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professor_v

129 karma · joined November 2, 2020

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professor_v··on Windows brings out the Rorschach test in everyone (2003)
I'm kind of offended they changed them all. At some point you just have to say 'okay this is just complete bullshit' and stand for the things you create. Otherwise everything ends up in this corporate bland soup of nothingness. Of course we know where Microsoft ended up, but I doesn't have to be that way.

By all means be pragmatic if it's a government complaining, but you don't have to take all crazy feedback at face value.

professor_v··on Claude Code as a Daily Driver: Claude.md, Skills, Subagents, Plugins, and MCPs
I just use docker and I don't feel I'm missing anything?
professor_v··on Claude Code Routines
It's not lack of self-awareness, they know what they are doing
professor_v··on Chrome Jpegxl Issue Reopened
Mail is dropping features left and right, like gmailify. I'm pretty sure they're trying to limit the maintenance costs as much as possible.
professor_v··on Death to type classes
"A monad is just a monoid in the category of endofunctors"
professor_v··on ChatGPT Is a Gimmick
Your examples are both quite gimmicky and not a fundamental value shift.
professor_v··on US lawmakers tell Apple, Google to be ready to remove TikTok from stores Jan. 19
So how do we ensure that Tiktok doesn't covertly alter the algorithm to subtly include propaganda tailored to China's geopolitical interests that are detrimental to the US? Or even just propaganda tailored to enhance internal strife to weaken the country?
professor_v··on DOJ will push Google to sell off Chrome
With 81% [1] of their revenue in 2022 provided by Google...

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[1] https://assets.mozilla.net/annualreport/2022/mozilla-fdn-202...

professor_v··on LLMs know more than they show: On the intrinsic representation of hallucinations
I'm extremely skeptical about this, I once believed the internet would do something similar and it seems to have done exactly the opposite.
professor_v··on Google pulls the plug on uBlock Origin
So what's a good alternative for Android and Windows/Linux usage? I've tried Opera, Vivaldi and Firefox and disliked them for one reason or another.
professor_v··on What Are File Descriptors in Linux
This whole article is terribly confusing. Take this paragraph for example:

Now, your process might depend on other system resources like input and output; as this event is also a process, it also has a file descriptor, which will be attached to your process in the file descriptor table.

What event? Are input and output an event? Why is this event its own process? Input and output are not a process are they?

Also, does a process have its own file descriptor table? That was never mentioned before and this reads like it is already known.

This sort of stuff goes on in my head throughout the entire article...

It's also still unclear to me what happens if multiple processes try to access the same file. Do file descriptors help to lock files during writing?

professor_v··on Logitech MX Mechanical Keyboard
Keychron has too high latency for me, I'm hoping this has a more acceptable input lag.
professor_v··on Computers Can Be Understood (2020)
I think this desire for understanding ultimately drives the resistance to systemd and the Linux/BSD divide, and I think for good reason. There will always be friction between features and inherent simplicity/ability to understand the system.
professor_v··on A Review of “The Man Who Solved the Market”
The article was talking about the first computer science guy in a team of mathematicians. I don't know if mathematicians should be called technical, but they're hardly MBA types.
professor_v··on The IKEA catalogue through the ages
I definitely think it's a mistake that IKEA stopped printing their catalogues last year. The offline experience is totally different from online. Online I tend to do direct searches for things I already decided I want, but the IKEA catalog is perfect for casual browsing and getting new ideas for stuff I would've never bought otherwise.

It might come off as a cost saving short term, but I doubt in the end the catalogues did not bring in enough money anymore.

professor_v··on Reasons to switch from Windows to Linux
I'm a heavy touchpad user and the sole reason I will not use Linux for the foreseeable future is because touchpad usage is absolutely terrible on Linux. Depending if you use the libinput or synaptics drivers it's either completely inconsistent between applications or all-around terrible.

I use Windows + WSL even though I practically never do anything Windows related.

professor_v··on MicroK8s – Low-ops, minimal Kubernetes, for cloud, clusters, Edge and IoT
I remember about 5 years ago I tried to deploy it on CoreOS using the available documentation and literally couldn't get it working.

I haven't done a manual deployment since. I hope it got significantly better and I may be an idiot but the reputation isn't fully undeserved.

The problem back then was also that this was usually the first thing you had to do to try it out. Doing a complicated deployment without knowing much about it doesn't make it any easier.

professor_v··on Useful and useless code comments
I can't think of a single benefit of a function over a comment for a piece of code that's only used once. The downsides of the function:

- Unless the function is extremely clear like max() or min(), you will have to read the function and jump around the code. I feel people underestimate the cognitive overhead required for this. This gets worse the more arguments are required to pass around. Linear code is much easier to read.

- More lines of code, a comment adds 1 line while a function or method adds at least 4. Also, code that has to be separated over multiple functions is practically always longer than linear code. Doing this to the extreme can have quite an effect.

- Naming issues, it can be hard to think of a good name for a function and it almost never describes it perfectly. Misnaming things leads to bad assumptions and leaky abstractions. Comments have the luxury of potentially conveying more information and are also less important to get right.

If you use a lot of vertical scrollbars then by all means go ahead and abstract it, but I'd generally pick the comment.

professor_v··on File Permissions: A painful side of Docker (2019)
Within docker-compose.yml I use

  services:
    foo:
      image: foo/bar:6.9
      user: ${UID:-1000}:${UID:-1000}
On Linux with Bash it runs with your current user and most other platforms it runs with id 1000, which is setup as the default user in the Dockerfile. This is no problem on MacOS or Windows because of the way Docker-Desktop uses VM's.

ZSH or other shells don't necessarily set $UID, so if you're running Linux, not id 1000 and not running Bash you might need a little .env file with `UID=1001` in it to make it work. And then the user is still nameless in the container. This is kind of rare and I only use it for dev containers where most relevant files (and permissions) are bind-mounted from the host, so it hasn't really been a problem in practice.

Remaps would be cleaner but I find it too much work to explain for normal developers just wanting to use a dev container.

professor_v··on Surface Laptop 4
I love the fact that the Thinkpad X1 has dedicated physical home/end/pgup/pgdown keys. I wouldn't consider buying a laptop without them anymore.
professor_v··on Giant Ship Is Moved To and Fro to Break Suction: Suez Update
It never costed $56 billion. It's just $56 billion worth of goods held up for a few days. A bit like a bitcoin payment.
professor_v··on Firefox 87 trims HTTP Referrers by default to protect user privacy
I just realized the 'Referer' header is actually a misspelling in the http protocol.
professor_v··on Mozilla Welcomes the Rust Foundation
They don't explicitly state that the rewrite is better? They just mention that they reduced the amount of code from 160,000 to 85,000 lines.

Using competing teams for this purpose seems like a waste of money to me.

professor_v··on Google’s next big Chrome update will rewrite the rules of the web
I find it insane that the European Union doesn't really seem to care about any of this. It's a massive drain on their economy.

They only seem to talk about chip manufacturing, which only recently started in the first place.

professor_v··on Factorio Future Plans
They should write more lines of code, they'll be rich!
professor_v··on Counterfeiting Stock – Explaining illegal naked shorting and stock manipulation
Do you want to buy my synthetic dollars with the price pegged to a dollar?

edit: I just realized this is exactly what USDT is, but I still feel like it will all come burning down at some point. Maybe it will take 30 years though.

professor_v··on I Feel Like I Have No Real Interests; My Only Interest Is Making Money
> Women / men of this age tend to be attracted to people who are interesting rather than wealthy.

I seriously doubt this. Looking at myself I care a lot less about 'interesting' people than I did in my twenties. Maybe interesting is a euphemism for social capital, but social capital is greatly linked to wealth anyway.

professor_v··on Background Features in Google Meet, Powered by Web ML
Have you actually used it? In practice I wouldn't say it works at all really. The artifacts are terrible.