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throwup238

20,190 karma · joined July 31, 2023

A bootlicker and their boots are not easily parted.

NOTICE: My religion forbids me from recognizing any terms of service that haven't been given the three blessings of the matriarch

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throwup238··on What do Visa and Mastercard do? An intro to card networks
I’ve never had a problem with the IRS or DMV, because unlike Visa or Mastercard they are government agencies with accountability to the people.

Visa and Mastercard are a cancer.

throwup238··on AirPods 5
> Or, you know, design trade-offs like every other hardware ever made.

Or different SKUs. Just saying.

Not that hard for the most profitable trillion dollar company on the planet.

throwup238··on Growing proof that autonomous cars save lives
If it’s anything like my San Francisco DMV driving test, they did a loop around Fell and Oak St (both one way streets with no opposing traffic).

I passed because I didn’t kill anyone in the span of eight blocks.

throwup238··on Anthropic Is Building a Predictive Surveillance System to Monitor Activists
> “We track concerning behavior over time through a person-of-interest process, allowing us to catch escalation patterns early.”

They’re building Samaritan.

throwup238··on LG TVs caught spying even when offline or on standby
Called it!

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43520903

throwup238··on ChatGPT Images 2.5
We’ve outsourced everything else.
throwup238··on Macbeth and His Problems
> just in time for the audience to see Macduff kill Macbeth.

Spoilers!

I was just about to go see my middle school’s production of Macbeth hoping to see some violence but now it’s ruined!

throwup238··on Leaving VMware just got harder after Broadcom pulled VDDK downloads
> As much as we don't like "this" we don't want to put any bureaucrats in power to squash creativity and enterprise.

That was literally Broadcom’s reason for existing before Avago even acquired them. It’s the other half of the Qualcomm/Broadcom telecom duopoly.

throwup238··on Impedance Matching (2017)
> Would tiny airborne particles be safe for our lungs ?

Almost certainly not. Pretty much anything inhaled in large amounts will cause pneumoconiosis including pollen. Some stuff like asbestos or coal dust are worse than others, but even biologically inert particles tend to cause health problems.

throwup238··on A Million Falcons Went Missing. Here’s How They Were Found
What dictionary are you using?

I just looked it up and MW’s definition of “missing” is “absent” or “lost” or “needed or expected but not included”. Dictionary.com says “absent, not found, or lost” and “lacking”. Wiktionary says “Not able to be located; gone, misplaced”, “Not present when it (they) should be”, and “Of an internal combustion engine: running roughly due to an occasional lack of a spark or other irregular fault.”

throwup238··on A Million Falcons Went Missing. Here’s How They Were Found
They were missing. Then they used GPS tags to locate them.

That’s why the article is titled “ A Million Falcons Went Missing. Here’s How They Were Found”.

Something was unknown, then we used sensors to solve the mystery. Wild, isn’t it?

throwup238··on Ask HN: Who is using MCP in production?
I use MCP for two types of things: ones where I need to give access to the memory of the process like an MCP server to inspect a Qt gui, and ones where I need to give authenticated access to my data to ChatGPT/Claude web/mobile apps. For these uses CLIs would be too cumbersome in use or auth.

For the latter, Cloudflare Tunnels + Zero Trust + Github SSO means securing them is rather easy and with the recent cf cli the agent does all the work. Their native support for base64 encoded images is also helpful to “encourage” the LLM to look at stuff without constant prodding.

throwup238··on Ask HN: Who is using MCP in production?
> - this article doesn’t enable tool search for starters where tokens start at near zero for MCP too

Is that why I have to constantly remind Claude and ChatGPT that they do have access to a Github plugin that can access my account, instead of trying and failing to use the gh cli?

throwup238··on A mysterious kidney disease has arrived in Texas
It does. This article is about Latino workers but there are well known hotspots for CKDu in Sri Lanka and India. There’s other reports of it in the rest of Asia, Middle East, and Africa but its not as well known of an issue and under reported.
throwup238··on OpenAI begins rolling out GPT-6 Astra
In a future where Claude and ChatGPT agents automate all aspects of society, that triggers a cascade of real world consequences where everything keeps running as if the new model is released, except the vibe coded upgrade procedure fails to do a staged rollout, taking down the entire agent infrastructure when they try to upgrade to a nonexistent model all at once.
throwup238··on ChatGPT ad targeting is garbage
Are you perhaps under the mistaken impression that you’re the only one getting retargeted?
throwup238··on Elevated Errors for Multiple Models
Or just their own models locally, since 8x GPU pods fit under a desk (makes a nice foot heater too)
throwup238··on Exit the Cave
For caving you’re supposed to take three and keep them in separate areas of the bag so you can’t lose all three at the same time.
throwup238··on ChatGPT ad targeting is garbage
You might return them and get another brand. Even that little positive signal is often worth the wasted impressions because most of the other signals are either so weak or so competitive.
throwup238··on Claude Fable 5.1 and Claude Mythos 5.1
> short, there are some big concepts like Christianity or Islam that people refer to as if it's the same thing but almost nobody has a shared meaning when they refer to such big things. Even so there can be concrete dialogues about these topics from different frames and with different underlying meanings.

See Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations for a deeper treatment of that topic.

throwup238··on Electric rain can eat through metal
Someone submitted the design during WWI but it wasn’t used: https://www.southernhighlandnews.com.au/story/2992498/boomer...
throwup238··on I co-founded Burning Man. The festival has lost its soul
> Heck Zuckerberg took a helicopter there one year.

The vast majority of the people I knew who flew in weren’t rich like Zuck, they just liked flying. It’s the only way to get a wristband that allows you to come and go at will (i.e. to run logistics for a camp) and avoid exodus if you had to leave that day.

15 years ago no one gave a damn about the rich people going to burning man. They were isolated in their camps. We were much more concerned with keeping our Sparkle Ponies alive.

throwup238··on Lawmakers added $1 to car insurance policies. That money paid for Flock cameras
“[dead]” usually means algorithmic (could be as simple as an account registered via Tor that hasn’t been vouched for enough times). “[flagged][dead]” usually means it was flag-killed by users, except I’ve been noticing some AI written comments that are flagged instead of just dead, but they’re minutes old so unlikely to be user flagged.
throwup238··on Indirect Calling of Nested Functions on GCC Without Executable Stack
Pharo [1] is a modern take.

[1] https://pharo.org/

throwup238··on I accidentally turned LLM memory into program analysis
> My problem is the context of today’s models (that I’ve been using - Claude Opus 5 and GPT-Sol) are a black box to a user like me.

Would it even help if it weren’t a blackbox? Maybe to the frontier labs with resources, but even trying to read through the thinking traces of an open model doing a nontrivial task easily takes me an entire day to do correctly (i.e. actually looking at the code it read in) and much more if I’m trying to tune a specific repeatable task.

Applying that to agentic coding seems like a losing proposition. The only way to manage it seems to be more agents and that’s its own rabbit hole of compounding errors (like Claude’s useless comments).

throwup238··on M5Stack Launches PaperMono
The better phrase is probably “reference design” marketplace. When I worked as an EE pretty much all but the hardest boards (which needed to be simulated) were glorified stripped down reference designs.
throwup238··on CEO fired developers to make room for AI. Developers create open source AI CEO
> developer productivity is so profitable in an outsized way that you'd always just hire more if you could, even if they were all 10x as productive (maybe this changes at some scale).

Definitely. Software is a digital arms race between companies so they’ll just keep expanding. I’m sure at some scale that breaks down but we are far from that point. My lumberyard, a few miles away from one of ASML’s US facilities, still runs its POS and inventory tracking on old DOS machines. In a decade they could probably make more money selling them as antiques.

throwup238··on Taylor Farms: How One Company's Reach Became a National Risk
I’m sorry but I can’t take you seriously if you’re bringing up mad cow disease in this discussion. Prions don’t spread because of butchers, they spread because of bone-and-meal feed. You know, stuff fed to a cow while it’s still alive, before it gets slaughtered. No amount of sanitary practice is going to help if you’re feeding prions to the animals because that’s just not how sanitation works.

And yes, small scale butchers slaughtering cows for a few local farmers and their customers buying whole carcasses have very different sanitary standards than an industrial meat packing plant. I sign a waiver every time.

> It’s not dirty or unsanitary by any means

How did you get from that to “this butcher was standing in his insufficiently cleaned butchering room”? Whatever personal bugbear you have, I want nothing to do with it.

throwup238··on Worst-case glacial lake flood scenarios in a transboundary Himalayan basin 2022
And you continue to ignore what I said (and what the book said). The whole point of a black swan event is exactly what you just described.

It’s the inflection point when our priors change.

throwup238··on Worst-case glacial lake flood scenarios in a transboundary Himalayan basin 2022
I think that’s a misreading of the entire book. A black swan event is a rare, high-impact outlier that is nearly impossible to predict under normal circumstances, but is rationalized as having been inevitable in hindsight.
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