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javawizard

1,245 karma · joined June 16, 2011

Opinions not those of my employer etc. etc.
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javawizard··on Is my blue your blue? (2024)
It's better than bleen I suppose.

Speaking of, I'd be curious about a similar experiment but one that compares how grotesque, for lack of a better word, certain words sound. The word bleen makes me uncomfortable, I think because my brain automatically goes to spleen; grue isn't my favorite either but I prefer it to bleen.

I'm curious how universal that is though. Do others have similarly aligned preferences for one word over the other, or are our feelings about them more evenly spread?

javawizard··on GitHub Copilot is moving to usage-based billing
> 1. Github could choose to grandfather in those plans and make no changes until those plans expire.

They explicitly stated that they won't be doing that: the multipliers go into effect in June for everyone, annual plan or not.

javawizard··on Amateur armed with ChatGPT solves an Erdős problem
That deserves to be on a plaque somewhere.

I've been using LLMs for much the same purpose: solving problems within my field of expertise where the limiting factor is not intelligence per se, but the ability to connect the right dots from among a vast corpus of knowledge that I would never realistically be able to imbibe and remember over the course of a lifetime.

Once the dots are connected, I can verify the solutions and/or extend them in creative ways with comparatively little effort.

It really is incredible what otherwise intractable problems have become solvable as a result.

javawizard··on New 10 GbE USB adapters are cooler, smaller, cheaper
I gotta say, I love my macbooks. Every Apple laptop I've owned that has USB-C ports will happily charge itself from a 5V/1.5A wall charger (albeit extremely slowly).
javawizard··on Qwen3.6-35B-A3B on my laptop drew me a better pelican than Claude Opus 4.7
Not when the article they're commenting on was doing literally exactly the same thing.
javawizard··on Gas Town: From Clown Show to v1.0
Love this.

How did you implement gates? Are they simply tasks Claude itself has to confirm it ran, or are they scripts that run to check that the thing in question actually happened, or do they spawn a separate AI agent to check that the thing happened, or what?

javawizard··on Anthropic downgraded cache TTL on March 6th
That's fascinating.

Any idea what their test harness looks like? My experience comes primarily from Claude Code; this makes me wonder if recent CC updates could be more to blame than Opus 4.6 itself.

javawizard··on Anthropic downgraded cache TTL on March 6th
The trouble with that argument, though, is that it works the other way as well: how do I, a random internet citizen, know that you're not doing the same thing for Anthropic with this comment?

(FWIW I have definitely noticed a cognitive decline with Claude / Opus 4.6 over the past month and a half or so, and unless I'm secretly working for them in my sleep, I'm definitely not an Anthropic employee.)

javawizard··on Tailscale's new macOS home
No, menu bar items being hidden when there are too many of them has happened for a decade.

The notch has just made menu bar space more scarce than it used to be.

javawizard··on Tailscale's new macOS home
> I know software quality has been going down in recent versions of macOS

Note that this particular problem has existed for well over a decade. It's atrocious, but let's not pretend it's anything new.

javawizard··on TSA lines are so out of control that travelers are hiring line-sitters
Yes, and: If I recall correctly, cloudflare is sinking all the extra traffic for him, so it doesn't actually impact him.

Last I heard it's a morally objectionable thing at this point rather than something that's having any practical impact.

(Which of course doesn't make it ok... I'm just a little less inclined to judge people that still use archive links when needed.)

javawizard··on This time is different
I wonder if that was an automated HN edit?

Similarly to how titles that start with "how" usually have that word automatically removed.

javawizard··on Converting a $3.88 analog clock from Walmart into a ESP8266-based Wi-Fi clock
If I had any NTP servers under my control, I probably would :)
javawizard··on Converting a $3.88 analog clock from Walmart into a ESP8266-based Wi-Fi clock
Oh now that would be a fun version 2 challenge: have all the clocks in one household synchronize such that they're all early by the same amount at any given time.

Easy enough for wifi enabled ones: a UDP broadcast to discover other clocks on the network, then sync how you will.

For non-wifi-enabled clocks, perhaps something like a CH572 would do the trick: a $0.20 RISC-V microcontroller with BLE support that all the clocks in the same vicinity could use to talk to each other.

You could really mess with your neighbors if they had the same clocks and you were within range...

javawizard··on Claude Code is suddenly everywhere inside Microsoft
I used to work at a place that had the famous Antoine de Saint-Exupéry quote painted near the elevators where everyone would see it when they arrived for work:

  Perfection is achieved, not when there is nothing more to add, but when there is nothing left to take away.
I miss those days.
javawizard··on Margin Call
Ah, very fair. Without otherwise taking a position on the article, I can totally see how that's editorialized.
javawizard··on Margin Call
Got it. Out of curiosity, what was it?
javawizard··on Margin Call
The article and the submitted HN post both appear to have the same title to me: "Margin Call".

What are you talking about? Did one or the other have a different title when you wrote your comment?

javawizard··on Tesla ending Models S and X production
Jet engines do not strike me as being inherently simpler than muscles, not by a long shot.

They're still the best way we know of going about the business of building a flying machine, for various reasons.

javawizard··on Side-by-side comparison of how AI models answer moral dilemmas
> But the other way around is not possible due to the closed nature of GPT-5.

At risk of sounding glib: have you heard of distillation?

javawizard··on The unreasonable effectiveness of the Fourier transform
Plenty of sources suggest it is:

https://github.com/giladoved/webcam-heart-rate-monitor

https://medium.com/dev-genius/remote-heart-rate-detection-us...

The Reddit comments on that second one have examples of people doing it with low quality webcams: https://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/llnv93/remote_...

It's honestly amazing that this is doable.

javawizard··on Lessons from 14 years at Google
Xoogler here.

When you get to a company that's that big, the roles are much more finely specialized.

I forget the title now, but we had someone who interfaced with our team and did the whole "talk to customers" thing. Her feedback was then incorporated into our day-to-day roadmap through a complex series of people that ended with our team's product manager.

So people at Google do indeed do this, they just aren't engineers, usually aren't product managers, frequently are several layers removed from engineers, and as a consequence usually have all the problems GP described.

javawizard··on Global software engineering job postings outlook – 2026
I would.
javawizard··on They made me an offer I couldn't refuse (1997)
Big companies are soulless.

I've related elsewhere[0] my story about how Google laid me and half my team off 2 weeks before we were set to receive a six-figure retention bonus following an acquisition.

In the original Q&A with corp dev just after the acquisition was announced, someone pointed out that the contract we were offered allowed for that sort of thing. Google's representative said something similar to the parent comment: "Don't worry, that's not something we actually do."

It was especially galling because, after a round of layoffs a year or two prior to the acquisition, that startup had issued retention bonuses to those of us who were left. Unlike Google's subsequent post-acquisition bonus, contracts for those bonuses explicitly stated they were payable even if we were subsequently laid off or fired, as long as we weren't fired for one of a few specific reasons like embezzlement or harassment or other serious workplace misconduct.

It was such a marked contrast and, like the parent comment, it told me all I needed to know about how Google really feels about its employees, and how very literally true the old saying of "you can't trust what you don't have in writing" is.

Big companies are soulless.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43680191

javawizard··on FPGAs Need a New Future
I wish CPLDs were more well known in the common vernacular.

The industry draws a distinction between CPLDs and FPGAs, and rightly so, but most "Arduino-level" hobbyists think "I want something I can program so that it acts like such-and-such a circuit, I know, I need an FPGA!" when what they probably want is what the professional world would call a CPLD - and the distinction in terminology between the two does more to confuse than to clarify.

I don't know how to fix this; it'd be lovely if the two followed convergent paths, with FPGAs gaining on-board storage and the line between them blurring. Or maybe we need a common term that encompasses both. ("Programmable logic device" is technically that, but no-one knows that.)

Anyway. CPLDs are neat.

javawizard··on Avoid UUID Version 4 Primary Keys in Postgres
Hence the presumed implication behind the public_id field in GP's comment: anywhere identifiers are exposed, you use the public_id field, thereby preventing ID guessing while still retaining the benefits of ordered IDs where internal lookups are concerned.

Edit: just saw your edit, sounds like we're on the same page!

javawizard··on CM0 – A new Raspberry Pi you can't buy
I'm not but I totally could!

Feel free to drop me a line - my email is firstname@website, where both can be found on my GitHub profile (same username as HN).

And yes, the A64 is still available! https://www.lcsc.com/product-detail/C3036453.html

javawizard··on CM0 – A new Raspberry Pi you can't buy
You know the fun thing is, something like the Allwinner A133 - which is one of the most popular SOCs in lower-end tablets today - is like $5, or $3 in quantity.

It turns out it's actually not as hard as you'd expect to whip together your own board with one of those + LPDDR4 RAM + eMMC storage + fixings, and get yourself something like what you're talking about for... I dunno, sub $50? Maybe even sub $20 depending on how much RAM you put on it and what other capabilities you give it.

I'm in the middle of designing just such a board right now. Totally recommend taking a stab at it if you have any EE chops at all (or want to learn!)

javawizard··on The Walt Disney Company and OpenAI Partner on Sora
I'm actually curious, how do we know for a fact that this is the case?
javawizard··on Bruno Simon – 3D Portfolio
Woohoo, I got number 10,000 on the altar! https://youtu.be/4KYI8CgGrLw

Now who was there with me running it up at the same time :)

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