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crowbahr

1,697 karma · joined February 13, 2017

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crowbahr··on US strikes $1.2B deal to pay German firm to halt offshore wind projects
Fun tidbit:

Climate change is real, caused by humans, and the fires were seeing are absolutely exacerbated by the effects of the climate.

However this is the _least_ on fire the world has been for a while because it's usually Asian and Africa that are rampantly burning and they're improving land management techniques enough that it's tamping down on the worst of the burns.

Progress isn't evenly distributed

crowbahr··on Israeli firm BlackCore suspected of meddling in New York and Scotland votes
New account made just for this comment is always suspicious.

Look - the correct amount of hate crime is always 0 but using a percentage masks the amount of crime that comes from noise. Hate crime is not evenly distributed - no crime is - and a rise from 10 to 20 per month in a city of 8.5 million is not the cataclysm you're acting like it is.

Again: no hate crime is good and this increase is an unalloyed ill. It's something that deserves attention and NYPD resources, as well as public campaigns.

The last thing I want is anyone to be attacked for their religious beliefs.

But the fact that this talking point is heavily botted is indicative of broader initiatives to make sure it stays a talking point disproportionately to its impact.

crowbahr··on Amazon CEO's talks with U.S. officials triggered crackdown on Anthropic models
Cynically: this is an attempt to quash open source or discount model competition through regulatory capture.
crowbahr··on Mornings and nights no longer exist at 47C: A day in the hottest place in India
Not when a datacenter is the size of manhattan
crowbahr··on Meta's ships facial recognition on smart glasses
How many biometrics per minute can every glass in Chicago collect, each one costing 5k? It's not per biometric, it's per violation. Collecting the same face 20x is 20 infractions.
crowbahr··on Is AI Profitable Yet?
Google is making money on selling cloud compute. Their margins have gone from 9% to 32%.

They're soaking up the investor bonanza into AI - Gemini ain't making them money.

For context Cloud Compute made 20bn in Q1, Other services made 90bn.

crowbahr··on Why did Clovis toolmakers choose difficult quartz crystal?
Your example is cultural.
crowbahr··on Kyoto cherry blossoms now bloom earlier than at any point in 1,200 years
And human civilization entirely sprung up during it, all of our nations, our cities, our pastures, our lives are built on the ice age. We need to start cooling the world down and we're doing the opposite
crowbahr··on Turns out your coffee addiction may be doing your brain a favor
Brussels have chemically changed significantly over the past 20 years of genetic engineering - they're more nutritious than ever and are nowhere near as bitter!
crowbahr··on I made ChatGPT and Google tell I'm a competitive hot-dog-eating world champion
If you give your assistant a task and they fall for obvious lies they won't be your assistant long. The point of an assistant is that you can trust them to do things for you.
crowbahr··on Speed up responses with fast mode
Where on earth are you getting these numbers? Why would a SaaS company that is fighting for market dominance withhold 10x performance if they had it? Where are you getting 2.5x?

This is such bizarre magical thinking, borderline conspiratorial.

There is no reason to believe any of the big AI players are serving anything less than the best trade off of stability and speed that they can possibly muster, especially when their cost ratios are so bad.

crowbahr··on Swift is a more convenient Rust (2023)
I do think xcode is the worst IDE I've ever worked in, bar none. Even Eclipse from 2010 was better than xcode from 2025
crowbahr··on Swift on Android: Full Native App Development Now Possible
Flutter has been abandoned by all the large companies - Google is throwing their weight in on KMP and has laid off the flutter teams.
crowbahr··on Swift on Android: Full Native App Development Now Possible
Touching xcode to avoid touching Android is like touching concentrated hydrochloric acid to avoid breathing a fart
crowbahr··on Toys with the highest play-time and lowest clean-up-time
You can get brick sets that are just a bunch of bricks - look up Creative Brick Box or Creative Vehicle Box

Feels just like Grandma's ole box o bricks

crowbahr··on Toys with the highest play-time and lowest clean-up-time
Minecraft: weak magnets
crowbahr··on AI helps ship faster but it produces 1.7× more bugs
He didn't say AI helps you ship with fewer bugs, just faster.

It's faster. It's not better, it's not more stable - the only promise is velocity on initial ship.

Oh you want to follow up? Extend it? Reconfigure? Sry can only go faster.

crowbahr··on Australia begins enforcing world-first teen social media ban
You do know that HN in in the category of social media right?
crowbahr··on Has the cost of building software dropped 90%?
You can't really compare those 2. Agents a re non-deterministic. I can tell Clod to go update my unit test coverage and it will choke itself, burn 200k tokens and then loudly proclaim "Great! I've updated unit test coverage".

I'll kill that terminal, open it again and run the exact same command. 30k tokens, actually adds new tests.

It's hard to "learn" when the feedback cycle can take 30 minutes and result in the agent sitting in the corner touching itself and crooning about what a good boy it is. It's hard to _want_ to learn when you can't trust the damn thing with the same prompt twice.

crowbahr··on Airloom – 3D Flight Tracker
What data source are you using? AeroAPI?
crowbahr··on Cognitive and mental health correlates of short-form video use
The linked study r values are all minor to no effect. -0.37 as an r value is barely correlated. Talk to me when they're up above -.5

How much of it is just constantly being told that SFVs are bad for you?

The linked article is a meta analysis with basically 0 controls that finds a statistical correlation barely better than background noise. Yawn

crowbahr··on Prozac 'no better than placebo' for treating children with depression, experts
That's your opinion, that is not the general opinion of the professionals in the field.

I trust a cohort of scientists significantly more than anonymous strangers online, and you should too.

crowbahr··on Prozac 'no better than placebo' for treating children with depression, experts
> Because the problem's not a "neurochemistry issue" (that theory's been debunked and the "chemicals" in play have never been known), and the solution is "no better than placebo."

It most certainly has not been debunked and mind altering chemicals most certainly do work.

SSRIs have _questionable_ efficacy but that's not the same as proven to have none, which is an exceptionally high bar.

This is close minded dogma no better a religion.

crowbahr··on Cognitive and mental health correlates of short-form video use
Couldn't be further from my experience. I enjoy it, watch for a bit, or even for an hour+, and then put it down. No noticable impact to my ability to focus at all: 5 hours flies by while coding still.

Idk if I'm built different, but I generally doubt it. I find these statements about brain rot to be either hyperbolic or at very least reminiscent of the "violent video games make you kill people IRL" conversations of the 90s/00s

crowbahr··on I don’t need a Steam Machine
Ascribing my entire comment to network effect makes me wonder if you even read it.
crowbahr··on I don’t need a Steam Machine
There's a reason everyone else who comes to take on this "market inefficiency" fails. Amazon threw billions at it. So did Google. So has Epic. And Microsoft.

None of them dethroned steam, so 30% is still the cost to access the steam user base.

If tens of billions can't overcome this "inefficiency" then it sure seems like there might be more to the story than economics 101.

The fact is that Steam has an incredibly loyal _userbase_ and you won't convince them to leave unless steam betrays their trust, which they haven't.

The trust in any competitor is nearly 0 compared with Steam which has been a platform people have loved and used for over a decade now with basically 0 issues. No corporate missteps.

Arguably the biggest controversy is the latest way they made CS2 loot boxes less valuable, popping the insane bubble in the skins market. That's still ultimately good for the average gamer and I expect they'll come out smelling like roses.

crowbahr··on Mullvad VPN present And Then? (Chat Control is back on the menu)
Same. Switched off PIA when they were bought by Malware vendors Kape
crowbahr··on Digital ID, a new way to create and present an ID in Apple Wallet
> There was a post from trailofbits blog recently about how passport crypto works. Kind of related here. > > I wonder if this is some zero knowledge proofs here or what? Reading the passport and its chip implies some terminal authentication capabilities coming from Apple devices. Passport would not allow reading sensitive data from the chip unless the terminal is valid. > > Another question is if Apple is allowed to read your biometric data?

Passport chips aren't that complex, especially not American ones. You just need to transmit part of the MRZ to unlock them (Other ICAO compliant passports have slightly different requirements, still all easily doable for any smart phone with NFC transmit)

The Apple ID isn't a ZKP - IIRC they're doing a CBOR representation of the claims which is signed with their own cert.

crowbahr··on GLP-1 drugs linked to lower death rates in colon cancer patients
In a similar boat (overweight, borderline obese - slightly elevated cholesterol - high stress) and my doc has recommended I look into GLP-1s and maybe ask my insurance which types they do and don't cover.

Worst comes to worst I could go compounding for about $200/mo from what I've seen.

crowbahr··on Why I'm Learning Sumerian
So why am I learning a language that hasn't been spoken in 50 years?
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