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serf

11,502 karma · joined November 25, 2012

i'm sorry!

hn_serf@gmx.com

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serf··on EA is shutting down BioWare
game to game, sure. story to story, I disagree.

kotor was one of the first interactive media franchises to showcase that era in the Star Wars universe, and it was an era that's radically different than anything in the movies.

bg3 is a typical DnD setting + sex + lovecraftian elements and flayers sitting in for beholders to spice it up; and they were only there because during dev-time lovecraft was a huge gaming trend.

don't get me wrong; I love both of them, but the BG3 story was the one that ended up feeling like -- for me -- something that would have been a modpack for Neverwinter Nights.

serf··on The No Kings Takedown Is Why You Shouldn't Rent Your Megaphone from Zuck
'the press' is seen as a pillar of democracy, without which the rest of things fall apart.

it's more important than you make it seem.

serf··on What shall I teach my son?
or, for the pessimistic parent : "Be happy with surviving"
serf··on What shall I teach my son?
That was my mom's strategy seemingly, and it didn't create anything near her intent; it just taught me a lot about her.

kids are smarter than people realize, and they don't glean the things that people intend.

serf··on Show HN: SimCity, but with Permits
that's counter to recent news about newly-developed never-to-be-developed land all over the U.S. [0]

[0] : https://www.americanprogress.org/article/unprotecting-americ...

serf··on Show HN: SimCity, but with Permits
I think that's a charitable read, and I submit that starting slow and ramping up is vital not just from a UX and usability standpoint but to imbibe a sense of panic later on.

The contrast from simple and slow to complex and rapid and the buildup between is what produces the emotion, a cluttered and busy UI is just a cluttered and busy UI.

Also : a city planners' job is still fairly serialized and procedural even if it is busy and back-and-fourth; a cluttered UI does little to convey 'busy-ness and conflict'.

serf··on Wine ported to OpenBSD
that's ridiculous.

one of the reasons that BSDs are less popular is because of the community advice of "The best supported machine is a ten + year old thinkpad."

so yeah you're right there isn't a finish line, but you do need to keep up with current stuff enough to give a possible fan base a decent selection of hardware to run the thing on.

in other words : if the companies that the BSDs already had a hard time keeping up with hasten development via LLMs the gap will grow ever wider until a critical point is hit and the thing becomes irrelevant.

if linux is the only show in town that supports flashy-hardware-Z then it's going to drive audience migration.

the thing that has allowed openbsd to adopt new things so slowly is a rock-solid set of core competencies; the amount that bsd is entrenched into the internet itself makes irrelevance hard to imagine -- but it's still a facet.

I still hear people bitch that BSDs don't support WiFi, and that hasn't been true in years and years.

serf··on Greg Abbott raked in $9M from data center-related donors
Greg Abbott going out of his way to use the cheapest piece of shit hospital chair whenever involved in a public photo-op irks me to hell as a wheelchair user myself, and I can't quite explain why. Him making bonkers money while doing so brings it up a notch.

I guess because it just seems fake. If Newsom came out in a torn t-shirt and a pair of converse flat-tops with the soles coming apart just to drive home that he's an every-man like me it'd drive me similarly mad.

It's a mad stupid thing to get upset about, i'll admit that, but next photo-op check it out, half the time he's not even sitting on a cushion; something unheard of and unthinkable for most wheelchair users.

(Why? Because he's using that chair for ten minutes before jumping back into whatever real chair he's using when the cameras are away and his image is secure.)

other folks have some interesting views on this[0] , essentially the thought is that he's foregoing relations with other disabled people to prove himself to the able public.. it's an interesting concept, but I don't know how true it is.

[0]: https://publicseminar.org/2025/06/greg-abbotts-wheelchair/

serf··on How abliterated models can get you pwned
totally agreed, and..

>, the firmware of the GPU it runs on.

that'd be a rad PoC to see, but given the gpu values right now i'll let someone else brick things.

serf··on I no longer care to work on any Ruby gems so I've archived all my repositories
a LOT of these arguments against New Thing seem to always fall into the category of "I no longer receive social credit for being a productive member of a niche in-group, so I quit.", masked as "They peed in the pool!".

The pool they're talking about isn't software or CS, it's the attached treadmill that provides social kudos and credit for a job well done.

This whole thing has been a huge revelation for me in that I naively presumed at first that other 'computer people' were also in it for the passion and interest in the hobby, now I am realizing quicker and quicker that "it's just a job" for the majority of people I talk to, the rest of the people do it "for exposure" , which is a nice way of saying that they're playing the Facebook/MySpace social kudos game with their linkedins and github profiles and blog articles.

very few Terry style "just passionate about the thing" people out there, and I had never realized how rare that was.

serf··on I no longer care to work on any Ruby gems so I've archived all my repositories
i'm sick of scatological metaphor.

Next time someone complains about software do me a favor and compare it to a nail through the foot or grabbing a hot dish and burning yourself or something else negative in the human experience. There is plenty to choose from.

We don't need 300 variations of enshitification, the folks at Pompeii and Herculaneum have that well covered.

serf··on I built a programming language that LLMs can't use
>Why do I want more people to see this? Because I want ideas for how to make the language even trickier for LLMs.

unless coupled with tools and paradigms thatd make it a joy for a human to use, why?

seems like it's an effort to make a language that's unusable by anything or anyone.

i've witnessed abliterated local models start taking apart compilers with ghidra and friends to better understand the underlying language when denied net access or source base for the lang, I would imagine the confusion this thing would cause would prompt most abliterated and able models to pretty quickly start reverse engineering.

serf··on I built a programming language that LLMs can't use
this is provably false using hobby langs or selfmade DSLs.
serf··on DeepSeek V4.1 Flash 1017 (Max)
high tps and braindead model is a dangerous and fun thing to watch.

give it browser access and it's a speed-run to a cloudflare bot detection freak-out in minutes.

serf··on Chirp Pong – uses microphones and audio for networked game play
you use a cyclic sequence counter and a rolling replay protection window to avoid overflow with the signature. use an epoch counter for rollovers after as long a period as you can stuff into the value.

you'll end up being protected from overflow for a practically-forever length of time with fairly few bits as long as the game isn't polling extremely fast.

it's not foolproof, and it's to thwart a kid, so ehh i'm not that into it.

serf··on Tesla 'Cannot Guarantee' Roadster Reservation Holders Will Ever Get a Car
this is one point I agree on.

It's about right there with other sports cars rated ranges; 911/M4 get around 300-350 and the Corvette hits 400ish.

a road rally from LA to LV is 270ish miles. What else do you need a hyper-car-thing for?

Now we just need to get some goofy Musk tunnels involved so there's a reason to have the fan suction.

(aside from breaking the windows of traffic behind you with road debris)

serf··on How the Elizabeth Holmes documentary “You Can See Everything” is deceiving
everyone has a bit of a social chameleon thing going on, but when a person is nothing but facade to the point of others being totally unable to pinpoint their actual psyche it's a flashing warning sign for a lot of people that they're a sociopath or at the very least have a lot of tendencies towards that behavior.

let's flip it on its' head; she's now seeking sympathy and understanding from the public and her voice softened: Does that aid perception of truth and honesty? It doesn't for me.

serf··on We still use paper
but then you're still limited to that set of glyphs.

I can fold the paper into origami.

I guess one could extrapolate a programming metaphor as the origami that notepad.exe enables.

serf··on DeepSeek-v4.1-Flash-1017
I like it because it does the thing I want it to do rather than moralizing.

No, I don't care about license provenance for all the components of a 30 line script that i'm using in my house, for myself to sync up some folders. No, i'm not going to find and archive the licenses for all the previous projects leading to this for future legal disclosure.

Yes, I own the DVD for the movie i'm transcoding. No I don't want to talk about the legality of rebroadcast.

Deepseek (and most chinese models as a whole) don't care . oAI and Anthropic models want to make it point #1.

... which is extra hilarious knowing the laws broken to create the damn models in the first place.

there's a literal meme about this floating around the harness/AI chats for the past few months[0]

[0]: https://i.ibb.co/SwH4Sgwq/796779070-28483090404651613-920066...

serf··on Making chicken transparent using Dorito dust
seeing the essentially un-cleanable calipers touching raw chicken irks me to hell, even if it is a cheapy pair.
serf··on GLP-1 may slow biological aging
pregnancy would seem rare too if you only looked at the averaged per-incident chances (swings from 0% to 33%ish for about 2 days for a perfectly healthy breeding-aged couple); or if you were to compare the amount of heterosexual sexual encounters overall to the amount of pregnancies.

but that's not really how the risk should be considered.

serf··on Show HN: Gemini 4 Argon plays StarCraft
none of these games really require a lot of experimental feedback, the goals are well stated and known; experiments may drive optimization if thats the question.

as far as the on rails comment : there's no good way to know the provenance of an LLM output, but the LLM made bots generally look like very small, modular, sometimes functionalized versions of the human equivalents; the difference being that the LLM is calling the funtions often rather than a conditional loop in a main().

a factorio bot I worked on when Astra was first getting previewed was essentially a directory of very small argument-receiving functional and self-supporting programs that had very limited scope, and an agents.md file that directed the LLM to where such capabilities existed to preempt a directory search every compaction/context-swap.

so you'd have things like "python walk.py N 40" for 40 units of northern travel. a watchdog that waited for HP to drop or movement to become inhibited, etc.

My very first experience with LLM driven bot development in the GPT3 days created huge unmaintainmable monoliths that kind of worked due to TDD but were essentially spaghetti. LLMs have been trending away from those paradigms into small self-encapsulated programs. probably because those are less abusive to ctx count and produce better results since they lose/compact less.

serf··on Wayland desktop for Linux with skeuomorphic design
a single color QT/mosaic interface is the definition of bland jurassic park UI and it's refreshing to use every after getting stuck dealing with modern machines and interfaces.
serf··on Wayland desktop for Linux with skeuomorphic design
"Whoever screwed up my egg should get the sack!"

at least thee 'hairy egg' one made me laugh; the alternate i've seen lately is a plea to avoid mentioning that they're furry if you're from HN using the HN referrer; that one is a bit more groan-inducing than the full page anti-capitalism nut scree.

serf··on Tell HN: Google Argon on a Pro subscription is worthless
Argon is a 4$in/20$out model; how far do you expect a 20 dollar a month plan to subsidize?
serf··on What I self-host
what the hell are you smoking? even the silly article earlier had the caveat "Yeah it downloads EXEs but its up to you or your family to run them"

and that's totally ignoring the fact that it's only a supremely naive user that hasn't yet refined their filters to exclude dangerous extensions (or, if they're too lazy to do that, rely on one of the many many pre-assembled filter/grabber settings across the net which already do so.)

what fear-mongering and FUD-spread.

You may also want to warn the public about the dangers of having curl, wget, python or gcc installed.

They expose a PLETHORA of attack vectors! you're probably already compromised, realistically!"

... and they're actually more dangerous than a free-floating EXE.

serf··on An Apology
I don't want weaponization of patents regardless of how much "Think of the Children!" and "We must defend the public!" is injected.

white knight with a sword made of patent lawsuits doesn't exist in my world.

It was good of them to decide to stay away from producing the product they realized they didn't want to exist, they should have stopped there instead of villainizing themselves by self-deputizing.

serf··on Someone on Torrent Sites Kept Fucking with My Sonarr
yeah!

let's all join a private tracker!

that'll fix the problem, the bad actors won't chase the crowd, and it definitely wont end in a burning of the library of alexandria loss-of-history what.cd style event again and again if the public can't archive it.

/s

how about we just create an exe/bat/com exclusion on our dumb-as-dick media downloaders like sensible people have been doing for 30+ years?

serf··on Krea 3 – An image model built for editing at scale
one thought : flux is open weight and available; krea is 'self-hosted capable with enterprise license agreement, contact us...' in the FAQ.

Maybe they don't want to make potential customers aware of competitive alternatives.

serf··on LFM2.5-24B-A2B: Built for fast on-device agents
fwiw this thing puts out results very fast even on max reasoning.

the results i've gotten so far have been a little braindead though. still playing around. bad luck with traversing filesystems remotely so far.

it seems to want to make concluding decisions very fast regardless of reasoning levels.

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