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looneysquash

146 karma · joined June 12, 2015

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looneysquash··on Adafruit receives demand letter from Fenwick legal counsel on behalf of Flux.ai
I love the transparency that Adafruit is proving on this.
looneysquash··on Fast Factorial Algorithms
I wonder if any compiler can rewrite that last one into one of the others.
looneysquash··on Meta blocks human rights accounts from reaching audiences in Saudi Arabia, UAE
And companies are legal fiction. Meta doesn't remove a post, a person does. Or maybe some software built by a person.

A person from a government told a person at Meta to block it, and that person did (probably by telling yet more people to do it).

looneysquash··on Saying goodbye to asm.js
Well, I haven't actually tried the asm.js approach for this, so maybe I'm missing something.

But since asm.js is just (a subset of) javascript, I assumed I could just pass ArrayBuffers around.

With wasm, I could pass a Uint8Array out of it. If I wanted to pass it in, I had to call malloc from the javascript side to allocate in the wasm heap. But since I already had an arraybuffer (from a file upload), that meant an extra copy.

looneysquash··on Saying goodbye to asm.js
I personally think this is a mistake. But I'm not sure how much it matters. It's not like a lot of people were using asm.js still AFAIK.

But wasm is too isolated from javascript. From my limited use of it, I was considering trying to compile to asmjs instead.

But I wasn't sure that emscripten still fully supported it.

You can't call most web apis from wasm.

But more important for what i was trying to do, you can't zero copy buffers from js to wasm.

Everything is a trade off. The isolation is a good thing, but also a bad thing.

looneysquash··on GitLab announces workforce reduction and end of their CREDIT values
It's not clear to me from that post how they will be spending the money they'll save by firing 60% of our R&D team.

Could someone explain it?

If you have a lot of new stuff to build, and if you're not currently losing money, why start a new initiative with a layoff?

looneysquash··on A web page that shows you everything the browser told it without asking
Would be nice if more people were focus on fixing these issues instead of just a bunch of "we already know", and making fun up the tone of the site.

Thanks op for reminding us of the privacy issues with our browsers. The EFF and others already told us, but the issues remain. Lets hope you're hear to stay and fight for our privacy alongside us.

looneysquash··on Maybe you shouldn't install new software for a bit
That sounds like it wouldn't scale. If everyone did it, then it would just delay things.
looneysquash··on What can we gain by losing infinity?
The number 42 is also a mathematical symbol we can observe. (Or two symbols, depending on how you want to define symbol).

You can observe the symbol. You can observe 42 of some object, 42 sheep for example.

You can observe a pie chart, or an actual pie, with 42% of it missing.

You can observe a plank of wood that is 42 inches or centimeters long.

But you can't observe 42 itself.

It is not like a hill on a map, where there is a symbol, and there's an actual hill.

It is an adjective and not a noun. It's not real unless it is describing something else.

My point being that regular finite numbers are not real either. So what's wrong with infinity? Or the square root of 2, or pi?

looneysquash··on Warp is now open-source
Why would you name yourself Warp without any connection to OS/2?
looneysquash··on Quarkdown – Markdown with Superpowers
To me, one of the big features of markdown is it's half WYSIWYG.

By that I mean, the basics reuse the way we faked formatting to do real formatting. The input is (usually) perfectly readable on its own.

Even if you don't know (or remember) how to author a markdown file, you can probably still read it just fine. The tables still look like tables. The paragraphs are just paragraphs.

I do still have to look up how to do stuff in markdown sometimes. And that's fine. Your active vocabulary is always smaller than your passive one.

So the way I judge this is by how readable the input is.

I'm not sure how well they succeeded at that. A lot of what they show doesn't really add to or take away from that.

But I didn't see any examples of them formatting math. I only rarely use LaTex. And when I do, it's not because I need a "paged" mode or need to include an author. It's because I need to format something markdown can't do, and that's usually a math equation.

So I am curious how that ends up looking.

looneysquash··on United Wizards of the Coast
Somewhat related, this book is pretty good: https://ethanmarcotte.com/books/you-deserve-a-tech-union/

It answers a lot of the questions I see being asked in this thread.

looneysquash··on United Wizards of the Coast
The company you work for almost always has more power in negotiations than you do. (For some hypothetical "you".)

The bigger the company is, the more power they have typically.

If you want to make more money or get better benefits or otherwise negotiate a better contract, you need more leverage.

Unionizing is one way to gain more negotiation power by negotiating together with your co-workers instead of individually.

It also makes it easier to address cross cutting concerns like safety and fairness.

looneysquash··on SDL Now Supports DOS
For a open source project like SDL is, for something like this, it's usually a matter of how invasive it is, and how likely the contributors seem to stick around and maintain it.

Different projects have different policies, and I don't know what SDLs is.

But they already have a lot of ports, so I trust they know what they're getting themselves into.

looneysquash··on Your Backpack Got Worse on Purpose
That's deplorable. We probably need to dig one or more levels deeper though.

What changed to enable and popularized these bad business practices?

looneysquash··on WireGuard makes new Windows release following Microsoft signing resolution
But what would have happened if they weren't able to get Microsoft's attention through an outside channel (this site) and had to go through the normal process?

I'm glad it was resolved quickly for WireGuard, but I'm concerned the results won't generalize.

Also, thanks for WireGuard!

looneysquash··on Show HN: I built a Cargo-like build tool for C/C++
> The tough truth is that there already is a cargo for C/C++: Conan2

Is it though?

When I read the tutorial: https://docs.conan.io/2/tutorial/consuming_packages/build_si...

It says to hand write a `CMakeLists.txt` file. This is before it has me create a `conanfile.txt` even.

I have the same complaint about vcpkg.

It seems like it takes: `(conan | vcpkg) + (cmake | autotools) + (ninja | make)` to do the basics what cargo does.

looneysquash··on Show HN: I built a Cargo-like build tool for C/C++
Besides Cargo, you might want to take a look at Python's pyproject.toml standard. https://packaging.python.org/en/latest/guides/writing-pyproj...

It's similar, but designed for an existing ecosystem. Cargo is designed for `cargo`, obviously.

But `pyproject.toml` is designed for the existing tools to all eventually adopt. (As well as new tools, of course.)

looneysquash··on Show HN: I built a Cargo-like build tool for C/C++
Nice. I have been thinking of making something similar. Now hopefully I don't have to!

Not sure how big your plans are.

My thoughts would be to start as a cmake generator but to eventually replace it. Maybe optionally.

And to integrate suppoet for existing package managers like vcpkg.

At the same time, I'd want to remain modular enough that's it's not all or nothing. I also don't like locking.

But right now package management and build system are decoupled completely. And they are not like that in other ecosystems.

For example, Cmake can use vcpkg to install a package but then I still have to write more cmake to actually find and use it.

looneysquash··on Founder of GitLab battles cancer by founding companies
I've only interacted with him a couple of times, years ago, but he was very helpful and accepted my MR.
looneysquash··on The 'paperwork flood': How I drowned a bureaucrat before dinner
When the government imposes these rules, this is an outcome they callously ignore.

Sure, we can rightly criticize the author for their abuse towards this working class government employee.

But then to some degree we're guilty of what the author is guilty of. We're fighting each other.

Let's focus our outrage on the people who made these rules. And that keep making more rules like them.

Not that we shouldn't have rules to prevent "welfare fraud". But that it's unacceptable for such rules to make it harder to receive benefits that you're entitled to.

And for many of our representatives, making it more difficult to receive benefits isn't just a side effect of bad anti-fraud policy, it's actually the point.

Let's focus our outrage on them and demand change.

looneysquash··on Chuck Norris has died
There's not a body inside Chuck Norris's casket, there's just a fist.
looneysquash··on Astral to Join OpenAI
I don't get it. Why buy Astral? Why not just fund it? Why not just hire the company to do whatever work you want to get out of the team as part of the merger?

Why buy, when they can rent?

(Not to mention, multiple companies could hire and fund them.)

looneysquash··on Notes on Lagrange Interpolating Polynomials
Maybe there's a gap in my knowledge of notation, but I was confused by:

> Let’s define the Lagrange basis functions

It looks like you defined `l_i(x)` as a piecewise function or a step function.

But then you show with it's actual definition later in that section. (That's what that section is building to and explaining.)

looneysquash··on I am directing the Department of War to designate Anthropic a supply-chain risk
Last I heard, it's still legally called the Department of Defense.

But anyway, I guess the question is, will any other big AI companies stand with them? It's what needs to happen, but I am not hopeful.

looneysquash··on Web Components: The Framework-Free Renaissance
You really really do want to use a framework (such as Lit) if you're writing web components.

Or at least, I don't want to use your framework free web components. Because the frameworks handle a bunch of stuff for you, like reactive properties, that you'll surely get wrong if you do it by hand for each and every component.

looneysquash··on I'm not worried about AI job loss
Ordinary people aren't even ok now.

Lest we forget, software engineers aren't exactly ordinary people: they make quite a bit above the median wage.

AI taking our jobs is scary because it will turn us into "ordinary people". And ordinary people are not ok. They're barely surviving.

looneysquash··on Bose has released API docs and opened the API for its EoL SoundTouch speakers
Or they could have offered local control from launch and not had this issue.
looneysquash··on Web Browsers have stopped blocking pop-ups
That's because the biggest ad selling companies make or fund the web browsers.
looneysquash··on LLVM AI tool policy: human in the loop
Looks like a good policy to me.

One thing I didn't like was the copy/paste response for violations.

It makes sense to have one. Just the text they propose uses what I'd call insider terms, and also terms that sort of put down the contributor.

And while that might be appropriate at the next level of escalation, the first level stock text should be easier for the outside contributor to understand, and should better explain the next steps for the contributor to take.

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