HNHacker News
TopNewBestAskShowJobs

geocar

6,362 karma · joined May 7, 2008

http://geocar.sdf1.org

geocar at sdf.org

if you used to email me at lonestar, that address no longer works.

submissionscomments
geocar··on English: A vs. An
Try making it with "a" - if thing can be "a thing" then it could be "the thing" but if it can't be "a thing" it definitely can't be "the thing" either.
geocar··on I built non-autoregressive decision models with RL a year ago
Hi I want to explain that arxiv is not "publishing a paper" - it's a step up perhaps from putting it on your own website, but this is not what is meant by professional academics when they talk about "publishing" (even when they work for big AI companies).

Your "papers" have only a single author and no current citations. It is not clear you are able to work with other people. The papers claim to offer results but no theory about why those results are the best possible. They read like sales whitepapers not scientific work. Reddit comments on the thread you linked to said they weren't able to reproduce your work.

I'm not looking to buy magic beans for my sales team.

geocar··on Of Gods and Languages: On "When God Spoke Greek" (2013)
Okay, wait a minute.

There were zero Hebrew Bibles at that time.

The Bologna scroll is found seventy(ish) times in greek and hebrew (and other languages) in the Qumran caves, along with a bunch of other stuff. Each of those times is a greek-literate persons' "bible". And they're all a little different. And they have their own notes in them too. They were probably paid to do it. At least some of them said they were rabbis.

Biblical scholars don't consider "The Septuagint" (Egyptian) to be any single translation and why they use the term "Majority Text" and stuff like that, to justify grouping all that stuff into "their" New Testaments'.

If it were possibly so simple as that, there probably wouldn't be so many forms of christianity.

geocar··on Of Gods and Languages: On "When God Spoke Greek" (2013)
> Reading any of this ancient text is like tourism.

You may enjoy the "map" on page two:

https://web.archive.org/web/20081031050603/http://www.tniv.c...

geocar··on Stabilizing Rust's Never Type
I don’t.

My software gets done.

The idea that it would suddenly not be done because the compiler upgraded sounds like a potentially limitless amount of future work. Why would I want to invest in something that promises that?

geocar··on Show HN: Everything a web page can learn about you, in plain English
A lot of this is just wrong; the only things they got right is that I can read English and I have an iPhone.

I’m surprised it got my timezone and location wrong. I’m less surprised they miscounted the number of speakers and my brand of gpu so confidently.

A big problem with being so wrong is I can’t use this to show anyone how tracking works online, because this is nothing like how tracking is actually done on line.

On the other hand, it’s a great advertisement for Apple.

geocar··on Why Emacs Consult async searches feel slow and how to speed them up
Cool story bro.

I've got an emacs uptime measured in years, so I have no idea what you're talking about, but I'm happy that you're happy.

geocar··on Ancient cave art suggests first known humans in Ireland walked over from Wales
There were no Brythonic languages 15,000 years ago.

What are you talking about?

geocar··on Why Emacs Consult async searches feel slow and how to speed them up
It's possible to determine good values automatically: Measure your typing speed.

You can do it in the background with:

https://pavpanchekha.com/blog/emacs-keylogger.html

and periodically update the latency parameters to be just over your natural typing speed.

geocar··on Navier-Stokes – Tristan Buckmaster [pdf]
Bullshit.

Ain’t no way you read one 100 page paper let alone two with enough understanding to make such a claim.

You ought to be ashamed of yourself.

geocar··on Navier-Stokes – Tristan Buckmaster [pdf]
He seemed to know a lot about what was going on in the state of the art despite not being a fluid dynamics expert or having any in “the project”, and absolutely nothing about what his own employees did with Tristan.

The most uncomfortable piece is where he shows screenshots “proving” his earnestness is unrewarded instead of the chats that are actually being complained about.

That he does so with tremendous gymnastics is perhaps soothing to investors, but every researcher I show this post to today says “see I knew ‘AI’ would steal my research”

So yeah, maybe we are reading different things.

geocar··on How to build a printer
> printing has never really been a thing from text editors I think.

It's always been a thing: We programmed on paper before we had screen editors, and so early screen editors have always had a way to murder trees on demand:

In vi it's :ha

In emacs it's M-x print-buffer

> It has been a while since I printed a plain text file, but I guess there's still a similar command available with some research.

`lp myfile.txt`

I still prefer using hardcopy for reading/debugging.

geocar··on “Tweet” and the bird logo apparently enter the public domain
> The core reason to enforce trademarks is not to fluff the corporation that holds it but to let the public be confident in the name.

Nonsense. The core reason to enforce trademarks is to prove that you have it.

The yo-yo used to be a trademark too, but the problem was what else do you call it? If the "owner" of a trademark cannot defend it, they don't have it. That's how trademark law is very different than copyright (which is implicit and automatic): You can lose a trademark even if you register it and popularise it, if you can't prove that the trademark represents your actual trade.

> [I think] the trademark should hold for as long as a reasonable person can be confused by the new Twitter regardless of people's dislike towards Elon.

That's your opinion man. Thankfully the law doesn't work that way.

I don't even know whether you mean X (the new thing that was once twitter) or tweet (the new thing that claims to will-be what twitter once was)

> I may be biased because I still go to Twitter via twitter.com.

and that didn't help in the slightest, but domain squatting is very common on the Internet.

geocar··on Go grandmaster Shin defeats AI KataGo with a two-stone handicap
What exactly do you think the difference is?

If you have an LLM add 2+2, it is doing a tremendous number of additions and multiplications it doesn't have to, same as us, and I am not sure the LLM can answer any more questions about that process than we can about ourselves.

geocar··on Go grandmaster Shin defeats AI KataGo with a two-stone handicap
> It's never made sense to me that so many go players study AI go play in the hope of emulating it in a human game.

> We're not machines. We can't do thousands of Monte Carlo tree searches per second.

You sound so sure of that, but I have seen people catch a ball, and I am not so sure that any artificial person should be any more aware of the tremendous maths they are "solving"

From the perspective of a game with far fewer rules, "trying to imitate AI" might not mean anything like what you are thinking.

geocar··on Google avoids a breakup of its ad tech business
Ok, so "ad tech" is basically situations where someone pays you to run their ad network, like a newspaper or a magazine or something who sells their own ads to people. Google used to call this "Doubleclick for Publishers" (DFP) and don't anymore to be confusing, but I am going to use the old names so it is easier to tell you what each part of the business does.

When someone sells "ads" they are selling the placement itself. When advertisers buy this, they use "AdWords" or "Doubleclick for Advertisers".

Many DFP users got a checkbox one day permitting Google to sell ads and checked this. As a result, Google was able to outcompete _every_ ad publisher, and now "ad tech" doesn't make money buy "ads" does.

Google is right that they cannot separate them, but is lying about why: Neither unit would be profitable without the monopoly, because quite frankly if someone else could sell ads without sucking a ton of money off the top to make a failing self-driving car company, they would and simply win on price.

geocar··on Over 170k Nonprofits Lost All Their Data. Is Microsoft to Blame?
We also have revenue. They're a public company.

You can look all this stuff up yourself.

geocar··on Over 170k Nonprofits Lost All Their Data. Is Microsoft to Blame?
Does it now.

Azure's cost of revenue is someplace between 14% (Productivity and Business Processes) and 36% (Intelligent Cloud). Software is 1%.

Looks to me like Software pays for the whole thing.

geocar··on Impulse Tracker
I remember FastTracker needed the overscan to tell you if you were in Edit mode or not (or I guess you could just try keyjamming). I think I saw someone announced a clone recently and I noticed they didn't implement that. Now that you say this I wonder if their only experience was in an emulator.

But we still have snow: remember rowhammer? Basically snow on purpose. So I'm not so worried that kids will lose knowledge of analog effects just because we don't have CRTs anymore.

geocar··on How Bluesky draws its logo on screenshots
> iOS and MacOS have a large number of built-in accessibility features.

Great. Which one is sending a "do I know this person?" message to my friend?

Because it _used_ to be taking a screenshot.

> Taking a screenshot of the screen is not necessary.

Who are you to tell me what is necessary?

Seriously. What the fuck.

Someone who takes a screenshot of something, and gets anything other than a screenshot is potentially being harmed in ways you don't understand, and you say it isn't necessary like you know that or something?

geocar··on How Bluesky draws its logo on screenshots
> it doesn’t accidentally end up in a screenshot

Your banking app probably has an option to disable that because it's a legal requirement in so many places: People who can't see need to use assistive tools, and that includes screenshots and friends. If you are using a tiny/stupid bank in the US, file a ADA claim and get some money. In the EU check your Ombudsman.

No, it's so you can't screen-record Netflix. The bank doesn't care about that because it's not a liability issue to them, just fetishism; no way they pay Apple and Google for this capability.

Apple and Google should step in and allow users to remove these shenanigans with a little button on the screenshot preview screen, but resist this because of Netflix et al.

geocar··on Impulse Tracker
It's an old/good trick. The linux kernel offers an ioctl to set the font tables, and has for years. I think the kms people want to remove them which is a little sad.

Until then you can also use a tool called SVGATextMode to set the registers and get 80x50 or even a 160x100. I still think text-mode is great. I don't know very much about FreeBSD; I last used OpenBSD almost 20 years ago. Before Linux my unix was Solaris or SCO.

These days, I have a tegra (nvidia arm64) system and it still has a x86 vga bios in there(!!!) so linux actually ships an x86 emulator to "read" the outb/w instructions. Amazing.

geocar··on Impulse Tracker
> I don't know how IT got PC speaker emulation down, but they did IIRC through some sort of high precision timer magic such that it didn't need a sound card per se

You can check!

https://github.com/jthlim/impulse-tracker/blob/main/SoundDri...

No magic I can see.

> basically by copying whatever glyphs would be under/around the mouse cursor to each sacrificial replacement glyph and dynamically drawing a fraction of a mouse cursor over each, and then writing the magic text chars to the text buffer.

Exactly correct.

> legacy FreeBSD text console

I never knew that. I wrote one for Linux because I like the visual feedback of what row I'm on by the mouse cursor changing.

geocar··on an ambiguity in C89 which will never be fixed
I don't think it's bad enough to think of them as an adversary: I think letting the compiler do a little of the boring stuff is ok, and for the most part I am rarely surprised by this stuff. I don't -O3 and -funroll-loops and just forget-about-it either - I choose each of the -f options individually based on a combination of my understanding of what kinds of transformations they do, testing, and whether I am prepared to continuously keep those things in mind when programming.

What are you thinking of?

geocar··on Impulse Tracker
Hi. You also might like to know about https://schismtracker.org which tries very hard to work like Impulse Tracker (especially if you enable its "classic mode")

And maybe if you are a text mode linux user who liked Impulse Tracker, you will also enjoy this: https://github.com/geocar/mm/

geocar··on an ambiguity in C89 which will never be fixed
void* and void(*)() are just not guaranteed to be the same size. If the latter is larger then those "implementation defined aspects" are what kicks in. It's nothing to do with the int.

In some systems functions are smaller, since they're gate addresses in a jump table (who has more than 64k functions?), so that's no problem.

But in some systems functions are bigger, and PCDOS systems running in real mode this was very common, and in those cases you'd need to get the extra bits from someplace else (union trick), or just design things another way.

geocar··on an ambiguity in C89 which will never be fixed
> I had to mine function prototypes out of all the code for exactly this reason.

The program that does this is called cproto and it was available back on comp.sources.unix as early as 1989 (if you find yourself with a time machine) and these days is available on nearly every Linux distro.

geocar··on Tracking down the 16-year-old WAL-reset SQLite bug
> SQLite has a "lite" in the name for a reason

I would not think of SQLite as "lite" anything. It's SQL In The Executable.

It has a better security and data-durability track record than both Postgres and MySQL, and often beats them in the sorts of things applications do with databases:

https://sqlite.org/speed.html

> it's often pushed into places where it's being asked to do things it was never really designed for

https://sqlite.org/whentouse.html

https://sqlite.org/hirely.html

Seems like it absolutely is "designed" for this use case.

geocar··on Os8088: A powerful Mac-like OS for the IBM XT, 286, 386
The IBM 1501 PGC (640x480x256) was available in 1983.
geocar··on Software development with AI is starting to feel like cooking steak
> The temperature when it makes contacts with the ground beans. You could certainly boil it and then let it cool first, but that'd take a lot of extra work.

It's not so much work with the right tool: I have a button on my kettle that does exactly that, and another button that will use a little thermostat to keep it warm. Works great.

https://www.sageappliances.com/en-gb/product/bke825?sku=SKE8...

← PreviousPage 2 of 34Next →