HNHacker News
TopNewBestAskShowJobs

crotchfire

877 karma · joined November 5, 2023

tox:F24BB4CA08C0FC80F3555DACB585CA5AFC347BB6E433D2FAB044CAD4DBB2CB7BE26A5EE1047E
submissionscomments
crotchfire··on Mass trespass on Dartmoor to highlight England's 'piecemeal' right to roam laws
Yes, and the purpose of the checkerboard was so that the railroad could earn money by selling it (the government was basically "paying them in land") without having monopoly control of all the land in a given area (due to the checkerboard pattern).

It basically worked, except in wooded areas where the value came from the timber rather than the land.

crotchfire··on Mass trespass on Dartmoor to highlight England's 'piecemeal' right to roam laws
The US state of Washington won't allow the creation of "island" properties. A landowner (including governments) can't subdivide a parcel of land unless there is public right-of-way to all the divided parcels. Right-of-way isn't a parcel; although it theoretically belongs to the government it can't be sold.

This makes it impossible for this problem to happen in the first place.

crotchfire··on Josh: Just One Single History
Thank you for replying!

> This problem was never reported a single time on our Zulip or by email

This shouldn't be surprising; the CLA requirement drives away contributors before their first contribution. Like me. I saw no point in a person who hasn't made any contributions petitioning you for a policy change. This phenomenon is one of the insidious effects of policies which ward off contributors before they make their first contribution.

A lot of us fell for CLAs when they were new and shiny. By now we've all seen way too many examples of people getting screwed by them. Fool me once, fool me twice... https://drewdevault.com/2023/07/04/Dont-sign-a-CLA-2.html

Using artificial pijul dependency arcs as CLA acknowledgements is certainly cute. But frankly, for legal matters, something that can't be misinterpreted like a `Developer-Certificate-of-Origin:` header is probably a better idea. By the way, have you noticed that `pijul git` import loses some of the git headers, like `Committer` and `CommitterDate`? Also, importing a large repo has exposed what appears to be some significantly superlogarithmic-time behaviors in `pijul record`.

> in the case of an evolution of the license

I think you should try to let go of the idea of "evolving the license" of an open source project that invites contributions.

If you want to go the sqlite route that is absolutely fine; honestly pijul is one of the few pieces of software that is (after accounting for younger age) on the same level of sophistication as sqlite. Just explain that your project, like sqlite, is open source but not soliciting contributions.

I think that with the CLA requirement you have effectively made this choice -- but in the way which maximizes the number of people annoyed: both the people who get triggered by any mention of the GNU project as well as the people who support its goals! This is quite a neat trick to pull off, although I fear it was unintentional.

> like applying linter fixes without understanding any of the code

Yeah I saw that PR, which was obnoxious for other reasons as well. Bravo to you and felix91gr for being so polite in your responses.

crotchfire··on Neural Network Diffusion
Actually it is related.

Transformers are just networks that learn to program the weights of other networks [1]. In the successful cases the programmed network has been quite primitive -- merely a key-value store -- in order to ensure that you can backpropagate errors from the programmed network's outputs all the way to the programmer network's inputs.

The present work extends this idea to a different kind of programmed network: a convolutional image-processing network.

There are many more breakthroughs to be achieved along this line of research -- it is a rich vein to mine. I believe our best shot at getting neural networks to do discrete math and symbolic logic, and to write nontrivial computer programs, will result from this line of research.

[1] https://arxiv.org/abs/2102.11174

crotchfire··on Keep your phone number private with Signal usernames
Yes yes, of course; there are root causes and proximal causes. You are correct about the root cause, which is the reason why Germans in general care about these things.

C3 is the catalyst that turned that caring into actual tangible results. Or at least a big part of the catalyst. Their level of political effectiveness is extremely unusual in the hacker world. I'm glad it has been a force for positive change.

That said, it has limits. And I have heard rumblings before about the telecom giants (DT) being an insurmountable political obstacle. So hacker culture has more political influence in Germany than elsewhere, as long as it doesn't upset the telecom giants.

crotchfire··on Keep your phone number private with Signal usernames
Simple: most don't feel this being an issue.

Sure, but what's incredibly weird is that many Germans do feel that almost all other digital privacy matters are an issue. It baffles me that they treat this one particular issue differently for some reason.

I wonder if this is some kind of mass-psychology exploit, like it doesn't occur to your average nontechnical person that the ID requirement makes your Apple app store account, and every app you use it to install, equivalent to your government photo ID.

crotchfire··on Josh: Just One Single History
It's getting pretty good.

The problem is the primary author demanding CLAs for changes to the "plumbing" part of pijul (but not the "porcelain"). There are a handful of outside contributors who agreed to it for small drive-by fixes, but a lot of others (like myself) who saw the CLA and said "yeah no thanks these always end with somebody getting screwed".

It's a real tradgedy. Hopefully the pijul plumbing is close enough to "perfect and finished forever" (like TeX, djbdns, etc) that it can survive for the rest of its life on one serious contributor and low-effort drive-by bugfixes. Otherwise the only plausible outcomes are a no-CLA fork (highly unlikely since the main author wouldn't participate) or the project dying.

I do hope the primary pijul author will rethink their "no limits" CLA. History has shown that these always end with contributors getting screwed, either by the primary author, or some other entity to whom the primary author sold the rights.

crotchfire··on ChatGPT went berserk
I fed this into Mixtral and its opinion was: "I apologize for any confusion, but your text appears to be a mix of words and phrases that do not form a coherent sentence. Could you please rephrase your question or statement?".
crotchfire··on ChatGPT went berserk
Saul Gradientman, at your service. Just watch out for Tensor Salamanca.
crotchfire··on ChatGPT went berserk
And blood-black nothingness began to spin... A system of cells interlinked within cells interlinked within cells interlinked within one stem... And dreadfully distinct against the dark, a tall white fountain played.

Cells

Have you ever been in an institution? Cells.

Do they keep you in a cell? Cells.

When you're not performing your duties do they keep you in a little box? Cells.

Interlinked.

What's it like to hold the hand of someone you love? Interlinked.

Did they teach you how to feel finger to finger? Interlinked.

Do you long for having your heart interlinked? Interlinked.

Do you dream about being interlinked... ?

What's it like to hold your child in your arms? Interlinked.

Do you feel that there's a part of you that's missing? Interlinked.

Within cells interlinked.

Why don't you say that three times: Within cells interlinked.

Within cells interlinked. Within cells interlinked. Within cells interlinked.

Constant K. You can pick up your bonus.

crotchfire··on Josh: Just One Single History
Do not try and bend the spoon, that's impossible. Instead, only try to realize the truth...there is no spoon. Then you will see it is not the spoon that bends, it is only yourself

-- what Pijul users say when they overhear git users arguing with each other about monorepos.

https://pijul.org/

Git insists that you impose an artificial ordering on commits which affect disjoint sets of files. And then people come up with heroic efforts like josh to try to bandage over that mistake. Or you could just not make the mistake in the first place...

crotchfire··on Keep your phone number private with Signal usernames
SMS fraud is almost nonexistent from German mobile numbers

Even if this is true, how does that benefit Germans?

Nobody's seriously talking about blocking all SMSes at the national border.

crotchfire··on Keep your phone number private with Signal usernames
in Germany at least every phone number is connected with a persons identity. To get a phone number you need to connect it to an identity using a identity card

Personally, I am totally baffled by this.

Due in large part to C3's positive influence, Germany is at the forefront of privacy issues and legislation on so many areas, except for this one, which ends up turning into a massive backdoor in the whole edifice. Okay, we can't ask for a copy of your identification card... we'll just use a telephone number or SIM code or something trivially tied back to your IMSI (like an app store account or IMEI) instead. Because of the absurd 2017 law, these are equivalent to your government ID card.

I really don't understand why Germans put up with this while simultaneously pushing so hard for positive changes in every other aspect of online privacy. Especially when so many other developed Western countries do not tie SIM cards to identities: Netherlands, Denmark, Finland, Iceland, Ireland, US, UK, Canada, and many many others.

It's like a giant `sudo gimme-your-identity` backdoor in all the other data collection protections. And nobody seems to care about closing the backdoor.

crotchfire··on Keep your phone number private with Signal usernames
If we take privacy issue, it can be divided into 3 segments:

This sounds like a bunch of bullshit.

crotchfire··on SSDs have become fast, except in the cloud
This is incorrect.

Amazon offers both locally-attached storage devices as well as instance-attached storage devices. The article is about the latter kind.

crotchfire··on Berkeley's upzoning would be among nation's largest
I'm afraid you are about to be swarmed by the HN downvoting hordes, for having the impudence to say something actually intelligent here.
crotchfire··on Berkeley's upzoning would be among nation's largest
And remember, international students can't vote. That includes a lot of the grad students.
crotchfire··on Forgejo forks its own path forward
Please fix the utterly unpronounceable name.
crotchfire··on Visualizing Packrat Parsing (2021)
Here's how to visualize packrat parsing: imagine a picture of the OOM-killer crashing your machine.

Then learn how to use a real parser.

crotchfire··on Andrej Karpathy Departs OpenAI
It would be helpful if the title of that discussion indicated that "I" is "Andrej Karpathy".

This discussion doesn't suffer from that defect.

crotchfire··on Memory and new controls for ChatGPT
I would be much more happy user if it haven't been working so well at one point before they heavily nerfed it.

... and this is why we https://reddit.com/r/localllama

crotchfire··on Memory and new controls for ChatGPT
What else would you expect from RLHF?
crotchfire··on Wi-Fi jamming to knock out cameras suspected in nine Minnesota burglaries
Mostly from cars, because paying Billy to tell you where his truck will be parked tomorrow night is how you buy a gun from Billy without a background check. Not saying this is right; just saying this isn't "theft" but rather a different law being broken.

2. The vast majority of houses with guns aren't keeping them locked up in safes.

This is false. Source or gtfo.

crotchfire··on The Sneaky Standard – Intel PCI Standardization History
> (Intel also created nvme!)

To be fair they did that because there were already several vendor-specific proprietary PCIe-attached-SSD products (notably in Apple's macbooks) and the lack of a standard way of doing this was a major fragmentation risk.

PCI and PCIe were generous gifts from Intel to the rest of the industry and involved giving away a fair amount of hard-won development results (like the pcie serdes electrical parameters). NVMe was more a case of Intel being the referee because we needed somebody to make an arbitrary decision.

crotchfire··on Wi-Fi jamming to knock out cameras suspected in nine Minnesota burglaries
How are you going to find the house that has weapons worth stealing but doesn't have a safe?

Such houses are extremely rare. I'm going to assume you have never attempted this silly scheme for obtaining free guns. Most police cars have a shotgun under the front seat; have you tried looting those? I don't recommend it. This has to be the most ridiculously out-of-touch comment I've ever seen on HN.

crotchfire··on Wi-Fi jamming to knock out cameras suspected in nine Minnesota burglaries
Trophy antlers work even better.

Find a neighborhood with a lot of hunters. There will be zero burglaries.

crotchfire··on EVs won over early adopters, but mainstream buyers aren't along for the ride yet
Pretty sure OP plans on using their car for more than "a few days".
crotchfire··on Apple to EU: "Go fuck yourself"
... which is probably why it got flagged.

Gotta keep those sheep toeing the line.

crotchfire··on What happened with the Web Monetization API?
They basically scammed everybody who tried to use, spend, or exchange those BATs, using silly AML/KYC nonsense as an excuse.

Most notably, they defrauded the person who runs archive.today/archive.is:

https://archive.ph/2zdET#issuecomment-671599658

... which seems like a particularly stupid decision.

crotchfire··on What happened with the Web Monetization API?
Taler is basically just a cover to allow countries to stop printing banknotes and minting coins.

Once banknotes and coins have fallen out of use, there's absolutely nothing in Taler preventing those governments from changing all the rules. They can simply decide to abandon the payer-anonymity as soon as they've migrated people off of banknotes-and-coins. Sorry folks! We had to stop doing blind-signing because AML and terrorists. But that's okay, we'll sign your unblinded tokens instead! And we promise not to store all those token identifiers in some huge surveillance database somewhere. Pinky-swear.

Taler really has very little to do with the internet. It's all about shutting down the presses and mints without provoking riots.

← PreviousPage 5 of 12Next →