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manwe150

843 karma · joined January 23, 2017

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manwe150··on Oregon Police Are Charging a Local News Outlet $2.5M for Records About One Cop
Even so, it'd be better to lose a small fraction of trains than make them all late, since have 2x trains at 2x intervals operates at much lower efficiency (with the first train being over capacity, taking much longer for people to get off and on, and the second train half empty -- unloading feels almost quadratic in the size of the stack of people to push and pop). Of course, yes, that assumes you can ensure it's only a small fraction of trains being skipped and that each train is big enough and scheduled frequently enough to move the expected passengers. Those seem like different problems to solve though, once the trains aren't allowed to run late.
manwe150··on Air Purifiers as White Noise Machines
Ionizers are described as "air filtration using electrostatic attraction", while the ESP page I linked as the alternative specifically lists being filterless as its distinguishing feature, and is described as typically using lower voltage in home applications.
manwe150··on Air Purifiers as White Noise Machines
That doesn’t seem to follow from the Wikipedia article on them, which seems to say one is the same as the other. Though there’s a third option with a similar name that is used without a filter https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electrostatic_precipitator
manwe150··on Oregon Police Are Charging a Local News Outlet $2.5M for Records About One Cop
I’ve often wonder if cancelling trains (and busses) would make them on time more in practice too, by queuing theory. If you just let them run late, that starts to compounds until you get a Bernoulli distribution (exponential arrival delays) as the system becomes unstable. If canceling a train means the next one can run actually on time, then the system is forced back towards stability with predictable reliable times. Sure you had to miss one slot, but in the alternative scheme where everyone is late, you miss every slot — and average wait times are doubled in an exponential process compared to a periodic system that sometimes skips an entire train intentionally.
manwe150··on Air Purifiers as White Noise Machines
Isn’t that just a marketing term for ionizer?
manwe150··on Air Purifiers as White Noise Machines
That’s the design appeal of ionizers like BlueAir (not most ionizers, but specially those designed to supposedly prevent ozone production). They comparatively sip power while getting the same measured reduction in particulates and ozone.
manwe150··on My old job feels distant now
Until either the enter key wears out and breaks, or we get pervasive sandboxes that act according to the users interests. It seems like Windows Vista UAC all over again for a new generation.
manwe150··on Passkeys are not a trap
You know how to feed the site certificate into gpg before every login to check for url phishing attacks? I usually have to ask my password manager to do that (which didn’t exist 25 years ago)
manwe150··on Passkeys are not a trap
I’ve never seen an implementation where passkeys deleted my password or could lead to a situation where it was locked out. They usually just bypass the password+2fa dance when functioning, and otherwise just don’t matter if they don’t function. (Well perhaps except home depot, where it gets mad at me every time I use a password and tries to install a new copy of the same broken passkey as last time, for my convience)
manwe150··on God of War on PSP, recompiled to WebAssembly and running in the browser
I asked Fable to write me a small CRUD app recently so I could keep tabs on my todo list and edit it. It chose to write the database as YAML files stored in git. When I asked why not use a database, it defended the choice by saying it would let me edit the files by hand whenever I wanted and sync them to where ever I wanted and get reliable git merges maintaining consistency, so I didn’t have to rely on remote database operations for that.
manwe150··on Zig v0.17.0
That’s assuming the reporter reproduced it. I’ve seen so much slop these days. Sometimes people post whole conversations in which the final answer from the AI is that the initial report was impossible to fit to the data after reproducing it, then continues in circles arguing that proves the original reported issue was real and the refuted cause isn’t actually refuted (eg it said there was a bug in function A, in code which never used function A — and that example was with the top tier models just released last month)
manwe150··on Apple's smart home camera reportedly won't record video
About 1700sf with taller than normal ceilings. It’s unnecessary bright in the evening, but blends with sunlight in the day. I feel like our brains must interpret light differently depending on the angle it reaches the eye. I used to rent a place that was 900sf with normal ceilings, which had 4 of those tiny sort of ones in the living room, and it was painfully bright in the way they concentrated the light into spots so we never used them (unfortunately they didn’t have dimmers)

I realized I did accidentally almost double my final number, so 500-1000W would be more accurate for the way this condo was built (depending on which extra lamps we are including—does every understair closet light count or just the main rooms, at the low end estimate)

manwe150··on Zig v0.17.0
A lot of bug reports aren’t valid, or handle a case that can’t realistically happen or realistically be handled (eg what do you do if you detect a crash while the prior crash is crashing and the logging pipe is throwing errors)
manwe150··on Zig v0.17.0
I feel very torn as a maintainer on this, since the only way to respond to the increased noise from AI has been to have AI do the research for me to extract all the links and line numbers I used to have to find by hand to explain why the PR needs more effort to be completed. But I also will be highly dismissive of any submitter who just posts AI text without cleaning it up first. It feels hypocritical, but the alternative is that I just can’t respond to most people instead due to limited bandwidth. I mark if something comes directly from the LLM though and to try to express my degree of confidence in its claims.
manwe150··on Apple's smart home camera reportedly won't record video
Yes almost 60 sounds right, and I keep the dimmers at about 50% usually since it’s a small condo. But it also very /evenly/ illuminated. The builders chose this, not me. Your typical incandescent hallway or stairwell probably used to have 1-2 lights (60-120W) to cast enough light to get around. Now that same hall in modern LED style might have 4-6, because it eliminates shadows, not because it makes it brighter in a given spot. Same for the kitchen—it probably used to have one central 100W light and 50W over sink, and now a modern style build in the same space might have at least 6 LED ceiling lights+6 under cabinet lights
manwe150··on Cops Can Bypass iPhone's Automatic Reboot to Get into Locked Phones
No, that would fundamentally break the way (good) hashing works if I could add known data and get it to reveal the secret data
manwe150··on Apple's smart home camera reportedly won't record video
Across my house, I think I have about a kilowatt or two of LED lights, mostly in the form of ceiling cans at 16W each. Running everything full brightness would thus be about $0.30-$0.50 per hour. It’s the paradox that the same rooms probably would have used the wattage with the old incandescents, it just would have had a lot more shadowy corners.
manwe150··on The great crime decline is happening all across the country
Seriously? It is also logical to kill anyone accused of a crime, in case they actually might have really committed it and might again. Is trial even worth the risk that one guilty man should go free?
manwe150··on Owed a billion dollars in Nvidia stock
Also seems like it isn’t clear that they ever owned it. There appears to be a mistake in the contract asserting mutually inconsistent clauses, but it appears that both parties agreed on the not-owning interpretation for nearly 30 years, which might already be a far simpler contract resolution (depending on jurisdiction, it can almost immediately binding as soon as both parties accent to that reading) than also having waited out the statute of limitations
manwe150··on The great crime decline is happening all across the country
I’m not sure if either of you are being honestly factual or snarky, but I seem to recall this hypothesis is actually quite highly contested in social circles, and not at all as strongly supported as the parent seems to state it as fact
manwe150··on I don't want to read what you didn't write
Why not do both though? I often now write my human summary, then paste in also the content you could get by asking a bot (with markers for which is which). You’re perfectly welcome to ignore the bot text, or ask your own bot, but bots are pretty slow, so I also don’t want to wait for it to “decompress” that 300 bit blob to get the detailed page back. But my human summaries are also only intended to be 50 bits — compressed again to just pass the signal I mean to convey, and not the whole prompt needed to fetch the right info from the right place to substantiate the claim.

TLDR the length was the same curtesy of tl;dr before, just now with a different name.

manwe150··on I vibed a proof of Conway's conjecture
Several of my coworkers — it’s not that unusual that if you can max out a couple accounts, the companies will obviously notice you (as a high cost customer), and sometimes offer more
manwe150··on Neovim have a ~$800k Bitcoin donation sitting untouched since 2023
That only makes sense if money is a durable good destroyed by use. But money is improved by use and lost when put under a mattress. In economics terms, MV=PQ, and your proposal sets V low, which harms Q (goods available for sale)
manwe150··on How an MIT research project became the Julia programming language
It was about lisp ;)

Secret mode: ./julia —-lisp

manwe150··on Hacking IKEA Furniture
I challenge you to dissemble your bespoke furniture and have it still usable after reassembly
manwe150··on EPA says power for data centers can sidestep pollution laws
It seems pretty much how law (specifically common law) has always worked though. If Congress thinks the law should apply to them, then Congress's job is to write a law that applies to them. The president and judicial branches are not supposed to make new laws, but rather to enforce the laws as written.

My reading of the EPA's statement here is they also wanted to mildly warn the companies that if they ever in the future want to contemplate connecting to the grid (eg. to bring down costs), they should be aware that bypassing compliance now could have expensive consequences for them later. Of course, Congress (local or federal) could also change the law in the much shorter term, so there's risk to them either way if they design without any forward thought for how to comply. On the other hand, if this inquiry to the EPA was merely requesting clarity on whether they are exempt from the reporting paperwork, but are using otherwise standard and compliant designs, then maybe the law is already working generally as intended.

manwe150··on Em Dash Is Fine – It Is AI That Sucks
Use a Mac or iphone? The opt-dash key combo has mapped to em-dash for a long time, and I think you can now just long press the dash key too. The opt key doesn’t scale beyond the hundred or so extra characters it gives space to live on the keyboard, but it sure is a lot better than memorizing Unicode code points, and the rest I can get from the Fn (or Fn-E), which activates a Unicode search panel just about everywhere. I don’t know which Linux toolkits do something similar, and Windows Character Map seems to be somehow even worse than I remember from several decades ago.
manwe150··on I'm becoming AI-blind
I think the parent meant it is more interesting to pose new problems than solve them. Posing a new conjecture along the path to solving something is a close cousin, but still seems more bounded than proposing something novel to prove—if only because proving that something novel is also actually interesting is subjective and thus difficult for a different reason.
manwe150··on Linux 7.3 improves performance when running out of vRAM
The difference is Linux has fork, while Windows doesn’t, so Linux cannot do accurate accounting (without wasting a lot of memory) while Windows can.
manwe150··on It's not empowering to hand off the details
That’s not really the issue. The issue I have (sometimes) is that it might discover it has read-only access to most places (.git, github) and so sometimes when it thinks it “finished” it will discover those are read only and try to find workarounds (erase the read-only files, hand edit the .git folder, make new forks to push to those instead)—none of which a human would normally consider reasonable necessary effort. Most of those attempts do fail, but it turns out that sometimes just being maximally helpful in following orders strictly can be quite surprisingly adversarial, entirely by accident
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