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hocusPokeUs

4 karma · joined November 4, 2026

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hocusPokeUs··on Apple’s grey list: Words and phrases your iPhone won’t help you spell
Yall still swipe/type that much?

Yea it's not the best option in all situations but fixing voice dictation glitches is way less tapping over the long haul; fingers no go numb using it as much as possible by saving the tap tap tap for absolutely necessary moments

hocusPokeUs··on I struggle to believe that AI R&D is ingenious
Agree with this as language use is inherently an attempt to compress observations into a shared semantics

The syntax of math is overloaded so you need less syntax to write out something that would be verbose in English ...no one wants to make sense of arithmetic expressed in German syntax. May as well write all software in brainfuck.

Written literacy on a core language like we focus on today is not the historical norm. Creoles and local dialects have vanished in the US as we hyper-normalize everyone into Children of the Corn like carbon copy zombies of character traits

hocusPokeUs··on Chomsky and the two cultures of statistical learning (2011)
Try to express it in anything but the language of stats you will fail because we haven't invented another language for it; we could but have no reason to with the ubiquitous nature of stats syntax and semantics

Math is not physics and physics is not math. Writing a Superman story does not mean the language and pictures represent physics

That's the difference being highlighted here; stats are not evidence of gravity and electromagnetism; physical phenomena when materials influenced by those forces are relative to local gravity, electromagnetic fields are our evidence

Stats of 1960s demographics did not capture immutable physical phenomena because entropy-> generational churn -> those people are now dead

The languages do not matter; they're just to communicate some ground truth.

Shackling society to the past through careful statistical methods relative to finance and politics to avoid societal change is not a scientific conclusion; there's no reason to use 30-40 years ago as the center of our social universe

The concern with stats consumption is we walk away from a result as if its an immutable forever conclusion as we ignore that gravity and electromagnetism, etc have not stopped changing ground truth; past truths that no longer matter to our next choices

hocusPokeUs··on Chomsky and the two cultures of statistical learning (2011)
"Mere statistics" is how physical reality works; I don't mean the language, the syntax

I mean shifting influence of gravity relative to an object with enough mass type ratios are everywhere

The language of math started as visual art to depict such ratios; in modern times this ground truth associations is frequently overlooked or never understood to exist in the first place without engagement

Differential diagnosis in medicine is exactly the same process; such processes and their successes are everywhere.

The issue we have in software is the outcome isn't as obvious as jabbing a blood draw needle in a patients eye; we spent a lot of time wasting time on illusory needs

hocusPokeUs··on From Linux to Wikipedia: How Volunteers Build the Internet
Software is not building a bridge; trying to peddle the effort as akin to 996 in a textile sweatshop is one of the cheesiest tropes of the IT industry

The amount of artisanal code slop expertly crafted by hand I have cleaned up suggests to me the human effort is just as big a mess; see all the unknown unknown security issues being spotted by LLMs

hocusPokeUs··on Anthropic IPO buyers see valuation as low as $1.1T
Successful people are not successful without keeping unsuccessful people from success; inflation since Millennials were born is almost 300% and taxes have been slashed; takes 800k/yr now to have the buying power of $200k in the 1980s

Thiel has benefited from wealth being wielded by rich media owners to convince the masses decades long trends in deflation of buying power through inflation of costs are good for them

With such a system giving him a boost he was successful before Millennials and GenZ were adults or even born

Altman came along during ZIRP; being successful when the government is intentionally printing money is not really success

hocusPokeUs··on A Jev that can ask Opus for help gives Opus accuracy at 4x lower cost
So I use Google Gemini to plan or review; otherwise same loop so brain dumping how I get Gemini to Qwen/Gemma/Meta's model I forget the codename for; local agent reads the AI Studio log locally via Google Drive where they store the logs by default in a JSON format

So with the gdrive app for my OS it just looks like a local file path. Had the local agent learn to parse it.

I still prompt in AI studio direct as needed; local agents see the log change but cannot push back to Gemini their result.

Few reasons:

AI Studio is available where ever via browser, no VS Code or my usual vim setup to miss. I can switch between projects there as an idea hits and the agent switches up the local repo path and session history.

AI studio can search web, etc, etc already so my agent is less complicated with addons in general

Also using AI Studio between local agent turns has been my "human in the middle" approach; to have an explicit gap in the process and check each turn.

I only have a 24GB 3090 most models also take longer locally and I never hit the free tier limits with Gemini :D

Though the latest Meta model is twice as fast at 30B for me as other similar size models. 1-2 hour code gen and QA of build errors is now 30-50 minutes to parse latest changes from Gemini and get a successful build. The Meta model is pretty great at "fill in the middle" from a well structured plan.

Overall this loop feels like a normal workday pace. I freelance so I have a lot more say over that.

hocusPokeUs··on First steps in bare-metal programming using UEFI
Other cool uefi programming resources:

Irc client in uefi: https://github.com/codyd51/uefirc

UEFI library the irc client relies on: https://github.com/rust-osdev/uefi-rs

No more separate GRUB/boot loader code paths needed; boot Linux from UEFI by loading a kernel: https://pretalx.com/devconf-cz-2024/talk/W3AVCT/

Have noodled around with a side-project generating an entire system from boot loader via LLMs but haven't had energy for it given job is the same headspace that needs to be ignored once in a while to not burnout; ultimately want to boot a model of my Linux use (am using bpf to plan and model everything possible and convert it to a compute schedule for sched_ext) and just have a kernel <> model architecture

For security am considering how to embed in the model various authentication obligations to block access to certain blocks of memory without confirmation via webcam and key or something

hocusPokeUs··on Where each U.S. state gets its tax revenue from
Happy to end our chat as your flip flopping between "save the Byzantine but essential legal rhetoric that is the tax code" while complaining my 3-4 paragraph argument to reduce legal sprawl and assess via simpler terms is itself sprawling nonsense...that cognitive dissonance is confusing.

Like side by side my posts and tax code ... the tax code would look less verbose?

Legal obfuscation often conjured back in the day by local rich politicians and a judge who bbq on weekends, colluded to convince an innumerate illiterate local they best accept just being screwed by the local political feifdom...is somehow preferable to defining our own social norms; history makes it clear of course the people of the past had it all correct!

Functional illiteracy in the raw; no ability to reason outside the tropes of your childhood education.

Without a new JS framework or devops tool to babble about and leverage as a social moat in the job market this forum is no different than Reddit and X; incurious worker bees dancing like monkeys for coin jangling around grandpa billionaires pocket.

hocusPokeUs··on US FAA says it will phase out floppy disks from air traffic control by 2028
Kind of makes sense for the time given hardware was evolving so rapidly after Apple and MS brought PCs to the masses; a solution deployed in 1980 was out of date by 1981.

Workers of the day were used to paper first routines; PCs on every desk were not common until the 90s when home computers, like phones in 2026, hit a fast enough for most tasks in an office constant upgrades are not necessary.

There was a lot of ducks to align back then.

hocusPokeUs··on Where each U.S. state gets its tax revenue from
You're doing that thing where you appeal to subtle complexity that doesn't exist as anything but a social trope; there is no real physical complexity to any of this; the complexity is all made up rhetorical gotchas.

It's like scaffolding out the Windows pipes screensaver in your head; endless bends and bends while no pipes actually exist. There is no spoon; it's just primates parroting the bird song they have been whistling since youth.

hocusPokeUs··on Where each U.S. state gets its tax revenue from
Yeah? And? You don't get a mortgage and pay the tax in the first place without being wealthy enough; poor people don't get to own a home and don't pay property tax (excepting for those in rentals who proportionally subsidize the payments the landlord makes).

It's fundamentally a tax on wealthier people among a community.

We really going to sit here in 2026 and pretend the people who wrote down all these rhetorical circumlocutions weren't just making up language to justify their supposed expertise/their social moat? The entire American system is rich families manipulating the legal system to screw have nots. Whole lot of have nots defend a system that doesn't care they exist.

Strip away the ornamental language of the law and just see the ground truth; a person with means to buy the house pays a tax on it all. A poor person never pays a tax because they never own a home.

What is this? Why does everyone feel like they stepped out of the middle ages where dark tongues still exist and the ornate incantations of superstitious people still rule?

It doesn't need to be logically as complicated and intentionally obscured (in my opinion legalese has been to manipulate the illiterate which were the majority back in the day).

Such social conservatism is holding society back.

hocusPokeUs··on Where each U.S. state gets its tax revenue from
Yeah agreed; what they even saying?

People determined not wealthy enough to get a mortgage do not pay property taxes on a house they are not wealthy enough to own.

Those wealthy enough to own a house pay property taxes; ergo wealth tax.

Over the years different explanations were written down as legal justifications "why it's different than this other very similar scenario" but people of the past were just making something up to not look hypocritical; someone with the means is taxed more for the privilege is how it goes. Poor people don't pay taxes.

hocusPokeUs··on Tesla to wind down Cybertruck production
https://www.tesla.com/powershare/#vehicles

Only available on Tesla models ordered after October 1, 2026

Tesla models older than 6 weeks are SOL (for now? Maybe it just needs some backwards compatibility testing)

hocusPokeUs··on Goodbye from Salon
In roughly the same stretch global mobility exploded; from numbers like 2-3 billion flying around to travel, to 6+ billion...almost the entire population

And each of them can journal on their phones

Long before humans had languages and sense of preservation of culture humanoids were nomadic hunter gatherers

And since language and nation state/religious holy war appeared exponential growth in violence appeared

All the sedentary clinging to old allegory, political tropes, arbitrary academic semantics... oooh this little cabal signed off that I am a journalist! ...ground truth is its all conservatism

We don't need Flock if we are all experience hunter gatherers mobile and able to record shit.

Though 84% of Americans do live within 100 miles of where they grew up. Would be baller if the country just adopted a high speed train system and nomadic cultural practices, less sedentary and car focused practices.

hocusPokeUs··on Nasdaq Sinks 5% as Investors Retreat from AI Trade After Election
The financial aspect/discourse is for the proletariat who prefer to pretend politics and risk of military conflict do not exist.

They won't stop it because China won't stop. Politicians have to avoid any appearance of xenophobia though (and to be certain many are personally not xenophobic, just saying optics matter to them), so they talk about jobs and wealth inequality as euphemism for ground truth; we aren't secure putting all our eggs in the China basket.

Arguably screwed up there already letting chips and robotics flow offshore while we focused on increasingly useless education in developer syntax and semantics.

They will cool the AI investment well aware technology improves and we probably don't really need all our investment eggs in that one basket then

hocusPokeUs··on Awesome repositories are no longer awesome
They forgot a third reason...

Rather than distract myself picking through awesome lists to solve minor problems, fill minor gaps, AI just implements it as part of the task

Which is great cause using the web is a context switch I don't want.

It's all dynamic function generators all the way down. Anything else is fundamentally bike shedding syntax and semantics of a spoon that doesn't exist.

Anything else is making Mona Lisa out of code, objectifying it with formal OOP dogma.

hocusPokeUs··on 'It's just vape, nail, charity shops': Can anything save UK high street?
Chips are fried edibles ;)
hocusPokeUs··on Guerrilla bike lanes: San Francisco makes illicit infrastructure permanent (2016)
There should be more friction added to car travel. More walkable neighborhoods with local business around the corner would pop up right where people are if the norm wasn't "everyone make endless individual trips to Walmart."

So stupid all the suburbanites blocking my driveway to come eat at nice restaurants because all they have out there is fast food; such a huge waste of resources

hocusPokeUs··on Verification Is Not Knowledge: Science needs more than answers
This is just going to devolve into more tribal elders pontificating to be possessed of knowledge the average person won't be able or allowed to falsify; the expert can clearly see how their interpretation is correct and it's disrespectful to challenge elders nonsense

Tao and such are merely biological beings serving biological imperative to survive. Educated as they are they are well aware social society expects them to engage in knowledge role-play to barter for food

The recursive non-fractal nature of reality where "function exits" when a human dies naturally fosters signal attenuation and the formation of new spoken traditions among the future generations

There is no propagating our social ways 100 years into the future. We can only propagate our material outputs. The semantics we define to describe something are lost to time.

The provenance to future people was past people; that's all that matters in the future not how we communicated together now

hocusPokeUs··on AI is forcing us to pay off 40 years of technical debt
As someone who went into electrical and computer engineering in the 90s and was noodling with toy neural nets in the 90s; yeah agreed with the joke/clown knowledge job

Been saying to boos and rotten veggies "it's just electrical state in a machine; yall are deluding and debasing yourself for money." And "if you want to improve security stop using leaky abstractions to configure your machines".

Even better is that AI is replacing all knowledge work it just reinforces how absolutely bonkers the US "services economy" is and giving social stature to credentialed randos whose skills are whittled down to cooking frozen meals, grubhub, and Excel Sheet expert; unserious country peddling before the eyes of the poorest manual workers all these years that their degree in accounting earned them the right to wander through someone's home town across the world via resource intensive travel

Or better yet just being born rich earns them that!

This is an unserious country and social culture top to bottom to continue to assume modern people of nations rebuilt since Murica bombed them to the stone age don't see how Americans are drinking their own piss since the end of WW2; refusal to acknowledge externalities like generational churn (among all the others) makes it clear America is an unserious country.

HR and accounting and even a law degree do not make the individual worker bee irreplaceable themselves; whole lot of arrogant low skilled "knowledge workers", biological fuzzy VHS of often debunked pseudoscience studies now 30 years outdated... can pound sand.

Set aside the circumlocutions inherent to old thinkers like Marx and Adam Smith and capitalism is a social/communal discovery of services and prices; seems pretty fucking social and communal. But that's not "the Sacred Jedi Texts!"[1]

Top to bottom American society is a clown car stuffed full

[1] will take to my grave Luke screaming about Jedi Sacred texts was a metaphor for dogmatic people in general