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dabbz

166 karma · joined June 26, 2023

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dabbz··on Virtual Oxide Labs: Emulating a Full Oxide Rack
Oxide is doing such fun stuff, really wish I had the skill set needed for their job postings.
dabbz··on The Origin Story of Kid Pix
oooopsss. Uhohhhhh. I can still hear those sounds in my head.
dabbz··on AOSP Source Releases Are So Late Developers Disassemble Libraries to Report Bugs
It's fully your right to want non-webkit for your browser, but just curious. Why? Why does it matter? I've never once wished for firefox to use firefox's engine instead. The UI/sync/extension stuff is all built on top anyway.
dabbz··on Show HN: SIM95 – a browser based 90s PC with it's own internet
I got tired of running 5 tabs to host each service, so I've moved them all under a single server called http://starthere.56k.net/ The index page is a directory to all the fun things I've built so far.
dabbz··on 56k.rip – the 1996 dial-up internet experience
Keeping aggressive expiration could help "cleanup". Make it always required to point to an active and online machine for some duration.

You could just become ICANN and allow anyone to host any TLD they want and keep certain TLDs reserved for yourself/own vetted projects.

I feel like "in-game currency" changes the goal of the system a bit. Though I have considered building PaySimPal service. So maybe not?

I think right now, what resonates with me in this project is just how open and buildable everything is. No forcing function to do things a certain way. Like I was about to go build a basic BIND service to serve DNS traffic over and let my Internet Explorer browser use it for host name resolution. Just, that means only people on IE would be able to view my beautiful works of art.

dabbz··on 56k.rip – the 1996 dial-up internet experience
If you're taking feature requests:

A BIND/DNS service built in so we can point multiple hosts to a single machine (the 5 tabs are burning my browser).

The ability to modify the core OS a bit. Would be fun to work on skins, change default behavior, or add capabilities into the Spark language itself. would love to add screenshot capabilities for screenshare service.

midi/audio sys calls.

dabbz··on 56k.rip – the 1996 dial-up internet experience
I've been having a little too much fun with it honestly. I've tinkered with so far:

Simbook, ColdMail (email server, website for mail), Frostbird (a spark program for checking emails), AskSim (an ask jeeves search engine that actually crawls all of the machines in the network), Simxplorer (An IE browser with a javascript engine built into it), ELIZA (the preLLM chatbot with silly responses), Vapor (a Steam like program downloader that also has Doom and Snake). I'm toying around with a Clippy idea but haven't landed on if I like it or not.

tl;dr I'm having way too much fun

dabbz··on 56k.rip – the 1996 dial-up internet experience
Sounds good: http://simbook.56k.net/
dabbz··on google.com/goto: Google's anti-scraping update
I mean, there’s more privacy protection on payment data than there is for email address and browsing habits. Plus most companies just push out payment handling to stripe. So most websites have little idea who actually transacted with them to begin with (email dependent).
dabbz··on OpenAI Agents API
This bothers me so much with the existing offerings. I start with the chat interface then as soon as I want to get technical/run scripts/automation, I have to copy the context into a fresh code session. So cumbersome.
dabbz··on OpenRouter is joining Stripe
Metronome has been experimenting with real-time payment on usage based billing for tokens. That technology leverages micro payments using crypto. It's cool but all it's doing is moving the accumulated balance from a provider onto your crypto wallet.
dabbz··on GitHub down again? no PR access
I mean one of those makes them look better than the other. That makes it tricky to be able to tell what is truth vs half truth vs a lie. You're right though, based off of what they claim, their great success is the cause of their failure.

How hard is it to up scale their servers though...

dabbz··on Text AI watermarks will always be trivial to remove
I was going to interject that very sentiment. The upfront costs of running any model of value to the average consumer is so large to be basically non-existent. We need hardware to become commoditized and capable of handling LLMs at the scale necessary to enjoy these agentic workflows.
dabbz··on AI is removing the middle class of software engineering?
Hey everyone! I found the COBOL developer!
dabbz··on Stop Killing Games: It's time to sue Sony, join us
Your analogy falls apart somewhere for me but I can't pinpoint the exact correction to make your analogy work for me. Either way I agree. If they don't like only being able to buy digital PS games via Sony's platform, go to one where they can.

That's not the fight I'd personally focus on. I'd personally focus on them revoking digital access after you've "purchased it". Then again, I don't have a game console and I don't "buy" digital media. I either rent via streaming subscription or own the physical.

dabbz··on AMD acquires Taalas to boost inference performance by etching models in silicon
Weird conclusion to draw from my statement. Feels intentionally hostile of an assessment about me, but I digress.
dabbz··on A year of fighting scrapers on my 1.5 million-page website
Machines don't pay my bills though. If the content was free to share widely, then yea, who cares how it's accessed.
dabbz··on AMD acquires Taalas to boost inference performance by etching models in silicon
I see a lot of discourse about it being fast-to-deprecation. But I see it a different way personally.

Modern LLMs are trying to do more with less. Focus on doing the right thing the first time. Even if we squeeze dumb LLMs, the significantly faster speed means quicker iterations. So a bad decision doesn't cost the time and inference costs that it cost before. It theoretically changes the scale of errant token spend.

I compare it to the 1 thousand monkeys on a typewriter. In this case it's 1,000 monkeys with stale training data of everything ever written and the ability to search the web.

dabbz··on The AI Billboards Are Killing SF
Far better than the band 999mb, they don't do well in the gig economy.
dabbz··on AMD acquires Taalas to boost inference performance by etching models in silicon
This is my thought as well. Models have to be intentional about which tokens they burn because there's a real lag time. If you can just fork out 10 different reasoning sessions at once with no regard for token waste/lag, you can compensate a smaller model with just doing more at once with it. No idea if this is reasonably true though.
dabbz··on GitHub Actions and Pages are experiencing degraded availability
My company moved to GH Actions 6 months ago even after I pushed back with a "Are you sure given their reliability issues of late?"

Now I'm stuck twiddling my thumbs with PR checks stuck/failing...

dabbz··on IP and DNS Leaks in WebKit Affecting Proxy Browsers and iCloud Private Relay
There's a PLIST entry possibly relevant to it in `~/Library/Preferences/com.apple.networkserviceproxy.plist`

I couldn't figure out how to get any changes to reflect but maybe it's a good pointer towards a solution?

EDIT: Reading into this, looks like they're very intentional about not allowing arbitrary enable/disable calls to it, likely to prevent a hostile entity from switching it off on unsuspecting users. The systems setting calls an XPC into a daemon that makes a web request, then validates the response from the API to update the PLIST structure.

dabbz··on Online ad giant Adform was hacked, proving once again why ad blockers are needed
My least favorite ones are the ones that fit in the rails to the left and right of the content that scroll with you. You can't click anywhere without an accidental ad click. Using any device without ublock reminds me just how much better life is with it...
dabbz··on Big Food vs. the People
True, we have way too many thematic versions of Monopoly. I'm still missing so many copies.
dabbz··on I'd not buy a LG monitor
Honestly I was more thinking about TVs than monitors but I often forget Dell makes good monitors.
dabbz··on I'd not buy a LG monitor
It's getting really hard to find a solid, reputable brand of screen manufacturers that don't pull this kind of crap. I swore off Samsung screens after their popup ads in phones and TVs. LG was my next choice but this is deterring me even further.
dabbz··on Show HN: Bento - An entire PowerPoint in one HTML file (edit+view+data+collab)
So OP needs to rename their slideshow tool to Claris?
dabbz··on Jellyfin founder Andrew leaves team
I have been using Plex since 2014, paid for the lifetime pass back then. It is by-far the most used piece of software I've ever relied on (excluding any general purpose software like OS/Browser).

I have my family setup on Plex, my automations, my apps, my preferences, etc. I'm so comfortable in Plex that until they do something catastrophic to my experience, I can't find the motivation to train my mother to use another app.

dabbz··on MoonBASIC: A modern BASIC for building 2D and 3D games
This reminds me immensely of DARK Basic built by The Game Creators. It was how I got my start into programming back in the day.
dabbz··on AWS: Inaccurate Estimated Billing Data – $1.7 billion
I've found personally it's better to use AI to build a deterministic script for calculations like that. (anything that manipulates data should be a script not an AI).
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