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smitty1110

676 karma · joined April 25, 2016

Software engineer in NoVA/DMV.

IANAL, opinions and views expressed here are my own.

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smitty1110··on Postgres isn't slow, your storage is
Sit down, think about the queries you are using, and think about how the tables are updated. Now take that and rethink your indexes. Use the right index type for the right situation, don’t just slap a basic index on a serial id field and call it a day. And while you’re at it, think about the ID fields you use, sometimes better options exist. UUIDv7 is now built in, use it.

Lots of things in PGSQL benefit from thinking about how your use case is manipulating the underlying B-tree, if you work in performance sensitive stuff the devil is really in the details. And having to rebuild indexes that have decayed over time is painful.

smitty1110··on DeepSeek Harness Desktop for macOS and Windows
Just put your trust in Big Winnie and all will be fine.
smitty1110··on SQLite Critical CVEs or LLM Slop?
It’s honestly not great. The security guys are completely exasperated at my job, we’re wasting time having with these. You take the scam really, investigate for a bit, write up a DNF with justification, they go and up date records, and we all just kinda hope that someone updates the scans so it stops showing up.

Something is going to give, and I suspect that the optimistic open filling is going to get canceled.

smitty1110··on Who's afraid of Chinese models?
The Philippines have some news for you…
smitty1110··on The last Romans are still around
I 100% deserve getting flamed a bit for skimming and shooting off a comment when not paying enough attention.
smitty1110··on The last Romans are still around
No mention of the Romansch, that's quite disappointing. But learning more about Romania and Romanian culture still made for a wonderful read, kudos to the author.
smitty1110··on Chess puzzle I found in my dad's old book
The solutions that look like a pinwheel are oddly satisfying, that was a fun little exercise. Thanks OP, I needed that diversion.
smitty1110··on How Tube Amplifiers Work
Guitar amps are all about getting the right kind of harmonic distortion, so of course the guy had opinions. But tube rolling is madness, avoid it at all costs.
smitty1110··on Guess I'm a Rationalist Now
The best jokes all have a kernel of truth at their core, but I think a lot of Yudkowsky's acolytes missed the punch line.
smitty1110··on Honey has now lost 4M Chrome users after shady tactics were revealed
Honestly, I think they don't have many active users. They're offering me $45 to install it as of this week.
smitty1110··on Walt Disney's MultiPlane Camera (Filmed Feb. 13, 1957) [video]
It's not really a genre, per se. This sort of comes from Opera, and was generally referred to as Incidental Music. Music written specifically to accompany the action on screen or stage. You don't really see albums or collections, because it doesn't generally make sense without the visual context.
smitty1110··on Tell HN: Generational Gap
Oh man, in Java world it used to be all over the place. You had a pom.xml for your builds, and you had configs in XML, and your API requests in SOAP, and you had SAML auth, it was just so much verbosity. And of course, you needed schemas to keep all of this sane, which was basically one more thing to keep up to date.

It was a large cognitive load, I don't miss those days.

smitty1110··on Cointelpro
You need Congress to make clear, explicit changes to laws on the subject. Not just to add additional restrictions, but to make changes to liability. Right now, a lot of violations will get chastised in court, but the officials responsible will face no consequences due to qualified immunity.

I don't claim to know what the right was to address this situation is, this is a thorny legal issue, but someone needs to think through options and consequences.

smitty1110··on Commercial jet collides with Black Hawk helicopter near Reagan airport
To quote the order itself:

> This order does not apply to military personnel of the armed forces or to positions related to immigration enforcement, national security, or public safety.

ATC surely falls under public safety. Additionally, the ATC issues stretch well back into the Biden term, and you can find plenty of articles discussing the controversy elsewhere.

smitty1110··on Supreme Court upholds TikTok ban, but Trump might offer lifeline
> What I've learned is that since Switzerland has 3 official languages

Everyone always forgets Romansh...

smitty1110··on Nokia's internal presentation after iPhone was launched (2007) [pdf]
I worked with an ex-Kodak guy, and he related the following story to me from the 80’s or early 90’s.

Xerox was kicking their ass, they were completely owning the copier market. But it was a natural fit for Kodak, they knew imaging better than everybody, why couldn’t they get into this market? This guy was on a crack team of engineers a VP assembled to create a competing product. 9 months later, they demo a fully digital copy machine, working, ready to go, with competitive pricing and features.

But the higher ups at Kodak were incensed. They told the product needs a redesign, because Kodak was a film company, so the product needed to use film for copying. The revised product was a complete failure, and was the reason said engineer left Kodak shortly thereafter.

My take is devotion to brand identity is death during these critical inflection points. YMMV

smitty1110··on Bill requiring US agencies to share source code with each other becomes law
Read section 4 of the law, especially the automatic exemptions. Lots of stuff isn't covered.
smitty1110··on Bill requiring US agencies to share source code with each other becomes law
> IN GENERAL.—This Act shall not apply to classified source code or source code developed primarily for use in a national security system (as defined in section 11103 of title 40, United States Code).

The exemptions are extremely broad in section 4 of the act. I don't expect anything interesting to come of this reporting. Or for any money to be saved.

smitty1110··on US probes Tesla's Full Self-Driving software after fatal crash
There’s two things going on here with there average person that you need to overcome: That when Tesla dodges responsibility all anyone sees is a liar, and that people amalgamate all the FSD crashes and treat the system like a dangerous local driver that nobody can get off the road.

Tesla markets FSD like it’s a silver bullet, and the name is truly misleading. The fine print says you need attention and all that. But again, people read “Full Self Driving” and all the marketing copy and think the system is assuming responsibility for the outcomes. Then a crash happens, Tesla throws the driver under the bus, and everyone gets a bit more skeptical of the system. Plus, doing that to a person rubs people the wrong way, and is in some respects a barrier to sales.

Which leads to the other point: People are tallying up all the accidents and treating the system like a person, and wondering why this dangerous driver is still on the road. Most accidents with dead pedestrian start with someone doing something stupid, which is when they assume all responsibility, legally speaking. Drunk, speeding, etc. Normal drivers in poor conditions slow down and drive carefully. People see this accident, and treat FSD like a serial drunk driver. It’s to the point that I know people that openly say they treat teslas on roads like they’re erratic drivers just for existing.

Until Elon figures out how to fix his perception problem, the calls for investigations and to keep his robotaxis is off the road will only grow.

smitty1110··on US Dept of Energy announces $1.5B in electric grid improvements
The Wikipedia article[3] is not entirely clear and has a shocking failure to cite sources, but it claims the the Texas grid connects to the Eastern grid in two place with DC lines, and has an AC connection that has only been activated once in the Houston area.

What I suspect this is referring to is connecting to the SERC[1] area. I can't find a good source, but I suspect the existing connections are to the MRO[2].

1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SERC_Reliability_Corporation 2: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Midwest_Reliability_Organizati... 3: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Texas_Interconnection#Ties

smitty1110··on Orion, our first true augmented reality glasses
Frankly, it sucks. I had so much fun with new tech when I was younger. But many companies, and FB in particular, have managed to crush my expectations time and time again.
smitty1110··on Ticketmaster breach affects more than half a billion users
The intent of GP's comment is to imply the hack is a Snowflake hack that happens to compromise Ticketmaster data. If this was a compromise of a Ticketmaster account that managed their data at Snowflake, Snowflake would have been downstream of the original compromise.

This is a far more scary claim than OP's article, because that means there could be many more compromised customers out there that don't know it yet. It's a bit chilling, knowing some friends might be in deep shit.

smitty1110··on To the brain, reading computer code is not the same as reading language (2020)
Alright, since I did a quick skim over the article liked by @JonChesterfield and didn't find any discussion of how they calibrated their fMRI machine or if they did any Multiple Comparison Corrections, time to post the obvious: http://prefrontal.org/files/posters/Bennett-Salmon-2009.pdf

fMRI is not a silver bullet, do your due diligence everyone. I'll wait for this to be replicated before I read anything into it.

smitty1110··on Rootless Docker in a multi-user environment
Well, that blog post is getting a bookmark. Next time a junior dev asks me how this BS works, I'm going to show them your diagram.
smitty1110··on People with gas and propane stoves breathe more unhealthy nitrogen dioxide
Actual paper can be found here: https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/sciadv.adm8680
smitty1110··on The Rabbit R1 is probably running Android and is powered by an Android app
And it's still a joke. Spend $200 less and get and Osmose[1] and have a keyboard that you can actually use, a better synth engine, and something that is actually used for music production. They even off free shipping. Portability is overrated when your keyboard tech is stuck in the early 90's, without velocity sensitivity let alone aftertouch and MPE.

1: https://www.expressivee.com/2-osmose

smitty1110··on Calendar types in watches
Ah yes, the Hebrew calendar on the 57260 is sorta mind-bending to figure out. It's hard to imagine figuring that out by mere observation and tabulating records. Their more recent Berkley Grand Complication [1] took things a step further with a Chinese Perpetual Calendar, which is kinda hard to explain. The article linked does a better job than I would at walking through the system.

1: https://www.hodinkee.com/articles/introducing-vacheron-const...

smitty1110··on Reddit is taking over Google
The real indictment here isn't that Reddit serves bad advice, it's that Google is just bad at providing you with relevant information. This is a symptom of people trying to find real humans talking about stuff by slapping "reddit" on the front of every search, because the SEO garbage that rises to the top isn't worth a read.
smitty1110··on A Surprising Advantage of Vinyl (2011)
You should be able to with a PS3 and linux installed. You need a PS3 from one of the first two hardware revisions (the fat body ones), they dropped the expensive SACD reader to cut costs after that.
smitty1110··on KKR to Acquire Broadcom's (VMware) End-User Computing Division
"News Id not Found", looks like this got pulled?
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