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renlo

664 karma · joined July 26, 2014

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renlo··on Tesla Roadster
Yes, it's a bomb, but there's no way in hell it's going to be legalized for public road use in the US or EU. It was a cool demo, it's literally a flying car, how could that not be cool.

Perhaps some billionaires will buy it, good for them.

Why do you guys contort yourselves into knots trying to find any and every conceivable problem with something that doesn't affect you ... get over it already. Go ahead and flag me.

renlo··on Tesla Roadster
The discussion was about the car's safety, not driver behavior. A car can be the safest car, but if the drivers who choose that car all decide to drive it off a cliff, it doesn't speak at all to the safety of the car, it speaks to driver behavior.
renlo··on Sharing AI progress in mathematics
Are ideas copyrightable? If you've read a book that gave you a fresh and new idea, should you send a royalty check to the book publisher every time you use that idea? Obviously tongue in cheek, but I think it highlights the absurdity of all of this, and the absurdity to point to "established" copyright law, established by corporate lawyers jockeying for tithes from the public, humorous.
renlo··on A note on subscription prices from LWN
> Since the 2022 price change, according to the undoubtedly reliable numbers from the US government, consumer-price inflation has added up to almost exactly 20%.

Enjoyed the sarcasm, but does anyone actually believe these numbers? Is there a more reliable metric that isn't affected by Goodhart's law and can be trusted?

renlo··on Crime Pays but Botany Doesn't
It was neither backwards nor goofy for a man in 18th century Europe to create a system only his 18th century European peers could use (the only peers whom he could even come into contact with in 18th century Europe).

What actually would be goofy and backwards would be for this man to consider all of the world's cultures with whom he had never come in contact with, and try to create a system that worked for them. That would be very goofy and backwards, it would make him a crackpot.

The mere mention of this conciliatory statement for those "[pesky] leftists" (of which the author is one), the author is asserting that "Linnaeus was backwards and goofy but yet he made a good system!". Why does this even need to be said?

Do we call Confucius backwards and goofy for only writing his virtues in Chinese and only considering his Chinese peers? Why didn't he, or the Chinese (they had an empire and the means to do this), send envoys to the west so they could divine and predict what cultures would exist in a thousand years, allowing him to write his virtues in all of the languages and to consider all of the different mores of the world when writing his virtues? It's too Chinese! Or what about the Mayans, why didn't they in their backwards and goofy manner realize that a thousand years later their script would be indecipherable (for a while) to the European-language-speaking researchers of the future? If they had written in Latin we would be able to understand what they were trying to say! Very goofy and backwards of them. \s

The author's statement is what is backwards and goofy, and it's a cultural shibboleth that worked -- I stopped reading the moment I saw that, because to me it is a goofy and backwards thing to say.

renlo··on Goodhart's Law Comes for Every Benchmark You Trust
My strategy these days is to scan and look for the tells and click out when I see them. Mine was the same "honestly ranked, with no silver bullets on offer". I suspect in less than a year we won't be able to tell the difference.
renlo··on The Dunning-Kruger effect may just be a data artefact (2020)
A similar argument was made a couple of years ago, here's the rebuttal of the argument from back then [2022]: https://andersource.dev/2022/04/19/dk-autocorrelation.html
renlo··on Show HN: Trifle – Open-source analytics that stores answers, not events
what happens to your database with all of these metrics coming in?

edit: could loading a performance dashboard affect peoples ability to buy their product?

renlo··on Judge approves $1.5B Anthropic settlement for pirated books used to train Claude
> That means that rightsholders can expect at least $3,000 per title (less costs and fees), which will be shared among the rightsholders for that title (if there is more than one rightsholder)

> if there is more than one rightsholder

Again, a publisher will have a whole catalog of books / titles, a non-negligible portion of that the publisher will own the copyright to (no one to split it with). There's all kinds of books outside of novels, there's media tie-ins, IP franchise books (ie Star Wars), childrens books, textbooks / reference materials, etc etc etc. Yes, with novels the author tends to own the copyright, but you're forgetting all of the other kinds of books out there.

renlo··on Judge approves $1.5B Anthropic settlement for pirated books used to train Claude
For the downvotes, my response is to read: https://authorsguild.org/advocacy/artificial-intelligence/wh...

> If there is a current publisher(s) (which still possesses an exclusive license), the author(s) will split the $3000 with the publisher. Any co-authors will share the author portion and, if there are multiple publishers (e.g., different publishers have exclusive rights to different formats), they will share the publisher portion. Assume that the co-authors and co-publishers will share the portion equally unless their contracts provide otherwise. The standard default split between publishers and authors of noneducational texts is 50/50, as described below. Authors who are the sole rightsholder in a work—such as self-published authors and authors whose rights have reverted or where the contracts have otherwise terminated—will receive the full award amount.

It is split between the publisher and the author, also publishers will have a large catalog of books they will submit, an author typically will only have a few -- the payout will be going to the lawyers and mostly to publishers.

renlo··on FreeInk: Open ecosystem for e-readers
remarkable / remarkable2 also work with KOReader. KOReader provides a very good ereader experience - can import dictionaries, export word lists (ie it tracks words you look up), and supports numerous ebook formats and lets you modify the padding/margins/layout. A very good piece of open source software
renlo··on Judge approves $1.5B Anthropic settlement for pirated books used to train Claude
the irony is that all of this money will go to rent-seeking publishers who won't pass it on to the artists; basically a dispute between the wealthy you're upset with
renlo··on Pentagon raised threat of Israeli spying on U.S. to highest level, sources say
> 1500 years

I’m curious what the Lindy Effect would mean in this case

renlo··on Tesla: Failure of the FSD's degradation detection system [pdf]
> When conditions are adverse, i.e. fog, heavy rain, the system simply shuts off and reverts back to manual driving.

I also own a Tesla, and there is no indication shown to the user that FSD's vision is degraded. They need to add this in.

For example, numerous times I have been driving my Tesla with FSD activated with ostensibly a clean and clear windshield when suddenly the car will do the "clean the windshield in front of the camera routine" without any indication that the car's camera is degraded. If people haven't seen this "clean the windshield routine", the wiper fluid is dispensed and the wiper will vigorously wipe in front of the camera only -- the rest of the windshield only gets a cursory wipe.

This indicates to me that the camera has poor visibility and I am not informed or aware of this as a driver, which is concerning. I am often curious if there is a thin occluding film on the windshield in the camera box in front of the camera, or something that has degraded FSD's vision, but they do not give you the ability to view the camera feed, nor do they notify you that the vision is degraded. I think a "thin occluding film" may be in the camera box because my normal windshield outside of the camera box started to show a thin chemical film after a couple of months, which apparently (according to a Google search) happens when a new car off-gasses, adding a thin film of chemical byproduct to the windshield. This is my first new car so I've no idea if this is normal or not.

renlo··on I found a useful Git one liner buried in leaked CIA developer docs
I use this tool, which allows one to select the branches to delete instead of just deleting everything: https://github.com/stefanwille/git-branch-delete

Unfortunately its name makes it hard to search for and find.

renlo··on Qwen3-Max-Thinking
“We have facts, they have falsities”. I think the crux of the issue here is that facts don’t exist in reality, they are subjective by their very nature. So we have on one side those who understand this, and absolutists like yourself who believe facts are somehow unimpugnable and not subjective. Well, China has their own facts, you have yours, I have mine, and we can only arrive at a fact by curating experiential events. For example, a photograph is not fact, it is evidence of an event surely, but it can be manipulated or omit many things (it is a projection, visible light spectrum only, temporally biased, easily editable these days [even in Stalin’s days]), and I don’t want to speak for you but I’d wager you’d consider it as factual.
renlo··on iPhone Typos? It's Not Just You – The iOS Keyboard Is Broken [video]
The key is to work around the text input. If you want to say "kill myself", you input "kill my" then complete the "self" portion by pressing delete (remove space), then s-e-l-f. I feel like most of my typing time is spent making these corrections, as it's very quick to swipe but corrections are almost always necessary and they are an order of magnitude slower. Yesterday for example I tried to swipe "succession" but it really wanted to output "secession", so I change my strategy to "success" (it really liked this word), then delete (remove space), i-o-n.

I think every time I swipe I need to do at least one correction like this, where I type one similarly spelled word with as minimum an edit distance as I can think of in the moment, then do a manual correction.

renlo··on PSF has withdrawn $1.5M proposal to US Government grant program
Most eye opening experience in my personal development was attending HR conferences (we sold an HR product but I am an engineer), where speakers were openly saying this out loud. I know you won’t believe me given your statement, but using codewords they said they were trying to hire “diverse candidates”, retain “diverse candidates”, explicitly mark “non-diverse candidates” leaving as non-regrettable churn, filtering and searching for diverse employees within the company to fast track for promotion, etc. I was in shock how brazenly they were saying the quiet part out loud, and breaking the law. This was 10 years ago, there were no repercussions for it, in fact they were all lauded.
renlo··on Leaving serverless led to performance improvement and a simplified architecture
Localstack makes that pretty easy. Before Localstack I had a pre-staging environment (dev) target I would deploy to. Their free/community offering includes a Lambda environment; you deploy your dev "Lambda" locally to docker, using the same terraform / deploy flow you'd normally use but pointed at a Localstack server which mimics the AWS API instead. Some of their other offerings require you to pay though (Cloudfront, ECS, others) and I don't use those, yet at least.
renlo··on Fast
> The trouble is that "fast" doesn't mean anything without a point of comparison.

This is what people are missing. Even those "slow" apps are faster than their alternatives. People demand and seek out "fast", and I think the OP article misses this.

Even the "slow" applications are faster than their alternatives or have an edge in terms of speed for why people use them. In other words, people here say "well wait a second, I see people using slow apps all the time! People don't care about speed!", without realizing that the user has already optimized for speed for their use case. Maybe they use app A which is 50% as fast as app B, but app A is available on their toolbar right now, and to even know that app B exists and to install it and learn how to use it would require numerous hours of ramp up time. If the user was presented with app A and app B side by side, all things equal, they will choose B every time. There's proficiency and familiarity; if B is only 5% faster than A, but switching to B has an upfront cost in days to able to utilize that speed, well that is a hidden speed cost and why the user will choose A until B makes it worth it.

Speed is almost always the universal characteristic people select for, all things equal. Just because something faster exists, and it's niche, and hard to use (not equal for comparison to the common "slow" option people are familiar with), it doesn't mean that people reject speed, they just don't want to spend time learning the new thing, because it is _slower_ to learn how to use the new thing at first.

renlo··on NIST ion clock sets new record for most accurate clock
as a layman, wouldn't you need a more-accurate clock to measure the accuracy of a clock? How is clock accuracy measured when the clock is the most accurate clock?
renlo··on Who wrote the Bible? A pioneering new algorithm may shatter scholarly certitude
felt more like an article legitimizing an origin myth than authorship
renlo··on I Built a Mechanical Calculator [video]
Great video, I really enjoyed how down to earth it was. It reminded me of The Secret Life of Machines [1], where we get to peek behind the curtain and see how seemingly "magical" machines (in your case a digital computer) emerges from simple fundamental concepts.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Secret_Life_of_Machines

renlo··on Add "fucking" to your Google searches to neutralize AI summaries
Spotify used to have a "dislike" button for their Discover Weekly which helped with pruning music you don't like, but with the natural law of tech enshitification they removed that feature a month ago.
renlo··on Proposal: JavaScript Structs

    function x() {/* ... */}
    const x = function() {/* ... */}
    const x = function foo() {/* ... */}
    const x = (function() {/* ... */}).bind(this)
    const x = (function foo() {/* ... */}).bind(this)
    const x = () => {/* ... */}
    const x = () => /* ... */
renlo··on What 10k Hours of Coding Taught Me: Don't Ship Fast
Agree that the repository/service pattern is a good way to adhere to separation of concerns and make refactoring and readability easier.

That said, I really disagree with any precommit checks. Committing code should be thought of as just saving the code, checks should be run before merging code not saving code. It'd be like Clippy preventing you from saving a Word document because you have a spelling error. It's a frustrating experience.

I can make sure my code is good before I submit it for review, not when I'm just trying to make sure my work has been saved so I can continue working on it later (commit).

renlo··on Dutch DPA fines Uber €290M because of transfers of drivers’ data to the US
He was saying that Uber will no longer operate in NL/EU, the pining was for "equal access to US services", not your data. FWIW, I am annoyed myself about having to accept GDPR popups on every website I visit, so I too pine for a day where US companies have nothing to do with "EU citizens".
renlo··on Google is the only search engine that works on Reddit now, thanks to AI deal
As was LinkedIn, who was forced to rate stop limiting / IP-banning scrapers for public pages.
renlo··on Timekeeping Before Clocks
I think the issue primarily is that there are two frames of reference used: "earlier" / "later" terms use the absolute frame of reference (time progressing forward), the numerical terms ("100s" / "4th century") are relative to the common era (higher BCE numbers mean further back in time).

To me it is confusing that they've mixed the two, even though it is convention to do so.

renlo··on Timekeeping Before Clocks
Not to be pedantic but I was genuinely confused by this statement:

> He lived and wrote in the late 200s and early 100s BCE

Shouldn't this instead be phrased as:

> He lived and wrote in the early 200s and late 100s BCE

He was born in 254 BCE and died in 184 BCE, he lived from the mid 200s BCE, started writing in the _early_ 200s BCE, and died in the _late_ 100s BCE.

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