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chucksmash

2,817 karma · joined December 16, 2014

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chucksmash··on Man discovers his parents' coffee machine used 1TB of data in 10 days
As of today, I've also started getting a non-dismissable nag modal on the www subdomain as well. It disappears on refresh, but pops up again after a period of time or engaging with the content (clicking "Show More" on a comment or scrolling) a la Twitter.

Reddit seems hell bent on making me not use Reddit.

chucksmash··on The Legend of von Neumann (1973) [pdf]
Seems to me it's less about gatekeepers and more whether what you bring to the table is useful to people in that field.

If somebody truly believes they have a useful model then they don't discouraged by academic gatekeeping, they go and build Time Cube.

chucksmash··on Weeping whales: Stillborn humpback whale grieving documented
If you're only concerned about the memory of the pain itself then time to start volunteering!

I had a very gruesome femur break decades ago. I can remember begging to be knocked out because of the pain but there's no memory of the pain itself.

chucksmash··on Reddit Now Blocking Firefox for Android with uBlock Origin?
Rebooted the phone and I now have access again. Inclined to believe it was an A/B test.

Firefox 156.0, Android 17 (Pixel 8a), uBO 1.74.0

chucksmash··on If coding is solved, what now?: Measuring the sloppiness of code
Correctness is not a binary thing though.

I doubt many people here are brave enough to claim their code does what is supposed to do in every conceivable case. Maybe you have high confidence in the correctness of parts of the code. Correctness of an application is murky though. Things we build are never fully correct, merely correct enough. Like maybe you're responsible for the UI in a web app and you're using your expertise to ensure it gracefully handles display across browsers and a gamut of screen sizes/form factors. But are you also verifying how it works when localized with an RtL script? Are you checking every change you make against CJK?

chucksmash··on Cherenkov Radiation
Nothing can travel faster than light through vacuum, so that bit is implied as well.

I disagree with their quibble about the title being intentionally misleading but, meh, I've picked stranger technically correct hills to die on, the rest of their comment is interesting, it's fine.

chucksmash··on Elevator of the Year Winner Modernization of the Metropolis Trust Building
(2017), if the pictured award is to be believed
chucksmash··on Show HN: OpenTIE and OpenXWA, Modern Ports of Tie Fighter and X-Wing Alliance
Loved these games. Grew up playing them with a yoke + throttle controller my dad bought for MS Flight Simulator. Didn't have the specs for Tie Fighter to run well but X-Wing worked great. I'd angle a clock radio next to the yoke for a little more of a cockpit vibe plus to change up the soundtrack.

So much joy being at that age and in that era of computing/gaming. Hope people are able to pass that same feeling along to the current gen in some way, shape or form.

chucksmash··on Show HN: The load-bearing vocabulary of Claude
+1, useful read!

Seam is used liberally throughout because it captures the idea well (i.e. a place where you can cleave ball of mud code apart to begin refactoring efforts in an isolated way) and that takes many different forms throughout the book whether that be via methods and classes, source files as a single unit, linker seams, on and on.

chucksmash··on Everything you do is being recorded
A DDoS against a blog that iirc was attempting to dox the archive.today maintainer.

The bit about tampering with archived pages is news to me though. Wish the wiki discussion included receipts. Is "two users report they were redirected to tehrantimes.com" what is being referred to when they say archived pages are being tampered with?

chucksmash··on We replaced Redis with MySQL for inventory reservations and it scaled
Great question. It's a vague term and a moving target that not everyone agrees on.

For instance, retarded is now considered a slur. If OP is saying "my director said the R word," then I would question whether OP spared the gory details out of concern for polite company or if they're being oblique in service of their point.

And if managers at Shopify are dropping N-bombs, I want to know that too.

chucksmash··on Shopify replaced Redis with MySQL for inventory reservations–and it scaled
Because "slurs" is vague and covers a wide variety of utterances that run the gamut from unprofessional to unemployable and I had a tingle of Spidey sense that OP might have chosen the vague phrasing specifically to inflate the sins of the nameless Shopify director in the mind of the reader.
chucksmash··on Shopify replaced Redis with MySQL for inventory reservations–and it scaled
Don't get shy now. Which slurs?
chucksmash··on The Fabled Flatbreads of Uzbekistan (2015)
> Mirza Ghasemi: A smoked eggplant dish cooked with garlic, tomatoes, and eggs, from the Caspian Sea area.

That sounds good. Makes me think of hunkar begendi.

chucksmash··on Professor's invisible prompt trap catches 32/35 students cheating with AI
It's endemic and it predates AI. I took a CS class 15 years ago where >40% of the class was caught copying the class project off of pastebin (no clue if it was specifically bait or student code that had a tell-tale error).
chucksmash··on Startup founders urge U.S. government not to shut off Chinese open weight AI
The world is full of nuance. Just like whataboutism and "both sides" can be convenient rhetorical devices for people lying to themselves or others, accusing someone of either can be a convenient figleaf for avoiding thinking about the flaws of one's own side.

The fact that Trump won in 2016 obviously overshadowed many things about that election. I didn't vote for him but I can still remember acutely the disappointment I felt during the primaries when the presumptive frontrunners were another Clinton and another Bush. Like out of 300 million people, these will be the choices presented to me? Whataboutism is bad mkay, but two things can also be true at the same time. Nuance.

chucksmash··on OverpAId – Fire your CEO. Hire the future
Because I don't have a CEO?
chucksmash··on How Kalshi Infects the News
It's a really good point.

"It's not a war on drugs, it's a war on personal freedom. Always remember that" is all well and good but pretending 1960s ditch weed and fentanyl are a single problem with a common prescription either way is misguided.

chucksmash··on My burner email blocklist blocked me
Sharing network access? That's not friendship. That's a tenth anniversary wedding gift.
chucksmash··on The AI Superforecasters Are Here
Any given trade also has a capacity. A mispricing opportunity can only absorb so much investment before it's no longer mispriced.

A particular trade that can 2x $20k won't be able to do the same for $20 billion.

It's why RenTech capped their Medallion Fund and closed it to outside investment.

If there's only a billion dollars sloshing around on Kalshi, you can't expect to put $1 trillion into bets and take $2 trillion out.

chucksmash··on How Kalshi Infects the News
Here at least I believe the gambling laws have changed.

Most gas stations I go into now have "gaming" machines and there's always some soul sitting at them at any time of day.

I'm mostly on team let-people-do-what-they-want-even-if-it's-bad-for-them but it's disheartening to watch a dad sitting there totally sucked into it and just ignoring their kid in a stroller behind them.

chucksmash··on Moby Dick Workout (2022)
I used to use this as my example for how big a megabyte actually is. I think the entire text is 4 MB uncompressed (a nagging voice in my head says 16 MB, but I think that's just the residual part of me that never really believed how big a MB actually is).
chucksmash··on Leaking YouTube creators' private videos
Your company's software enhances the process somehow, making it easier or faster or cheaper. Your company's software did not unlock the technology of road building.

There were roads built before your company's software and I'm sure if your company disappeared that ultimately roads would get built with or without their software.

It would be interesting to look at all the technological advances of the last 60 years and break them down into categories based on what happens if they went away though (category A: the field just goes back to 1950s and we more or less get by vs Category B: society utterly collapses).

chucksmash··on Looking Ahead to Postgres 19
Just because it's easy to say doesn't mean it's wrong.

By the same logic, you could say Microsoft Access should have all the capabilities of Postgres because it's painful for small businesses to move off of it when it's no longer a good fit for their needs.

chucksmash··on Apple is about to make Hide My Email useless
1. Create a domain like myquickanonemailaccount.com.

2. Use the domain exclusively for hosting your own mail, but create a fake account creation page that just temporarily doesn't work.

3. As an added bonus, should you one day get a subpoena for information about one of your site user's online activities, you've got like a 24 hour head start on fleeing the country.

chucksmash··on SpaceX to buy Cursor for $60B
I just showed this to a Black person and they said it was regarded, whatever that means.

More seriously. Is "moronic" okay? It's just an ever so slightly more archaiac way to say retarded. The meaning, the negative connotation, the level of offense—it's synonymous and analogous across the board in its time.

Is it okay because "nobody means it like that, they're just using it as a synonym for stupid?" If so, congratulations, you now understand the other side of the argument better than when you started.

chucksmash··on SpaceX to buy Cursor for $60B
Mercy me, a slur? Retarded also has a non-offensive meaning. It just means slowed.

In fact, while I wasn't around at the time I'd wager that "mentally retarded" came into an official usage specifically because it was a clinical, sterile, bloodless, and utterly anodyne descriptive term. Moron, imbecile, and idiot all were once clinical terms. And then people throw them back and forth at each other to call each other stupid, they gained an offensive connotation and new terms were needed.

In 20 years will you find it absurd if people say that "differently abled" is a slur? Will you say "this is nuts, we literally came up with that term to avoid offense?" I will!

chucksmash··on SpaceX to buy Cursor for $60B
And my point is that I went out of my way not to use it any more in that circumstance.

Yet in the years since, I still talk about poor decisionmaking, poor luck, poor performance, and poor word choice. Because it would be poor logic to go through life auditing everything I say just in case a middle schooler with a somewhat poor vocabulary might mistake my meaning.

chucksmash··on SpaceX to buy Cursor for $60B
Why would you think I'd continue to say it after realizing I'd inadvertently hurt the kid's feelings? You are making assumptions of ill will from me in the anecdote I shared just like you are making assumptions about the OP intending offense because you didn't like their word choice.
chucksmash··on SpaceX to buy Cursor for $60B
In 2004 I used to volunteer as a tutor at an afterschool center in a low income housing project. One day a middle schooler was complaining about how much homework they had and I ribbed them a little, "oh, poor baby."

They were stung. "I'm not poor!" I felt so bad about it that it's stuck with me all these years. Does that mean because I've seen first hand how hurtful it can be that I should chide people whenever they use the P word?

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