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chimeracoder

21,180 karma · joined October 12, 2010

Inveterate builder.

Personal site: http://www.adityamukerjee.net/

My email is pretty easy to guess from my username.

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chimeracoder··on 90% of crypto's Illinois primary spending failed to achieve its objective
> Ranked choice still succumbs to a spoiler effect. https://realrcv.equal.vote/alaska22

That website presents an unconvincing argument and uses it to arrive at a conclusion that is at odds with the extensive academic research on this topic.

chimeracoder··on 90% of crypto's Illinois primary spending failed to achieve its objective
The First Amendment does not explicitly mention campaign spending (or political campaigns at all), and until 2010, the First Amendment was not considered to apply to monetary spending in political campaigns.

The right to petition the government is explicitly protected, but that doesn't apply in the case of IL-9, which was an open race and therefore none of the candidates were actually elected representatives.

chimeracoder··on Polymarket gamblers threaten to kill me over Iran missile story
> It is the most Degenerate form of gambling out there. There is no skill, no human factor, no nothing. Just pure random numbers.

While I wouldn't use the word "degenerate", in terms of gambling, this isn't anywhere close to as bad as it gets.

At least this form is (psuedo)random, and the odds are statistically fair and published (by law).

Contrast to slot machines, which are not random, but are in fact preprogrammed to provide payouts in ways which maximize the earnings for the house and the addictive value for the player.

The house always wins, but there is no form of gambling where that is more guaranteed and manipulated than slot machine games (which includes the video arcade-style slot games).

chimeracoder··on Online age-verification tools for child safety are surveilling adults
> I've yet to come across anything I want or need outside banking or government use where age verification benefits me, or is so useful/important that I would willingly hand over critical secret documents

So far. As these laws proliferate (and companies continue complying in advance), at this rate, it won't be long before you can't meaningfully do anything on the Internet otherwise.

chimeracoder··on Online age-verification tools for child safety are surveilling adults
> I thought HIPPA law had very harsh fines for this

Not at all. The maximum fine a company has to pay is capped at $2 million per calendar year for a violation, and that's assuming it's even eligible for the highest tier of penalty.

chimeracoder··on No right to relicense this project
I don't know the details of that specific case so I can't speak to it, but the text of the AWCPA is very clear:

> The copyright in an architectural work that has been constructed does not include the right to prevent the making, distributing, or public display of pictures, paintings, photographs, or other pictorial representations of the work, if the building in which the work is embodied is located in or ordinarily visible from a public place.

This codifies an already-established principle in US law. French law does not have that same principle.

chimeracoder··on No right to relicense this project
> This is not true. I will just give the example of the nighttime illumination of the Eiffel Tower:

That example is not analogous to the topic at hand.

But furthermore, it also is specific to French/European copyright law. In the US, the US Copyright Act would not permit restrictions on photographs of architectural works that are visible from public spaces.

chimeracoder··on TikTok will not introduce end-to-end encryption, saying it makes users less safe
> Meta still tracks analytics which isn't good for privacy, but I'm not aware of any news of them or 3rd parties reading messages without consent of one of the 1st parties? Signal is probably much better though

Correct. WhatsApp uses the Signal protocol, and there is zero evidence of them reading message contents except with the consent of one of the users involved (such as a user reporting a message for moderation purposes).

(And before anyone takes issue with that last qualifier, consent from at least one party is the bar for secure communications on any platform, Signal included. If you don't trust the person you are communicating with, no amount of encryption will protect you).

Discovering a backdoor in WhatsApp for Facebook/Meta to read messages would be a career-defining finding for a security researcher, so it's not like this is some topic nobody has ever thought to investigate.

chimeracoder··on New York could prohibit chatbot medical, legal, engineering advice
> As for non LLM legal resources, they are just fine if you have all day to read them and all of another day to draft the required filings, but most people have jobs.

You misunderstand. If you are facing tenant harassment in New York City, there are other avenues for you to resolve it that don't involve engaging a lawyer at all.

> True, but it is only an incredibly narrow subset of legal cases where contingency based lawyers exist.

Not really? If anything, there's a pretty narrow subset of cases where it's not possible to get someone on contingency but it is possible to use an LLM to meaningfully push your case forward without one.

chimeracoder··on New York could prohibit chatbot medical, legal, engineering advice
> So “I’m right but can’t afford the lawyer time” is a very real scenario.

For most cases like the ones we're talking about (NYC unlawful eviction and/or tenant harassment), if you have a good case, you don't have to pay up-front. A lawyer will take it on contingency and get paid by the defendant if you win.

In addition, there are also plenty of free legal resources dedicated to this exact topic as well.

chimeracoder··on New York could prohibit chatbot medical, legal, engineering advice
> I don't understand how anyone can rationalize this bill in the face of what OpenAI just agreed to with the DoD.

> AI can surveil and direct munitions but it cant answer legal questions.

There's no contradiction. The people sponsoring this bill don't think that AI should be used for either of those purposes.

chimeracoder··on Don't make me talk to your chatbot
> Power cycling is not a solution. It's a crappy workaround, and you still had downtime because of it. The device should never get stuck in the first place, and the solution for that is fixing whatever bug is in the firmware.

I'm sympathetic to the argument that companies should make support calls less necessary by providing better products and services, but "just write bug-free software" is not a solution.

chimeracoder··on I’m joining OpenAI
> hopped on a plane for SKO in LAX. United delayed the plane departure by 2 hours (of course) and diverted the flight to Honolulu.

I'm assuming there's a typo here, because I can't imagine a flight from LAX to SKO at all, let alone one that goes anywhere close to Honolulu. But I can't figure out what this was supposed to be.

chimeracoder··on An Update on Heroku
> Salesforce acquired them and just let it die, baffling.

This is a common misconception, but it's actually not true. The reality is even more bizarre.

Most of Heroku's successful years came after the acquisition, not before. Heroku was acquired extremely early in its lifecycle, and Salesforce does actually bear responsibility for investing in it and making it the powerhouse it became. Most of what people remember as the glory days of Heroku came long after the acquisition. And in fact, at the time of acquisiton, Heroku was nowhere near as competitive as a product as it later became.

It was only much later on that Salesforce began to pull the supports out from underneath it, leaving it to fall behind and become what it is today.

The narrative of "BigCo™ acquires startup, then leaves it to wither and die" is a trope because it is very commonly true, but it's actually not what happened in this particular case.

chimeracoder··on Internet Archive's Storage
> In the unlikely, for San Francisco, event that the day is too hot, less-urgent tasks can be delayed, or some of the racks can have their clock rate reduced, disks put into sleep mode, or even be powered down. Redundancy means that the data will be available elsewhere.

So it sounds like they have data in other locations as well, hopefully.

chimeracoder··on He set out to walk around the world. After 27 years, his quest is nearly over
> The whole concept of nationalism and border sovereignty has been with us for essentially all of human history,

Quite the opposite. The modern concept of "border sovereignty" as intertwined with the nation-state is a Westphalian construction. (Students of world history will recognize why this timing is not a coincidence). And even then, they didn't exactly catch on immediately.

Sovereign nation-states are a tiny piece of human history. They're not even the majority of recorded human history.

chimeracoder··on iPhone Typos? It's Not Just You – The iOS Keyboard Is Broken [video]
> And exactly because it's the only keyboard that just lets me type in two languages without having to "switch", and it does that well. Right now my spacebar just says "NL - EN" and it lets me combine Dutch and English just fine.

I can't stand keyboards that do this - especially those that don't let you turn it off. If you write in another language that doesn't use the Latin alphabet, you end up with nonsense suggestions - common English words like "the" or "and" will get replaced with obscure words in another language that just happen to sound vaguely phonetically similar. I almost never switch languages mid-sentence when typing, and yet the keyboard can't seem to grasp that.

chimeracoder··on I failed to recreate the 1996 Space Jam website with Claude
> Six nesting levels for tables?

Hacker News uses nesting tables for comments. This comment that you're reading right now is rendered within a table that has three ancestor tables.

As late as 2016 (possibly even later), they did so in a way that resulted in really tiny text when reading comments on mobile devices in threads that were more than five or so layers deep. That isn't the case anymore - it might be because HN updated the way it generates the HTML, though it could also be that browser vendors updated their logic for rendering nested tables as well. I know that it was a known problem amongst browser developers, because most uses for nested tables were very different than what HN was (is?) using them for, so making text inside deeply nested tables smaller was generally a desirable feature... just not in the context of Hacker News.

chimeracoder··on Google unkills JPEG XL?
> Have you seen JPEG XL source code? I like the format, but the reference implementation in C++ looked pretty bad at least 2 years ago. I hope they rewrote it, because it surely looked like a security issue waiting to happen.

At this point, in 2025, any substantial (non-degenerative) image processing written in C++ is a security issue waiting to happen. That's not specific to JPEG XL.

chimeracoder··on There may not be a safe off-ramp for some taking GLP-1 drugs, study suggests
> No, it isn't. “Men’s vitality” doesn’t mean “getting pumped with testosterone regardless of indications”

When I Google "men's vitality clinic", the top result I see is titled "Your experts for testosterone replacement therapy...". TRT is front and center.

> Being pumped with testosterone isn’t the outcome being sought from a men’s vitality clinic, it is (even for the people who are actively thinking about it) a mechanism (and not an appropriate one for every patient) for atteempting to acheive the desired outcome.

This is such a weird distinction to try and make.

I frequently see ads for these services, and even when they're not so explicit as that one is about what they're selling, it's extremely clear what demographic they're going after and what the hook is.

Testosterone being a Schedule III substance, "men's vitality" is the way that they can legally advertise an service that prescribes AAS. It's no more of a secret that men's vitality clinics prescribe testosterone than it is that fertility clinics are prescribing estradiol. Both of these are sex hormones that induce a specific effect on the body which the patient is looking for.

Can I imagine someone walking into a men's vitality clinic and being surprised that they're getting offered testosterone? Sure, and there's also that German couple who went to a fertility clinic because they weren't having a baby, and were surprised to learn that they needed to start having sex.

Clueless people exist. That doesn't mean that it's not readily obvious to anyone who's paying attention what these clinics exist to do, and how they do it.

chimeracoder··on There may not be a safe off-ramp for some taking GLP-1 drugs, study suggests
> If someone shows up with a testosterone level of 700 you can (and should) explain that low testosterone is not the explanation for whatever they’re suffering from.

I'm not going to say TRT clinics are the best actors here, but to an actual endocrinologist, diagnosing hormone issues isn't so simple as looking at single point-in-time measurement of total testosterone.

Testosterone levels naturally vary even for a given individual - two readings at the same time of day on different days even a short period apart can be dramatically different - and that's not even taking into consideration the fact that total testosterone levels aren't the sole (or even primary) mechanism for diagnosing androgenic endocrine issues.

chimeracoder··on There may not be a safe off-ramp for some taking GLP-1 drugs, study suggests
> Unless you went on when you weren't really low because the men's vitality clinic pushed you into a treatment protocol

Saying that the men's vitality clinic "pushed you" into a treatment protocol is like saying that a fertility clinic pushed you into getting pregnant.

Sure, it's a common outcome, but you had an idea of what you wanted out of it before you walked in the door.

chimeracoder··on Disney Lost Roger Rabbit
> He set up two computers and manually played low-res DRM-protected MP3 files out of one and into the other for weeks, documenting the process on BoingBoing. He touted this not only as freedom but "preservation."

I see. When I hear "record collection" I think of vinyl records, so I was quite confused how DRM was relevant there.

chimeracoder··on Disney Lost Roger Rabbit
> So is Warren being an asshole here? I mean, we haven't seen a Dick Tracy movie since the 90s. I am out of the loop so trying to understand.

Well the rights were held by Disney from 1988 until 2005, and then they were tied up in court (between Beatty and Tribune) until 2011, when Beatty won the rights. The movie you're referring to was released in 1990.

So Beatty has held the rights for only 14 of those 35 years. Although the first special he made was released in 2010, during that legal battle.

chimeracoder··on Disney Lost Roger Rabbit
> It does, however, make providing housing more profitable, which, on the margins, will drive more landlords and home builders into the market, decreasing long term costs

Landlords are, by and large, not the ones who create new housing units, and "lack of profit potential is" also generally not the main impedance to creating new housing in most locations either.

chimeracoder··on Disney Lost Roger Rabbit
> He once sat in his basement for an entire month "playing the DRM off" his record collection

What are you referring to here?

chimeracoder··on After my dad died, we found the love letters
> How do you know the father never said he was gay?

I don't, which is why I didn't say that. I said:

> as far as the essay mentions, the father never said he was gay.

chimeracoder··on After my dad died, we found the love letters
> It does not sound as such if you read the content of the post. It's hardly a misconception to suggest that gay men do not generally fall in love with women.

Aside from the fact that this premise is incorrect, it's also inapplicable, because, as far as the essay mentions, the father never said he was gay.

chimeracoder··on The disguised return of EU Chat Control
> (6) Online child sexual abuse frequently involves the misuse of information society services offered in the Union by providers established in third countries.

It's quite wild to see child sexual abuse continue to be cited as a justification for far-reaching, privacy-invading proposals, allegedly to empower government actors to combat child sexual abuse.

Meanwhile, we have copious and ever-increasing evidence of actual child sexual abuse being perpetrated by people with the most power in these very institutions, and they generally face few (if any) consequences.

chimeracoder··on Hemp ban hidden inside government shutdown bill
> Why not a mixture of both? CA for instance had their populace vote to ban gay marriage in prop 8, CA then just told the voters to go fuck themselves and tied it up and overturned it in court.

> So you can see even if you literally amend the constitution in california by popular referendum, those in power can just tell the populace to go fuck themselves and they won't be recognizing it, no matter that the constitution is the supreme law of the state.

Your argument would make sense if the courts had overturned Prop 8 on the basis that it was unconstitutional at the state level. But that's not what happened.

The state case against Prop 8 was upheld by the courts. The federal courts ruled against it, in a completely separate case, on the basis of the Equal Protection Clause in the US constitution. Prop 8 amended the state constitution; it did not amend the US constitution.

It's also a moot point, because Prop 8 was also repealed by a subsequent ballot initiative, with 61% of the vote.

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