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trimbo

4,552 karma · joined May 1, 2011

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trimbo··on eMudhra to exit global SSL/TLS certificate business
> There were no end entity certificates issued out of the affected CA’s

Adding "out of the affected CA's" is top PR weasel wording that will slip by non-technical people who read this.

Congratulations to those who wrote or prompted this statement.

trimbo··on Rust Style Guide
This style is aligned with protocol buffers, which is aligned with the style of protos in C++.

https://protobuf.dev/reference/rust/rust-generated/

trimbo··on A misalignment of AI in mathematics
> Those who realize how much you can accelerate your research with the help of AI will succeed.

Yes, but, in the last week we saw an AI lab front-run[1] the research of mathematicians doing what you suggest. The lab threw something like $15M of compute at a problem and the researchers were able to spend nowhere near that. I think the authors are more concerned about that kind of asymmetry and race to publish the results.

[1] - I am not going to debate whether that was deliberate on the part of the lab or if it crept into training data, etc. I don't know and don't think it matters towards the point of the authors here.

trimbo··on How the Tobacco Industry Drove the Rise of Ultra-Processed Foods (2025)
Okay... Pop Tarts are also Kellogg's, not a tobacco company. But let me pick some other examples.

Eggo waffles predate RJ Reynolds getting into this by 10 years.

Twinkies were introduced in the 1930s.

I'm not defending ultra-processed foods nor tobacco companies. I'm just saying the authors have a major blind spot if they think the concept or popularity of ultra-processed foods started in the 1960s.

trimbo··on How the Tobacco Industry Drove the Rise of Ultra-Processed Foods (2025)
> In the early 1960s ...

Huh? Ultra processed foods got very popular long before the 1960s. Wonder Bread came out in 1921. Kellogg came out with corn flakes in the 1900s. Etc.

trimbo··on The Alpha 21264 CPU: NT's Greatest RISC (1998)
And just like the 90s, every major tech company is making their own RISC chip[1]! Apple Silicon, Tensor, Graviton, Axion, Cobalt, Grace....

[1] - Though not exactly since they're all ARM ISA at the foundation.

trimbo··on Google Discloses $94.1B in SpaceX Stock, Marking 6% Stake
I don't think companies expanding their business should be the only reason to sell. Apple was a desktop and laptop computer company when they released the iPod. Nokia was a company making rubber products when they started making cellular equipment in the 1970s. Amazon was a ecomm company when they released AWS. Etc.

Sure, I'm cherrypicking the success stories but I don't think it's the only signal people should use.

trimbo··on SpaceX wants to launch 100k more Starlink satellites for 100x the bandwidth
> project a decade into the future can increase costs

A very good point.

I don't agree we can blame Trump for HSR though. 2/3 of the time that has passed have had Democrats in the white house. HSR is nearly all pure-California-style self-inflicted wound. And honestly it's just the most visible project California has failed with, there are many others. The one I'm personally angry about is Prop 1. We're now 12 years after, and have no additional water resources even broken ground. It's shameful.

trimbo··on SpaceX wants to launch 100k more Starlink satellites for 100x the bandwidth
The thing is, everyone's interpretation of "environmental impact" is different. To one person it can mean, "don't put the construction garbage in the river." To another it can mean "not one single Delta Smelt can be scared because of this construction."

And because it's so flexible, in states like California where we have aggressive environmental laws, it's leveraged as the NIMBY trump card. When it can't block a project, the process is used to make it inordinately expensive and take decades. One example would be the environmental studies for the CA High Speed Rail.[1]

[1] - https://ifp.org/fast-track-democratically-approved-transit-p...

trimbo··on It seems that the age of reading might be a short anomaly in human history
The Brick has been helping me with phone overuse. getbrick.com (I have no association with the company)

On your laptop, route those sites to localhost.

trimbo··on Long Island's decommissioned nuclear power plant
This video about Shoreham was my entry into the Proper People's channel. If you like this kind of abandoned structure exploration, I recommend checking out their other videos.
trimbo··on Prefer duplication over the wrong abstraction (2016)
> Hard disagree. When you've had to chase through a change in untold and actually unknown numbers of duplications of code in different permutations and fix them because they are all on fire simultaneously, you'd disagree too.

The other end of this spectrum is dealing with the architecture astronaut's up-front abstraction. Totally overengineered for solving the initial requirements, but then constantly needing new hacks to make it cope with new requirements as they come up in the normal course of work.

That's why there's a balance in there, it's somewhere between "always duplicate code even when you know a lot about the problem" and "always write abstractions even when you know very little about the problem."

trimbo··on Grit: Rewriting Git in Rust with agents
> Not a fan of this trend of "cleaning" GPL licensed software > Wether it's technically legal or not, it's disgusting behavior IMO.

GNU was originally developed to "clean" UNIX from the AT&T license.

trimbo··on AI is slowing down
> So where is all the productivity going? Where is the value?

Infrastructure doesn't produce value overnight. How long did it take the Interstate System to provide measurable value? I asked Gemini. Supposedly increased national productivity by 25% over 39 years[1]. But if you drove on a newly finished interstate in 1959, you saw the same cars just moving a lot faster.

That's what we're seeing right now. People can produce an incredible amount of stuff really quickly with AI. Is it directly connected to measurable productivity across the entire economy? No, because, realizing a mass productivity increase from infrastructure takes time.

[1] - https://www.richmondfed.org/publications/research/econ_focus...

trimbo··on Is AI Profitable Yet?
Yes whoever made this website apparently doesn't understand how LLMs are being used for massively profitable consumer products like Instagram.
trimbo··on If AI writes your code, why use Python?
Yup, adopting Go is exactly what I've done too.

Typed, garbage collected, fast to compile and run, stdlib that includes just enough to work out of the box. I really don't like writing it by hand but for the LLM it's perfect.

trimbo··on Tim Cook's Impeccable Timing
You can choose not to ship the 99.
trimbo··on AI overly affirms users asking for personal advice
> They also included 2,000 prompts based on posts from the Reddit community r/AmITheAsshole, where the consensus of Redditors was that the poster was indeed in the wrong.

Sorry, anonymous people on reddit aren't a good comparison. This needs to be studied against people in real life who have a social contract of some sort, because that's what the LLM is imitating, and that's who most people would go to otherwise.

Obviously subservient people default to being yes-men because of the power structure. No one wants to question the boss too strongly.

Or how about the example of a close friend in a relationship or making a career choice that's terrible for them? It can be very hard to tell a friend something like this, even when asked directly if it is a bad choice. Potentially sacrificing the friendship might not seem worth trying to change their mind.

IME, LLMs will shoot holes in your ideas and it will efficiently do so. All you need to do ask it directly. I have little doubt that it outperforms most people with some sort of friendship, relationship or employment structure asked the same question. It would be nice to see that studied, not against reddit commenters who already self-selected into answering "AITA".

trimbo··on Oil nears $110 a barrel after gas field strike
> this is going to destroy world economy on every angle

Oil prices were around $100 for a lot of the early 2010s. It's been three weeks. Calm down.

trimbo··on US Job Market Visualizer
> Universities typically are in the public sector side of the equation... and the public sector doesn't pay any non-administrative role the Big Tech rate.

There's absolutely no reason government couldn't pay competitive rates for software engineers. They do it for doctors and administrators of state-owned medical centers. Not to mention football coaches

https://openpayrolls.com/justin-wilcox-146812860

trimbo··on Apple to soon take up to 30% cut from all Patreon creators in iOS app
> It was 2008; "big box" software was largely seen as obsolete to the vast majority of developers.

Well, I'm just reporting it as I understood their decision in the moment. I was working on The Sims at that time, and I assure you, retailers still mattered to us bigly.

trimbo··on Apple to soon take up to 30% cut from all Patreon creators in iOS app
In 2008, the app store was launching, and physical software was still sold at Targets, Walmarts and other large retailers. A 30% margin was roughly what retailers would make off of physical software sales. By setting the App Store to be the same, Apple was signaling to retailers that they were not trying to undercut their margin, and keep a healthy relationship with them.
trimbo··on Ÿnsect, a French insect farming startup, has been been placed into liquidation
Steak is the meat that people pay the most attention to in this regard! People will pay hundreds of dollars for a few ounces of steak solely based on how the cow was raised and fed.

For steak, I disagree with the article about stigma of eating bugs. Feeding cows bugs will save money, no doubt, and that might help cost on the low end of the beef market. Steak is a different thing though. A "bug-raised, bug-finished" steak would have to be incredible to overcome the stigma.

trimbo··on Rob Pike goes nuclear over GenAI
You should be commended for being principled and sticking with what you believe. Thanks for your candor.
trimbo··on Rob Pike goes nuclear over GenAI
> Which was about when it became clear it was 100% down in the gutter without coming back.

Did you sell all of your stock?

trimbo··on Steve wants us to make the Macintosh boot faster
I wonder what Steve would think of the time it takes to apply minor OS upgrades to iPhone and Mac!
trimbo··on California Will Stop Using Coal as a Power Source Next Month
> coal is expensive and unreliable

Please elaborate. China is building an absurd amount of new power plants, and most of that has been coal, with last year hitting a new high of coal deployment[1]. Why would they do that if it's expensive and unreliable? The letter you linked is advocating for a new gas plant.

And no, I am not advocating for building more coal plants.

[1] - https://www.ft.com/content/4658e336-930f-49db-abc9-0036ee0ea...

trimbo··on AirPods live translation blocked for EU users with EU Apple accounts
> Which is fine as well if that's really the case (which I don't think it is, Europe apparently makes up ~1/3 of Apple's total Airpods revenue).

So your belief is that, if DMA didn't exist, Apple still would not ship this feature in the EU?

trimbo··on AirPods live translation blocked for EU users with EU Apple accounts
And Apple is now saying "That's fine, we'll instead adhere to the law by having our product do less. Don't buy it if you don't like the reduced featureset."

Someone at Apple did math on this and it's not worth their time to make this feature interoperable just for the EU market. That's because of this law. They wouldn't have even considered it without the law.

trimbo··on AOL to discontinue dial-up internet
Real miss by the NYT here in not finding and interviewing people who were still using it in 2025!
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