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pas

8,493 karma · joined January 22, 2011

pas@zomg.hu
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pas··on uv: Deduplicate all files in the wheel cache
warm cache case is only imperceptibly slower, no?
pas··on Iceland votes on whether to restart talks on joining EU
there are members with veto power (for things that require unanimity)

https://michalovadek.github.io/eu-veto-tracker/

pas··on Iceland votes on whether to restart talks on joining EU
They are already de facto inside. Hence the argument to have a vote at least.

They are already paying the price for not being de jure members. (Currency exchange costs, rate hedging is also costly, and they don't benefit from EU unified foreign policy - the current Trump scare for Greenland could come for them too - hence the argument to join.)

pas··on Doctors are finally learning to manage antidepressant withdrawal
people whose life is amazing don't go through the process of getting stimulants (or even SSRIs) prescribed to them. psychiatrists know about this. the plan is usually to cycle the meds. is this great and works every time? no. is this better than the alternative? yes.

ADHD is not great. and in many cases it's so bad people die from "not paying attention", and Ritalin (methylphenidate) is visibly helping people avoid those early deaths.

https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC10901868/

pas··on Doctors are finally learning to manage antidepressant withdrawal
for anyone who's curious about the sexual side-effects, this subreddit has stories from the unlucky few

https://reddit.com/r/PSSD/top/

pas··on My Business Is Dying
it's completely ridiculous that some comments are demonizing OP (who actually cares about the outcome that management told them) when anybody who ever sat in a lame corporate meeting knows exactly what bullshit OP does not want to put up with.

there are so many people just phoning it in, or even worse being (both) socially and technically incompetent.

by what OP said we don't know their usual M.O., and just because they said they can and do cut through bullshit in meetings, does not mean that they are not compassionate with the people who are aligned with the outcome that management wants.

simply because OP does not achieve world peace we shouldn't assume they go around sloshing kerosene everywhere and giving out free hand-held sparklers.

...

and probably the reality is much more mundane and boring. usually technical people have absolutely reasonable concerns , yet most of the time they misjudge the cost-benefit ratios.

pas··on Beyond Recall and the Illusion of Competence
just FYI for anyone who doesn't know about this amazing tool yet:

https://github.com/semgrep/semgrep

pas··on Meta reaches $17B settlement over social media harms to children
there's no need to "optimize" it already has the basic loop. stochastic reward (interesting news, interesting comments/replies), gamification (points go up!), and no real social interaction. (no connection, some performative elements, ie. comments are written not just to one known person or a small group of people you know.)

the things you mention all exploit this loop for monetization. I agree it's great that HN is not, but that doesn't mean it won't tickle our brains.

pas··on Beyond Recall and the Illusion of Competence
Still, even current AI/LLMs can do debugging.

For example after an hour of process of elimination it finds the bug, reproduces it, then it recommends a ~1 line fix. Then that's where one should spend their attention budget, and think through the consequences, weighing positives and negatives, and then either asking for a different fix, not merging, or accepting it. This is a lot more productive IMHO.

pas··on Meta reaches $17B settlement over social media harms to children
HN is also social media :)

but let's say friends sending links to group chats (or through direct messages) and you open it, and uh you see you got messages from other people on Instagram, or on Facebook you see that someone had a baby/wedding/whatever, and ...

also I see that people install these limiter apps on their phones, and then just override them many times a day.

and of course if every few days you spend 30 minutes giggling while looking at funny cats/dogs, sure, great. but on bad days you end up doing it for hours and escaping into it, ignoring something else, or using it after stressful meetings to "clear my head" (which becomes a coping mechanism for anxiety)

the problem is obviously (right?) that this happens to everybody. kids are probably more susceptible, but in general we withdrew into our screens and do our flight/fight/fawn/freeze responses online (videogames, outrage porn, porn porn, food porn)

https://www.slowboring.com/p/from-bowling-alone-to-scrolling...

pas··on Show HN: Huzzah – a novel approach to coding with AI
designers, team leads, tech leads, architects, senior devs are all doing this kind of formal or informal management work

just because someone doesn't have the "manager" in their job title they might still do a lot of supervision

pas··on Bun 1.4
GitHub commits, PRs and issues are public. even their recent buildkite CI logs are public.

apparently there's some kind of automated differential fuzzer to discover Node.js incompatibilities, but probably that's behind the curtain.

We might never know the exact dollars and cents amount, but we can make pretty well calibrated guesses.

pas··on It is a sign of the times that Amazon gets to call this fair use
that's not how regulatory capture works. they get some exemption, cross-licencing, or pay a fine, and nothing changes for the better
pas··on Error by AI scribe during medical appointment leaves patient devastated
though this is exactly the thing that can be handled during RL deep learning

the problem is that introduction of any new technology usually happens with so much emotional baggage, that when there's an error (human or otherwise) some humans will understandably see their biases confirmed in them, and will signal boost everything to the Moon.

pas··on Google has stopped pushing Git tags for some Android source code
what does the license say? provide source when asked or publish source?

OSI is not clear on this either. ("Where some form of a product is not distributed with source code, there must be a well-publicized means of obtaining the source code for no more than a reasonable reproduction cost, [...]")

pas··on Solo – a .so loader for static Linux binaries
static link everything? ship a docker image? ship your own userspace (like Oracle DB used (?) to)?
pas··on On A.I. regulation and messaging
are they dealing with more or less memory safety bugs?

for me it was already "don't run in prod" quality before. (at least after this I'm considering adding it to the CI to see how it fares.)

segfaults. I don't know. I looked at their CI and GH issues over the past few weeks. (though now GH is down so I can't do a search, but I didn't see thousands of segfaults.)

by all accounts and measures it seems it made their house of cards more manageable. despite the frankenport, no?

they already had a zig compiler fork, wanted to upstream it, but the zig maintainer(s) said it's low-effort. now they don't have to maintain their compiler fork. (or wait for the zig team to deliver the features they wish for.) no need to maintain a hybrid codebase. (though it has C++ because of the embedded JSC.)

also I have no idea what's the zig-rust FFI status, but getting over with a rewrite faster is usually better, even if you are left with non-idiomatic code.

pas··on On AI regulation and messaging
the neat part is that you don't have to, millions will do it for you!

the point is that it's a quite obvious opportunity that was just some pipedream years ago.

by the time v8.0 comes around we'll have more data on the bun rewrite. also we'll see how LLMs will affect the productivity of kernel developers, and the overall stability/maintainability.

pas··on On A.I. regulation and messaging
> at which point, why not just do that from zig.

because for the same effort you get a better result if you can and do use a better tool?

pas··on On AI regulation and messaging
> I don't believe the LLM port makes the full transition any easier than doing things the old fashioned way: a dual lang code base like Linux

...

how so?

let's say Linus opens a branch, rust-temp, and in 2 weeks pushes ~15 million lines of code deleting most of the old C code. and then it gets merged in a few weeks. and then there's still a few months of the "merge window" and RC process. and each day folks report bugs, and automatic fuzzers make sure that both versions "behave the same".

I was pretty skeptical (still am), but what the Bun team did is pretty great so far.

https://bun.com/blog/bun-in-rust details the process, we see the results (Node.js compat [0], more than 3 thousand of issues fixed since since 1.3 [1], more than 900 issues fixed in ~24 hours [2], and it's live/in-prod [3])

> 50 dynamic workflows in Claude Code run continuously over the course of 11 days.

so let's say 500 workflows could do something similar for the kernel. the reported cost is 165K USD, so let's say this would cost 1.65M USD, plus CI costs [4] (which is ~200K/year for bun, so let's say it's 2M USD for the kernel)

How much the world is spending on kernel bug bounties and various security programs each year? (rough estimate says that just the visible kernel testing programs cost at least 15-30M / year)

The bar is not perfect. The bar is something better.

[0] https://xcancel.com/bunjavascript/status/2087436767054213517...

[1] https://xcancel.com/bunjavascript/status/2082298681223680002...

[2] https://xcancel.com/bunjavascript/status/2080882189663907859...

[3] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48966569

[4] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49070494

pas··on On A.I. regulation and messaging
this seems exactly the usual anti-consumer bullshit that is regulated state-by-state (or sometimes by (lack of) FCC/FTC effort, or by the CFPB that is now a zombie)

however, AI doesn't really influence this. already there's a lot of problem with things like Ticketmaster, Apple's walled garden, abuses of IP law (patent trolls, DMCA trolls), etc.

the insurance industry is a prime example of this. the suffering caused by power imbalance is incomprehensible, and yet there's not enough political will to address this.

sure, it's easily possible that some important aspects of our everyday lives will be worsened by bad AI regulation. but IMHO this is wholly an upstream problem, it's a symptom of bad politics. (a byproduct of the Zip2 to Tesla to "democracy with roman salute characteristics" pipeline.)

that said, obviously the foundation to have any chance of a nonpatological market to exist is that self-hosting has to be legal.

pas··on On AI regulation and messaging
LLM-assisted software engineering seems to be very efficient if you have a deterministic target. (bun rewrite from zig to Rust, 100% Node.js compatibility, pnpm compatibility -- https://github.com/oven-sh/bun/pull/38333)
pas··on On AI regulation and messaging
Arguably the question is whether it's economically feasible to self-host something similar.

Are you self-hosting Google or Bing? No, but we have quite a huge ecosystem of full-text search tools with PageRank, with options to scale to almost Google scale (if you have the money). After all LLM training starts with the same crawl mechanism.

As long as barriers to entry is not too high (ie. it makes sense to take the risk to start a business that provides something similar - usually for a niche) market forces work.

We have the classic empirical chart reproducing microeconomics.

https://www.fda.gov/about-fda/center-drug-evaluation-and-res...

And setting up a pharma plant is also very capital intensive.

Here the obvious barrier to entry is completely artificial. (Which provides an incentive to spend a lot of money on R&D -- though it naturally raises the question of Pareto efficiency.)

pas··on The Life and Death of Direct File [pdf]
let's say a non-profit hosts it somewhere can people use it to file their taxes for free?
pas··on Count Binface receives over a quarter of votes in Clacton by-election
you need to compare the alternative. and also take into account the growth that happened thanks to cheap mortgages.

there was a nominal price bubble (especially visible in the rent vs buy graph) but rents did not show the same spike, there was no general shortage (as seen in vacancy rates), and since interest rates fell nominal prices went up, and the central bank overcorrected.

https://www.fullstackeconomics.com/p/the-2000s-housing-bubbl...

... the obvious problem is the low productivity of suburbs. spending a lot of money on building them is good for short-term GDP growth, but long-term it's a poor investment compared to the usual recommendations.

pas··on Count Binface receives over a quarter of votes in Clacton by-election
how come the UK bailout was an expense? the US one paid for itself.
pas··on Stealing Reasoning Traces from Proprietary LLM APIs
LLM does not work on encrypted tokens. It happens at the API gateway.
pas··on Stealing Reasoning Traces from Proprietary LLM APIs
or add some metadata and don't allow downgrading.
pas··on Shopify replaced Redis with MySQL for inventory reservations–and it scaled
assuming their "reserve item" function is just "update the table set N rows to reserved=true where reserved==false"

more transactions can commit at the same time, but with one counter they would conflict (as it did in the Redis case)

they should use CRDT (and trying to model that with this 1000 row workspace, no?)

still, eventually at some point they need to do the math

pas··on As a Windows user, it's a surreal way to install a program
in the age of containers, overlay filesystems, a decade of UX work regarding sharing data/files/content between applications on phones, it should.
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