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dmm

6,897 karma · joined February 3, 2008

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dmm··on Evidence of a spying operation by ICE against left-wing social movements
What do you mean by this? This article seems to be mostly about govt surveillance and not gun rights.
dmm··on High Diesel Prices Bankrupted 16 Trucking Companies in Just 30 Days
I'm not saying trucks are bad or that we should get rid of them or that truckers shouldn't be paid or anything like that. If we closed the externality of trucking causing more damage than they pay for then trucking and transportation would get better. The trucking companies would have more information to make decisions about what routes/equipment/etc are worthwhile.
dmm··on High Diesel Prices Bankrupted 16 Trucking Companies in Just 30 Days
> the heaviest users (‘heavy’ both figuratively and literally) invariably pay the largest share

But the point is that the heaviest users(semitrucks) cause almost all of the damage (literally >99%) but don't pay for most of the maintenance. This represents a subsidy of trucking companies. They cause damage that they don't pay for. This is an example of the economic concept of an externality, which is bad and should be eliminated.

dmm··on High Diesel Prices Bankrupted 16 Trucking Companies in Just 30 Days
So you agree this externality should be internalized? What time in the past would have been better to implement this?

Maybe you're right and putting this off is the right decision. If we get automated trucking and those thousands of trucking companies are replaced with a handful of tech companies it might be easier to implement reforms.

dmm··on High Diesel Prices Bankrupted 16 Trucking Companies in Just 30 Days
The point isn't to preserve roads, but to expose the true cost of damage to the industry causing it. It can be phased in over time. Trucking will become more expensive and businesses will respond by optimizing transportation and raising prices. This will be offset by much lower taxes because trucks cause the vast majority of road damage from vehicles.
dmm··on The American Age Is Over
"you aren't going to like what comes after America "

- Leonard Cohen https://genius.com/Leonard-cohen-what-is-coming-21603-annota...

dmm··on How Much Has Trump Made from Crypto? ($1.4B from 2025 Federal Disclosure)
> whataboutisms

Not a Trump supporter but from the ones I've spoken to it's mostly this. Something like, "They all do it, he's just honest about it."

dmm··on Why I'm Not Excited About the Graphene OS and Motorola Partnership
Unlocking the pixels also requires an internet connection, to determine whether the device has any restrictions on it.

From the grapheneos installation instructions: """ On device model variants (SKUs) which support being sold as locked devices by carriers, enabling OEM unlocking requires internet access so that the stock OS can check if the device was sold as locked by a carrier. """

https://grapheneos.org/install/web#enabling-oem-unlocking

dmm··on deSEC – Free Secure DNS
I switched to deSEC because they allow you to create tokens for DNS-01 validation which are tightly scoped to a single subdomain. This means I have a VM running "service1.foo.example.com" which is not publicly available but can still get certs from letsencrypt, but with a token that can't be used to issue certs for other domains.

It works great!

dmm··on New U.S. college grads now have higher unemployment than the average worker
He didn't post a source either. Go look at the Atlanta Fed's wage growth data if you're actually interested.
dmm··on New U.S. college grads now have higher unemployment than the average worker
> It's a k-type curve where the high deciles are getting higher and the lows are getting lower

The lowest quartile of income have had the highest growth the past four years.

dmm··on Green card seekers must leave U.S. to apply, Trump administration says
Yeah it was a bad comment. I really misunderstood the grandparent.
dmm··on Green card seekers must leave U.S. to apply, Trump administration says
I didn't say they were pickpockets. I was trying to point out the absurdity of correcting illegal activity by simply eliminating laws.

I love immigration. We should have lots of immigration! But it should occur within consistently, fairly enforced laws passed by our legislative system. I get that our immigration system is arguably broken and that it's very difficult to pass meaningful legislation, but that doesn't mean we should just allow whoever is president to dictate immigration policy.

dmm··on Learnings from 100K lines of Rust with AI (2025)
What aspects of Rust do you find ugly? Can you provide three examples?
dmm··on The bottleneck was never the code
Are you referring to the author specifically? Or a specific hypocritical person you know? If you're making a general statement about groups of online people you might be falling for the group attribution error[1], where the characteristics of an individual are assumed to be reflective of the whole group.

In any case, two things can be simultaneously true:

1. Writing code is not the bottleneck, as in we can develop features faster than they can be deployed. 2. It's annoying and disruptive to be interrupted when doing work that requires deep focus.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Group_attribution_error

dmm··on 'Point of no return': New Orleans relocation must start now due to sea level
Not even old town is safe.

“Even if you stopped climate change today, New Orleans’s days are still numbered,” he added. “It will be surrounded by open water, and you can’t keep an island situated below sea level afloat. There’s no amount of money that can do that.”

dmm··on 'Point of no return': New Orleans relocation must start now due to sea level
""" “New Orleans is not going to disappear in 10 years or anything like that, but policymakers really should’ve thought about a relocation plan a century ago,” said Dixon """

People have seen this coming for a long time. Here's a classic article about the channelization of the Mississippi by John McPhee from 1987: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20636254

dmm··on Emacs-libgterm: Terminal emulator for Emacs using libghostty-vt
My main use case is emacsclient and vterm as a terminal multiplexer, in place of something like tmux or screen.

But even locally I use vterm. A terminal is just text, why wouldn't I manipulate it with emacs? At any time you can switch to `copy-mode` and it behaves like a read-only text buffer that you can manipulate as you please.

dmm··on On a Boat
Pull-based streaming can work with webrtc. I implemented it for my custom ip camera nvr solution. I just open N streams on the client and when one is deactivated (typically by scrolling it out of the viewport), the client sends an unsubscribe message over a separate control channel and the server just stops sending video until they resubscribe.

I'm currently switching to a quic-based solution for other reasons, mainly that webrtc is a giant blackbox which provides very limited control[1], yet requires deep understanding of its implementation[2] and I'm tired[3].

I looked at moq-lite but decided against it for some reason. I think because I have <5 clients and don't need the fanout. The auth strategy is very different than what I currently use too.

[1] Why is firefox now picking that (wrong) ice candidate?

[2] rtp, ice, sdp, etc

[3] webrtc isn't bad for the video conferencing use-case but anything else is a pain

dmm··on I'm 60 years old. Claude Code killed a passion
> I could use AI and have a working solution an hour later.

That sounds really cool. You should share what you used.

> The goal was not to become a Bluetooth archaeologist. The goal was to solve the problem.

I'm sympathetic to this view. It seems very pragmatic. After all, the reason we write software is not to move characters around a repo, but to solve problems, right?

But here's my concern. Like a lot of people, I starting programming to solve little problems my friends and I had. Stuff like manipulating game map files and scripting ftp servers. That lead me to a career that's meant building big systems that people depend on.

If everything bite-sized and self-contained is automated with llms, are people still going to make the jump to be able to build and maintain larger things?

To use your example of the BLE battery monitor, the AI built some automation on top of bluez, a 20+ year-old project representing thousands of hours of labor. If AI can replace 100% of programming, no-big-deal it can maintain bluez going forward, but what if it can't? In that case we've failed to nurture the cognitive skills we need to maintain the world we've built.

dmm··on US plans online portal to bypass content bans in Europe and elsewhere
Incitement is only illegal when "directed to inciting or producing imminent lawless action".
dmm··on I guess I kinda get why people hate AI
> The classical cultural example is the Luddites, a social movement that failed so utterly

Maybe not the best example? The luddites were skilled weavers that had their livelihoods destroyed by automation. The govt deployed 12,000 troops against the luddites, executed dozens after show trials, and made machine breaking a capital offense.

Is that what you have planned for me?

dmm··on The US is flirting with its first-ever population decline
Much more likely is that conditions for elder care will continuously degrade until MAID becomes most people's choice.
dmm··on The US is flirting with its first-ever population decline
> Boom. Done. You had the answer already and just didn't reconcile your own thoughts.

TFR has been falling in the US since the 1800s, long before birth control.

dmm··on AI generated music barred from Bandcamp
whipper is built on cdparanoia but uses the AccurateRip database to verify the accuracy of your rip: https://github.com/whipper-team/whipper

Or you can run EAC in wine.

dmm··on Anker goes big with new whole home backup system
Unfortunately, many of these system don't offer any kind of local control, like the ability to monitor and set charge level. You have to use a cloud service with Ecoflow systems, for example.
dmm··on Anker goes big with new whole home backup system
LiFePo4 are generally safer and less prone to thermal runaway. The safety standard for home energy storage systems is UL9540 (UL9540A is different).
dmm··on Anker goes big with new whole home backup system
Does this system allow local control and monitoring, ie without a cloud service? Ecoflow does not, although someone has reverse engineered the bluetooth protocol for some models.

Is it UL9540(UL energy storage system safety standard) certified? I didn't see it listed in the specs but several of the ecoflow models are.

dmm··on Anna's Archive loses .org domain after surprise suspension
> We recommend checking our Wikipedia page for the latest domains.

I wonder how wikipedia feels being used as DNS?

EDIT: Apparently this is a well known practice. Some interesting discussion here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40008383

dmm··on Staying ahead of censors in 2025
> applied by a judicial system that is not the executive branch

You have the right to a trial. Defending yourself from a Federal felony charge only costs $250k+.

Given recent events, I think undermining civil liberties to expand executive powers is crazy.

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