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tomp

22,607 karma · joined March 8, 2011

interested in programming, AI, space, future tech, experimental & creative food, skiing, philosophy, social issues, politics, economy, finance, hiring, languages, health, fitness, longevity

tom@primozic.org

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tomp··on What on Earth Is Dekton?
I give my best reviews to dekton.

Torture it however much you want - heat (dish straight from the oven at 240C), acid, oil, scratching, etc. it resists all.

Only thing: use 2cm thick, thinner 1.2cm could crack if you drop a pan onto it.

tomp··on Neural networks are clean
You don’t need Twitter app on your phone, web works seamlessly.
tomp··on Switzerland proposes banning profiling-based ads to minors
by "zero knowledge" you of course mean "the government can shadowban you without your knowledge" ?

Edit: non-snarky response: what's the default "fall-back" if government's signature is missing? IMO any option ("tracking/no tracking/invalid request") will be exploitable in bad ways.

tomp··on Switzerland proposes banning profiling-based ads to minors
I'm arguing against a ban.

There's no way to implement this without (1) usage-based profiling (what's being banned in the first place) or (2) ID verification.

I'm against both of those.

For me, the only acceptable solutions are: (1) ban all profiling-based ads (2) require respecting DO_NOT_TRACK (so that people/minors/their parents can individually decide what to do, but websites are then legally forced to respect that)

tomp··on Terence Tao: Math 2.0 [pdf]
> Many of our institutions and cultural practices have evolved around human beings, not ruthless paperclip maximizers.

You just think that because you don’t know how the drug discovery process works.

There’s a step called “lead optimization” where human chemists literally add atoms to drug-like molecules (“lead”) and tests its various properties (toxicity, potency, permeability, …) and iterate until they find a molecule with desired properties (literally “hill-climbing”).

The whole idea of drug trials is to validate those properties in actual humans, in a way that makes it very hard for pharma companies to game the process.

tomp··on Two-tier encryption in the UK
> - We just changed our PM

non-democratically. there was no election. the ruling party simply made a decision itself. Just like in China.

tomp··on The current balance of power in open models
I don't get this. It's not like the models are running on their own GPUs.

So if you're running open models on AWS GPUs, you might as well run Claude (which AWS supports, and doesn't share any data with Anthropic).

Same with Azure/OpenAI.

tomp··on I said no and Apple said yes
Indeed. TBH if I was running a Google- or even OpenAI-scale company (3000+ devices) I'd probably invest into creating a useful Linux distribution and hardware configuration myself (at that scale, it could maybe start to make sense).
tomp··on I said no and Apple said yes
Because Mac laptops are lightyears ahead of any other hardware.

Build quality (aluminum), charging (magsafe), screen resolution, battery life, noise (or lack thereof), trackpad…

It’s like other vendors aren’t even trying.

Also the OS mostly “just works”, just last week my Linux laptop disabled NVIDIA GPU (and almost bricked itself?? Not sure, had to fix apt) during automated updates

tomp··on Temporal raises $550M at a $12.55B valuation
Does it actually work?

In a past job, they tried to implement a similar thing on much lower scale with bidirectional database migrations.

Fortunately, they were mostly ran in one direction.

tomp··on Copyright does more harm than good and should be abolished
Harry Potter copyright is still being heavily utilized (milked?) 30 years after the first book's release.
tomp··on Oceans hit highest temperature on record
Pretty much everything the EU does, is inconveniencing most of its population, often in the name of "climate change" (while not actually making any impact).

Positives: no mobile roaming charges

Negatives:

- less efficient home appliances (dishwasher, washing machine, drier)

- cookie law

- car annoyances (e.g. "beep if over the speed limit")

- paper straws

- attached bottle caps

- LED lights

- expensive electricity (a lot of this is caused by individual countries, but probably also the EU plays a role, e.g. by not classifying nuclear as "green" / "renewable" and banning Russian gas)

tomp··on ElevenLabs, TwelveLabs, ThirteenLabs
Why would people use Fish instead of e.g. ElevenLabs? (I was a heavy TTS user in previous job, but we generally went with one of the "major" providers (11labs, PlayHT when they were still around), not any of the "new players".)
tomp··on Situational Awareness down 67% in July in AI stock rout
You make it sound like a conspiracy theory but it's just rational behaviour.

Large amount of leverage / shorting / concentrated bets in a single stock => increase probability of large swings in that stock's price => bigger risk of sudden market moves => bigger risk to market makers => market makers limit their exposure.

tomp··on Kill The Cookie Banner
Or you could just stop spying on people.

No cookie banner is required for functionally necessary cookies.

tomp··on Future euro banknote design proposals
I've never heard of Maria Callas before. Especially ridiculous because she was born in the US and Wikipedia describes her as American and Greek.
tomp··on I love LLMs, I hate hype
I was downgraded to Opus after asking “how do fish get into mountain lakes”. Fable managed to get like half an answer through…
tomp··on Founding a company in Germany: €9600, 152 days and I still can't send an invoice
> The 25,000 is there to make sure you can cover some liability.

Is this actually true?

Can't the company just loan out the 25k immediately?

tomp··on Digital euro clears key hurdle as EU seeks to break free from U.S. credit cards
which is in fact a massive pain in the ass, because car rentals and hotels often require credit cards to make reservations (at least in my experience...)
tomp··on I'm Tired of Talking to AI
Same. I no longer fix spelling mistakes (I never used auto-complete or "smart" keyboards).
tomp··on Outsourcing plus local AI will soon become more economical vs. frontier labs
The entire business model of "outsourced" developers / shops is to overbill people - "we have 4 engineers working on your project" (and also on 5 other projects).

Even if the engineers themselves are cooperative, their managers / business owners will resist close cooperation and enforce work at arm's length (e.g. 1x weekly calls).

Ask me how I know. I once spent £300k (fortunately not my money) on an outsourced team of developers, and they delivered nothing at the end. Most of the time it was simply about aligning the work! We (me and my partner, we together had some idea of what we actually wanted) tried repeatedly to make sync-s more frequent, to better align the efforts, but their managers kept resisting. It's the "consulting" business model!

For remote jobs, the incentives are reversed. You're literally a full-time employee, there's no management layers to impede communication, and (unless you're lazy or a fraud) you probably want to work on interesting problems and not be bored!

tomp··on Green card seekers must leave U.S. to apply, Trump administration says
Melania Trump wasn't on "low wage immigrant worker" visa (H1B) but on a "exceptional ability" visa (O1).

Didn't check the others...

tomp··on Apparently Google hates us now
FYI Google also hates OpenCV

What used to be easily searchable (e.g. "opencv orb") now brings up pages and pages of spam sites (basically "learn opencv here!" blogspam).

Literally the first result on "docs.opencv.org" is on page 4, and points to version 3.4 (9 years old!).

The page that I want https://docs.opencv.org/4.13.0/dc/dc3/tutorial_py_matcher.ht... is nowhere to be found.

tomp··on Everything in C is undefined behavior
ok so Claude says I was wrong, it's more subtle.

(1) you can cast between any pointer types (no UB - assuming they're aligned), but accessing memory through a wrongly-typed pointer is UB

(2) the only exception is char*, which allows you a "byte view of memory"

(3) calling a function through a pointer requires the parameter pointer types to be compatible, and none of these are: int*, struct foo *, void*, char*

tomp··on Everything in C is undefined behavior
Casting to a pointer of incompatible type is UB. The exception is casting to char*.
tomp··on Grok 4.3
I couldn't get Gemini nor ChatGPT to do OCR of children's books (I literally own the books, so there's no copyright issue - all just fair use!).

The OCR was complex enough (bad quality photos) that "simple" OCR models couldn't do it.

Fortunately, Claude obliged (as well as Mistral OCR was helpful!)

tomp··on Slovenia becomes first EU country to introduce fuel rationing
I'm not sure about that. AFAIK it's just per km and not impacted by gas price.

https://www.racunovodja.com/clanki.asp?clanek=232/kilometrin...

tomp··on Slovenia becomes first EU country to introduce fuel rationing
In Slovenia, fuel prices have been regulated since, like, forever.

A few years ago (or last year? not sure) they were deregulated on the highways (i.e. to make tourists pay more) but then the government changed their mind (several times, IIRC).

tomp··on Swiss e-voting pilot can't count 2,048 ballots after decryption failure
Why are you lying?

from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Helios_Voting

> The centralized server must be trusted not to violate ballot secrecy,[7] this limitation can be mitigated against by distributing trust amongst several stakeholders.

> The ballot auditing/reconstruction device must be trusted to ensure successful ballot auditing (also known as cast-as-intended verifiability),[7][16] this limitation can be mitigated against by distributing auditing checks amongst several devices, only one of which must be trusted.

So neither secure nor anonymous...

tomp··on I am directing the Department of War to designate Anthropic a supply-chain risk
A bit of a cop-out, don't you think?

They still pay taxes, which fund the US government, which kills innocent human beings around the world...

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