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strbean

2,020 karma · joined September 26, 2019

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strbean··on Australia begins enforcing world-first teen social media ban
So you are alleging that Reddit manipulates vote totals to affirm their biases? There's plenty wrong with Reddit, but I haven't seen any credible evidence that this is the case.
strbean··on Nature's many attempts to evolve a Nostr
There's certainly a middle ground. I'd like to have A WAY to authenticate with the US government, other than an in-person ID check or a random private company.

It would be great if governments provided the option to authenticate with third party PKI. Having a public option would be nice as well. Identity management and verification is a core competency of government, after all.

strbean··on AI will make formal verification go mainstream
> decide what the software is supposed to do in the first place.

That's where the job security is (and always has been). This has been my answer to "are you afraid for your job because of AI?"

Writing the code is very rarely the hard part. The hard part is getting a spec from the PM, or gathering requirements stakeholders. And then telling them why the spec / their requirements don't make sense or aren't feasible, and figuring out ones that will actually achieve their goals.

strbean··on Tell HN: HN was down
I can stop any time I want, I just don't want!
strbean··on Show HN: Solving the ~95% legislative coverage gap using LLM's
Getting "An error occurred" trying to vote for one of thr Civic Projects.
strbean··on Show HN: Solving the ~95% legislative coverage gap using LLM's
Blocked by my corpo firewall for some reason.
strbean··on Nature's many attempts to evolve a Nostr
Hopefully some day we will get state-managed PKI, and citizens will get used to handling their keys appropriately.

It's crazy that some functionality on e.g. the IRS website requires me to verify my identity using a private company (ID.me).

strbean··on Avoid UUID Version 4 Primary Keys in Postgres
Sending a friend request is an obvious example.
strbean··on Australia begins enforcing world-first teen social media ban
> authoritarian

>downvoted out

Erm...

strbean··on Valve reveals it’s the architect behind a push to bring Windows games to Arm
Strong disagree. I play a lot of casual CS, and the number of extremely poor / new / young players using rudimentary cheats and performing far below average is huge. Most players don't watchfully spectate the bottom fraggers in the lobby, but if you do, the number of them brazenly using wallhacks is quite high.

These players aren't using aimbot / triggerbot (or if they are, they don't understand the gunplay and try to shoot while running), and may not even understand wall penetration, so their reaction times wouldn't look abnormal at all. From the data, they would likely have below average reaction times still.

Even though they are not performing well, their presence still massively alters the gameplay for legitimate players. For one, lurking becomes a pointless endeavor. You're better off rushing wildly than attempting any sort of stealth.

strbean··on DeepSeek uses banned Nvidia chips for AI model, report says
The phrasing "chips that are banned in the country" seems completely inaccurate. These are chips that the US does not allow to be exported to China. We do not have the power to ban anything in China, that's up to the Chinese government.
strbean··on Patterns for Defensive Programming in Rust
Immediately thought of INTERCAL :)
strbean··on Valve reveals it’s the architect behind a push to bring Windows games to Arm
I think that fits with how they think. HL3 has mythical status. We've already seen Valve devs make a major game in the HL universe and intentionally avoid "making HL3" due to this mythos. It takes a lot of confidence to say "Hey guys, I'm putting together the team to make Sistine Chapel 2."

(To be clear, I'm not saying it's a matter of ownership and personal brand. But someone needs to start the project and form a team around it. I don't think they're worried about personal brand, it's more an issue of reverence for the franchise.)

strbean··on Valve reveals it’s the architect behind a push to bring Windows games to Arm
> Then youve immediately made the cheater worse than the best players to blend in with them.

You've made them the same as the best players. Otherwise we're banning the best players.

strbean··on Valve reveals it’s the architect behind a push to bring Windows games to Arm
> Any player responding to ingame events (enemy appeared) with sub 80ms reaction times consistently should be an automatic ban.

It's really much more nuanced than that. Counter-Strike 2 has already implemented this type of feature, and it immediately got some clear false positives. There are many situations where high level players play in a predictive, rather than reactive, manner. Pre-firing is a common strategy that will always look indistinguishable from an inhuman reaction time. So is tap-firing at an angle that you anticipate a an opponent may peek you from.

strbean··on Valve reveals it’s the architect behind a push to bring Windows games to Arm
You'll never stop the arms race, but requiring specialized hardware to cheat is as close as you'll get to a decisive victory against cheats.

The vast majority of cheaters in most games are not sophisticated users. Ease of access and use is the biggest issue.

strbean··on Valve reveals it’s the architect behind a push to bring Windows games to Arm
Ah, haven't gotten the chance to play it yet. But the same implication - we'll need someone at Valve with a big enough ego to take up the mantle.
strbean··on Valve reveals it’s the architect behind a push to bring Windows games to Arm
From interviews with the Alyx devs, it really sounded like the only reason they didn't call it HL3 was fear of not living up to the name.

Given the org structure at Valve, it's going to take someone with massive hubris to say "I can be the one to lead the HL3 project."

That or Gabe getting off his megayacht to lead it (or tell someone their project is worthy of being called HL3).

strbean··on Search tool that only returns content created before ChatGPT's public release
Sites like Credit Karma / NerdWallet exist. While I think they are rife with affiliate link nonsense and paid promotion masquerading as advice, I'm also pretty sure they have paid researchers and writers generating genuine content. Not sure that quite falls into the bucket of SEO blogspam.
strbean··on Search tool that only returns content created before ChatGPT's public release
Certainly seems that way if you observed the waves of usability Google search underwent in the first 15 years. There was several distinct cycles where the results were great, then garbage, then great again. They would be flooded with SEO spam, then they would tweak and penalize the SEO spam heavily, then SEO would catch up.

The funny thing is that it seems like when they gave up it wasn't because some new advancement in the arms race. It was well before LLMs hit the scene. The SEO spam was still incredibly obvious to a human reader. Really seems like some data-driven approach demonstrated that surrendering on this front led to increased ad revenue.

strbean··on Inside Rust's std and parking_lot mutexes – who wins?
With zero prior knowledge of the context, the impression I got from the parent comment was that `parking_lot` had features that made it desirable enough that there was a decent amount of discussion about replacing the standard lib locks with it. I didn't catch that the previous standard lib option was terrible and has since been replaced with something better.
strbean··on Shai-Hulud Returns: Over 300 NPM Packages Infected
You could create/run thin proxies for every external service that handle the auth side, and run each in a separate container. Orchestrate everything with docker-compose. Need to connect to cloud services for local development? Have a container with a proxy that transparently handles authentication. Now only that container has the secrets for talking to that service.

That's a lot of work though, and increases the difference between your local dev environment and prod.

strbean··on Inside Rust's std and parking_lot mutexes – who wins?
Seems like the simple solution to this problem would be to have both, no?

A simple native lock in the standard library along with a nicer implementation (also in the standard library) that depends on the simple lock?

strbean··on Nano Banana Pro
If you look closely, the NBP giraffe has a gaping hole in it's neck.
strbean··on The last-ever penny will be minted today in Philadelphia
Now is our chance to switch to European style "you pay the price it says on the shelf"!
strbean··on You can't cURL a Border
Ah, good point.
strbean··on Unexpected things that are people
> Similar to nomads, vagabonds, and college students on extended study abroad,

But not to be conflated with rovers or wanderers!

strbean··on You can't cURL a Border
Last time I looked was a few years ago, but I was surprised how hard it was going to be to legally live in France while keeping my US tech job. My employer was happy to do what they had to to make it happen, but there just didn't seem to be a route in the French immigration system.

The options seemed to be:

- Get a job in France and get a work visa. This is very difficult due to economic protectionism.

- Come on a tourist visa and not work.

- Be provably independently wealthy and get some variety of golden visa. This meant proving that you had enough assets to live (lavishly I might add) long term without working.

No easy option for "I want to come to your country, get paid USD by a US company, but pay taxes to you!"

I think there have been some new developments regarding digital nomad visas since then. Still, seemed crazy given what a good arrangement it would have been for France.

strbean··on You can't cURL a Border
Even if they did check his passport, he didn't have an EU passport so probably shouldn't have been allowed to skip customs.
strbean··on John Carmack on mutable variables
AbstractFactoryResultFactoryProcessedResultProcessedResultProcessorBeanFactory
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