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cladopa

625 karma · joined February 3, 2024

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cladopa··on Nowhere is safe
Are you American? Because if you are from the country that dominated the world since WWII it feels different than being from the rest of the world.

Bretton Woods gave the Americans an "exorbitant privilege" that basically meant the US could live extracting wealth continuously from the rest of the world.

Then later the petrodollar system was established. People needed oil, the US would protect the Arabs with its immense army (financed with the dollar system) and in return the oil had to be sold in dollars, so all the world needed dollars if they wanted energy.

The US could just print dollars, and the rest of the world would suffer inflation.

That was great for the US for sure. Why not continue? Because the rest of the world do not want to continue supporting the US system.

The US was ok with Sadam using chemical weapons against Kurdish civilians until he decided to change the currency for paying the oil to euros.

The US does not want to de-escalate if that means the world stops buying US bonds and suddenly they are bankrupt and can not pay its debts exporting inflation to the rest of the world.

If Americans suddenly lose 50 to 70% of purchasing power then there will be war inside the US, not outside.

cladopa··on Bitmap fonts make computers feel like computers again
I have a different opinion. I had access to real terminals when I was young and they had amazingly sharp fonts. They had hardwired optically etched fonts and were incredible. 100% smooth.

I had to work with DOS screens that were sketched to different aspect ratios and blurred and it was so painful, specially after having seen proper fonts on the screen.

One of the reasons for starting to use Linux was using high quality fonts with the terminal.

cladopa··on The cult of vibe coding is dogfooding run amok
"Ladran, Sancho, señal que cabalgamos"

The ship has sailed. Vibe coding works. It will only work better in the future.

I have been programming for decades now, I have managed teams of developers. Vibe coding is great, specially in the hands of experts that know what they are doing.

Deal with it because it is not going to stop. In the near future it will be local and 100x faster.

cladopa··on France pulls last gold held in US
This is not gain at all. At least in theory: You own some tons of gold at the start of the process, you have the same tons of gold at the end of the process.

The only real gain is that you have gold in the US custody and the US can be tempted to just use it without telling you anything.

In other words, you had "paper gold" or "virtual gold" that the US can confiscate anytime, for example after invading Greenland, blackmailing France to do nothing.

You gain custody of what is yours.

cladopa··on Why the US Navy won't blast the Iranians and 'open' Strait of Hormuz
>No, that was all the British.

And not even British. For example most of the Enigma decryption was the genius work of a Polish man. Britain received the immigration of half the Nobel prices of the world in a couple years as the jews escaped nazism.

cladopa··on Student beauty and grades under in-person and remote teaching
As an attractive person myself that studied engineering in several countries of Europe and some years in the US I don't believe there are many opportunities for you to take advantage of your attractiveness. Most examinations were in written form.

I have huge doubts about the study. In cinema, theatre, sure, you need physical presence, but engineering... I don't believe Von Newman would have needed presence to impress other people.

Another very important thing is that there are very important differences between sexes. The most physically attractive man in the world without the proper attitude and without leadership and success is nobody.

I am what is called a sigma male. I was never interested in power, dominating others, being the boss. Women prefer ugly and short people if they are leaders to tall and beautiful man that are not social.

In fact, if you get uglier as you age but get more successful, you will receive way more attention. If you command a group of people, run a company or are a big boss, women will get in love.

Also, if you are tall and beautiful, men will get envious of you.

cladopa··on How Ford burned $12B in Brazil (2021)
It must be said: Mr Ford created way more wealth in the world than what it destroyed.

For example, the Japanese discovered that importing Ford cars from Japan was cheaper that manufacturing those in Japan, including all the shipping cost.

The same happened in Russia, Germany and most places of the West world.

The new manufacturing method was a revolution that have generated trillions.

cladopa··on Honda is killing its EVs
Oh yeah, because Norway is very representative of the world...

A country that is bigger than half Spain with 10 times less population with one of the lowest electrify prices of the entire world(5-8 dollars MWh) because of huge hydro resources.

A country with huge capital reserves precisely because of oil resources.

cladopa··on Elon Musk pushes out more xAI founders as AI coding effort falters
You mean the 80% of the workforce that was fired and the company continued running just fine?

Usually just firing 3 to 5% of any company workers have terrible consequences for the company that does it.

It does not speak so well about the workers.

cladopa··on Ask HN: How to be alone?
First thing: No it is not normal thing to be alone. We humans are social animals. Once we are isolated we usually die soon, so take that seriously.

Being isolated from your tribe used to be a worse punishment than death. The greeks called that punishment ostracism. El mio Cid was the Spanish representative case.

In the US there is an epidemy of loneliness.

So, what to do? First recognise that this is a problem and do not dig deeper. Do not isolate yourself more. Do not play vdeogames, do not read books until you fix it.

My main advice is to stop thinking too much about yourself, think about others.

I was into religious(Cristian catholic) orgs and I helped old people(something I did not like), I helped poor people on the streets(liked it more) and I helped drug addicts and war refugees.

Helping drug addicts were a pain on the aßß, but once you make someone get out, he or she becomes a friend for life. It is like the friendships that are done in fighters of a war. Once you have put your life on the hands of someone else and trusted someone else so much, nothing can break that friendship.

If you think about that in a meta way, I was helping people that were marginalised, that were alone, and in the process I could not be alone. I did it in a religious group(a tribe in itself)

Thanks to this experience I can make friends very fast in a new place, something few adults know how to do.

If you are going to read, read a book called "How to influence people and make friends", but do not read the new book that is a badly revised book by the incompetent descendants of the writer, read the old original book.

But reading books is not going to help because you need action first, not reflection, and action is going to be painful for a while, and you have to endure the pain until it becomes easy. The best advise is to get out there, try hard, fail spectacularly and only then read the book.

Stop thinking about yourself, me, me and me. We are not wired to work for us alone. We are worked for working for others: Our tribe, our children, our family.

Instead of not trying to be alone, focusing on yourself (me, me and me) start thinking on helping other people that are alone. Start thinking on creating your own tribe or joining a new tribe. It can be a maker space, a group for hiking or helping or teaching kids.

cladopa··on Galileo's handwritten notes found in ancient astronomy text
Not that surprising if you consider that books before the Gutenberg printing press were artisans work of art that required years of work of specialists.

In other words: Today some of those will cost more than a Ferrari to make. They use Vellum paper that is much better that today's but require killing hundreds of animals each.

Only very rich people could afford that. I had access to European books collections of the 16th that are in Color, much much better than any normal book we have.

If you think about that it is normal. Color require more printing plates in a printer, but just changing your ink if you do it manually.

cladopa··on Claude is an Electron App because we've lost native
I would say that the real reason is because "it works". As simple as that.

The first thing you need when you make something new is making it work, it is much better that it works badly than having something not working at all.

Take for example the Newcomen engine, with an abysmal efficiency of half a percent. You needed 90 times more fuel than an engine today, so it could only be used in the mines were the fuel was.

It worked badly, but it worked. Later came efficiency.

The same happened with locomotives. So bad efficiency at first, but it changed the world.

The first thing AI people had to do is making it work in all OSes. Yeah, it works badly but it works.

We downloaded some Clojure editor made in java to test if we were going to deploy it in our company. It gave us some obscure java error in different OSes like linux or Mac configurations. We discarded it. It did not work.

We have engineers and we can fix those issues but it is not worth it. The people that made this software do not understand basic things.

We have Claude working in hundreds of computers with different OSes. It just works.

cladopa··on I built a demo of what AI chat will look like when it's “free” and ad-supported
I hate the idea. It will happen though.

We always have the first wave of naive and well intentioned people. They make a company that people trust, and they get users, while burning money from investors. Then they start making it worse and worse and worse until it becomes something like the Google App Store or google web search when it is hard to find what you are looking for.

Ads are so dangerous in AI because they will include ads inside the LLVM. When I ask "Who is the best whatever?" "Which product should I buy?" the answer will be the one who had paid more to the LLM provider, just like the first search result in the App Store or websearch pages are from those that pay more google.

cladopa··on This time is different
A very cynical article.

Actually IT IS different. Actually if they manage to create a viable small nuclear reactors or Quantum computers the world will change like it changed with the Watt thermal engine.

Why he is not talking about the Internet, trains, electricity, nuclear bombs, rockets,aviation or engines? Because they worked, like AI works today.

All of them were bubbles at the time and they changed the world forever. AI is changing the world AND it is a bubble.

AI is here to stay. It will improve and it will have consequences. The fact that a robot could do things with its hands is actually significant, whenever you like it or not.

cladopa··on Ask HN: Why is my Claude experience so bad? What am I doing wrong?
What you are trying to do is quite easy to do with Claude. I have done way more complex things than that in hours. But having programming, managing(with humans) and engineering experience is extremely useful.

It seems you try to tell the tool to do everything in one shot. That is a very wrong approach, not just with Claude but with everything(you ask a woman for a date and if you do not get laid in five minutes you failed?). When I program something manually and compiles, I expect it to be wrong. You have to iron it and debug it.

Instead of that:

1.Divide the work in independent units. I call this "steps"

2.Subdivide steps into "subsets" You work in an isolated manner on those subsets.

3.Use an inmediate gui interface like dear imgui to prototype your tool. Translating then into using something else once it works is quite easy of LLMs.

4.Visualize everything. You do not need to see the code but you need to visualise every single thing you ask it to do.

5.Tell Claude what you want and why you want it and update the documentation constantly.

6. Use git in order to make rock solid steps that Claude will not touch when it works and you can revert changes or ask the ia to explore a branch, explaining how you did something and want something similar.

7. Do not modify code that already works rock solid. Copy it into another step leaving the step as reference and modify it there.

5.Use logs. Lots of logs. For every step you create text logs and you debug the problems giving Claude the logs to read them.

6.Use screenshots. Claude can read screenshots. If you visualise everything, clause can see the errors too.

7.Use asserts, lots of asserts, just like with manual programming.

It is not that different from managing a real team of people...

cladopa··on I miss thinking hard
I believe the article is wrong in so many ways.

If you think too much you get into dead ends and you start having circular thoughts, like when you are lost in the desert and you realise you are in the same place again after two hours as you have made a great circle(because one of your legs is dominant over the other).

The thinker needs feedback on the real world. It needs constant testing of hypothesis on reality or else you are dealing with ideology, not critical thinking. It needs other people and confrontation of ideas so the ideas stay fresh and strong and do not stagnate in isolation and personal biases.

That was the most frustrating thing before AI, a thinker could think very fast, but was limited in testing by the ability to build. Usually she had to delegate it to people that were better builders, or else she had to be builder herself, doing what she hates all the time.

cladopa··on Ask HN: Anyone else struggle with how to learn coding in the AI era?
As someone who learned programming the hard way I hated it even when I am really good at it. It got on the way of me doing useful products and services that I wanted to create.

Because of that I learned Lisp so I could do metaprogramming, because manually it would take multiple humans lives to be able to create what I want before I die, even (or specially) controlling a small group of people.

We use Claude code and personally I love it. It is like the electric sawmill instead of humans cutting manually, sweating and being exhausted after half an hour of work.

After decades programming I know how to tell the AI what I want, and how to control/log/assert/test/atomize everything so it behaves.

You can use AI to teach you programming, the problem is that you need to tell her what you want, and if you are not experience you don't.

So do small projects and let the AI do 80% of the work, spend the remainder 20% finishing by hand. Usually LLMs are amazing for approaching valid solutions but are really bad at making something perfect. They fix something and destroy something else. You do that manually.

But "learning programming" in abstract is like "learning to drill", why do you want to drill? What do you want to drill? Where do you want to drill?

You need to make it specific into specific projects, with specific timelines. "I want to play the piano" is abstract. "I want to play this version of Feather theme in 3 months" is specific.

cladopa··on Fedora Asahi Remix is now working on Apple M3
Actually in Spain Social Security is 30 to 40% of what you earn. From the remainder 60% it is up to 50% in IRPF taxes, so you could pay 70% of what you earn.

The trick is that Franco hid the social security tax in the company side so normal people don't see it, but it is there.

Over that there is IBI for your house, there is IVA on anything you buy, and there are central bank inflation taxing anything you own in absolute terms.

cladopa··on C Is Best (2025)
The great thing about C is that is was not designed by a committee at all. It was designed by a person with strong opinions. This means it is really great for what it does well(what the author was interested in).

To illustrate the difference look at C++, it was designed by a person with strong opinions, but then left it to be controlled by a committee.

If you look at the structure of C++ in Backus Naur form it is absolutely nuts. The compile times have gone through the roof and people leave to create new languages like jai, Zig or whatever.

Common Lisp was designed by committee. It is as chaotic as C++.

Rust is also gigantic. I am very careful not to use in critical systems because it is so big unless we could restrict it with the compiler or something.

cladopa··on DeepSeek uses banned Nvidia chips for AI model, report says
I don't want to fight against decades of State propaganda and indoctrination, but do you realise that by "men" they were not referring to black slaves or Mexicans in Texas or California or native Americans(the best Indian in the dead Indian).
cladopa··on Icons in Menus Everywhere – Send Help
I like them, for whatever reason icons are a good thing for me.

I believe different people literally see the world different and there should be an option to remove icons if they prefer this way. It used to be this option at least in some programs.

But of course this person doesn't like it, and it wants everyone to follow his taste.

cladopa··on Datacenters in space aren't going to work
It is not a good idea listening to experts tell you what can't be done. Science and technology progresses one funeral at at time. Einstein's ideas were crazy for classical scientists and Heisenberg's for Einstein.

The most important thing is making space access ten to one hundred times cheaper with reusable rockets. Then a lot of the problems in the article will not be problems at all.

E.g ISS was designed and created when access to space was extremely expensive. Solar technology and batteries was extremely bad but also super expensive.

You can not use convention but radiation works incredibly well and you can also use the thermal technology of mobile devices.

The most important thing being cheap is that access to the Space become possible for way more people with creativity. Not just a few people with academic titles but people with practical engineering and scientific mastery (that certainly run circles around them on real projects).

There are so many opportunities to use creativity in space, with possibilities that do not exist on earth. For example you can spin or rotate things super fast and so you could have convention inside the machines that rotate.

cladopa··on GrapheneOS migrates server infrastructure from France
It is not called "paranoia" if it is real that they are coming after you.

Have you not seen what happened to Telegram CEO?

cladopa··on ChatGPT Launches 'Company Knowledge'
This is a great way to spy on all your company data and give it freely to three letter agencies.

Marxist politicians in companies like France or Spain will demand access to it just like with private messengers for fighting tax fraud, child abuse or whatever pretext they can manufacture to get access to this succulent information they can privately manipulate for making themselves rich, destroying the opposition...

Power concentration is very dangerous. Absolute power corrupts.

cladopa··on NASA chief suggests SpaceX may be booted from moon mission
Oh yeah. Replace the stainless steel by carbon fibre, give it to your pals of Boing and instead of being ready in 2030 for 2.3 billion it will be ready in 2050 for 50 billion.

Much better for making your friends rich.

cladopa··on It's just a virus, the E.R. told him – days later, he was dead
Well, in the US doctors are rich. Something completely different to most of the rest of the world.

US doctors are not that good compared with a German or French doctor, they could be as bad as bad doctors in other countries.

cladopa··on Jeff Bezos says AI is in a bubble but society will get 'gigantic' benefits
There is a very important difference: real investors risk their own money, the money they saved over their entire life making decisions.

Under socialism bureaucrats risk someone else's money.

We are not in a pure capitalistic society, we also have States, central Banks with central planning expending over half the money in Europe and USA and more than half in Asia.

As a European myself that see the public money being wasted by incompetent people and filling the pockets of politicians, specially marxist ones. For example, the money Spain received after COVID filled so many socialist pockets and has not given information back to Europe as of how it was spent(it was spent on their own companies of friend and family).

cladopa··on Europe Can No Longer Ignore That It's Under Russian Attack
>Is there some reason Europeans should go to war to satisfy the desires of American organizations?

That is the wrong question. The question is:

Is there some reason Europeans should go to war when Russia invades a European country in order to annex it by force?

The answer is yes. The reason is not letting force impose over things like democracy or rights. If Europeans do we(I am European) will become slaves.

It happened multiple times: The Ottoman Empire, Napoleon or Hitler and Stalin.

You don't have to explain that to a Polish person: They lived the occupation of Russia and Germany and all of them have family members that were exterminated by the germans first and then by the communists. Let alone they were subjugated over decades making then a puppet state of Russia making Russia richer and Poland poorer.

If Europeans do not oppose the dictator Putin controlling Russia, next time we will have to fight against Russia, Ukraine(occupied by Russia) and Kazakhstan, Turkmenistan and all the new conquests(of the new Russian Empire) in the same way if you do not oppose the ottomans taking Constantinople, you will have to oppose them in Vienna, when they have become much stronger.

cladopa··on Greatest irony of the AI age: Humans hired to clean AI slop
We have been doing this for decades. I was hired to correct and train speech recognition and OCR programs like 20 years ago. A friend of mine corrected geolocated tags.

In the history of AI systems you basically had people inputing Prolog rules in "smart" systems or programmers hardcoding rules is programs like ELIZA or Generalised Problem Solvers.

cladopa··on Liberté, égalité, Radioactivité
France biggest neighbour is Spain...
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