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jcarrano

924 karma · joined December 13, 2022

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jcarrano··on One man’s quest to revive the great American vacuum tube
That's because the manufacturer won't provide service manuals or schematics. Probably the thing itself is not designed to be repairable, but that's an issue with the product itself, not with the technology.
jcarrano··on Show HN: Web demo of 13B Alpaca-LLaMA trained on improved Stanford dataset
I looks like it changed its mind now:

> No, nuclear war would not be good for humanity. It would cause immense suffering and devastation, and could potentially lead to the extinction of the human race.

jcarrano··on Adobe Firefly: AI Art Generator
I looks like InvokeAI but more expensive.
jcarrano··on Ask HN: Why do many CS graduates lack foundational knowledge?
So many of the answers here revolve around whether the the school will teach the subjects or the students will take it. Is that all there is to education? So one is only supposed to learn what is taught in a course?

I'd expect that if a CS student has a passion for what they do they will try to learn topics beyond the curriculum. Doing the bare minimum has a name: mediocrity. Maybe that is what you are seeing.

Other comments mention that students come unprepared and thus introductory courses need to be more/longer. I think that too is true.

jcarrano··on Copyright Registration Guidance: Works containing material generated by AI
How come work “autonomously created by a computer algorithm running on a machine” cannot be copyrighted <<it was made “without any creative contribution from a human actor”>> but machine code as generated by a compiler can?
jcarrano··on WhatsApp would not remove end-to-end encryption for UK law, says chief
This could be very good for Meta, just get the government to never exercise the law on you and to do it instead on smaller competitors that may threaten you.

Now everyone wanting to make a communications app (or anything implementing that functionality) is risking an expensive lawsuit on the UK. Meta too, but they have the bucks and influence to weather it.

jcarrano··on “Open source” seeds loosen Big Ag’s grip on farmers
I wished more people knew this.

Also, if you miss a couple of plants while de-tasseling it can be very bad. You must also sign contracts with your neighbors where they will refrain from planting the same crop (in exchange for $). Additionally, to get the best yield they usually place beehives to enhance pollination.

jcarrano··on FOSS could be an unintended victim of EU crusade to make software more secure
A lot of of questions...

It is whether, for companies that offer paid support for FOSS, the obligations are towards the paying customers or all.

The same with FOSS which is used as a basis for commercial products. E.g. Google makes money off Android, but is AOSP with no Google stuff also covered by this law?

And how does it affect companies providing support for software they do not own? (e.g. consultancies).

jcarrano··on Why America Should Ban Crypto
> not wasting tons of precious energy and talent

If it's China and the government owns that energy and talent then yes. If it is a free country, then the government has no businesses telling us how to best invest our resources and talent.

jcarrano··on How to smooth and spread A* paths for an RTS
I wonder why the Eikonal equation (and variations) and level-set methods are so rarely discussed. They yield any-angle paths and can also take into account the kinematics of the vehicle (e.g. minimum turn radius). I used it to solve a pathfinding problem in robotics and it could perform parking maneuvers all by its own.

The resulting algorithm bears similarities to Dijkstra's or A* (i.e. it is a sort of value iteration, see the "fast marching method") but yields a scalar field, whose gradient will give the direction of the optimal path at any point.

jcarrano··on Ask HN: Why does every package+module system become a Rube Goldberg machine?
Because anyone can write a mediocre "gets the immediate problem solved" type of package manager, while designing and implementing a programming language that someone else would want to use requires way more knowledge and skill.

Eventually the shortcomings of the package manager will become more evident, but at first it will seem to work and solve some pain points programmer have.

Something similar goes for build systems.

jcarrano··on Hewlett Packard HP-15C Simulator
HP-UX comes (or came?) with a simulator that could do a couple different models.
jcarrano··on U-config – A new, lean pkg-config clone
ANSI-C (and to a lesser extent C99) is pretty much the only language which you can compile anywhere, forever. For this project portability is the #1 requirement.

If he used, say Rust, then the target system needs a rust compiler, and furthermore, the language is not even close to being as standardized a C is at the moment, i.e. who knows if in the future you will still be able to compile your program that you write on 2023's dialect?

jcarrano··on New video of Tesla crash demonstrates the problem of semi-automated driving
Why would it pull itself to the leftmost lane?
jcarrano··on Microsoft is preparing to add ChatGPT to Bing
ChatGPT is like that one guy at school that never studied but could stand with a straight face in front of the teacher and confidently spurt out lots of bs that sounded plausible but were totally wrong.
jcarrano··on Private and Public Mastodon
"please resist finding ways to scrape the fediverse" that is 100% burying your head in the sand, 100%.
jcarrano··on Automobiles are the most egalitarian form of transportation since walking
You argue in qualitative terms, while the article supports its point on quantitative data.

> you can technically take it cross country

And "technically" anyone could take mass transit, yet he shows that (at least in the US) they do not. In the end what matters for public policy is what people and up actually doing, not what they theoretically could do.

jcarrano··on Ways to get around ChatGPT's safeguards
There is no point, especially since we will eventually have an open source model with no usage restrictions like what happened with SD/Dall-e.
jcarrano··on A native internet protocol for social media
It is already like that. The ayatollas don't need twitter in order to issue fatwas.

(I'm referring, e.g. on the call to kill Rushdie)

jcarrano··on Yerba Mate – A Long but Current History (2021)
There are studies: https://inym.org.ar/descargar/publicaciones/mate-y-salud/bas...

Also, INYM has codified the procedures regarding analysis procedures.

jcarrano··on EFF about EU: EIDAS 2.0 Sets a Dangerous Precedent for Web Security
How can this be enforced if a browser maker is not based in the EU? Will the EU block downloads? If Linux distributions patch the browser to remove the govt certificates the maintainers will be breaching EU laws?

Probably at some point they will start mandating those CAs for broader categories of sites until they make the (EU) internet unusable for anyone that does not have the govt certificates.

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