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mmoustafa

749 karma · joined January 24, 2015

mmoustafa.at.hn
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mmoustafa··on Data centers in space makes no sense
They do not at any point outline how cooling will be done, they simply say "it will be more efficient than chillers due to the larger delta T" which is incorrect because it's about dT not delta T
mmoustafa··on xAI joins SpaceX
> "The only logical solution therefore is to transport these resource-intensive efforts to a location with vast power and space. I mean, space is called 'space' for a reason. [crying laughing emoji]"

This is all the reasoning provided. It is quite sad how a company I admired so much has become embroiled in financial doohickery.

mmoustafa··on Provenance Is the New Version Control
It is not about tracking changes, git does that well enough.

It is about tracking the reason for the changes, i.e. git messages but on steroids.

mmoustafa··on Claude's new constitution
new trolley problem just dropped: save 1 billion people or ...
mmoustafa··on Provenance Is the New Version Control
I wrote an article on this exact issue (albeit more simpleminded) and I suggested a rudimentary way of tracking provenance in today's agents with "reasoning traces" on the objects they modify.

Would love people's thoughts on this: https://0xmmo.notion.site/Preventing-agent-doom-loops-with-p...

mmoustafa··on Oh My Zsh adds bloat
Although this is what Opus recommends, it will give you many issues as you don’t really have any node runtimes in the path (or worse if you do).

What I recommend is replacing it with $PATH=(a command to find the nvm default alias directory, detect the verion and load it from that specific version directory directly) so you always have default node in path and then lazy loading only nvm itself, so you can switch when you need to.

Sorry I don’t have the command handy as I’m on mobile but if you paste the above into Opus you’ll get it.

mmoustafa··on Oh My Zsh adds bloat
I don't think 0.38s is a bad trade-off for convenience when the rest of the tools I need to do my job collectively are another 2s at shell startup. NVM alone adds 0.5-0.6s on my M4 Macbook Air.

Bigger fish to fry if we're being practical.

mmoustafa··on During Helene, I just wanted a plain text website
I did, it's available at olly.bot :)
mmoustafa··on Decorative Cryptography
> All encryption is end-to-end, if you’re not picky about the ends.

This reminds of how Apple iMessage is E2E encrypted, but Apple runs on-device content detection that pings their servers, which you can't possibly even think of disabling. [1][2]

[1] https://sneak.berlin/20230115/macos-scans-your-local-files-n... [2] Investigation in Beeper/PyPush discord for iMessage spam blocking

mmoustafa··on During Helene, I just wanted a plain text website
I built a connection to a web-powered LLM over SMS/iMessage for literally this purpose. While traveling I’d have really bad or sparse service but still needed to find my way around.
mmoustafa··on IPv6 just turned 30 and still hasn't taken over the world
the other day I had to change my node server to prefer ipv4 dns records because fly.io doesn’t support outbound ipv6 connections but defaults to a dns server that returns them
mmoustafa··on Ask HN: Those making $500/month on side projects in 2025 – Show and tell
Right about $500 now, down from $5K at peak

AI assistant in your iMessage group chats https://olly.bot

mmoustafa··on Show HN: I built an interactive HN Simulator
Post — “Ask HN: Can you write a limerick?”

Top Comment — “This reads like someone who just discovered poetry forms exist and thinks a limerick is some novel concept. The real challenge isn't writing one—any undergraduate can follow the AABBA scheme—it's understanding why meter and scansion matter beyond just counting syllables.

If you're actually serious about this, you'd be asking about anapestic trimeter or how comic timing affects caesura placement. The fact that you're not suggests you haven't done the groundwork.”

mmoustafa··on Basalt Woven Textile
Scissors has entered the chat
mmoustafa··on Hemp ban hidden inside government shutdown bill
We do not live in a democracy, we live in a representative democracy. The founders simply had no option, you had to pick a person, put them in a carriage, and send them to the capitol to do your bidding (also why electoral college exists for reporting votes, but I digress).

I always wonder what they would’ve created if everyone had a device in their pocket to send their preferences directly to the capitol at the speed of light.

mmoustafa··on Why are hyperlinks blue? (2021)
… according to Marc Andreesen
mmoustafa··on Waymo for Business
I think maybe unclear in my comment, I’m referring to scaling within the cities they’re in. e.g. in SF it still takes 15m for a Waymo to arrive as opposed to Uber’s 3m and it costs more. I would’ve expected Uber drivers to be out of a job, which is not the case (I also drive occasionally)
mmoustafa··on Waymo for Business
Why are they not hyper-focused on scaling the number of vehicles on the road now that they have a working system? Is Waymo afraid of flooding the supply and crashing prices? Are they too expensive to build/maintain to justify a lower price point?

What is going on, if you have PMF the logical next step is scale.

mmoustafa··on Starship's Tenth Flight Test
touch some steel, you’ve lived in the world of bits for too long
mmoustafa··on The Right Way to Embed an LLM in a Group Chat
nice write up! covers every consideration I had to go through while building group chat myself for https://olly.bot
mmoustafa··on Show HN: Code Claude Code
Ha! I prefer this one
mmoustafa··on Show HN: Real-time AI Voice Chat at ~500ms Latency
Huge problem space. Usually referred to as “turn taking”
mmoustafa··on Show HN: I built an app to generate story relationships using Mermaidjs
Cool idea, but from my tests it seems like the LLM needs more grounding since it misses lots of characters. Maybe a list of the actual characters in the story?

I had the same problem with https://timelines.0xmmo.co where I had to ground it in Wikipedia articles.

mmoustafa··on Thank HN: The puzzle game I posted here 6 weeks ago got licensed by The Atlantic
Second this, I've built some puzzle games (e.g. https://snoozpaper.com) but lacked distribution :)
mmoustafa··on The Dishwasher Paradox
I like how succinct this is at making the point. I would just remove the note in the parentheses, it kind of led me astray and confused me.
mmoustafa··on Grok3 Launch [video]
it's closed source and open outcome
mmoustafa··on Sunsetting Create React App
Yes, but Meta is a consumer of React not a provider. They don’t host React apps, let alone present themselves as the prima facie way to deploy them.
mmoustafa··on Sunsetting Create React App
The article kindly phrases the alternative as “use a framework” and links to a page that has only one actual framework: NextJS.

I don’t support React pushing a wholesale shift to NextJS as a starting point for every project, given it’s mostly directed by a single private company (Vercel) that have positioned themselves as the default deployment platform for NextJS apps, publish the documentation, and do not shy away from claiming it as their own.

It has become extremely difficult to distinguish between NextJS features that are community-driven vs profit-driven e.g. api route functions (putting your backend in your React project, so now you will pay them for compute) and NextJS image optimization (famously expensive, and NextJS literally throws warnings if you don’t use it).

mmoustafa··on Jacksonpollock.org (2003)
That looks awesome!
mmoustafa··on Jacksonpollock.org (2003)
Fun! Reminds me of spending a week in 2012 trying to find the perfect blackboard chalk effect http://mmoustafa.com/experiments/chalk/

After many experiments, the most realistic was painting a thick line and then erasing tiny randomly sized rectangles out of it.

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