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harrall

1,515 karma · joined November 23, 2024

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harrall··on Mars Bar from 1991 found – and it's 20g bigger than today's
McDonald’s has been 1/10th pound since 1950.
harrall··on Taxi drivers rarely die of Alzheimer's
The article doesn’t say taxi drivers are immune to Alzheimer’s. It specifically talks about having more cognitive reserve, which means having “more brain” to atrophy. Essentially Alzheimer’s makes their hyper-developed hippocampus become that of an average’s person because they started off higher up.

Being intelligent doesn’t mean you still learn new things as you age. Using your brain doesn’t do anything, it’s using your brain in novel ways.

That companion is also bunk. Two entirely different diseases.

harrall··on Taxi drivers rarely die of Alzheimer's
The study accounts for that.

Delay your aging by using your brain a fuck ton, all the time, learning brand new things nowhere near anything you already know.

harrall··on Almost no skill required to cook a steak
Same but I’m sure my sense of smell is weaker (or average?). On the other hand, my sense of color differentiation is extremely fine.

Unsurprisingly my interests are very color-dominant (design, art, fashion) and I do not care for anything where smell matters (wine, coffee, flowers).

harrall··on How Hollywood stopped making movies in Hollywood
The cost of housing is probably the #1 reason and, in my opinion, California’s biggest problem.

California as a whole is still doing pretty well but high housing cost is slowly pulling out the rug from under the state.

But the California legislature does know that and has forced many cities to start building housing but there is still a lot work still in flight.

harrall··on Google fixed more Chrome bugs in June than over the past two years, thanks to AI
I’d say it’s not so much senses but defining what success means.

If you want to learn darts or perfect parallel parking for example, most of the increase in accuracy comes from simply but very deliberately pointing out to your brain where you wanted to land versus where it did land.

We like to usually just do things and hope for the best. Defining success is not something we automatically do and naturally we don’t do it with AI either.

harrall··on Google fixed more Chrome bugs in June than over the past two years, thanks to AI
If I were to be real, my coworkers that post AI responses straight rarely had insightful comments before AI.
harrall··on The lost civic life of movie rental stores
Supposedly only ~10-15% of adults use DoorDash and Instacart in the US.

In 2026, most people don’t use technology to buy groceries or order food. Those people are a minority.

harrall··on Should you wash your solar panels?
It’s not just emotions, it’s a sign that, when presented with something annoying that you should do but not strictly required, it shows that you pushed through and did it anyway.

It doesn’t prove that you’ve been generally on top of things for the lifetime of the house but the inverse situation where you couldn’t clean one time for guests sure doesn’t.

harrall··on Is this the end of the once-mighty GoPro?
Red Bull doesn’t just market, they bankroll and support.

Most companies just sponsor a team or something, but Red Bull has paid for the baseline infrastructure of many sports.

harrall··on Rocketlab acquires Iridium
I 100% agree but Starlink is the only profitable space division of SpaceX.

The truth is diverting money to space exploration is not that popular.

We only got the moon because we were in a battle with the Soviet Union about capitalism vs. communism. It was never about space or science. The instant the Soviet Union collapsed, we reduced NASA’s projects and budgets.

So while I’m not a fan of the circumstances, I need some way for money to go to space exploration and I’m riding this like people rode the Cold War as an excuse to build a moon rocket.

harrall··on Captcha proves you're human. HATCHA proves you're not
But since you built the bot, you can have it do anything? Answer all HATCHAS and then do anything according to my instructions?
harrall··on Unauthorized alert sent to cell phones across Brazil
But the architecture doesn’t matter as much as the implementation. You can write standards however strict but Bob might not care.

Now you could try to enforce more onerous requirements but then people will simply just find an alternative — my own area has its own alerts on top of whatever else is already there.

Technical solutions are important but past some point, you’re dealing with a product or people problem and further technical improvements bring marginal benefit.

harrall··on Developers don't understand CORS (2019)
It’s easy to understand but most people don’t naturally think of ways people try to break in. Without thinking about that, the importance of security is low.

It isn’t a knowledge thing (though it could be), or a capability thing, or intelligence. It’s pure mindset.

Ask yourself: is the average person noticing holes in fences and trying random doorknobs… probably not.

But on the other hand, most security people don’t think of product or UX (but some might) so that’s why you have roles.

harrall··on Unauthorized alert sent to cell phones across Brazil
It’s not a technical problem. And the problem is that it’s not centralized.

Everyone and their mom has their own system, managed by different people with different standards.

It’s like USB cables — yes there are strict technical standards but when you have a million different manufacturers, they all do it differently and some cut corners and bend the rules how they want to.

Look at how two different cities handle their water supply or their police — different management, different priorities.

harrall··on CSSQuake
CSS is a general rendering solution, not something built for rendering 3D games.

And no one has spent any time optimizing 3D transforms to make a game workable because no one would be able to justify the use of their time like that. It wouldn’t even give you brownie points ‘cause most people would just ask “why?”

harrall··on GPT-5.5 hallucinates 3x more than MIT-licensed GLM-5.2
In cognitive science, it appears your brain has two modes of thinking:

- A very parallel type of computation that is fast and generally accurate and integrates hundreds of variables. It’s sometimes labeled as intuition or system 1 thinking.

- A much slower, step by step, analytical type, commonly linked with your pre-frontal cortex (one of the newest parts of the brain). Sometimes called system 2 thinking.

Maybe the way the universe works is that all computation more or less is one of those two types. In which case, an LLM alone is only the first part, which is often right but its results also cannot ever be proven.

harrall··on Hyundai buys Boston Dynamics
That’s only if you look at the final price without understanding the makeup of that price.

The components of computation have been getting cheaper every year… it hasn’t lately because the demand for memory suddenly massively started outstripping supply.

harrall··on How to feed a dictator
But I think that is overly presumptuous though.

Some people have a different moral framework. Some people think Saddam’s brutal dictatorship was for the better because it finally brought stability. When forced to choose between stability and freedom, they choose stability.

There are also just simply amoral people too who just don’t care.

So I wouldn’t automatically assume someone working in an “evil” regime as “trapped as a cog” — they might frankly be OK with it. This is why sometimes just cutting off the head doesn’t enact change.

harrall··on How Japan's railways stayed one while splitting apart
Decaying rural areas happen in every country, throughout history, throughout time. It’s just how the world works.

The only reason it recently reversed in the US was due to COVID.

Second, many countries are modern in some ways and backwards in some other way. To label a country as modern or not is silly.

Here how it works: I build a porch today and my neighbor builds a pool. In 30 years, he builds a porch but I build a pool. If you cherry pick porches, I look outdated and he looks modern, but it’s reversed if you cherry pick pools!

harrall··on Sixty percent of US consumers say 'AI' in brand messaging is a turnoff
I’m in constant code switch mode.

Among a larger % of my tech friends, AI is cool.

Among my non-tech friends, AI has been uncool.

Among by artist friends, AI has been really uncool for years.

I’m personally in a “water is wet” position.

harrall··on Stop Using JWTs
JWT is secure.

I just noticed that after JWT was created, people would just slap on JWT like an end-all because JWT sounded secure and they thought it was all that they needed to do.

That’s my only “problem” with JWT but to be honest, people will build insecure systems anyway.

harrall··on The time the x86 emulator team found code so bad they fixed it during emulation
A big portion of GPU driver updates are actually just that, same with Windows updates.

Windows 95 patched a bug in SimCity just to get it to work.

harrall··on What happened to nerds?
I don’t know about everyone else but “nerds” have never had a positive image to the general population.

Nerds as honest or incorruptible? In popular media, from Revenge of the Nerds to The Simpsons to Big Bang Theory, the defining feature of “nerds” is that they have poor social skills and less regard for their fellow humans.

Now people like Jeff Bezos or Elon Musk look like the nerds that now have money and power! Ah ha! “It doesn’t matter what others think of me now! This is revenge for looking down on me before!”

harrall··on Hetzner Price Adjustment
But VPS providers share the same hardware and overprovision. They don’t need to add new hardware every time a new customer signs up.

If you buy a dedicated server at Hetzner, you actually need immediate hardware.

Many VPS providers also just resell Hetzner, OVH or other dedicated servers so they won’t increase the price until their own provider does.

harrall··on What the Fuck Happened to Nerds
It’s not a “nerds” thing.

Most CEOs are completely private.

Most people don’t post their thoughts on Facebook on random topics either.

Because when most people post all their private thoughts on matters publicly, it’s kind of embarrassing.

harrall··on Not everyone is using AI for everything
This isn’t an AI problem. You can’t ask anyone to “be truthful” on any subject because everyone sees through their own world perspective.

Two people might say “they love camping!!”

But does it mean…

- Going camping twice/year and partying by the river?

- Or going 20 times per year, sometimes on 4 week long trips?

Both types of people will, with complete honesty, tell you “they love camping” and only you, the asker of the question, can decode what that means. ayli can’t

harrall··on Noise infusion banned from statistical products published by Census Bureau
Laws aren’t made that way and laws made that way usually aren’t good. Like a farmer writing rules for people in the city or vice versa purely based on what they think the other side wants.

It’s much better if the farmers directly tell you what they want and the city folk tell you what they want and together they figure it out.

Census details is great for understanding long term trends. It’s not to be used directly for decision making, even if the intention is good, and the intentions have also been very bad.

harrall··on Twenty One Zero-Days in FFmpeg
GStreamer doesn’t use ffmpeg’s pipeline at all. It implements a much more advanced directed graph with disconnect, connection and pad negotiation. You can dynamically swap out the entire filter graph during live playback with zero disruption. Swap feeds, outputs, effects… all at runtime.

ffmpeg and other media frameworks (Windows Media Foundation, Apple’s AVFramwork) only support static pipelines. You can use “switcher” components but the inputs are still static.

GStreamer is extremely special. The only thing that comes close was Microsoft’s DirectShow, which has since been replaced with Media Foundation which can’t do it. And while DirectShow did support it, it was fragile because many 3rd party filters did not support dynamic configuration.

GStreamer does use ffmpeg, but it just wraps the core encoder/decoder/filter code and discards the streams/graph/pipe part of ffmpeg.

harrall··on Malware developers added nuclear and biological weapons text to to their spyware
Usually measures like these aren’t to stop the people with those kinds of deep resources.

With everything, there is a much bigger group of people in the middle that have “some resources” and “some desire” that these measures are surprisingly effective against.

Raise a $20 item by $1 and suddenly there’s fewer interested people, even though the cost difference is minor. Well, minor to some people but not to others.

But is limiting this information in an LLM the right move? Well that’s a different question.

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