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in_a_society

278 karma · joined February 7, 2020

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in_a_society··on AMD acquires Taalas to boost inference performance by etching models in silicon
The best way I can explain it is that it's the same feeling when I upgraded from 56k dialup to cable broadband.
in_a_society··on Advancing the price-performance frontier with GPT‑5.6
I don't see why it should be all that difficult. All you have to do is first find a library that implements a decent solution to the halting problem and you're off to the races.
in_a_society··on Kimi K3, Qwen 3.8, and Anthropic's (Potential) Unravelling
Baking weights in makes a lot of sense for inference speed and power efficiency and has the added benefit of putting many end-users on the hardware refresh treadmill.
in_a_society··on Google's Antigravity Bait and Switch
I'll echo this. They're very good at consistent support and never pulling the rug. The folks at Railway have nothing but the wildest praises to sing.
in_a_society··on Incident Report: May 19, 2026 – GCP Account Suspension
Google has a culture problem. This is not something that can change easily nor will it change when it’s not recognized as being an issue within their organization.

Between my peer c-suites, the conversation is that GCP cannot even be in the consideration set until such a time as a several-year period has elapsed without this kind of incident.

in_a_society··on GitHub is investigating unauthorized access to their internal repositories
This comment reminds me of a joke where the punchline is that a person is so poor that burglars break in to their house and leave money.

Similarly, I could see ransomware groups hacking in and feeling bad for GH so they improve a few things to help them get to at leave nine fives of uptime.

in_a_society··on The lost art of XML
Smells like an article from someone that didn’t really USE the XML ecosystem.

First, there is modeling ambiguity, too many ways to represent the same data structure. Which means you can’t parse into native structs but instead into a heavy DOM object and it sucks to interact with it.

Then, schemas sound great, until you run into DTD, XSD, and RelaxNG. Relax only exists because XSD is pretty much incomprehensible.

Then let’s talk about entity escaping and CDATA. And how you break entire parsers because CDATA is a separate incantation on the DOM.

And in practice, XML is always over engineered. It’s the AbstractFactoryProxyBuilder of data formats. SOAP and WSDL are great examples of this, vs looking at a JSON response and simply understanding what it is.

I worked with XML and all the tooling around it for a long time. Zero interest in going back. It’s not the angle brackets or the serialization efficiency. It’s all of the above brain damage.

in_a_society··on The recurring dream of replacing developers
Only to get in response: “INSUFFICIENT DATA FOR MEANINGFUL ANSWER”
in_a_society··on The Going Dark initiative or ProtectEU is a Chat Control 3.0 attempt
GDPR for thee, but not for me.
in_a_society··on One of our clients hasn't paid us $130k – or "Why Every Contract Clause Matters"
This is a standard playbook at large organizations with finance departments. CFO 2 companies ago used to literally coach people on extending payments and delaying. Best case scenario for them, you never get aggressive enough to actually collect. Repeat that at scale across many vendors and suddenly their entire P&L looks substantially better.
in_a_society··on Protecting undersea internet cables is a tech nightmare
I wonder if the cable could be enclosed in some sort of container whose shape would make an anchor glance off its surface.
in_a_society··on OpenAI, Google and Anthropic are struggling to build more advanced AI
Expecting AGI from Reddit training data is peak "pray Mr Babbage".
in_a_society··on Don't obsess over tax and legal structures
Quite disagree. Early mistakes cost me a lot of heartache later on. But you don't have to figure anything out by yourself. People like us get hired because we're experts in software development; we can absorb requirements, understand the business, and apply technology to get an optimal outcome. There are professionals in the accounting and legal fields who specialize in things we don't have experience in and they are worth it.
in_a_society··on Europe is in danger of regulating its tech market out of existence
Just curious, what industry do you work in?
in_a_society··on Instrumenting Python GIL with eBPF
I'm not sure your conclusion is a fair take. In the app I work on, GIL acquisition would easily take 2-3x longer than the postgres queries which would subsequently be issued.
in_a_society··on Panic at the Job Market
There are people who literally say this and then you hire them -- they turn out to be complete duds. I'm genuinely curious because I'm hiring right now: by what mechanism would I discover that you have these skillsets and are good at what you do?
in_a_society··on The Existential Relief of Having Children
I suspect that parent comment is not referring to the same kinds of people you are. I can relate because I know several people who flippantly dismissed family formation as not for them and now that it's too late they admit it consumes them like a fire on a daily basis.
in_a_society··on Data exfiltration from Writer.com with indirect prompt injection
Without removing the functionality as it currently exists, I don't see a way to prevent this attack. Seems like the only real way is to have the user not specify websites to scrape for info but to copy paste that content themselves where they at least stand a greater than zero percent chance of noticing a crafted prompt.
in_a_society··on The Unix timestamp will begin with 17 this Tuesday
> 2001-09-09T01:46:40.000+00:00

2 days later...

in_a_society··on Text Is All You Need
And yet somehow before written language and text, we were still human and had personhood.
in_a_society··on The entire crypto ecosystem is a ponzi
Every time they try, a lot of people seem to die. Maybe pattern recognition over time isn’t a strength people have.

Same story in crypto. There will be shock and awe when Binance falls and plenty of people saying “real crypto has never been tried”.

in_a_society··on Things that used to be hard and are now easy
A better analogy would be the locksmith refusing to let you in because you can’t produce the deed, which itself is in the house.
in_a_society··on Six corporations control 90% of America media
None of that sounds particularly attractive. I would rather use nuclear, wind, or solar to capture the carbon until we figure out how to stop making so much of it.
in_a_society··on Why printers add secret tracking dots (2020)
Or letting your printer run out of yellow ink.
in_a_society··on Six corporations control 90% of America media
What would a lifestyle look like that meets these targets?
in_a_society··on Biden wins White House, vowing new direction for divided U.S.
As Chris Wallace is asking him Trump says “sure” three times. He’s interrupting, which is unfortunate, but the goal posts on this have moved endlessly. I’ve never seen you, hedora, condemn white supremacy. Does that mean you support it? By the way, if you condemn it, I’m going to be the arbiter on whether you did it well enough or if you’re still tarnished in the court of public opinion.

Honestly I expect more from HN than to fall into Kafkaesque arguments about these things but perhaps the problem lies within my own expectations.

in_a_society··on Biden wins White House, vowing new direction for divided U.S.
It was 7 counties identified by the previous admin as high risk. Lots of Muslims were still allowed to enter. I should know, I’m middle eastern myself.
in_a_society··on Biden wins White House, vowing new direction for divided U.S.
https://www.factcheck.org/2020/02/trump-has-condemned-white-...

The fact that the whole racist and white supremacist trope gets pushed around this much means that the media has been very effective at lying to entire populace. Think about what else they may have lied about.

in_a_society··on Global warming is speeding up Earth‘s ocean currents
Some things that are being investigated are: solar luminosity, the three periodic levels of change in geo orbit, variations in geo magnetic field, as well as more local things such as energy retention properties of various materials used at all levels of construction and seemingly boring things like industrial uses of organic flourides.

One nit: observing that Newtonian physics don’t hold up perfectly at all times would not necessitate having to immediately provide an alternative explanation but would motivate the search for one in the absence of such.

in_a_society··on Global warming is speeding up Earth‘s ocean currents
Falsifiability is important in science. I’m sorry that all I can do for now is call into question currently accepted hypotheses. When I say models I’m referring to ones that test other sources of temperature and climate gradation while incorporating current work where appropriate. We have funding but the bulk of money is channeled into co2 research, which I think is misappropriated.

Because of this, current political solutions are the equivalent of debugging a billion line program by randomly changing various functions, where each change costs billions of dollars.

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