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ludsan

375 karma · joined December 23, 2013

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ludsan··on Ask HN: What your experience with the monthly "who wants to be hired" thread?
1994? that's pretty amazing

what's the email "category"? an edu? I don't want to dox you but curious about what sort of institution has had that sort of stability enough to have kept your spot in place.

ludsan··on Univac Factory Tour 1968: Twin Cities Minnesota [video]
I only just recently found this youtube channel. I've been having so much fun looking at all the technology that used to be. I thought I was old school having worked with Tandem and JCL and all that, but this is an entire other generation.
ludsan··on Meta Employees Denounce Interference in Brazilian Elections
oof... i clicked on that.

I feel like I'm taking Crazy Pills. That was the most bizarre AJ (AP?) article I've read.

ludsan··on Meta Employees Denounce Interference in Brazilian Elections
Sorry all. I'm very slow here. The linked story only talks about a group within Meta showing concern with concernable events. What was the event?

I'm slow because this article doesn't describe it: and believe it or not, I use this website as a source of "breaking" news, so I sincerely would like to know.

EDIT: ahh p2detar has something real: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50248577

ludsan··on Phloem: Git history grown like a slime mold
beautiful
ludsan··on Ask HN: Why were OpenAI, Claude, and Grok simultaneously down?
i just grepped my codebase where i let claude markdowns go rampant. 212 instances of "load-bearing"
ludsan··on Statement on US government directive to suspend access to Fable 5 and Mythos 5
>The real story here is that this may be the beginning of governments restricting the availability of strong LLMs to the public, to you.

I can't agree more. This is a precedent not just in denial but possible vagueness. Judiciaries have 'vagueness doctrines' to counter such laws/directives but _these_ may be re-trumped by the deference given to national security.

If we don't get soon a framework by which models may be measured as 'too powerful' vs 'not too powerful' we supercharge the self-dealing (corruption) that this administration has brazenly adopted. Many fingers can be put on many scales; groks may be given a pass while others are held to higher "standards".

Will OpenAI now just asymptotically bump its versions to 5.99999999 to stay under a limit that nobody really understands?

I realize that this has all just happened and we might get some good rigorous clarification from our government.... sigh. We are living in a kakistocracy. Who am I kidding?

ludsan··on DBASE on the Kaypro II
In a moment of serendipity, I was about 30 minutes into watching this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bYU3CQomE5M

I had memories of Foxpro and Clipper on my mind, when I found myself in this rabbit hole.

ludsan··on Zoo of array languages
no uiua :(
ludsan··on Libghostty is coming
I guess that's what I always do. or grep or awk or sed.. Maybe if a program takes hours to return it's helpful to be able to search the terminal, but otherwise i'm just pushing up with my arrow and `| grep -v UGLY | grep BEAUTIFUL`
ludsan··on Vera C. Rubin Observatory first images
I'm glad you responded (i'm assuming you knew i wasn't criticizing the effort, but just in case -- I wasn't). I was assuming asteroid trail, but I've read that green stars can't exist and _could_ be a technosignature of "little green men". :) Your work on this is lovely. The combined effort of so many smart people over decades of work is truly heartening. Thank you.
ludsan··on Vera C. Rubin Observatory first images
something green: https://skyviewer.app/embed?target=186.82033+8.25479&fov=0.0...
ludsan··on A new Sudoku layout with 81 uniquely shaped cells
I think Sudoku can be very fun to play with new rules, when you begin thinking in higher abstractions. I'm a big fan of anti-knight rules.

I look forward everyday to see what new puzzles are out on the Cracking-the-cryptic channel.

IMO, your use of the word 'satisfying' is to me the definition of fun!

ludsan··on Ask HN: Where are the good Markdown to PDF tools (that meet these requirements)?
I'm surprised Pandoc didn't fit the bill. It's quite configurable with fenced attributes.

I switched from using MD-->(Pandoc-->(latex))--> PDF to using MD-->(Pandoc-->(typst))--> PDF.

ludsan··on Why Are Jujutsu's ID Prefixes So Short?
I love the Jay Jays and the design of the page. Big fan of jujutsu too :)
ludsan··on DOGE has 'god mode' access to government data
Credulity is a fine default for human interaction. It is gift of assumed sincerity.

Deciding at which point that gift was misplaced is a learned skill and one I cannot claim to have expertise in.

I may credulously assume that our poster friend is sincere. However, as I read replies that the poster has made to sincere responses, I observe:

  * a claim of mutual empathy via mutual distrust "I've criticized Musk!" ... "I've been contradicting DOGE on things since they became a thing"

  * a surrender of high-ground via tenuous appeal-to-authority "Bibi says he's not a nazi"

  * a veneer of emotional maturity over others: "we don't have to be so stressed about needing to trust DOGE's changes"
I've seen enough of on-line conversations to understand the "I'm just asking questions" type -- the kind who only grows in power as response after response is parried with "my goodenss, how rude?!" aplomb.

Buffeted yet calm, our poster friend claims the high-ground while having-and-eating cake.

Our poster is in an incredulous superposition of:

"So yeah, I don't trust him." and "I was shocked"

or

"I don't think they'd renege on it. I'm certainly not naive!"

I've wasted too much time discussing our mutual friend. I should not have done my drive-by, and I apologize to you both for the energy consumption of my this and my previous post. I shrink away cowardly from responding anymore.

I do not apologize for lacking credulity.

ludsan··on DOGE has 'god mode' access to government data
Post your bank account number here. Give us the benefit of the doubt.
ludsan··on Trump wins presidency for second time
> you won't win by claiming to be 0.1% less bad.

Please.

ludsan··on Why are Texas interchanges so tall?
Honshu is the 7th largest island in the world. It's area is a little more than 1/3 of texas.
ludsan··on Africa is building a Great Green Wall to prevent expansion of the Sahara
> How does it prevent building up resentment, when obviously a green landscape is more important to the foreigners, then the starving locals? > How does it solve the hard problem of exponential mankind vs civilizational allmende protection? > How do the plants survive in the climate change storms yet to come?

I plan on using this set of questions next time my girlfriend says we should do something I don't want to do.

> I abhor these projects...

Jeesh.

ludsan··on Inside the proton, the ‘most complicated thing you could possibly imagine’
the proton motive force powers us all
ludsan··on Neovide – A simple, no-nonsense, cross-platform GUI for Neovim
As a data point, I'd like to chime in here. I have been a 15 year user of tmux (and screen before that) and never thought I'd change my development habits. Over the holidays I decided I would do one of those once-every-five-years upgrades to my vim setup as I had accrued dozens of vendored plugins in normal vim and wanted to see what the big deal with neovim was.

I bit the bullet and evaluated some of the "distributions" (AstroNvim and kickstarter) and played around with all the new lua plugins that I had never thought I needed (why use telescope when FZF-vim worked so well?).

Anyways, after a month of tweaking and absorbing, I found myself running Neovide only, and doing something I never thought I'd see, running tmux from within neovim/neovide. I think this only works (for me) because of session management (there are half a dozen plugins for handling quickly changing 'workspaces') and because the built-in terminal (with a very useful plugin called toggleterm: https://github.com/akinsho/toggleterm.nvim) works so well.

I have not stopped using tmux and layouts, and it sits in another fullscreen iterm2 workspace, but I find that I now spend 90% of my time using a fullscreen neovide and summoning/toggling tmux momentarily for running commands.

Of course, the caveat here is that my preferred mode of operation is being fullscreen as often as possible. I think if your preferred mode of operation is to always see splits then running neovim from the terminal within tmux is still the way to go.

As for why I like neovide? I find the animations, when tweaked to be less 'cool' are extremely useful to see where the cursor jumps to. I am also a huge fan of the fact that I can finally use 'linespace' to put some space between my lines of code -- it is an aesthetic I didn't realize I wanted.

ludsan··on Fly through your shell history
now try it with fzf. You will have two birthdays
ludsan··on IDEs we had 30 years ago
My first Java IDE was Symantec Café (which became Visual Café). I haven't thought about that in 25 years.
ludsan··on Microsoft was blindsided by OpenAI's ouster of CEO Sam Altman
fan of e e cummings
ludsan··on ASK HN: What’s a small thing you’ve purchased which has made your life better?
The Thermapen One meat thermometer. First I had to get over the arrogance that I could 'feel' when meat was the right temperature, then I had to invest in a product that, while being wildly more expensive, actually encourages me to use it all the time.

Pork, chicken, steak. I now have a sub-second answer to when the food is cooked.

ludsan··on Secretary Granholm to announce major scientific breakthrough by DOE [video]
One misses the point if one assumes that this is about which technology is most appropriate for de-carbonizing the world in the near future -- it is clear that the LCoE of wind and solar are phenomenal, and will continue to ramp up with the exponential curve of adoption. Solar and wind, AND storage, will get there first by a long shot. For that, I am grateful. Yay for learning curves.

But I don't accept your premise of an exclusive or. We can walk and chew gum at the same time. The economics of fusion will not be what we need as a game changer for this generation, but learning curves and technological progress are like contributing to your 401k when you're in your 20s, and they will apply to fusion just like they did for solar. And by next generation, it would be lovely to have a gamut of technologies to choose from for different use-cases (powering spaceflight, for example).

The world is enriched by scientific and engineering progress, and just because I like Messi doesn't mean I think Ronaldo is shit. I think there is a tendency in these fusion discussions to put up a strawman and to assume that any excitement about fusion detracts from the practical tools that we can apply today. I can only assume that this tendency comes from the green-washing energy companies have engaged in (e.g. "green hydrogen" from natural gas). I understand this cynicism, because it has been earned. However cynicism can prevent us from being happy for real accomplishments -- and yes, the Q>1 is as arbitrary as celebrating the year 2000, but it IS an accomplishment.

ludsan··on Secretary Granholm to announce major scientific breakthrough by DOE [video]
Goodness gracious. This is the definition of cynical -- an argumentation of "why hasn't this solved everything?" and an appeal to an electric bill. I don't know why these fusion energy discussions seems to attract the worst of our impatience and edge-lord cynicism. At least we haven't had a smarmy "always 5 decades away" post yet.

Science and engineering is made of hundreds of unsung triumphs with incremental decades-long payoffs. Like it or not, the "Q>1" mark has been a target for decades. I am glad to see it finally surpassed, and look forward to the order-of-magnitude increase we need to make the economics work.

ludsan··on Secretary Granholm to announce major scientific breakthrough by DOE [video]
> It's yet another "over unity" announcement.

Correct me if I'm wrong, but there haven't been "over unity" announcements before this -- aside from bombs. The Q of 1.5 here is the story. All Qs before have been under 1.

ludsan··on Tailscale SSH
quick question. Does this do user (de)provisioning like Jumpcloud? I.e. if the target machine doesn't have a /home/someuser but someuser is in my tailnet ACL, will it create the account?
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