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topham

84 karma · joined April 19, 2026

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topham··on A lack of male protagonists is making it harder to get young boys into books
We just spent the last several years hearing how representation matters, and when the numbers flip sufficiently that a new group is now under represented they get told "that's too bad".

When you look at where money is spent and by whom, keep it in mind as you shift the demographics of who's watching / reading. The money moves with the groups interest, and it doesn't necessarily get filled by the new demographic.

topham··on What's My ΔE? – Chromatic Census
No.

It measures the detection point of my finger, its accuracy for where I'm actually pointing is poor. So, useless.

topham··on Don't Write Bugs
The ability to do something right under ideal circumstances has no bearing on the right way to do things in real circumstances.
topham··on OccupySaaS – They laid us off. We're rebuilding their SaaS
And how do you expect to stay out of the quagmire of lawsuits over NDA, accusations of stolen trade secrets and simply a shitload of lawsuits. Even if the developers are acting in good faith, the lawsuits could crush you before you're done.
topham··on Cisco gives engineer unlimited AI tokens to rewrite legacy code
Organizations spend a lot of time destroying the creative ideas their employees have; burying it in red tape, crushing it in meetings.
topham··on Reddit to Transition to Logged in Only
Reddit death looks exactly like this.

It's often an echo chamber, and this will kill it, the only question is the timeframe. And no, I don't mean 20 years, I mean weeks/months.

topham··on Chained PHP2Shell exploit roots 25 servers, including US Government servers
You win.

Perl 4 specifically of course though.

topham··on Maltese-flagged vessel is on route carrying Russian diesel to American ports
Pray that's what's on it.
topham··on eMudhra are now blocking access to their certificate revocation list
It's almost like this is intentional. Weird.
topham··on Do you want to keep your job? Stop feeding AI models
You can hide; but it's not going to end because you cover your eyes.
topham··on Game trips modem/router breaker
AFCI breaker?

Electromagnetic noise can trigger them, it could feed back from the power supply.

topham··on Today's PHP security release, and how we're strengthening security
Please identify a non-toy language that has never had a vulnerability.
topham··on Ask HN: Is Wikipedia going to be obsolete soon?
Yes
topham··on Impossible to get Adsense approval for my browser game
Maybe provide some evidence to show you've found and followed some research of your own before asking the entire internet for advice? Some specific targeted advice might be warranted, but I think we'd need to know a lot more specific details first.
topham··on Xkcd: Random Number
7.
topham··on Man arrested after discussing plans for childcare mass shooting with [Claude]
Wasn't the kid in Tumbler ridge just fucking with a LLM before he decided to kill other students?

I don't care if the guy threatened a lawnmower, I do care if he started spouting off about killing kids.

Context matters, but that's what the evaluation is for, not you our I deciding that a rant with potential violence towards children is just a rant at an LLM, or a premeditated act in advance of a violent crime.

I don't know. Do you know for sure? What happens if you're wrong?

topham··on Man arrested after discussing plans for childcare mass shooting with [Claude]
I'm trying to figure out why anyone would have a concern with this.

Seems there's a line and this is well past any reasonable line.

topham··on Cloud computing is a trap, warns GNU founder Richard Stallman (2008)
Eww
topham··on We generate accessible color palettes for AI-built apps
Not sure why you bothered, the AI I used the other day didn't have a problem with white on white, why make things complicated by using color?!

/sarcasm

topham··on "We're not going to make rules that say you can't use tools for X"
A bug is a bug is a bug. But not everything reported is a bug.

I watched a significant portion of that video, it represents what I expect well. You can't bury your head in the sand because an AI reported a bug, it's, potentially, still an exploitable bug. They can however raise the standard. They can require that reporting a bug comes with a fix, even if they reject the fix provided, it gives them an opportunity to evaluate that the bug is real, that someone put some effort in resolving it for the community (even if an LLM provided the fix); it gives something to evaluate the can benefit rather than only being a determent to the community.

I've sent a half dozen patches over the year to projects, I've always provided my perceived fix for the issue, occasionally they've been implemented as-is, and sometimes they were replaced outright with an alternate solution. I never really cared about the solution, just that the issues was resolved.

The first was a commercial library that dealt with multiple modems (interrupts and daughter cards)on dos based machines. They took the fix and integrated it and provided me with an updated library. Not much of a thank you, but the library was fixed.

More recent ones was another commercial library, open source but proprietary, and they sat on it for 3 months waiting for me to fix it their way, before the accepted it as-is and released appropriately adjusted patch. (I'm not their employer or employee, their complaints were tedious undefined rules. I fixed the bug and had working code. I waited them out.)

Good responses, bad responses, none of them mattered, what did matter to me, and others, is the developers involved cared enough to eventually implement the right fix for their codebase. The bugs need to go. Set the ego aside and fix it.

topham··on AdFection: Targeted ads turned into a pipeline for zero-click mercenary spyware
Knew the country of origin before I read the article. Surprise!
topham··on "We're not going to make rules that say you can't use tools for X"
I'm substantially less worried about the Linux kernel than almost everything else.

Honestly, seeing people go from concern trolling to what I like to call _concern farming_ has been utterly disappointing.

_concern farming_ is when people build entire crops of concerns with no intent to do anything other than fertilize them.

topham··on Teaching a Door to Say No
Does the AI trigger the dtmf tone directly?

Yes -then no, you cannot trust it won't make that decision.

topham··on QGIS enacts moratorium on AI assisted contributions
The community is relying on the obscure process flows they've learned and optimized for their own purpose; replacing QGIS will probably wipe out jobs.

Couldn't happen sooner.

topham··on QGIS enacts moratorium on AI assisted contributions
Considering this application needs an entire overhaul on its UI it would simply be easier to start from scratch.
topham··on I hired an illustrator to draw my house. Now it's my Home Assistant dashboard
Except it's not a misconception.

Air temperature is only one contributing factor for comfort in a home. Surface temperatures take longer to achieve and the larger the gradient the longer it can take.

There are multiple factors to take into account, including the highest temperature the home gets to, that is dependant on location and weather patterns.

If you keep the temperature in the home to 28-30 degrees then later cooling to lower temperatures before bed time you can reduce costs and energy expenditures than if you let it rise to 34 degrees or more and only lowering it when you get home. Or, what you save in costs you expend in otherwise like poor sleep.

Lowering it advance, on a schedule makes more sense if you want surface temperatures to also be reduced.

The blanket disabling of air conditioning when not home is not the only solution, and often is sub-optimal.

topham··on I predict Apple will open their platforms within the next five years
I predict they won't.
topham··on I hired an illustrator to draw my house. Now it's my Home Assistant dashboard
"When everyone leaves, all the air conditioners switch off."

That's often substantially more inefficient than keeping it at the temperature desired, or adjusting the desired temperature to mitigate it somewhat.

topham··on How did Rosalind Franklin miss the helix in her iconic DNA image? She didn't
Perhaps one forgets how long it takes to write a patent.
topham··on A minimal kernel in Swift, running in QEMU
Those are references to "Hackers" the movie from 1995.
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