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whateverboat

466 karma · joined December 17, 2025

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whateverboat··on Terence Tao: Math 2.0 [pdf]
There's a difference between a human trying to break into drug labs and changing experimental results vs a machine in that the machine can do it much easier today.
whateverboat··on ASML says it sold 'absolutely nothing' in Europe in 2026
yes, hugely so.
whateverboat··on Anatomy of a Lean proof for software engineers
Runtime robustness is all you need though.
whateverboat··on Anatomy of a Lean proof for software engineers
The core of a proof checker is a formally validated core that is based on a small amount of concepts. Every single line in the proof reduces to that core, therefore, as long as you can trust the core, you can trust the execution of the proofs.

Therefore, whether the proof is generated by LLM or not is immaterial, since you know that core will always evaluate correctly whether the proof is correct or not.

What is much more important is to evaluate the theorem and determine if that theorem is actually the theorem you wanted to prove.

whateverboat··on Greg Kroah-Hartman – Security in the LLM Age [video]
Developer Certificate of Origin

This is not a new problem. AI just changes the scale.

whateverboat··on World Labs is Joining AMD
I didn't know their consumer cards had rocm.
whateverboat··on On caring for user data: NeoVim caused Vim undo files to be deleted
VCS doesn't preserve your local history? Did we miss why git became successful? I mean I understand, you are not committing every 2 lines of code, so git is not replacement for persistent undo, but stil.
whateverboat··on ASML says it sold 'absolutely nothing' in Europe in 2026
Life cycle of the fab is 3-5 years, an opimistic estimate of slow down in europe due to all the paper work is 2-3 years, so then you would rather not build the plant.
whateverboat··on ASML says it sold 'absolutely nothing' in Europe in 2026
TSMC's Arizona fab needs 200MW of electricity.

But even more importantly, they need 2 separate completely independent substation feeds, since a 15 second interruption can cause 0.1B Euro of losses.

Finally, and here is where Europe really really suffers, generally you need these things to be planned, approved and built within a year.

whateverboat··on ArXiv receives multiyear commitments to support it as an independent nonprofit
This comment is one of the most bizzare things I've seen here regarding ArXiv.
whateverboat··on Navier-Stokes Announcement
No. You do have checks, it's just that once you publish 4-5 papers, 99% of your field is open to you so you never have to do the checks again.
whateverboat··on TiVo to charge money for skipping commercials in your own recordings
weapons are a tool to wield political power.
whateverboat··on Is mathematics about to enter the conservatory?
It is quite well known that the culture around Pythagora's time was heavily influence by architecture and engineering like Tunnel of Eupalinos.
whateverboat··on Navier-Stokes Announcement
LLM's have generated "False" proofs in Lean, so that statement is not far off. Malicious or incompetent? Take your pick.
whateverboat··on Navier-Stokes – Tristan Buckmaster [pdf]
> Now that we can see their work, the approaches appear to be different. It is also worth noting that our latest model can solve many, many other math problems.

Is that a threat?

whateverboat··on Is mathematics about to enter the conservatory?
Before Mozart came along, we had folk music, music of the masses, and they continue to exist and will exist today.
whateverboat··on Is mathematics about to enter the conservatory?
> Could this model work for mathematicians? It’s easy to imagine: in Euclid’s time, mathematics largely existed as an intellectual pursuit worthy of a few inclined people.

NO! Pythagoras discovered his theorems because they wanted to divide up the revenue. While there have been sections of mathematics discovered by leisure, majority of mathematics has been discovered due to an engineering need.

whateverboat··on TiVo to charge money for skipping commercials in your own recordings
Power in this case is the political power. There's no other power.
whateverboat··on Research acceleration: The view inside OpenAI
> For AGI to benefit all of humanity, we believe it must be democratically governed. This can only happen through an informed public debate about the capabilities, risks and safeguards of highly capable AI systems. People everywhere need to understand the likely future trajectory of frontier AI, so they can have a meaningful voice in how it develops.

This first and foremost also means that means of generating intelligence should be democratically available to everyone.

whateverboat··on M-DISC – DVD/Blu-ray compatible discs that may last up to 1000 years
Very good, now where can I buy a 5.25inch recorder thingie that I can stick in my PC? No one manufactures them anymore.
whateverboat··on UC Berkeley indefinitely suspends international student work authorizations
what happens if you get GPA above 3.5? ;-) /s
whateverboat··on C++26: Standard Library Hardening Experiments
Yeah, Croydon was the deadline according to the committee's internal process on changing the draft before it is sent for ballot (rubber stamped as you said typically). What Bjarne is asking for is: 1. either an exception to the c++ committee's internal rule about changing the draft after the definitive meeting (in this case croydon) 2. or veto in the national ballot as you said.

By the way, didn't realise when I answered this that I was answering to you. Thanks for all the work on Rust! Your views on Rust and C++ are both much appreciated.

whateverboat··on C++26: Standard Library Hardening Experiments
The current state of C++ next is maintained in what is called the C++ draft.

People (from the committee of experts appointed as national body representatives or invited experts) submit proposals which is essentially merge requests to make changes to the C++ draft. A proposal, by the way of it's changes, can either add a feature to C++ or remove features from C++ (kind of like deleted code).

In each C++ meeting, they have a vote for each proposal in the meeting and decide whether that proposal is allowed to act on the C++, thereby determining if the features gets in the draft (if the proposal was proposing a feature) or if the features is kicked out of the draft (if the proposal was advocating for removal of a feature).

Once a proposal has been voted in the draft, only another proposal can remove that feature from the draft.

Every 3 years, they seal the current state of the draft into a standard and send it for voting to the official ISO C++ committee of national bodies (different from committee of experts we mentioned above). And I think each national body has a veto. (that is the vote has to be unanimous, but not sure here).

At this point, first the National bodies can make comments where they can threaten to veto the standard if their comment is not looked at. Then, the committee of experts can either respond to the comment or follow the comment or do whatever.

The official committee (essentially national body members) then votes and can only approve or reject the standard in the whole. So, if they reject of example C++ next now, there will be no C++26.

The whole process from sealing to actual voting takes around a year or so. In the mean time the committee of experts starts working on the next c++ standard from the sealed state forward without waiting for the committee to ratify the current one.

What Bjarne is doing is that he was threatening to get a national body to veto the proposal so that there is no C++26 at all. So, his point was, either accept his paper as it is (which calls for removal of contracts from the C++ draft before it goes to committee of national bodies), or he probably gets US or Denmark or some NB (not sure which) to vote no on the C++ standard (when it eventually goes to the committee of national bodies with the contracts in it, kind of like throwing baby with the bathwater).

whateverboat··on UC Berkeley indefinitely suspends international student work authorizations
School break means between-semester breaks.

Furthermore, CPT is used for STEM internships. You cannot do internships using OPT because that requires UCSIS permissions which can take upto 4-5 months. CPT is approved completely by university.

Without STEM internships, there's almost no chance of employment after internship.

whateverboat··on RISC-V is now officially supported by CPython
One could always build libraries which people can use if they need the more high-performance cores. There is not much in the CPython core that will benefit though.
whateverboat··on Brits would quite like their private messages to stay private
> Hm, which is worse: An entire country of millions of people suffers from the shortsighted actions of a few

Few? 51% is a few? I mean, I also think Brexit was a monumentally stupid decision, but 51% of people wanted it, no?

Even assuming that everyone who didn't vote would have voted for remain, given the voter turnout of 71% (which is already very high for any election, typical turnout is around 57%), 35% of people said yes. That's not a few, that a big chunk.

whateverboat··on Is it safe to call print in a Python signal handler?
> No, I understand that. I just find it deeply ironic that when an interrupt/signal arrives, pretty much the only thing you can do to handle it, is to raise some flag, then leave the handler and continue doing whatever you were doing in a message loop.

That's how most hardware interrupts would also work.

whateverboat··on There's no such thing as a small software team anymore
In fact microservices are arguably more complex. It is the reason why microkernels have not succeeded compared to monolith till now.
whateverboat··on Fixing a bricked Framework laptop
I know at least one: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47609716

Having said that, MacBook is a very homogenous machine with minimal choices (which can be a good thing) so testing upgrades patches on them should be fairly easy as compared to other vendors (a good outcome of that thing).

With framework and effectively with other vendors, this is where a lot of problems come from. And the problem is significantly harder.

whateverboat··on What's missing to have reproducible builds on PyPI
Yeah, but then you are packaging the distribution, which is a valid and often a good choice, but then it is not a reproducible wheel anymore.
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