thot_experiment

A tiny victory. Copyright should not be more than a decade. This intellectual property system is one of the worst things to happen in modern society is what I would have said a few years ago, now I got bigger problems but I'm still mad.

What are you talking about, have you tried to exist in America without a credit score? It absolutely is an American principle, just because it's not explicitly stated in the constitution doesn't mean it's not true.

Valve is one of the only companies that appears to understand this, as well as that individual productivity is almost always limited by communication bandwidth, and communication burden is exponential as nodes in the tree/mesh grow linearly. [or some derated exponent since it doesn't need to be fully connected]

It's terrifying everywhere, really shines a light on the insane levels of propaganda we live under. I don't really know what can be done about it, it's really just hard to wrap my head around living in a country that so explicitly and directly supports an ethnostate and their active genocide.

The museum helpfully has a "Provenance" tab that gives you the answer to this question. (the answer in this case is market capitalism)

anyone wanna throw up a magnet link for this so we don't hammer their website unnecessarily?

Yeah that's a completely different approach, I buy lego to have access to more pieces so that when I dump them all on the floor and build whatever comes to mind I have more to play with.

Lego is still the best toy, but man, I really miss the old style Technic sets where most of the pieces were very generic vs today's sets which are less versatile. 8480 and 8250 as examples (my two favorite sets growing up, though I didn't manage to get my hands on 8480 until I got my first job)

What do you mean far behind? Far behind what? The new (actually the old one too) Qwen can give you bounding rectangular prisms around things in a scene, OCR text with ink spilled on it correctly, read graphs and understand spatial relationships, I think it's pretty impressive for something I'm running on like a 5 year old GPU.

You should consider reading the article as everything you talk about is addressed almost directly by the author.

"When you measure, include the measurer" - MC Hammer

Holy shit that's an ugly watch too, looks like something outta chinatown lmao.

What do you mean it's not an issue with root not being available. Root solves the problem, that's the whole point, when the OS doesn't expose the capability I want I can just read the file or piece of memory. The reason for root is that I want to have the failure mode be "ugh i have to go deal with the root security i've elected to have to do XXXX" rather than "well i guess i'm sol"

NTA but almost certainly, the advantage is that Qwen3.5 is extremely generic already so adapting it to a specific task is way easier than training a NN from scratch. It's probably akin to how OCR is now just something I use Qwen for even though I have access to dedicated OCR tools, Qwen is good enough and it's already in my vram. Modern VLLMs are pretty great at answering basic questions about an image by default and I'm guessing finetuning takes them from "pretty good" to "good enough to use in production".

You're missing the point completely, of course there are more secure ways to do a lot of things, the problem is that if there isn't an alternative "secure" mechanism to accomplish what I want if I have root I can just get it done whatever way works for me. I do not want to run into a situation like I did prior to having root, where my voice memos unbeknownst to me end up in some sort of elevated privileged enclave and I can't copy them over to my computer.

There's a myriad of reasons to have root, like baseline I want to be able to watch my network traffic. I want to be able to spoof my location, I want to be able to sftp into my phone and mount it as a drive because it's convenient. I want to access sensors and log them in the background. I wanna just run normal linux daemons.

I don't need any of these reasons though, all I need is the desire to be the ultimate arbiter of what happens on my devices. I don't need to or want to control all aspects of what goes on my device, I'm fine giving up control, I'm not fine with it being taken away from me. Everything else is secondary, the person with final say on what happens on my device should be me.

Lots of freedoms have downsides that are outweighed by the upsides, I'm absolutely unconvinced that the line lands on the far side of allowing you to control your phone.

Yeah and security models are fine. Having root on my device isn't the same as running everything as root. e.x. I want to access my files on my device over SSH so i don't have to keep plugging my phone in, sadly turing completeness doesn't get me there when I can't give my SSH daemon access to the filesystem. These are all solved problems, we're just CHOOSING not to expose the solutions to the end user under the guise of security in order to retain control.

Rooting is only a bad idea if there is an alternative. Unfortunately I have to root my devices because there isn't an alternative method to provide me, the physical owner of the device with control over the device. I would much prefer not to generally have root on my phone but to be able to access root externally or via a hardware switch or some other scheme. ADB root is fine.

The alternative to "running as root" isn't "not having access to root".

What a disgusting take. It's actually so depressing to see anyone say this, presumably sincerely. It's how all the modern operating systems I use work.

It's what makes computers so wonderful and powerful, you can just have it do whatever you want. Turning that into "whatever google decides i should be allowed to do" is not gonna lead us to a bright future.

I mean sure but I should be able to have DMA on some level, like I should be able to rootkit whatever software on my device, because it's on my device.

Yeah I swapped to using the f-droid version after that debacle, though the one i use has a green icon. XD

> As if you can't program C# functional style.

This, I was really impressed recently when I met a C# dev who was also a programmer (as opposed to your standard C# SaaS dev who just copy pasted from the framework docs and stack overflow and was fully automated by Claude in 2025) and he showed me how nice the language has gotten since I last used it over a decade ago when it was just Microslop Java. They've really put in work and it has a lot of great functional constructs now.

Cube 2: Sauerbraten too! Definitely spent some evenings playing that with my roomies back in the day before we invariably went back to Q3. What an insane resume.

The "access your own files" thing is so insane! Hard to describe my feelings [negative] when I found out that all of my voice notes were in the voice recorder and the easiest way to get them out was to manually send each one to myself over discord. Google helpfully mentions that you can just "download them through google takeout" and doesn't leave any option for people who don't just give all their personal data to google.

I can tap to pay with google pay on my rooted pixel while the spoof key isn't blacklisted, IIRC it uses dumped credentials extracted from other devices but I can reliably spoof Play Integrity and SafetyNet. It would be nice to not have an adversarial relationship with my things for once.

Yikes. Nevermind. The whole phone security model is one of the worst things to happen to computing, the concept that you shouldn't own your device for safety is so fucked.

I'm not holding my breath but it would be amazing to have root and be able to tap to pay without constantly playing cat and mouse with google.

Ok, but if you read my comment you would note that I constructed a category of humans who can reason but cannot count the r's in strawberry.

I think you don't know what it means to reason, and are dismissively claiming AI cannot reason as though it invalidates a point made earlier without even having a sturdy definition in your head. I think for you to say "LLMs can't reason" in this context is essentially a NOP.

    Location: I'm from the BAY, I rep it hard.
    Remote: Sure
    Willing to relocate: No
    Technologies: JS (both ends), C (mostly embedded, some high perf), Python/Torch (mostly model inference), 15YoE
    Résumé/CV: On request.
    Email: thot@thiic.cc

Looking for contracting/part time work specifically anywhere bootstrapped, not seeking outside investment, and working on a product that will be sold and not rented out. Open to fulltime for the right fit.