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stdbrouw

4,906 karma · joined December 15, 2010

Developer and data scientist in the news industry. I blog over at http://debrouwere.org

[ my public key: https://keybase.io/debrouwere; my proof: https://keybase.io/debrouwere/sigs/Cnr9GaJGcojfjdLSHpSlDuKmoGDIspELZlN-7yq1pVY ]

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stdbrouw··on The result of the C++26 DIS ballot
Only Rube Goldberg can make a Rube Goldberg machine?
stdbrouw··on The 1.5°C goal of the Paris Agreement is no longer viable
People really like coral reefs. "Civilization will collapse and this baby kitty will die."
stdbrouw··on QGIS bans AI assisted contributions
If you are the enforcer, which the maintainers are, then surely any rule you come up with is enforceable in exactly the kind of way you'd like it to be enforced?
stdbrouw··on Triple-A Minesweeper
I guess I will be the sole person in this thread to admit that I really enjoy my hand being held while I play a video game.

I used to play a lot of games in high school but didn't find the time for them once I started working and now, after about a 15 year hiatus, got curious and have been playing God of War, Expedition 33, High on Life and enhanced editions of slightly older titles like GTA 5 and BioShock 2. The cinematic experience of God of War, the hints in the environmental lighting about what direction to go in Expedition 33, the popovers in GTA that remind you of what the left joystick does again, the repeated voiceovers that explain what each gun does in High on Life, exact directions to where you need to go in Cyberpunk 2077, never having to bother with save games because most games have copious checkpoints... it's great!

Maybe I'm a klutz, but I remember in the late 90s and early 00s there were plenty of titles where a typical night of gaming would go like this: you have to make sure the intergalactic terrorists don't blow up the power plant, but after half an hour it's clear that you will need to level up to have a chance, another half an hour later you resort to google and figure out that you really shouldn't have skipped that side quest because then you'd have that invisibility upgrade, you finally make your way past the baddies but after a toilet break get confused about what direction you were going in and suddenly find yourself back where you started, you retrace your steps, go on, press the Avoid Reactor Meltdown button but because you've clicked a couple of pixels too far to the left, then a couple of pixels too far to the right, it doesn't do anything, so now you're thinking, maybe I didn't complete all the prereqs so let's wander around some more, but you're getting annoyed so you repeatedly fall off of some walkway into lava... ultimately you make it to the end boss and after the 17th try you realize that their right eye is their weak point, but only for a window of five seconds after it has stopped glowing red. Too bad you didn't stock up on sniper bullets and entered the last room without full health, might have to load an earlier save game to fix that.

I'm sure a lot of people are nostalgic for that special feeling when you've beat a difficult game, but there are a lot of ways in which games used to be difficult that were incidental, through lack of affordances, instead of essential to the gameplay.

stdbrouw··on Owed a billion dollars in Nvidia stock
As a parent of young children it rarely makes sense to litigate anything that happened more than 10 minutes ago, so perhaps people extrapolate from there :-) I'd enjoy that deep dive, though.
stdbrouw··on Swap, ZRAM, Zswap and Hibernate on NixOS
Maybe not what's happening in your case, but stuff that is in swap will not be moved back to memory unless there's a need for it, so if you did have memory pressure at time 1, which resolved at time 2, then you might still see a lot of swap in use at time 3.
stdbrouw··on The softness of metal
The parent seems very aware that he's lucky he happens to be into a kind of music that isn't very popular.
stdbrouw··on GamersNexus and LG: Or why rooting your TV is a bad idea
I used to think this too, but e.g. Bosch and IKEA have great replacement parts websites accessible to the consumer. IKEA’s parts are mostly free, too! With modern logistics (automated warehouses, cheap shipping, ordering online) it is actually a solvable problem, if the company gives a damn about it.
stdbrouw··on Ask HN: Would you read a statistics textbook?
Rethinking is indeed written for people who have some or even a lot of existing proficiency in statistics, but for whom it never really clicked. If that’s not your background, I can understand that it might feel disjointed.
stdbrouw··on Ask HN: Would you read a statistics textbook?
+ Krushke’s Doing Bayesian Data Analysis, and for the very basics there is Downey’s Think Bayes. I guess there might be a gap in the literature for a different approach, heck, I’d read it, but there is some very good material already out there.
stdbrouw··on I wanna live an NPC life
That was a good read, thanks! I think one thing the blog post perhaps misses is that although humans are nice throughout the movie, we are supposed to view a lot of their best behavior near the end as part of their "awakening", the realization that there is more to life than just pleasure and that it'd be great to get to live on earth again. It's not as incoherent as it seems, though there is definitely still room to wonder whether the protagonists are actually the villains.
stdbrouw··on Salad Theory
It would be ontology if you consider salad (properly defined) to be part of the fundamental fabric of the universe.
stdbrouw··on True Rate of Unemployment
This seems like the opposite from what the OP is describing. There is a lot of affordable expertise going around, you just have to find it, and it's extremely frustrating because often you can't!

Almost by accident we found out there's a fantastic seamstress living near us, who does it just as a hobby while attending college. She can fix almost any item of clothing for barely any money.

A friend of mine is a woodwind instrument repairman, and no worries if your 1920 flute is missing a key, because he's a wizard with a lathe and will create an exact replica. Musicians typically aren't rich, so he has to keep things affordable.

When renovating our house, we had an arched doorway made by a bricklayer with help from his extremely experienced retired father in law who was up for a bit of fun and still knew how to make the wooden supports.

Then there's repair cafés, where somehow there always seems to be someone around with the extremely niche skill of repairing a broken vacuum cleaner. Which they will do for free.

And so on. But if you don't know these people or these places, you might pay x5 or x10 for the same service, if you can even find someone to take on the job.

stdbrouw··on Quality non-fiction books are the antithesis of AI slop
Same thing with beer and wine awards, some are good but most are just a paid promotion lottery.
stdbrouw··on Open Source Low Tech
One aspect is perhaps that simple things aren't necessarily cheap. One Laptop per Child struggled to get costs down, whereas a mass market solar panel is not self-serviceable but at their current cost, who cares. Even in the developed world, you get noticeably more bang for your buck if you buy a cheap, basic car than if you buy a cargo bike that could replace it, because of the fierce competition and huge economies of scale for cars. Touch screens are cheaper than seven segment displays. And so on. (Not a snub on the Open Source Low Tech community, their designs look great!)
stdbrouw··on Gribouille 0.3.0: A Grammar of Graphics for Typst
Yes, ggplot2 is lovely to work with for complex graphs. Whereas a classic plotting library will have one function to create a bar graph, another to create a line graph, etc., in ggplot instead you can stack layers, each with different properties, variables, shapes, data-dependent colors, scales, whatever you want. It also makes it easy to create grids of similar graphs.
stdbrouw··on Apple's weird anti-nausea dots cured my car sickness
OTOH, motion sickness is often called "car sickness" for a reason, people who suffer from it only sometimes suffer on a bus, and rarely if ever on a train or a plane, so I'm not sure I would agree that "all transportation and tourism related businesses" are impacted. Also, doesn't dimenhydrinate work for your wife or kids?
stdbrouw··on "Don't You Just Upload It to ChatGPT?"
... yet you still conclude "AI translation has gotten so good", so which is it?
stdbrouw··on Squillions: How money laundering won
Phenomenal author indeed. "Capital", a novel about the financial crisis and bankers on the hedonic treadmill, is wonderful too. Too bad either Lanchester or his publisher has beef with Amazon, most of his work is not available as an ebook.
stdbrouw··on 1940 Air Terminal Museum Begins Liquidation
Side note: what a stunning art deco (?) building! (There's a photo on the front page of the site.)
stdbrouw··on OpenAI’s o1 correctly diagnosed 67% of ER patients vs. 50-55% by triage doctors
"The boy who cried wolf" is a story about false positives, so if that's what you want to avoid then you want to get close to 100% specificity, and accept that there are many things that the tool will not catch. If, as you propose, the tool would mainly be used to create a low confidence list of potential problems that will be further reviewed by a human, then casting a wide net and calibrating for high sensitivity instead does make sense.
stdbrouw··on Spain to expand internet blocks to tennis, golf, movies broadcasting times
Before Netflix was a thing, I sometimes tried to have conversations with people about "gee, it's a bit annoying that my only options to watch a movie is to buy an expensive dvd that I will watch once, or to pirate it" and the most common response was complete befuddlement, they simply could not comprehend that someone might not want to pirate things if they could, they could not comprehend that besides being illegal it was also just... wrong. Not absolutely evil, for sure, but still something that maybe you might want to avoid doing. Now that you can just pay 10-20 euro for a streaming service, most of them have switched over, so, yeah, service does matter, but a lack of risk or consequences on the one hand and vague notions about actors and directors (and soccer players) already being rich enough as it is, were enough to convince very many people that piracy was a victimless crime.
stdbrouw··on They're made out of meat (1991)
You just have to go along with the idea that skin provides no indication of meatiness and that the two aliens are Ford Prefect types, then the short film lands just fine.
stdbrouw··on AI overly affirms users asking for personal advice
The AITA comparison seems apt insofar as chatbots function as a second opinion. You're consciously or subconsciously looking for an outside perspective that might differ from that of your friends, provided to you by a computer that doesn't need to care about your feelings, unlike a friend. If the chatbot ends up mimicking what (not very close) friends do, you might falsely conclude that two very different kinds of sources have converged on the same answer, whereas you are really just getting two flavors of the same diplomatic interaction.
stdbrouw··on AI overly affirms users asking for personal advice
My subjective impression is that 5 years ago AITA was actually quite wholesome and the top comments tended to be insightful. The shift towards "set boundaries, always choose yourself, you don't owe anybody anything" seems fairly recent.
stdbrouw··on What young workers are doing to AI-proof themselves
I read the Norwegian article that was linked, and it isn't actually similar: you would only have to pay taxes on food you've grown on your balcony (and mean to consume yourself) if you are a farmer, are growing it during regular working hours, and have an insanely huge balcony.

Another thing that makes home construction a bit different in this regard is that you could claim to build a house for yourself, live in it for a bit, and then sell it on a couple of years later. That'd be an easy way to avoid or evade taxes. Not so easy with lettuce -- once you've eaten it, you've eaten it.

stdbrouw··on Debunking Zswap and Zram Myths
I get the impression that most desktop users enable zram or zswap to get a little bit more out of their RAM but there is never any real worry about OOM, not regularly anyway, so then (according to the principles laid out in the article) it shouldn't matter much.

On my workstation, I run statistical simulations in R which can be wasteful with memory and cause a lot of transient memory pressure, and for that scenario I do like that zswap works alongside regular swap. Especially when combined with the advice from https://makedebianfunagainandlearnhowtodoothercoolstufftoo.c... to wake up kswapd early, it really does seem to make a difference.

stdbrouw··on Debunking Zswap and Zram Myths
It doesn't really need any config on most distros, no.

That said, if you want it to behave at its best when OOM, it does help to tweak vm.swappiness, vm.watermark_scale_factor, vm.min_free_kbytes, vm.page-cluster and a couple of other parameters.

See e.g.

https://makedebianfunagainandlearnhowtodoothercoolstufftoo.c...

https://documentation.suse.com/sles/15-SP7/html/SLES-all/cha...

I don't know of any good statistics script for zswap, I use the script below as a custom waybar module:

  #!/bin/bash
  stored_pages="$(cat /sys/kernel/debug/zswap/stored_pages)"
  pool_total_size="$(cat /sys/kernel/debug/zswap/pool_total_size)"
  compressed_size_mib="$((pool_total_size / 1024 / 1024))"
  compressed_size_gib="$((pool_total_size / 1024 / 1024 / 1024))"
  compressed_size_mib_remainder="$((compressed_size_mib * 10 / 1024 - compressed_size_gib * 10))"
  uncompressed_size="$((stored_pages * 4096))"
  uncompressed_size_mib="$((uncompressed_size / 1024 / 1024))"
  uncompressed_size_gib="$((uncompressed_size / 1024 / 1024 / 1024))"
  uncompressed_size_mib_remainder="$((uncompressed_size_mib * 10 / 1024 - uncompressed_size_gib * 10))"
  ratio="$((100 * uncompressed_size / (pool_total_size + 1)))"
  echo "$compressed_size_gib.$compressed_size_mib_remainder"
stdbrouw··on What young workers are doing to AI-proof themselves
You don’t get more income, but you do get more disposable income.
stdbrouw··on What young workers are doing to AI-proof themselves
You don't have to pay VAT on things you fix for yourself, because you don't pay yourself at all. This is in fact a kind of (legal) tax avoidance, but not (illegal) tax evasion. Given the cost of housing, being able to build your own house or even just doing small fixes here and there, leads to a big increase in perceived income. The tradies I know can afford whatever kind of car they want, whatever kind of holiday experience, and they live in a nice home. Mind you, they typically work 50h+ a week so there's that.

Of course, the parent may also have been referring to getting clients to pay in cash and not putting anything on the books, at the expense of getting barely any pension in the end, but that's not how I read it. This is getting somewhat less common because people are more likely than 20 years ago to get a loan from a bank to pay for renovation work, and the bank will want to see invoices.

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