HNHacker News
TopNewBestAskShowJobs

wang_li

2,140 karma · joined March 17, 2015

submissionscomments
wang_li··on Polymarket gamblers threaten to kill me over Iran missile story
If you can't do a thing safely and without harm, perhaps you should not be doing the thing? It blows my mind the number of tech people who just say "it's too hard to do it safely and without harm so we'll just do it anyway and externalize the damage to other people." Lazy, greedy, amoral douche bags.
wang_li··on Redox OS has adopted a Certificate of Origin policy and a strict no-LLM policy
It should be a litigable offense.
wang_li··on Does Apple‘s M5 Max Really “Destroy” a 96-Core Threadripper?
The only reason for a multicore benchmark is when the benchmark represents some common task that is not embarrassingly parallel. If your multicore benchmark is just a single threaded test run on a bunch of cores, it’s pointless. I can simply do math to find that result, max(single core performance multiplied by the number of cores, memory bandwidth divide by bandwidth required per thread).

A good benchmark will be something people actually do.

wang_li··on GPL upgrades via section 14 proxy delegation
When a copyright holder dies, their copy rights pass on to their heirs. Depending on the state, this means it can go to cousins or twelfth cousins twice removed if that's all that is alive. Failing that, it goes to the state. Any/all of these could potentially sue if there is money in it.
wang_li··on Claude's Cycles [pdf]
It was bing as that is the default for Edge as supplied on my work laptop. It doesn't do this now, but it does do something else quite weird:

search: was val kilmer pregnant or in heat

answer: Not pregnant Val Kilmer was not pregnant or in heat during the events of "Heat." His character, Chris Shiherlis, is involved in a shootout and is shot, which indicates he is not in a reproductive or mating state at that time.

And then cites wikipedia as the source of information.

In terms of cognition the answer is meaningless. Nothing in the question implies or suggests that the question has to do with a movie. Additionally, "involved in a shootout and is shot, which indicates he is not in a reproductive or mating state" makes no sense at all.

AI as deployed shows no intelligence.

wang_li··on I built a pint-sized Macintosh
Sprites mods did one a few years ago. A Mac Plus in a tiny chassis with a 1.5" monitor.

https://spritesmods.com/?art=minimacplus&page=7

wang_li··on Claude's Cycles [pdf]
Last week I put "was val kilmer in heat" into the search box on my browser. The AI answer came back with "No, Val Kilmer was not in heat. Val Kilmer played Chris Shiherlis in the movie Heat but the film did not indicate that he was pregnant or in heat. His performance was nuanced and skilled and represents a high point of the film." I was not curious about whether he was pregnant.

We are not only not close to human level of intelligence, we are not even at dog, cat, or mouse levels of intelligence. We are not actually at any level of intelligence. Devices that produce text, images, or code do not demonstrate intelligence any more than a printer producing pages of beautiful art demonstrate intelligence.

wang_li··on Claude's Cycles [pdf]
Or you could have just said "they can't form new memories."
wang_li··on Mondrian Entered the Public Domain. The Estate Disagrees
There is a legally protected right of publicity. You cannot take someone's likeness and use it for your advertising campaign/movie/endorsement without their permission.
wang_li··on Mondrian Entered the Public Domain. The Estate Disagrees
That's a dumb system as it doesn't account for the fact that a piece of property's value can change over time. You write a book, you have to declare its value prior to knowing it's value to consumers. If you aren't independently wealthy already you will never be able to become wealthy by writing books, paintings, songs, etc. as you will have to declare their value quite low in order to pay taxes on them. If it becomes popular the publishing company comes along and forcibly buys it from you for the low value you had to put on it because you couldn't pay the tax, then raises it's value far beyond what the author could afford and profits from the movies rights and etc.
wang_li··on In 2025, Meta paid an effective federal tax rate of 3.5%
You don't need a startup. Millions of people have an effective tax rate that is 0% and they have a net tax rate that is negative. They do this simply by having no meaningful skills or knowledge.
wang_li··on Following 35% growth, solar has passed hydro on US grid
I am not attempting to describe the world. I am trying to define the expectations we should have of the citizens of our polity. It has nothing to do with illiterate people manage not to commit crimes. I am saying that before we decide to get "big money" out of politics or we let people vote for the seven people who promise them the most shit, we should decided to put people who chose not to acquire basic skills that any human within standard deviation of average intelligence can acquire, when given 12 years of free education, into jail. It literally is not a literacy test for voting. It's an "are you a lazy piece of shit who is going to drag all of society down" policy.
wang_li··on Following 35% growth, solar has passed hydro on US grid
Maybe you should learn to read at a level that you understand what I wrote? Smugness based on an intentional misreading just makes you look dumb.
wang_li··on Following 35% growth, solar has passed hydro on US grid
I'm not saying you have to have a certain level of education to vote, I'm saying you have to have a certain level of functional ability to not be incarcerated for the rest of your life. Such as you have to be able to read and write and do math at some certain level.

Voting yourself other people's stuff would be that the safety net is bare minimum to keep people who are going through unexpected issues alive. But no one gets to live in the social safety net. No one who is receiving these kinds of benefits from the government should expect name brand anything, or to even be able to choose what food to eat, or to travel, or even pick who you socialize with. If you want to eat steak, you have to be a net producer. If you want name brand clothing, be a net producer. If you want to go to the beach, be a net producer.

Everyone who should pay some amount of tax, and anytime there is an increase in government spending, that amount that they are taxed should go up. If there is a decrease in government spending, it can go down. But everyone pays something. People need to have skin in the game. The US's current situation where nearly half the country are not net tax payers is not sustainable. Anything that can't go on forever, won't. So the country should ease into better situation, where the country is a nation of producers and not a nation of consumers, instead of hitting a brick wall where suddenly your ration of beans just stop.

wang_li··on Following 35% growth, solar has passed hydro on US grid
How about, before we try to keep "big money" out of politics and adopt ranked preference voting, we ban ill educated people and ban voting yourself other people's stuff. Voting is not a survival skill, it's a civic obligation.
wang_li··on What it means that Ubuntu is using Rust
So you're calling for dynamic linking for rust native code? Because rust's safety doesn't come from runtime, it comes from the compiler and the generated code. An object file generated from a bit of rust source isn't some "safe" object file, it's just generated in a safe set of patterns. That safety can cross the C ABI perfectly fine if both things on either side came from rust to begin with. Which means rust dynamic linking.
wang_li··on Paged Out Issue #8 [pdf]
A couple of the stories where I feel I have expertise I found to be a bit objectionable. The title/headline was some clever or unexpected thing, but upon reading it turns out there is nothing supporting the headline.

E.g. "Integer Comparison is not Deterministic", in the C standard you can't do math on pointers from different allocations. The result in the article is obvious if you know that.

Also, in the Logistic Map in 8-Bit. There is a statement

> While implementing Algorithm 1 in modern systems is trivial, doing so in earlier computers and languages was not so straightforward.

Microsoft BASIC did floating point. Every 8-bit of the era was able to do this calculation easily. I did it on my Franklin ACE 1000 in 1988 in basic while reading the book Chaos.

I suppose what I'm saying is the premise of the articles seem to be click-baity and I find that off putting.

wang_li··on Terminals should generate the 256-color palette
You are confusing the unix terminal model with specific terminals. The TTY concept doesn't mandate an 80x24 text only device. Outside of applications that specifically rely upon the existence of a directly addressable grid of characters, Unix TTYs and PTYs would work perfectly fine in a mathematica notebook style interface.
wang_li··on Terminals should generate the 256-color palette
That's hardly a harsh truth. We use the terminal model because it works good enough and there are decades of software that rely on it. There are certainly other models that could work, but so far they haven't been adopted. I'd love Mathematica style notebooks for my shell work.
wang_li··on Ministry of Justice orders deletion of the UK's largest court reporting database
You're talking about a tragedy of the commons situation. There is an organic query rate of this based on the amount of public interest. Then there is the inorganic vacuuming of the entire dataset by someone who wants to exploit public services for private profit. There is zero reason why the public should socialize the cost of serving the excess capacity caused by private parties looking to profit from the public data.

I could have my mind changed if the public policy is that any public data ingested into an AI system makes that AI system permanently free to use at any degree of load. If a company thinks that they should be able to put any load they want on public services for free, they should be willing to provide public services at any load for free.

wang_li··on Building SQLite with a small swarm
>a worse database than SQL, a worse C compiler than GCC, a worse website than one done by a human.

But it enables people who can't do these things at all to appear to be able to do these things and claim reputation and acclaim that they don't deserve for skills they don't have.

wang_li··on Windows Notepad App Remote Code Execution Vulnerability
>But we fumbled that because we (collectively) have no idea what we are doing.

Because, almost entirely, the software development industry has disclaimed all responsibility. It's super common for people to try to do shit they have no experience or skill at, push their effort to be adopted by others, then when it crashes and burns they have no accountability. If software "engineers" adopted the rigors and accountability and dignity of traditional engineering, the industry would be very different.

wang_li··on AT&T, Verizon blocking release of Salt Typhoon security assessment reports
>And such access kicked off an internal investigation and got him fired. Privacy is taken seriously.

The complaints of the victim's parents kicked off an internal investigation, months later. It's not like google found this and took care of it on their own. Also, it has happened before too.

wang_li··on Irish man detained by ICE for 5 months
There is no single "the locals", every tribe represented a different polity. They warred with each other constantly and conquered and took over land all the time. There is no part of the continent that is held by the original human that arrived here first. Every part has been conquered and reconquered many times. The Europeans are just the latest conquerors. Except in the cases where they literally bought the land. Which also happened.
wang_li··on AT&T, Verizon blocking release of Salt Typhoon security assessment reports
>I know that technically a Google employee could read it if they really wanted to, but the policies, security, and culture in place make it have a 0% of happening.

We know it's non-zero as they have already had occasions when it has happened that Google employees used their access to stalk teenagers.

wang_li··on Omega-3 is inversely related to risk of early-onset dementia
“Evolution” is not a sound basis for most choices. We didn’t evolve to wear shoes, live in houses, to use powerful cleaning agents, indoor plumbing, decontaminated water, refrigeration, and pretty much all modern medicine, among about every other thing that is part of modern life.
wang_li··on Omega-3 is inversely related to risk of early-onset dementia
Go find one that is IFOS certified.
wang_li··on Postgres Postmaster does not scale
A process that is blocked for io, whether network or disk, will get taken off the cpu and another process put on the cpu. It doesn’t just waste the cpu until the quanta is gone.
wang_li··on Postgres Postmaster does not scale
It’s not an option or feature because it’s built into the shell. Just slap a > /dev/null on the end.
wang_li··on Launching the Rural Guaranteed Minimum Income Initiative
Feb 1: receive monthly UBI payment Feb 2: spend all of it on strippers/drugs/alcohol/twinkies/etc. Feb 3: I'm hungry.

Unless you are prepared to let the idiots starve to death, UBI will never work.

← PreviousPage 7 of 34Next →