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kbensonon Bacteria found in the human intestine capable of improving muscle strength

If you have a complaint against "scientists" as hsme homogenous group, I think I'm going to have to ask you to explain how these particular scientists did not do that, and why you would think this is a problem of scientists (a label for a largelt disparate group not connected through any specific communication or hierarchy and mostly in output) in general?

kbensonon The 1987 game “The Last Ninja” was 40 kilobytes

The first time I ever heard The Glitch Mob I had such a clear memory of this games soundtrack come to mind that I mentioned it to my brother soon after (as it was his commodore and his copy of the game I was playing when I was young). I'm not even sure if the song I heard even sounds like the game soundtrack particularly closely, but the connection in my mind was very strong.

kbensonon OpenClaw is a security nightmare dressed up as a daydream

Well, I've taken to describing the best responsible use of AI to help your work as though you have an executive assistant, so I can see why people would come to that conclusion. I don't tend to think of booking flights for that though, I tend to think of asking them to gather information and present it to me so I can review it for whether it's appropriate to include, probably with changes, in whatever I'm working on. Perhaps an executive assistant isn't the right term for that, or perhaps it's just that different people and different industries have vastly different ideas of how to make use of an executive assistant. I don't know enough to answer that.

kbensonon Following 35% growth, solar has passed hydro on US grid

It's not quite as straightforward as that though. You're also required to pay a large sum up front to get the worker, have to pay for room and board and health for the worker, including children of workers which while they are investments that may eventually pay off, are mostly cost sinks until at least a few years have passed. There's more of a trade-off that might be immediately obvious when you dig into the reality of what it took.

kbensonon Following 35% growth, solar has passed hydro on US grid

Salved are free in neither up front nor ongoing cost, just as industrial equipment is not. It comes down to costs. Industrial equipment that is most costly than slaves seems unlikely to supplant them based on monetary incentives alone, while once it is less costly it's just the social economic momentum which needs to be overcome, which is likely a matter of time.

Importantly, I think there's only so much advancement you can get out of people by investing in economies of scale and iterating on process (and people, as icky as that idea is), while there's a huge amount of advancement to get out of machinery, including moving to whole new categories of machinery (which depending on how far you want to take the "slaved are machines" metaphor is waht a shift away from slaves was in the first place). In that respect maybe what you're noting is just that the shift from slaves to machines was the first in an iterative process which is speeding up over time.

> If we'd abolished slavery in Roman times we might have terraformed Mars by now.

I think maybe the right was to look at it is if we were able to abolish slavery and keep the same output (which might have required an economic or social system that incentivized farm consolidation for economies of scale that plantations were able to more easily achieve), then yes, we would have terraformed mars by now, but probably just because we happened to be along the tech tree earlier in the timeline.

kbensonon Following 35% growth, solar has passed hydro on US grid

Identical might be a bit strong. It's only identical if we signed a law that made oil and gas illegal tomorrow. There are definitely parallels, but this is much more of a normal market situation where most things are handled through incentives, not regulation to such an extreme degree we make the common immediately illegal.

Perhaps most importantly, it not being an immediate change allows the entrenched interests time to shift their strategies and portfolios over time to take advantage of the more economically advantageous option. Many people aren't happy with the time frames that generally requires, but they also seem to be very happy with reliable energy and and economy that doesn't collapse overnight and having invested a year or two ago in a car which would become worthless tomorrow.

kbensonon Following 35% growth, solar has passed hydro on US grid

> After abolition, the South's per capita productivity dropped substantially, and remained 20% lower per capita in 1880 than it had been in 1860.

I wonder how much of that was because of economies of scale (Even if it's forced scale). Plantations are large and have many workers, and can scale without having to worry (to a degree) about retaining workers, since workers are for most intents just machines you invest in and pay to keep up in that system, which allows for easier scaling.

We've seen increasing consolidation of farms into large entities over the centuries, so perhaps this was just a system that made that much, much easier to do.

kbensonon An Unbothered Jimmy Wales Calls Grokipedia a 'Cartoon Imitation' of Wikipedia

Why would we assume an LLM, even one that doesn't appear to have a bias like that built in, doesn't have one? Just because we can't identify it immediately, does not mean it doesn't exist.

Groups of people can and do have bias, but I also think it's much harder to control the outcome (for better or worse) when inputs are more diverse.

kbensonon Factory-built housing hasn't taken off in California

From the description given, "The developer hired contractors who didn't know what they were doing and ignored stop work orders when the city learned of the problems" seems like it might have a lot to do with it.

kbensonon What functional programmers get wrong about systems

You say don't use databases, and that we had the option to use something different and did not, and chose this path.

I ask you what to use instead, and how to deal with datastore versioning.

You say you're talking about how we don't have type safety that extends to the remote systems we're interacting with.

I ask how that helps versioning problems with these systems where you need to deal with applying changes across distributes systems, which specifically is not solved by having types in lockstep definition between systems, because in application of change there are problems to work thought.

You note we did all this deliberately and we didn't have to. I keep asking you what the other option is, because you keep acting like there is one, but refusing to give an example of what that would be, because a monorepo is no solution for the problems being discussed here in the article, which to be clear, are not limited to code.

You've made it very clear you think we should have done "something" else, but refuse to articulate what that is. If it's not known, or not explored, then I posit we didn't "choose" this path, it's the path that was open to us.

> You’re discussing how to live in the house after the foundation cracked.

You keep saying we should have used something else for the foundation that wouldn't crack, but refuse to explain what this mythical material is.

What is your proposed alternative, or are you just waxing theoretical?

kbensonon What functional programmers get wrong about systems

I would only loosely categorize this as technical writing, depending on how you categorize technical writing. It seems much more a survey of problems and discussion piece, with notes about projects making inroads on the problem. It's definitely not a "this is how you solve this problem, and these are the clear steps to do so" type of article. Maybe that's some of the disconnect in how we view it. If I was hoping that this communicated a clear procedure or how to accomplish something, I would be disappointed. I don't think that was their intention.

I came away with some additional understanding of the problem, and thinking there are various nascent techniques to address this problem, none of them entirely sufficient, but that it's being worked on from multiple directions. I'm not sure the article was aiming for more than that.

kbensonon What functional programmers get wrong about systems

> I said monorepo and monodeploys in this thread

And that helps when you are dealing with schema changes that need to be rolled out at AWS, your local DB, a Kafka cluster, how? The whole point of this article was how to approach the problem when there are different components in the system which make a monorepo and what it provides for this infeasible or impossible.

> I know it's not "practical" but that's not my point. My point is that there's a huge portion of problems with "systems" that are literally obviously solvable and with obvious solutions it's just I'm too lazy to write a production grade database from scratch, sorry guys.

The article talks about database solutions that help with this problem.

I'm uncertain how to interpret your responses in light of the article, when they seem to be ignoring most of what the article is about, which is solving exactly these problems you are talking about. Is your position that we shouldn't look for solutions to the harder problems because some people aren't even using the solutions to the easy problems?

kbensonon What functional programmers get wrong about systems

> For some reason people frequently suggest that my problem with LLM writing is that it's too good.

> I felt as though this article was, through its headers and overuse of specific rhetorical devices, constantly trying to grab my attention in that same shallow manner.

I think perhaps you're quick to assess a certain type of writing, which many see as done quite well and in a way that's approachable and is good at retaining interest, as AI. Perhaps you just don't like this type of writing that many do, and AI tries to emulate it, and you're keying on specific aspects of both the original and the emulation and because you don't appreciate either it's hard for you to discern between them? Or maybe there is no difference between the AI and non-AI articles that utilize these, and it's just your dislike of them which colors your view?

I, for one, found the article fairly approachable and easy to read given the somewhat niche content and that it was half survey of the current state of our ability to handle change in systems like these. Then again, I barely pay any attention to section titles. I couldn't even remember reading the ones you presented. Perhaps I've trained myself to see them just as section separators.

In any case, nothing in this stuck out as AI generated to me, and if it was, it was well enough done that I don't feel I wasted any time reading it.

kbensonon What functional programmers get wrong about systems

Oh, I thought you were speaking more to the topic and content of the article in question, which goes to great lengths to describe the sorts of problems that are much, much harder to catch than simple compiling of queries and checking them against the database, or the message store.

Even if you were to reduce the database to a simple API, the question then remains how do you make sure to version it along with the other portions of the system that utilize it to prevent problems. The point of the article seems to be to point out that while this is a much harder problem (which I think you are categorizing as "things that can't really be easily solved"), there are actually solutions being developed in different areas that can be utilized, and it surveys many of them.

kbensonon What functional programmers get wrong about systems

Perhaps this is just a form of technical writing you're unfamiliar with? Those titles are pretty standard for what I consider good technical writing section headers. LLM writing tendencies are tendencies LLMs have integrated by encountering those tendencies. If your assessment standard for AI is just "common best practices for a subset of good writers", then I think perhaps you need to adjust how you assess to be a bit more nuanced.

kbensonon What functional programmers get wrong about systems

> Second don’t use databases. Databases don’t type check and aren’t compatible with your functional code written on servers.

That isn't very useful by itself. What's your suggested alternative that aligns with your advice of "don't"? How does it deal with destructive changes to data (e.g. a table drop)?

kbensonon Roundcube Webmail: SVG feImage bypasses image blocking to track email opens

The test is whether you can successfully identify phishing attempts bu approximating what they look like in the wild. Bypassing the test entirely means there's no data on whether you're susceptible to this, and just because someone knows there's a header and how to bypass something doesn't mean they aren't also the kind of person to be distracted and click on stuff they shouldn't.

This method of test passing wasn't okay when Volkswagen did it, and it's not appropriate for employees at a company that asks them to take the test, for the exact same reason.

kbensonon Mt. Gox CEO Karpelès Reveals Details of 2014 Collapse and Japanese Detention

Small nitpick with the title, because I still find it humorous all these years later, but it's not "Mt. Gox" like Mount Gox, it's MTGOX, which stands for Magic The Gathering Online Exchange, as it started out as a trading platform for that, and adopted bitcoin early as a way to facilitate trades of the cards without cash.

kbensonon Fabrice Bellard Releases MicroQuickJS

> For me though Lua is clearly better than JS on many different dimensions and I don't appreciate the needless denigration of Lua, especially from someone as influential as you.

Is it needless? It's useful specifically because he is someone influential, and someone might say "Lua was antirez's choice when making redis, and I trust and respect his engineering, so I'm going to keep Lua as a top contender for use in my project because of that" and him being clear on his choices and reasoning is useful in that respect. In any case where you think he has a responsibility to be careful what he says because of that influence, that can also be used in this case as a reason he should definitely explain his thoughts on it then and now.

kbensonon Auto-grading decade-old Hacker News discussions with hindsight

I noticed from reviewing my own entry (which honestly I'm surprised exists) that the idea of what it thinks constitutes a "prediction" is fairly open to interpretation, or at least that adding some nuance to a small aspect in a thread to someone else prediction counts quite heavily. I don't really view how I've participated here over the years in any way as making predictions. I actually thought I had done a fairly good job at not making predictions, by design.

kbensonon The Joy of Playing Grandia, on Sega Saturn

This point is driven home by Justin’s insatiable desire to uncover the mystery of his Spirit Stone, and the ancient Angelou civilization.

My mind immediately jumped to the idea that this is a play on words for the ancient Maya civilizations, and Maya Angelou. Apparently I wasn't the only one.[1]

1: https://gamefaqs.gamespot.com/boards/197483-grandia/53620555

kbensonon Jepsen: NATS 2.12.1

That was my immediate thought as well, under the assumption the lazy fsync is for performance. I imagine in some situations, delaying the write until the write confirmation actually happens is okay (depending on delay), but it also occurred to me that if you delay enough, and you have a busy enough system, and your time to send the message is small enough, the number of open connections you need to keep open can be some small or large multiple of the amount you would need without delaying the confirmation message to actual write time.

kbensonon Kilauea erupts, destroying webcam [video]

Choosing your risk level and working within it isn't stupid. Not knowing the risk when it's easy to gather some more info and then acting in ignorance is, which is what GP was describing, and likely why they called their own actions stupid.

kbensonon Show HN: SyncKit – Offline-first sync engine (Rust/WASM and TypeScript)

I think I know what this is, but the description is so much in its own context I'm not sure. It's for web-apps that also want an offline local version that works and deals with syncing the data when online again and either local or remote is updated?

It probably markets and explains itself perfectly find for someone in that space and/or looking for this solution, so I'm not sure that's actually a problem, but if you also want to stick in the mind of someone that sees this and doesn't have any current interest, but may stumble into needing a solution like this in the future, a few extra words in your initial description might help it be understood more quickly and be something remembered even if they don't dive into it. Or maybe it's fine and I'm just a bit slow today.

kbensonon Same-day upstream Linux support for Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 5

Incentives trump feelings for publicly traded companies 99 times out of 100. People constantly anthropomorphize them, but they aren't people (regardless of similarities in the law), and they definitely don't act like people, at least normal ones. At best, you can view them as something like a sociopath. I wouldn't look at a sociopath acting nicer and think "oh, they turned over a new leaf" because they aren't just going to change how their mind works, I'd think "oh, they found a reason to act in a way I like for the time being. I hope it isn't short lived."

kbensonon Someone at YouTube Needs Glasses: The Prophecy Has Been Fulfilled

What? There's obviously 1.25 non-ad videos on the home screen, which might as well be two, so they're right on schedule! /s

kbensonon The Generative Burrito Test

Oh wow, I've been hearing about Nano Banana Pro in random stuff lately, but as a layman the difference is stark. It's the only one that actually looks like a partially eaten burrito at all to me. The others all look like staged marketing fake food, if I'm being generous (only a few actually approach that, most just look wrong).

kbensonon Human brains are preconfigured with instructions for understanding the world

> Give a whale, dolphin, or orca some neuralink adapters for arms and dexterous hands, and a fully operational virtual human vocal apparatus, and they'd be able to match humans across a wide range of cognitive capabilities.

While I don't disbelieve this out of hand, I can think of different things that might easily make this untrue. On what evidence is this assertion based? Is it just "our brains are essentially similar and much of it is not hard wired therefore they should perform the same" or is there deeper science and/or testing behind this?

kbensonon I can't recommend Grafana anymore

Munin was what we used for a while, along with a smattering of smokeping.

We're using a combination of Zabbix (alerting) and local Grafana/Prometheus/Loki (observability) at this point, but I've been worried about when Grafana will rug-pull for a while now. Hopefully enough people using their cloud offering sates their appetite and they leave the people running locally alone.

kbensonon Immutable Software Deploys Using ZFS Jails on FreeBSD

It's all just history now for all I know, but there was work in the past to make Linux containers work on a Solaris fork (SmartOS, specifically) by emulating the Linux syscall table and presenting that to the containers. Joyent did work on this (alas, and there's an excellent and entertaining talk from Bryan Cantrill[1] that goes over it.

I imagine FreeBSD could do something similar if they aren't already. IIRC FreeBSD has a Linux emulation layer (but I don't know how much attention it still gets), and it's had containerization primitives longer than linux, so some amount of filling in the gaps in containerization features and syscall tables (if needed) could possibly yield an OCI compatibility later (for all I know all this already exists).

The problem, and the reason if this doesn't exist why people probably weren't as interested in doing the work, is it would always be "mostly" compatible and working and there would be no guarantee that the underlying software wouldn't exhibit bugs or weird behavior from small behavior differences in the platform when emulating something else. Why open yourself up to the headache when you can just run Linux with containers or build what you want on FreeBSD with jails and their own native containerization primitives.

1: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=coFIEH3vXPw