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justjonathan

143 karma · joined August 18, 2016

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justjonathan··on Tom Lehrer has died
Source?
justjonathan··on Thieves took their iPhones. Apple won't give their digital lives back
I believe “She” here refers to the original owner (the victim). Apple offers a feature to remotely wipe your device if lost, and that was what I understood the owner to have done. I’ve done the same thing for a stolen iPhone.
justjonathan··on Defcon stiffs badge HW vendor, drags FW author offstage during talk
I was at this talk, someone (you I guess) left at the beginning of this talk. To the audience it was not clear what happened,
justjonathan··on The IRS unit taking on America's millionaires and billionaires
Millionaires are 7% of the us population (22 million people).

There are less than 1000 billionaires in the US.

Just because these words rhyme doesn’t mean they are remotely similar.

justjonathan··on Ukraine intelligence 'confirms' Russian forces using Starlink
Starling is not being provided at “no cost”.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/national-security/2023/06/01/...

justjonathan··on Gummy Bear says Christmas is not about surveillance
If you are not familiar with the Elf on the Shelf that you put in your home to "report" to Santa, I guess I consider you lucky. The Gummy Bear on the Chair is HN friendly kind of answer. It sells nothing and promotes science and a maker culture. Happy Holidays.
justjonathan··on Mystery math whiz and novelist advance permutation problem
From just the headline I bet it was going to be Greg Egan, author of Permutation City. Was not disappointed.
justjonathan··on Show HN: I built an on-device LLM based chatbot for iPhones
I was too slow…
justjonathan··on American children are drowning in self-esteem (2016)
Title Missing (2016)
justjonathan··on Roald Dahl ebooks remotely updated to censored versions after purchase
That’s a lot of trouble, more than straight piracy and more than straight commercial “purchase”. That seems an unreasonable burden to impose on normal people.
justjonathan··on NLRB bans non-disparagement and confidentiality mandates in severance agreements
Quick except from article…

A few thoughts and takeaways.

1.) This case only applies to employees that the NLRA covers. In other words, it does not apply to anyone classified as a "supervisor" under Section 2(11) the Act. For these employees, keep your severance agreements as-is; this case does not impact them at all.

2.) McLaren Macomb is prospective only. It will have no impact on severance agreements previously signed.

3.) This decision makes very little sense. By the very nature of a severance agreement, you are giving a former employee something to which they are not entitled (additional money) in exchange for a signed agreement that contains certain covenants. The ex-employee is free to take the severance payment in exchange for the signed agreement (including the confidentiality and non-disparagement clauses) or not take the severance payment (and say whatever they want to whom). As these non-disparagement and confidentiality clauses are a condition of the receipt of a severance payment to which a non-employee is not otherwise entitled, I fail to see how the NLRA is implicated at all.

justjonathan··on Storing OpenAI embeddings in Postgres with pgvector
That’s so smart! I read stuff like that and I’m just in awe of the cleverness.
justjonathan··on Apple unveils suite of AI-voiced audiobooks
I had the same impression, do you know the name?
justjonathan··on Apple unveils suite of AI-voiced audiobooks
The voices sound pretty good, better than I expected. I “recognize” the female voice. It sounds a lot like somebody who I’ve heard read many New Yorker or Atlantic articles ether for Audm or the old Audible New Yorker service. I’ll try and find the readers name, but I’d bet anything she was used in the training.
justjonathan··on Almost all searches on my independent search engine are now from SEO spam bots
I just learned of your site through this post, it looks useful (and not just for SEO spam), thank you.

Some feedback: some initial searches did not find blogs that were of interest. When browsing I noticed the tags. I wish there was a page of tags that I could browse. If there is, I could not find it.

Also many of the site titles do not provide useful information on their topics and are untagged. If you could auto generate some tags, perhaps based on word frequency in post titles (with some stopwords no doubt), that would improve the browsing experience, at least for me.

justjonathan··on Resources for Learning Computational Complexity Theory
Inspired by reading Steven Strogatz's Sync, I recently began working thru "Agent-Based Modeling" from Complexity Explorer (Santa Fe Institute) it is a very gentle introduction to the subject. There is a online MOOC class, or you can just watch the lectures and play with the app. It makes use of NetLogo. NetLogo is kind of horrible if you come from a programming background, but if you can suppress the constant annoyances of the syntax, grammar and the enormity of the builtin keywords/functions (and it does require some effort) you'll discover that you can build and visualize some pretty neat models very quickly with very little code.

https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLF0b3ThojznRKYcrw8moY...

justjonathan··on A virtual Apple Macintosh with System 8, running in Electron
I recall everyone using Netscape.
justjonathan··on Semantic Satiation
That is really a brilliant connection, that I would not have made. Thank you!
justjonathan··on Semantic Satiation
Are you enjoying Ted Lasso? That’s where I learned about semantic satiation. :)
justjonathan··on More blockchain sandwich attacks and victim becomes predator
Another example of the dangers of "risk free" aggression in DeFi Land: https://twitter.com/SiegeRhino2/status/1381035640989626369

Some choice excerpts:

"a bot paid a hefty 68 ETH fee to the miner in order to buy 100 ETH worth of KTN before anyone can..."

"The catch is ... there is a line in the code that says that liquidity snipers can't dump their tokens..."

"The @kattanatrade team even published the source code, with the "LiquidityTrap" feature, which prevents sniper from dumping their token."

justjonathan··on More blockchain sandwich attacks and victim becomes predator
This is an update in the war started by: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26514624

"The owner of the first poisonous token noticed their victim was the latest predator on the block and they dropped a cryptographically signed note of respect in the Flashbots discord":

From: https://etherscan.io/verifySig/2503 : Congratulations 0x2, looks like I was sloppy and left some money on the ground. You have my respect, not a lot of people react like you did.

justjonathan··on Leaked phone number of Mark Zuckerberg reveals he is on Signal
Without regard to the security of any of the protocols, Zucj may have just installed to play with it.
justjonathan··on SF poop-testing startup, once compared to Theranos, charged in $60M fraud scheme
It was all good until the shit hit the fan.
justjonathan··on Donald Trump is creating his own social media network
Now SuperPAC funds can be used like VC, and just when the world so desperately needs another G+
justjonathan··on Wrecking sandwich traders for fun and profit
I used to think that too, but this excellent piece from Matt Levine explains why that is not really the case: https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2021-02-05/robinh...

Retail traders benefit from this, and on Schwab, for example, they show you the dollars of price improvement the got you.

justjonathan··on Glitterbomb Trap Catches Phone Scammer (who gets arrested)
I suspect that most Airbnb customers do not have a lot of packages delivered to the places they stay. The fact that he doesn’t throw the package away is noteworthy.
justjonathan··on Ethereum on Amazon Managed Blockchain
This is basically half of ankr’s business. They do back and block chain for large companies as well as start ups, and even PCs that want to stake their tokens.
justjonathan··on PayPal Bids $500M to Acquire Crypto Startup Curv
In case you were confused by the headline... no relation to curve.fi
justjonathan··on Calvin and Hobbes Search Engine
I do
justjonathan··on Calvin and Hobbes Search Engine
Tried do this on a mac. I had to replace gnu grep with perl:

  perl -wnle '/(.{0}https://assets.amuniversal.com.{0,33})/ and print $1'
I had to replace wget with curl:

  curl -s https://www.gocomics.com/calvinandhobbesespanol/$x -o $z-es;

Then I realized I need gnu date, which had to come as part of coreutils:

  brew install coreutils
So date becomes gdate

  for i in {1..1000}; do x=$(gdate +'%Y/%m/%d' -d "$i days ago");
  z=$(gdate +'%Y-%m-%d' -d "$i days ago");
Hope I din't break other stuff with that.

Now it still doesn't work, but I'm giving up, hopefully I saved a little time for somebody...

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