the best calculators on the market.

RunMat is an interesting idea, but a lot of MATLAB's utility comes from the toolboxes, and unless RunMat supports every single toolbox I need, I'm going to be reaching for that expensive MATLAB license over and over again.

boscillator··on It's insulting to read AI-generated blog posts
Yah, it is very strange to equivocate using AI as a spell checker and a whole AI written article. Being charitable, they meant asking the AI re-write your whole post, rather than just using it to suggest comma placement, but as written the article seems to suggest a blog post with grammar errors is more Human™ than one without.
boscillator··on Uncertain<T>
Does this handle covariance between different variables? For example, the location of the object your measuring your distance to presumably also has some error in it's position, which may be correlated with your position (if, for example, if it comes from another GPS operating at a similar time).

Certainly a univarient model in the type system could be useful, but it would be extra powerful (and more correct) if it could handle covariance.

boscillator··on We shouldn't have needed lockfiles
Ok, but what happens when lib-a depends on lib-x:0.1.4 and lib-b depends on lib-x:0.1.5, even though it could have worked with any lib-x:0.1.*? Are these libraries just incompatible now? Lockfiles don't guarantee that new versions are compatible, but it guarantees that if your code works in development, it will work in production (at least in terms of dependencies).

I assume java gets around this by bundling libraries into the deployed .jar file. That this is better than a lock file, but doesn't make sense for scripting languages that don't have a build stage. (You won't have trouble convincing me that every language should have a proper build stage, but you might have trouble convincing the millions of lines of code already written in languages that don't.)

boscillator··on The new literalism plaguing today’s movies
I'm glad you bring up Kojima, because I think he's a master of this New Literalism. I just watched my partner play Death Stranding 2, and it feels like every other cut-scene has an NPC turn to camera and explain the themes of the game. And I love it! And it doesn't detract from the games ability to express those themes through metaphor and game-play.

Obviously subtlety is good, but choosing to be very literal can be an interesting artistic take. I don't think Kojima was thinking about how to dumb-down his message for audiences. I think its a genuine artistic choice rooted in his style. While I didn't like it for other reasons, I think the same can be said for Megalopolis. I loved the scene were it's just a full screen interview with Catiline, even if it was kinda dumb.

There's probably something interesting about how both the ten thousandth grey-CGI marvel movie and these more experimental artists are drawn to hyper-literalism in the now, probably with some thoughts about the social internet thrown in. I'll have to think about it.

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