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jamal-kumar

3,253 karma · joined March 16, 2021

Conspiracy theory is a kind of epistemological cartoon about reality. I mean, isn’t it so simple to believe that things are run by the Greys, and that all we have to do is trade sufficient fetal tissue to them and we can solve our technological problems. Or, isn’t it comforting to believe that the Jews are behind everything, or the Communist Party, or the Catholic Church, or the Masons. Well, these are epistemological cartoons. It’s, you know, kindergarten stuff in the art of amateur historiography. I believe that the truth of the matter is far more terrifying. That the real truth that dare not speak itself is that no one is in control. Absolutely no one! You know, you don’t understand Monica? You don’t understand Netanyahu? It’s because nobody is in control. This stuff is ruled by the equations of dynamics and chaos. Now, there may be entities seeking control—the world bank, the communist party, the rich, the somebody-or-others—but to seek control is to take enormous aggravation upon yourself. Because this process that is underway will take the control freak by the short and curly and throw them against the wall. It’s like trying to control a dream, you see. The global destiny of the species is somehow unfolding with the logic of a dream. - t mckenna
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jamal-kumar··on OpenBSD 8.0
Puffy's always looked kind of weird. I remember when they gave the damn fish human lips a few times and it always put me off
jamal-kumar··on Tell HN: Bob Cringely has died
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vmbrFFP7bXU

Here's a fun clip. I think this company is the one which eventually became the one behind the excite search engine

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wf4SKkTEkfU

I think this is also a clip from the same documentary. We had to watch this as part of IT class in high school, everyone laughed pretty hard

jamal-kumar··on Babylonian Lamb Stew with Beets (1750–1730 BCE)
I can usually find hing (asafoetida) in grocery stores in certain more populous parts of Canada in the spice section, it's quite a good garlic substitute for those who can't do garlic
jamal-kumar··on Babylonian Lamb Stew with Beets (1750–1730 BCE)
Meanwhile English speakers joke about disagreements over the pronunciation of tomato
jamal-kumar··on Nitter has more working instances than before the takedowns
Great dogwhistle dodging there but man that shit is stupid as fuck and if you're here to wash over facts all I can say is get stuffed. Elon is actively pandering to nazis in Germany, the whole tactic of normalizing hate is gross
jamal-kumar··on Nitter has more working instances than before the takedowns
Which is kind of ironic. I remember realizing that they called it nitter for specifically horrible reasons after finding the online git web panel with the source code which was called "gitler" (hitler in russian for anyone who speaks it). Can't find it now but 4 or 5 years ago it's hard to forget. It even had some kind of nazi anime theme.

4-5 years ago is also about when Kanye West started to go insane, posted the raelian swastika/star of david hybrid on twitter and elon said something like "this is not love" and banned him, which to me explains the motivations for nitter coming up in the first place

jamal-kumar··on Bugtraq is back
So where's the residue of vulnerabilities that don't get sent there? You know of anything better?
jamal-kumar··on Bugtraq is back
I agree - most of my notifications do come right to my primary email and the discussion on these lists is invaluable to me. There's some really good ones with some of the smartest people in the world concentrated on them. Never had infosec twitter and don't want anything to do with it.

That said it would be nice if people sending stuff to oss-security would batch their emails instead of sending like 10-50 for each little CVE (I'm looking at you, apache software foundation)

jamal-kumar··on Producing ammonia and fertiliser using wind power in Morris, Minnesota
If you're not accounting for all the wildfire smoke costing billions of dollars maybe your calculations for cost effectiveness have some adjustments to be made
jamal-kumar··on How Do We Stop Vibe Coding?
I enjoyed the article, I think you're right that the tooling to get out of making things too automatic is definitely lacking. AI coding is cool if you have something in a certain valley of simple enough for it to get but not so complex or low level that it will screw it up, but commercial models don't really do the following yet:

1. malware development

2. anything security tooling related

3. reliable assembly

4. reliable and somewhat more obscure programming languages like blockchain programming langs or distributed programming with elixir

I feel that https://maldevacademy.com has been keeping my skills relatively fresh, it's fun in the discord where sometimes we try using models to do this stuff and it just chokes

On the other hand I "vibe coded" (Although I've heard more nuanced distinctions in terminology here about doing it right rather than just letting it rip automatically or without much thought) a fairly large and profitable software project in about a month recently that would have probably taken me over three if I hadn't used claude.

In the end and as you mentioned, these things are just tools and if you're busy complaining about them rather than finding what they can't do yet and having a bit of fun with working within those limits, you might be able to find a good niche to make better use of your time and avoid the skill atrophy

jamal-kumar··on Does creatine make you smarter?
I switched from creatine to eating pickled herring or steak instead. It's WAY more expensive, but considering I don't live in a country with very great control over stuff like adulterants, I'll definitely elect for tasty and safe.

Each 2-ounce rollmop contains about a gram or two of creatine, sometimes more. Steak is about a gram per 8 ounces.

If you can afford it, it's way nicer than choking down that powder in water getting all crunchy in your teeth and stuff.

It's decent pre-workout food although not for everyone as mentioned elsewhere in the comments here (Something like 20% of people don't see any workout endurance benefits)

jamal-kumar··on Vancouver PD website features Quick Escape button that wipes itself from history
That's funny, right before this I was just reading about how some idiot I knew from back in the day beat the shit out of some stranger on the SkyTrain for his headphones. Maybe it's time to realize how fucked Vancouver is and that the cops aren't the problem
jamal-kumar··on Mr. Baby Paint and accidentally discovering a new cellular automata
Reminds me of the Nanny Lynn tapes that everyone was wondering what the hell it was about for a while like it was some kind of analogue horror thing and then it turned out to be just some cartoon someone made for their grandkids or something

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H-x_JtsdCvA

jamal-kumar··on CSSQuake
For what it's worth it works like smooth butter under Chrome on an M2, on Safari it's clunky and seems to clip alot
jamal-kumar··on Show HN: FFmpeg WebCLI – Full FFmpeg in Browser, Offline PWA, No Uploads(WASM)
thanks didn't note that until now lol
jamal-kumar··on Show HN: FFmpeg WebCLI – Full FFmpeg in Browser, Offline PWA, No Uploads(WASM)
Any chance those AVX-512 optimizations they released a while ago work within this? [1]

[1] https://www.phoronix.com/news/FFmpeg-July-2025-AVX-512

jamal-kumar··on Dogma 25 – Vow of Chastity (2025)
Lars Von Trier is objectively good cinema
jamal-kumar··on Building a web server in aarch64 assembly to give my life (a lack of) meaning
A lot of the encoding side on ffmpeg now uses hand-coded assembly optimizations to take advantage of avx512 instructions on newer x64 processors for "100x speed increase" since February 2025 in a stable form

https://www.techspot.com/news/108715-ffmpeg-gets-100x-faster...

jamal-kumar··on dBase: 1979-2026
If you're ever looking to migrate off of that a better starting point is finding a way to dump the DBF files into CSV (there's a perl script for this that works wonders called DBF2CSV but I hear LibreOffice can just open these files too)...

After inheriting a project where the source code CDROM went missing I can definitely see a use case for at least trying with the latest frontier models to rescue the logic because it took me a while to reverse that thing manually to fix a bug with radare2

jamal-kumar··on The Burning Man MOOP Map
Ah yeah I've seen that video. What blows me away is that in the end all the accused did to get suspected for sexual assault was somehow made contact with her thigh

Seeing stuff like that makes me glad I left the anglosphere

jamal-kumar··on Aspartame is not that bad? (2022)
Oh damn I just linked the first article I could find without fully reading it, my bad. That's crazy haha wow
jamal-kumar··on Aspartame is not that bad? (2022)
Crazy how most of the negative hype around that, total nonsense people have believed for decades now, started from some doctor making a joke paper in the New England Journal of Medicine because one of his other doctor friends was saying that orthopaedic surgeons were too stupid to get something published in there and bet like 10$ that to my recollection didn't even get paid (although this says 2024 I swear I remember reading about this 5-10 years ago):

But the story doesn’t end there. In 2024, a major twist emerged when a retired orthopedic surgeon and Colgate University trustee named Dr. Howard Steel contacted Colgate University professor Jennifer LeMesurier to make a shocking claim: He was the author of the letter. Goaded by a friend who had bet him $10 that he wasn’t smart enough to have an article published in The New England Journal of Medicine, Dr. Steel said he had invented the sensationalistic “strange syndrome” and the persona of Dr. Robert Ho Man Kwok to win the wager, LeMesurier recounted in a 2025 episode of This American Life. [1]

[1] https://www.self.com/story/what-is-msg-and-is-it-bad-for-you

jamal-kumar··on Traders placed over $1B in perfectly timed bets on the Iran war
It's pretty much the same math behind weather prediction. Very roughly speaking, they have models to rank predictors (Or say, weather forecasting models) on accuracy and then figure out where the best predictors are all agreeing and the worst predictors are all saying the opposite of those best predictors.

It's worth noting that these prediction markets just run on blockchains, so pretty much anyone with the mathematical and technical knowhow can analyze those data streams and do much better than your average degenerate gambler who has no idea what they're getting into

Key is reconstructing the historical data from the smart contracts that run these things, that's a bit of a challenge but last I checked there's some companies which have figured this out [1]

[1] https://www.probalytics.io

jamal-kumar··on Traders placed over $1B in perfectly timed bets on the Iran war
I think it's worth noting that my bank lets me ruin my own life too if I want with their own trading platform
jamal-kumar··on Traders placed over $1B in perfectly timed bets on the Iran war
Government leaders and political policy advisors, intelligence agencies, hedge funds & quants, and large corporations doing crowdsourced forecasting for sure. That's probably why they haven't just been made illegal - the very policy makers are utilizing the data streams from this to predict the near-future to a decent degree. Companies like Cultivate Labs [1] go into the maths of it all but if you prefer videos Hypermind has some good ones [2] - anyone thinking this is just some degenerate gambler thing and criticizing them on those terms likely has no idea that people are doing pretty serious quantitative analysis on these things, to which use I will leave to your imagination

[1] https://www.cultivatelabs.com/crowdsourced-forecasting-guide

[2] https://www.hypermind.com/master-class

jamal-kumar··on Wired headphone sales are exploding
Other advantages: for music production, wired studio headphones don't have lag - also wired with mic is crucial for video games for same reason
jamal-kumar··on Bubble Sorted Amen Break
amen and funky drummer are fun but I find it funner to chop up the apache break. it's got a little bongo in there
jamal-kumar··on Bubble Sorted Amen Break
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rI5Qlo2Y6Jg

Nice pick! Above that same song but not compressed to hell

I like this one for amen stuff. Heavyweight Vol.4 - Untitled 7

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dfyHx7SCn3g

jamal-kumar··on Show HN: X86CSS – An x86 CPU emulator written in CSS
wasn't a lack of networking what made it a temple, untouched by the influences of the corrupt internet or something like that? idk I'm not like a Terry Davis scholar by any means but I always figured he did that limitation with some kind of reason in mind
jamal-kumar··on A list of fun destinations for telnet
My favourite way back in the day (late 90s/early 00s or so) was telling people to go start->run->telnet www.boston.ru and it would be a little asciimation of a penis getting erect and then spurting with a pc speaker noise...

People would sometimes flip out like they had gotten a virus or whatever

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