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fooofw

104 karma · joined November 14, 2020

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fooofw··on Jensen Huang: Those warning on AI apocalypse "have ulterior reasons"
YouTube videos can have multiple simultaneous titles if the uploader decides to A/B test titles (and thumbnails). Up to 3 as it would appear: https://support.google.com/youtube/answer/16391400?hl=en
fooofw··on Grep beats LSP? Why coding agents ignore your fancier tools
> On a noisy TypeScript repository, it improved F1 by 0.246 and used 12% fewer tokens. The useful predictor was lexical noise, not whether the language had strong static types.

What is "lexical noise", which appears to be a key term in the argument, and why is it not defined? Does it mean that an identifier could show up in, say, a docstring in a non-structured way where a semantic tool would not identify it?

Makes sense to me that LLMs, which are language based, would match better with a tool that searches at a language lever rather than at a deeper structured level.

fooofw··on More than half of adults in U.S. say they lack basic statistical understanding
Wouldn't "the typical person has above average number of legs" or some such be better?
fooofw··on Danish high schoolers will have to verbally defend written assignments
This is not general to all subjects in Danish universities. I studied physics in Denmark and while the majority of my exams after the second year match this description (though not all), my impression is that this is not at all the norm. Students in the humanities in my dorm, for example, seemed to have an overwhelming majority of several-day take-home written exams (with no associated oral defense).
fooofw··on Mistral's Shieldstral: 3B open-weights model for multimodal moderation
It seems like you're just clutching at strals now
fooofw··on “We have information that Moonshot distilled Fable for the development of K3”
Lethal self defense?
fooofw··on LinkedIn is searching your browser extensions
How is it even possible that we've reached a point where "yes, this is obvious and pretty unsurprising" is the default response to spying on an industrial scale.
fooofw··on C++ says “We have try... finally at home”
I believe this might be slightly imprecise also.

The traceback is actually shown based on the last-thrown exception (that thrown from the finally in this example), but includes the previous "chained exceptions" and prints them first. From CPython docs [1]:

> When raising a new exception while another exception is already being handled, the new exception’s __context__ attribute is automatically set to the handled exception. An exception may be handled when an except or finally clause, or a with statement, is used. [...] The default traceback display code shows these chained exceptions in addition to the traceback for the exception itself. [...] In either case, the exception itself is always shown after any chained exceptions so that the final line of the traceback always shows the last exception that was raised.

So, in practice, you will see both tracebacks. However, if you, say, just catch the exception with a generic "except Exception" or whatever and log it without "__context__", you will miss the firstly thrown exception.

[1]: https://docs.python.org/3.14/library/exceptions.html#excepti...

fooofw··on Firefox will have an option to disable all AI features
My version of Firefox (146.0 on Debian) has exactly this. If I select a sentence and right-click, I get the menu item "Translate selection to <LANGUAGE>". In the resulting box, I can change the language pair - but the defaults that I have seen were also reasonable.

https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/website-translation has the text: "A new Translate selection feature has been added starting in Firefox version 128, that enables you to highlight and translate selected text."

Edit: Sorry, I misread the comment to say that there was no such menu item. Edited to reflect this.

fooofw··on HTML as an Accessible Format for Papers (2023)
I think this project is based on LaTeXML (https://math.nist.gov/~BMiller/LaTeXML/) which is exactly that (except for the SVG part)
fooofw··on Show HN: Gemini Pro 3 imagines the HN front page 10 years from now
The tokenization can represent uncommon words with multiple tokens. Inputting your example on https://platform.openai.com/tokenizer (GPT-4o) gives me (tokens separated by "|"):

    lower|case|un|se|parated|name
fooofw··on HTML as an Accessible Format for Papers (2023)
It's kind of fun to compare this formulation with the seemingly contradictory official arXiv argument for submitting the TeX source [1]:

> 1. TeX has many advantages that make it ideal as a format for the archives: It is plain text, it is compact, it is freely available for all platforms, it produces extremely high-quality output, and it retains contextual information.

> 2. It is thus more likely to be a good source from which to generate newer formats, e.g., HTML, MathML, various ePub formats, etc. [...]

Not that I disagree with the effort and it surely is a unique challenge to, at scale, convert the Turing complete macro language TeX to something other than PDF. And, at the same time, the task would be monumentally more difficult if only the generated PDFs were available. So both are right at the same time.

[1] https://info.arxiv.org/help/faq/whytex.html#contextual

fooofw··on HTML as an Accessible Format for Papers (2023)
That would (mostly if not always) work in the sense of reproducing the layout of the pages, but would defeat the purpose of preserving the semantic information present in the TeX file (what is a heading, a reference and to what, a specific math environment, etc.) which is AFAIK already mostly dropped on conversion to PDF by the latex compiler.
fooofw··on You can make PS2 games in JavaScript
Why have you failed though? Is the point to try to deceive people to think that XKCD actually published something else? Why not modify the xkcd one without hinding the fact that you modified it?
fooofw··on HTTPS by default
What defines private sites, I wonder – beyond "such as local IP addresses like 192.168.0.1, single-label hostnames, and shortlinks like intranet/"?
fooofw··on To MD - Convert PDFs, Word, HTML and more to Markdown
This made me think of Microsoft's MarkItDown tool/library [1] which seems to have quite the overlap in supported file formats [2,3] and conversion options [4]. I couldn't find any reference to the library on the website, so it may be useful to know about.

[1] https://github.com/microsoft/markitdown

[2] https://tomd.io/#supported-extensions

[3] https://github.com/microsoft/markitdown/tree/main/packages/m...

[4] https://github.com/microsoft/markitdown/blob/8a9d8f15936b206...

fooofw··on Claude Code Checkpoints
Then you've just traded that for lock-in to Cursor, no?
fooofw··on The Size of Adobe Reader Installers Through the Years
pdfjam [1] uses a LaTeX package under the hood, is included with the TeX Live distribution and acts as a wrapper for a LaTeX package. With this, I believe your example would be:

    pdfjam PDF_A.pdf '2-3' PDF_B.pdf '7-23' --outfile joined.pdf
I'll admit that I had to look it up but that only took about 3 minutes (it's an example in the readme).

[1] https://github.com/pdfjam/pdfjam

fooofw··on The Size of Adobe Reader Installers Through the Years
For reference, here's a version with a linear y-axis: https://imgur.com/a/A2D1puk
fooofw··on Dropbox Passwords discontinuation
Your parent comment may refer to requesting and waiting for a login link in, say, an email to authenticate - not SSO.
fooofw··on Password reuse is rampant: nearly half of observed user logins are compromised
Out-of-control single point of failure?
fooofw··on Regex character "$" doesn't mean "end-of-string"
Fortunately, it's pretty simple to test.

    $ printf 'Line with EOL\nLine without EOL' | grep 'EOL$'        
    Line with EOL
    Line without EOL
    $ grep --version | head -n1
    grep (GNU grep) 3.8
fooofw··on Seth Abramson on X: “Get your things together and be ready to go”
Threads is also made by Meta
fooofw··on Circles do not exist
Yes, I agree completely.
fooofw··on Circles do not exist
I was curious, so I looked up arc in the PostScript Language Reference [1]. It contains the following (p. 530):

> The arc is represented internally by one or more cubic Bézier curves (see curveto) approximating the required shape. This is done with sufficient accuracy to produce a faithful rendition of the required arc. However, a program that reads the constructed path using pathforall will encounter curveto segments where arcs were specified originally.

[1] https://www.adobe.com/jp/print/postscript/pdfs/PLRM.pdf

fooofw··on Learn as you search (and browse) using generative AI
I'm not sure that fully explains it here. I see more relevant search results below the "People also watched" section (just checked now). Further down, there is also "For you" and "Previously watched" which have videos of no discernible relevance to the query and these are also followed by again more relevant search results.
fooofw··on Blocking Threads won't be enough to protect privacy once they join the Fediverse
I feel like the fact that Meta (and anyone) can see posts and users regardless of whether or not they are defederated is a bit of a distraction.

However, I do see the point of considering ways for instances to somehow distance themselves from Meta's instance. If another instance/admin was publicly known to comparably engage in pervasive user tracking (both on and off their own websites) and algorithmic attention monopolization, would we not expect many other actors in the fediverse to defederate or otherwise distance themselves from those practices/that instance? Obviously, several instances have decided to do so by premptively saying they will defederate. I'm just saying that I think it makes sense to at least consider it. E.g., compare the labels the data collected by the Threads Android app (https://play.google.com/store/apps/datasafety?id=com.instagr...) to those of the Mastodon one (https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=org.joinmastod...), and I at least see the contrast.

But perhaps this is just me being naively unaware of rampant community-sanctioned indiscriminate collection of user data in the fediverse (I'm not part of it, just curiously observing Meta's entry).

fooofw··on Making IELM (Emacs Lisp REPL) More Comfortable
If we're in the business of listing alternative ways to evaluate elisp (not to diminish IELM or the elisp modes of course), I can think of two other common ways to evaluate elisp.

* Eshell (launched with M-x eshell) is a shell in Emacs which uses a language that has elements from elisp. In particular, expressions in parentheses are evaluated as elisp forms [1]. Eshell is a shell (like e.g. bash), so it also has syntax to conveniently evaluate external commands, though it lacks some common shell functionality such as job control [2] and some types of redirection [3].

* Org Babel elisp source blocks [4,5]: In Org mode, use "#+begin_src elisp" and "#+end_src" to delimit lines with elisp and evaluate using C-c C-c, which will, by default, insert the result of the evaluation below the source block. This can be useful, if you want to keep a more organized record of the evaluated commands and their results in comparison to a REPL.

[1] https://www.gnu.org/software/emacs/manual/html_mono/eshell.h...

[2] https://www.gnu.org/software/emacs/manual/html_mono/eshell.h...

[3] https://www.gnu.org/software/emacs/manual/html_mono/eshell.h...

[4] https://orgmode.org/manual/Working-with-Source-Code.html

[5] https://orgmode.org/worg/org-contrib/babel/languages/ob-doc-...

fooofw··on Replace Jupyter with Emacs Org Mode: Unleash the Power of Literate Programming
For anybody following along with the examples, a few points/tips that might help newcomers:

1. (By default) before you can use Python source blocks, you need to have the Org Babel Python functionality loaded which is most easily done by evaluating the elisp (require 'ob-babel), but there are other ways also [1].

2. The first example, which uses the print function, will not output anything because the Python blocks by default are evaluated inside a function body and the return value is returned to Org [2]. To return the printed output instead, you need the header argument ":results output". There is an example of this syntax later in TFA.

3. If you are serious about replacing (or complementing) other Jupyter tools with Org mode, you might want to eventually look at emacs-jupyter [3], which provides a more advanced handling of outputs and also supports other (i.e. non-Python) kernels.

Also, I don't think I've ever seen anything like the debugging example and when I tried to replicate it out of curiosity, the block simply failed with a bdb.BdbQuit exception. Am I missing something? What is supposed to happen?

[1] https://orgmode.org/manual/Languages.html

[2] https://orgmode.org/worg/org-contrib/babel/languages/ob-doc-...

[3] https://github.com/nnicandro/emacs-jupyter

fooofw··on Google and Amazon Struggle to Lay Off Workers in Europe Due to Labor Laws
Is there anywhere I can learn more about these regulations and what are the differences between different European countries? What Bloomberg writes here is not so concrete beyond requirements for consultations". Are you really not allowed to lay people off to save money?
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