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tuckerman

803 karma · joined June 22, 2011

Frequent dabbler and dilettante, dad, coffee drinker, software engineer.

I work at Google but these opinions are my own, not that of my employer.

Previously at Google/Google[x], Wayve, and Airbnb. Alumnus of South Park Commons.

cameron at ctuck dot com twitter.com/tuckerman https://bsky.app/profile/ctuck.com

[Verifying my cryptographic key: openpgp4fpr:135c23b218651a6275ecc71efefdf30a8e3e3078]

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tuckerman··on Meta takes down a critical video about meta AI Glasses after filming at Meta
I would be surprised if those don't already exist, I hear stories in the news all the time about small hidden cameras places they shouldn't be. For a private space like the locker room I'm not sure what option there is besides laws making that illegal (I assume/hope that already is?). Someone dedicated already can get a much more discreet camera.

For public spaces, at least where I am, there really isn't a legal expectation of privacy. I couldn't tell if someone was watching YouTube or filming me with their phone and I probably don't have any recourse anyway.

tuckerman··on Meta takes down a critical video about meta AI Glasses after filming at Meta
> That isn't normal

Every gym I've been to is full of people with phones out in the locker room, from cheap chain gyms to the nicer athletic club I currently go to. My experience is much closer to GP.

> Glasses are passively recording

All the smart glasses I know of have a light on when recording. My phone does not and can be much more discreet (subject to the fact that everyone has a phone out already).

I agree that if a location is actively banning phone use patrons should absolutely also be asked to take off smart glasses.

tuckerman··on A Beginning for Mathematics
Ah that's fair.

I do think in a lot of fields there is a lot of impact/influence to be had by people who are willing to do work to bridge different fields. I wonder to what degree this is because practitioners don't always see how their work could be used elsewhere.

tuckerman··on A Beginning for Mathematics
Do you have any examples of places you felt like there was a lot of gatekeeping? Perhaps having studied mathematics I am a bit blind to the issue here and would like to learn more.

I agree making simple things sound complicated to appear more impressive is bad but there are limits. Even with Feynman he could only go so far, e.g. his interview about why questions and magnetism.

tuckerman··on What Ozempic does to the gut-brain axis
Why is that something to strive for though? Maybe for some people that mental energy is better spent everywhere. If there is a simple and safe pharmaceutical solution for a problem, that sounds like great progress to me!
tuckerman··on A message from President Kornbluth about funding and the talent pipeline
I would say there was a brain drain from Iran to the US but I've also heard it used as a transitive verb. I think if there is a clear place talent is moving it's useful to specify it (and fwiw it doesn't sound weird to my ear).
tuckerman··on A message from President Kornbluth about funding and the talent pipeline
They are saying the opposite. People have been coming to America for higher education and staying here and that has historically benefited the US. And that seems to be changing.
tuckerman··on My .config Ship of Theseus
Yeah, I find it especially annoying when apps do use the XDG directories but use them incorrectly (dumping a bunch of state/data in .config is unfortunately too common). If apps want to do that I wish they would just grab $HOME/.appname rather than mess up my .config dir.
tuckerman··on My .config Ship of Theseus
Besides cleanliness which is more a preference I agree, separating config, data, and cache makes it easy to know what can/should be backed up, what can be synced across machines, etc.
tuckerman··on Framework Laptop 13 Pro
I was pleased to see that The Verge's coverage of the event [1] was very positive on the feel of the laptop (even saying they got the hinge feel right like on the macbook which was the first thing I noticed being "not quite right" with the framework when I got it). I'm optimistic that this will be a big step in the right direction.

[1] https://www.theverge.com/gadgets/915508/framework-announces-...

tuckerman··on Framework Laptop 13 Pro
My heart sank when they said 13 pro and then to see that so much is backwards compatible was amazing. It's quite refreshing to see a company live up to their mission so well.
tuckerman··on Framework Laptop 13 Pro
I did last year after deciding that Apple's software just isn't for me anymore. I've always had a Linux desktop around (and used to daily drive Linux on a laptop years ago) so I was happy to consolidate on my preferred platform.

Biggest gripes I had are:

A) battery life (both during use and standby just kinda sucking on Linux in general compared to os x, not exactly framework specific but I did get used to how amazing my m1 pro for longevity)

B) the case looking nice but feeling a little flimsy

C) the speakers are pretty bad (though I did get turned on to easyeffects and there is a profile for the 13 which helped a bit)

D) macs completely spoiled me trackpad wise

It seems like they are taking a stab at all of these in some way and I'm excited to see how it goes, especially with so much being backwards compatible.

tuckerman··on Sam Altman's response to Molotov cocktail incident
I don't know who you think the "real family" is but a) narrowing what a real family is does an awful disservice to a whole host of unique families, not just families that involve surrogacy and b) nearly all surrogacies in the US are gestational surrogacies where at least one parent is genetically related to the child and the surrogate is not at all related to the child (not that genetic relations is what makes something a real family or not, but I'm pretty sure thats what is implied here).
tuckerman··on Sam Altman's response to Molotov cocktail incident
I think he's just trying to remind people that someone can both be a CEO of a powerful company you might disagree with/hate as well as a real human with a husband and child and that trying to set fire to his house could kill those people.

I personally wouldn't go as far as to say the Farrow article caused this but it seems fair game to respond to an article that had an over the top cover image of an animated Sam Altan picking and choosing faces with a photo reminding people he's human like everyone else.

tuckerman··on I won't download your app. The web version is a-ok
Robinhood gets double shame points for naming the app "Banking" (previously "Credit Card"), no Robinhood or RH in the name. I love the card but hate everything about that app.
tuckerman··on I won't download your app. The web version is a-ok
For games I agree that an app makes sense (though I think at least the games I used to play were in a separate nyt games app). For interactive articles, I've not seen anything I couldn't use fine in my browser, but in theory I wouldn't mind covering up the interactive part with a "Open in the app for a better experience" button (similar to what YouTube does on the video portion of the page). Where I encounter this though is in standard, text-heavy articles that maybe include a photo or two.

I assume the reason they are pushing me to the app is that it benefits them not me (longer dwell times, maybe easier tracking for behavior/ads), and that is precisely why I want to stay in the browser. Covering up a good portion of the article and preventing me from scrolling until I click the tiny link to decline is hostile and is the only thing degrading the experience on the website for most articles I read.

tuckerman··on I won't download your app. The web version is a-ok
The site that irks me the most here is New York Times. Opening an article in the mobile browser often has a toast over the bottom third of the article to open it in their app for "a better experience". I struggle to think how nytimes isn't a perfect fit for a site over an app. The only frustrating experience I have with the web version that would be better in the app is not seeing that that pop-up.
tuckerman··on Author of "Careless People" banned from saying anything negative about Meta
For arbitrary contracts I would agree, but I think increasing the limitations in severance agreements specifically makes sense. There are already certain requirements (at least in California) for severance agreements and I think limiting the duration of non-disparagement clauses to 1-2 years would be a positive change.
tuckerman··on RubyGems Fracture Incident Report
I might be reading it wrong, but it sounds like you and some others here are either more closely connected to the folks involved or at least have more context. I don't want to imply that I know better what the author or anyone at Ruby Central _actually_ believes or is doing, I'm just commenting on the article at face value. Whether the article is true, deceptive, or in between, I think there is still an interesting general lesson about organizations in it.

> You are correct that they did not make any claims, but the article did insinuate illegal behavior on the part of André and Samuel by selectively juxtaposing facts to imply wrongdoing without ever directly stating or saying that their behavior was illegal.

I think we just took away something very different from the article. I didn't read it that way, I read it more as "these two have already decided to move on to work on this without Ruby Central so it's pragmatic to cut off their access". We might just need to agree to disagree on what the article implies; perhaps we are just reading it with different boundary conditions.

Where we might agree is that repeatedly bringing up the selling user data proposal doesn't add anything to the story except to prejudice the reader against Andre. If it's to show that there was still some communication between Andre and others at Ruby Central, I would have kept it at that. Every time it got mentioned I winced.

> California is actually quite clear on this!

My understanding is quite different. There is a duty of loyalty an employee owes their employer and directly competing with your employer is clearly a breach. There is recent enough case law on this (at least covering terminating an employee for cause as a result). I don't have access to the materials from a previous employer that explained some of this but I did quickly find [1] which roughly agrees with my recollection (though I would not be willing to vouch for this particular site), namely "that Section 16600 has consistently been interpreted as invalidating any employment agreement that unreasonably interferes with an employee’s ability to compete with an employer _after_ his or her employment ends".

I'm not a lawyer (I assume you aren't either but at the very least you aren't _my_ lawyer) so I think it's not worth debating this further, we seem pretty firm in our beliefs on this one.

[1] https://www.aalrr.com/Business-Law-Journal/californias-polic...

EDIT: I want to acknowledge that one of the individuals here was a contractor and not an employee. I have no idea how that factors into moonlighting restrictions. I imagine it would be more limited and lean more on what that individual's exact role is at the company? I think my point still stands that my understanding is that the general situation for the average software engineer is more nuanced.

tuckerman··on RubyGems Fracture Incident Report
I don't have much skin in the game but as a passerby, I agree that the report obviously was made with a lot of time/effort but wouldn't dramatically change someone's view of Ruby Central or assure anyone this won't happen again. This is like writing an outage postmortem without really getting to the root cause and identifying what can be done to prevent in the future.
tuckerman··on RubyGems Fracture Incident Report
The document didn't mention a lawsuit and I was just responding to the above comment with only the context of the postmortem and pointing out that this particular article didn't claim anything illegal happened. You and some others here might have much more context that I or other readers of this postmortem don't have.

I seem to remember there were some threats of legal action related to unauthorized access after this kerfuffle but I a) don't know what is going on with that, b) don't know what the law actually says about that and c) don't know if that is what you are referring to. If so, I think it is different than what the original comment alleged which was more about moonlighting/using proprietary information/competing. I think that topic is extremely complicated (e.g. I am not so sure moonlighting for a competitor while an employee is necessarily protected in California...) but that wasn't alleged in the postmortem anyway.

tuckerman··on RubyGems Fracture Incident Report
That wasn't my read of what the postmortem is claiming. I didn't see a claim that anyone did anything illegal with proprietary information and the only legal question anyone raised was around a tangentially related proposal with user data[1]. I think the question about working on competing work is unfortunately more grey than most on HN would like, but even then nobody was fired/terminated for that. It sounds like people voluntarily left.

My biggest takeaway from this is the intermingling of opensource work/foundations/companies and employees/contractors/volunteers needs to be incredibly explicit. It sounds like everyone had very different expectations about what this group of people was (ranging from an exclusive club of influential ruby developers to a very formal, business-like foundation) and, as a result, each other's actions seemed hostile/strange/confusing.

[1] I actually think the comments about the proposal of selling the user data does a disservice to the postmortem. I think it invokes a much more emotional reaction from the reader than anything else and, while potentially interesting, seems like dirty laundry that doesn't change the lesson the postmortem teaches.

tuckerman··on Florida judge rules red light camera tickets are unconstitutional
I agree that's likely true but I'm not sure if there are any jurisdictions finding things differently? I'm not aware of any rulings from appeals courts with broader jurisdiction but I imagine if they don't exist they will soon.
tuckerman··on Florida judge rules red light camera tickets are unconstitutional
It seems like that is not the case in Florida according to this judge.
tuckerman··on AMD will bring its “Ryzen AI” processors to standard desktop PCs for first time
I think for brand new computers/builds that's correct but where it hit me was wanting to upgrade an existing desktop. I already have more DDR4 RAM than I need and would have been willing to purchase a new CPU/motherboard and being forced to also purchase new RAM at the same time made it too big of a price tag all at once. I just found the best zen 3 cpu I could on ebay and called it a day.

I think your point still stands overall for AMD's business though, I assume a vast majority of CPUs are purchased in new desktops?

tuckerman··on Google Workspace CLI
Google operates across so many verticals that it's difficult to argue a side project is outside the scope of Google’s business and therefore Google could argue it has copyright over the work. To make it easier for engineers to keep contributing to open source, there’s a fairly straightforward path to release code through a Google-owned repository (if you look at github.com/google it is full of personal projects alongside official ones).

There is an official process where an engineer can apply to a committee to have Google waive any copyright claim. That requires additional work so if your goal is simply to publish the code as open source and you do not mind it living under the Google org, using the Google repo path is usually much faster.

Disclaimer: ex-googler, not a lawyer, not arguing whether or not the situation with copyright assignment is legally enforceable or not/good or bad/etc.

tuckerman··on New accounts on HN more likely to use em-dashes
Post C++11 you can just do (like this:)), no extra space needed before the last parenthesis.
tuckerman··on GPTZero finds 100 new hallucinations in NeurIPS 2025 accepted papers
I don't think the original comment was saying this isn't a problem but that flagging it as a hallucination from an LLM is a much more serious allegation. In this case, it also seems like it was done to market a paid product which makes the collateral damage less tolerable in my opinion.

> Papers should be carefully crafted, not churned out.

I think you can say the same thing for code and yet, even with code review, bugs slip by. People aren't perfect and problems happen. Trying to prevent 100% of problems is usually a bad cost/benefit trade-off.

tuckerman··on Nvidia Stock Crash Prediction
I agree that is a strange notion that would require some evidence and I see it in some other threads but looking at the parent comments going up it seems people are discussing economic usefulness so that is what I'm responding to.
tuckerman··on Nvidia Stock Crash Prediction
I agree that there is hyperbole thrown around a lot here and its possible to still use some hardware for a long time or to sell it and recover some cost but my experience in planning compute at large companies is that spending money on hardware and upgrading can often result in saving money long term.

Even assuming your compute demands stay fixed, its possible that a future generation of accelerator will be sufficiently more power/cooling efficient for your workload that it is a positive return on investment to upgrade, more so when you take into account you can start depreciating them again.

If your compute demands aren't fixed you have to work around limited floor space/electricity/cooling capacity/network capacity/backup generators/etc and so moving to the next generation is required to meet demand without extremely expensive (and often slow) infrastructure projects.

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