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godshatter

1,893 karma · joined January 29, 2016

godshatter.at.hn

Living in a small town in the mountains, working as a developer for a land-grant university.

I code on my own time mostly in C. I'm currently working on the following projects:

* an entry for the Hutter Prize * building a bot to play go, reworking an old idea. Not using AI. * a rogue-like factory builder and exoplanet explorer (just getting started)

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godshatter··on AI is forcing us to pay off 40 years of technical debt
I wonder how many vulnerabilities exist in each project, and how long it will take for all of them to be patched (and any new vulnerabilities from the patches are also patched) until we get a bug-free system everywhere.

There's enough new code being written to feed the AI vulnerability finding machine that I don't see a way out of this mess anytime soon.

godshatter··on Charles Tandy, the mastermind behind Radio Shack
I could easily be misremembering. I know it was a CoCo I, so it must have been 32k instead.
godshatter··on Charles Tandy, the mastermind behind Radio Shack
I still have my Color Computer I in a box somewhere in the garage, with the original large cassette tape player I used to read and write cassette tapes with. I've probably forgotten exactly what volume I had to keep it at to get it to read the tapes. As a dumb kid, I managed to get the keyboard swapped out (hated the chiclet one it came with), and I think I found someone who swapped out the 16K it came with for (iirc) 128K. I should really see if it boots. Or even turns on.
godshatter··on Google will turn off search for schools that reject AI
Google really is an evil, enshittified company now. I see it every day when I'm on YouTube with an ad-blocker. "Experiencing interruptions?" Yeah, Google, thanks for fucking with me. If you don't want me viewing your videos, don't make them accessible on the standard protocols.

There are a host of other search engines. I use search.brave.com myself (after leta.mullvad.com was decommissioned).

Students will learn about other search engines, and about how corporations are not your friends. Both good lessons to learn.

godshatter··on The Ford Privacy Promise: You're in Control of Your Data
It's in one of the questions you have to open to see the answer to. The answer they is simply "No".
godshatter··on Valve "played capitalism so well they broke it" and now Steam can't be replaced
I'm not a fan of that, either. But they have made gaming on Linux move from the Tux Racer days to the current state of almost every game I want to play is playable on my favorite OS, so I can cut them a little slack for previous obviously bad decisions. Compared to almost any other corporate overlord we might have had, they seem to me to be by far the best that we could reasonably have hoped for.
godshatter··on Genie 4
Still, it's local, and I can't wait to see what it can do now that I know it exists.
godshatter··on Genie 4
> I agree that this technology is absolutely world changing, and am cautiously eager to see what comes of it, but it just bums me out, perhaps needlessly, that the people at the helm can be so artless, unreflective. Whatever.

This is something your average person can play around with. The filmmakers have been fumbling the ball a lot lately (not all the time, though) and I can't wait to see what rises out of the average populous. Lots of crap expected, for sure, but there will be gems in there that I'm willing to bet will blow away what we've seen in the industry. Kind of how indie game companies are eating AAA's lunch lately.

godshatter··on JAXA is about to perform a Phobos sample return mission
Apparently five Venus missions (DAVINCI, VERITAS, Envision, Venus Life Finder, and Venus Orbiter) all in the next five years or so: https://www.space.com/astronomy/venus/these-5-venus-missions...

For Europa, Europa Clipper Mission (already on the way): https://science.nasa.gov/mission/europa-clipper/mission-time...

... and JUICE (already on the way): https://www.esa.int/Science_Exploration/Space_Science/Juice

There might be others, those are just what I found in a quick search.

godshatter··on There's never been a better time to go into math (by: 3blue1brown) [video]
Humans should focus on coming up with conjectures and new problems to solve. I don't see LLMs doing that.
godshatter··on It's still ok to enjoy programming
I have found a different method of using an AI when I'm making a hobby project. I have convinced it to only give me enough information about a topic such that I can have a chance at intuiting the rest. When I get stuck, I ask it specific questions about what I'm trying to code, or standard ways of getting around errors I'm encountering or making particular constructs work. We have long conversations about the goal I'm after and what might be involved in achieving it.

I don't use any code from the AI, and I don't give it code to look at, other than as something I have completed in the past. I'm not asking for code review, and I'm not asking it to optimize things for me. This works quite well for me. I learn more, and I keep doing what I consider the fun stuff.

It is similar to asking the AI for tricks on getting through a particularly harsh level in a video game, or how to get better at certain actions when playing. I'm not asking the AI to play the game, that's the fun part. I'm asking it how I can get better at it myself.

Also, as an early gen-Xer, I don't need anyone validating my enjoyment of something, thanks. I'll enjoy it whether the author likes it or not.

godshatter··on Iosevka is an open-source, sans-serif and slab-serif monospace font
I'm still in the "tabs for indentation, spaces for alignment" camp. If you adhere to it, it makes your code look nice on any tab size.
godshatter··on Publishers Killed the Paperback, Then Blamed Readers
I'm glad I'm not the only one. I can't do anything else if I'm listening to a podcast or an audio book, I lose the thread. So I end up just sitting there listening. I'd much rather read the book in whatever form because I get way more out of it, presumably because of the effort I have to put into it.
godshatter··on Character.ai has initiated voluntary Chapter 11 bankruptcy
People are, in fact, animals.
godshatter··on "Just Ask Claude" Is a Rare and Valuable Skill
You do give them something. All the data they can collect on you that might make them even a few pennies somewhere.
godshatter··on 'Jonathan' is the oldest land animal on Earth
There really is an xkcd for everything.
godshatter··on “Math 2.0” will need to value mathematical progress more holistically
I think everyone is missing the "...that nobody has thought of" part. You can have it switch known abstractions, but can it come up with one on it's own that doesn't exist in it's training data?
godshatter··on Classic PC demoscene productions running natively in the browser
I always tend to think of the phrase "comfort kills" when I hear this kind of thing. The journey is at least as important as the end result.

Have you ever soured on a video game because you downloaded a "god mode" cheat?

godshatter··on ChatGPT is adding real cartoonists' signatures to fake New Yorker cartoons
Do they even have the equivalent of a game loop? I'll bump them up a notch when ChatGPT texts me, wanting to continue the conversation we were having yesterday.
godshatter··on LLMs may have helped my RSI
What helped my RSI was learning a new computer layout (dvorak in my case). It went away and has stayed gone for 25-ish years. Keeping bikeyboardal between qwerty and dvorak probably helps.
godshatter··on Vibecoding isn't as fun as writing code by hand
I've been programming for fun for decades, at work and at home. I have no desire to have someone or something else write my code for me. However, I've managed to convince ChatGPT that I like to be mentored in a way that allows me to build intuition instead of just having the answer given to me (or worse) the code to build it. I'm building something like AlphaZero in C in my own way without any third party libraries, going my own way, building it as I go along and discussing how it all works with the AI. I find this even more fun than just trying it on my own.
godshatter··on Pixel 11 doesn't yet meet the GrapheneOS security standards and may be skipped
5% of a $500b market? Sign me up.
godshatter··on Ask HN: What are you reading?
I'm on Book Seven of DCC. Very fun. Looking forward to reading Book Eight.
godshatter··on Bug: Border radius has infected VSCode editor
I don't use VS Code, but when I look at the before and after in the video I can hardly tell the difference. I think the "border radius" problem is overwhelmed by the "too much crap on the screen" problem for me to really notice it that much.
godshatter··on I'm Tired of Being on the Network
My phone is in my pocket all the time basically, along with my keys and my wallet. I use it to respond to text messages from friends and family, read books on the Kindle app, check the weather report, and occasionally check Teams to see why my watch has been vibrating constantly with notifications for the last twenty minutes. Oh, and to talk on the phone once in a blue moon.

I get that I'm an outlier, but I'd worry more about the people that launch it across the room the minute they get home. Of course, if you're always picking it up and checking social media, that's also a problem.

godshatter··on Ideas on modernizing the open-source desktop
> I think he's bang on with his observation that overlapping windows are a relic.

The paradigm of setting windows on the desktop strategically placed so parts of the title bars or portions of windows that can be clicked without issue are visible can be a really useful one. Combine this with virtual desktops and it works nicely so you don't have one humongous blob of everything but a few strategically placed windows dedicated to one task in each virtual desktop, overlapping so that each window is large enough to use.

I'm not a big fan of tiled windows. I tend to focus on one window at a time and if I am focusing on just one, then a large amount of screen space is wasted.

So please don't just take that away because some dev somewhere is a fan of tiling windows.

godshatter··on Disney+: New user agreement allows ads before movies in all subscriptions
People making passion projects for free don't owe anyone a business model.
godshatter··on AI Has No Wisdom and Neither Will You
I've been taking a "help me help myself" approach to interactions with LLMs. I might run my plan on how I'm going to build something past an AI asking it to critique it. I then incorporate that info into my original plan, or not. However, I am responsible for the design, I write the code. I started doing this because for decades I've been building my own programs since I learned to code just for the sheer fun of it (like many here) and I don't want to give that up to LLMs. I might as well let them play my video games for me.

I wish more people would at least consider this idea.

godshatter··on Disney+: New user agreement allows ads before movies in all subscriptions
The people who were doing this on the early internet were not trying to make a living off of it, they were just doing it because they enjoyed it and wanted to share what they built with the world. If you could cover your server costs then that was considered a win.
godshatter··on Disney+: New user agreement allows ads before movies in all subscriptions
I wasn't sure which of the parameters was causing it. Looks like ad blocking is the one, then.
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