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3eb7988a1663

3,270 karma · joined September 5, 2024

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3eb7988a1663··on What's the best programming language for coding agents?
Pick something slightly esoteric (eg Haskell) and the quality of public code is very high, because you only have enthusiasts writing it. Choose something taught in schools (Python) and you are going to find 10,000 traveling salesmen homework problems and Django todo applications.

Not sure how you thread the needle on the quality vs quantity dynamic.

3eb7988a1663··on What's the best programming language for coding agents?
You are going to have to give more support for those assertions. I write Python every day, and never would I call it a good candidate for the clankers. Pretty much any dynamic language would be ruled out, as there is too much implicit logic which makes it harder to understand what is happening.
3eb7988a1663··on Ocean heat records broken as hottest July temperature recorded
It takes 1000 calories of feed to make 100 calories of animal protein. While the type of animal feed is not what humans probably want to eat, the calories already exist today. Without livestock, there would be a huge surplus of available food.

Wikipedia[0] Says that US directs 4345 million bushels of just corn to livestock feed. Which would be ~13 bushels or 330kg per American.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corn_production_in_the_United_...

3eb7988a1663··on Windows 11's built-in Weather app wastes more than 1 GB of RAM
That's basically my weather app. Though, I made it fancy at 7 lines of bash which takes location arguments and pipes into jq for display.
3eb7988a1663··on Plug-In Solar Panels Starting to Sprout in U.S. Backyards
A suggestion I liked was to time-shift water heaters as a thermal battery. Water heaters are a significant sink (~20%) of household energy. They are already installed and well insulated, you just want to over-heat them during cheap noon solar to off-set the heat losses over the day.
3eb7988a1663··on Plug-In Solar Panels Starting to Sprout in U.S. Backyards
That might have to do with existing deal structures to maintain a non-renewable base load. Something like, if cloud cover/wind suddenly changes, we want to ensure there is already X% of natural gas running so there is a less sudden surge. There is a lot behind the scenes planning to try and ensure grid robustness.

California is certainly curtailing a lot of energy. EIA report[0] said 3.4 TWh in 2024, which was a 29% increase over 2023. If I am reading this[1] chart correctly, the 2024 California demand was ~275TWh.

CASIO also has pages dedicated to curtailment with much of the data available[2].

[0] https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.php?id=65364

[1] PDF https://www.energy.ca.gov/sites/default/files/2024-11/2024_C...

[2] https://www.caiso.com/about/our-business/managing-the-evolvi...

3eb7988a1663··on Can Intel finally beat ARM on performance per Watt?
Does anyone even do repairs anymore? Swap a motherboard and that's it.
3eb7988a1663··on No one can afford to make Myst games anymore
Sure enough. Oxford only gives a bewildered definition. Although, their ambiguous examples could fit an amused/confused definition.

https://www.oxfordlearnersdictionaries.com/us/definition/eng...

3eb7988a1663··on Monitors for Work
Teams still does not make it easy to share your screen when you have a non-standard size. Have to either make the receiver deal with the size mismatch, or share a single window at a time. I have to maintain a 1080p monitor on the side just to have a convenient place to host a screen share.

Come on, Microsoft, please. I would even take a vibe-coded, crap solution that only works on Tuesdays.

3eb7988a1663··on Can Intel finally beat ARM on performance per Watt?

  > no headphone jack
I am fully old man screaming at the clouds here, but what does this cost for Dell to include? I insist on a wired headset - telecommunications already barely works, I don't want to add wireless+battery problems into the mix.
3eb7988a1663··on No one can afford to make Myst games anymore
I only think of bemused as "confused".

Maybe incredulous at a stretch?

3eb7988a1663··on No one can afford to make Myst games anymore
During peak Covid, Vampire Survivors blew up as the hot game. It is a pedestrian dual stick shooter. There are hundreds of examples which do the same thing, possibly better.

Getting a hit game requires decent fundamentals and a heap of luck.

3eb7988a1663··on No one can afford to make Myst games anymore
Quake came out in 1996, Diablo in 1997, Starcraft in 1998. Sure the adrenaline juicing is more sophisticated now, but there were already multiplayer games which could hook one for life.
3eb7988a1663··on Fastmail offers EU data region
Even at cloud prices, 50GB of storage is ~$1/month. Offering an additional tier with pathetic storage to save $0.80 or whatever is muddling the offering.

I guess they could offer a 0GB storage option that only operated as a relay?

3eb7988a1663··on Nashville uses eminent domain to block data center near zoo
The signal speed in fiber is some 200k km/s. If you go 10 miles outside of a city, you are adding 0.1ms ping, and you will have dramatically fewer pitch forks.

The ping between New York and LA is ~70msec. Chatting with a LLM is not latency sensitive.

3eb7988a1663··on Discovery of a multicomponent alloy forged by the Hiroshima atomic blast
Wikipedia has an article about it[0]. Gas had been leaking for three years before they were able to use a nuke to seal the well. Estimated that it was burning 12 million m3 of gas daily.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Urtabulak_gas_field

3eb7988a1663··on Kelly Criterion Simulator
What is DP?
3eb7988a1663··on Developers are attached to tools because tools encode trust
What mythical software is this? The only infinitely customizable software I can think of is emacs, and that takes an enormous amount of effort to become proficient.
3eb7988a1663··on Developers are attached to tools because tools encode trust
You are assuming the changes would all be positive, minus some UI hassle. I have seen plenty of products where vital workflows were scrapped entirely or made significantly more clunky.

Modern software is quicksand. Maybe an update improves things, but users have all experienced working software made worse.

3eb7988a1663··on Show HN: Shitty – fast terminal. Memory-unsafe and faster than yours
There was also the video where he did write the doctoral research project in a weekend.
3eb7988a1663··on Show HN: Shitty – fast terminal. Memory-unsafe and faster than yours
Gutenberg's copy of Moby Dick is 1.2MB[0]. Which is to say the slowest benchmarked terminal could display a paltry ~53 Moby Dicks per second, while shitty gives you ~98 Moby Dicks.

I am not sure how many Moby Dicks I require per second, but it is good to have options.

[0] https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/2701

3eb7988a1663··on RipGrep musl binaries occasionally segfault during very-large searches
On the other hand, plenty of NAS/file server systems are going to have paltry CPU and memory. Running slower with a more modest memory foot print might be the only way to keep the system stable.
3eb7988a1663··on RipGrep musl binaries occasionally segfault during very-large searches
I imagine there is no free lunch in the allocator space, but a series of trade-offs. Pick your poison on implementation which is going to be sub-optimal for some subset of use cases.

Without a hugely compelling reason to switch, going with the default is reasonable.

3eb7988a1663··on Sand battery: Finland's answer to a renewable energy headache
Roughly a quarter of global energy is directed towards industrial heating. There are many "hot rocks" companies who have been commercializing ways to time shift cheap/free daily solar to night or even longer stretches.

I personally like Rondo's pitch[0] which is stacking concrete bricks into "heat batteries".

[0] https://www.rondo.com/

3eb7988a1663··on US citizen charged after GrapheneOS phone wipes during airport search
This is my core question as well. At what point do you have to maintain property so the government can use it to testify against yourself?

If I have a dash-cam, and I wipe the SD card, can the government imply that because I erased the card, it must prove that I was speeding? The dash-cam automatically over-writes old footage - perpetually destroying evidence.

Given nebulous cases such as "hacking" a site by looking at the HTML[0], am I destroying evidence of crimes whenever I format my PC? I hope the government requires specific charges and more proof of a crime other than missing evidence. Say I destroy my diary - can the government claim that is the key evidence where I confessed to being the gunman on the grassy knoll?

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28992667

3eb7988a1663··on Some more things about Django I've been enjoying
As things get more complicated, I will separate out by some kind of concept. Which can be something as simple as:

  /coreapp
    /forms_foo.py
    /forms_bar.py
    /models_bar.py
    /models_foo.py
    /views_bar.py
    /views_foo.py
You can do a more sophisticated module layout, but essentially something as straightforward as the above, all under a single "core" application. Prevents Django from fighting you when you want to work across the arbitrary "app" boundary.
3eb7988a1663··on Some more things about Django I've been enjoying
Not the author, but I no not understand the desire to use multiple apps. I am never going to want to carve one out as a separate module I re-use in another product. It is all interconnected, why add arbitrary boundaries separating them? Put everything into a "core" app and move on with life. Maybe if you are an enormous organization working on Instagram where you have rigid responsibilities per team.
3eb7988a1663··on The Strongest El Niño Ever
I live in SoCal and am continually shaking my head at the architecture. So my floor-to-ceiling glass buildings in a climate known for sunny weather. So much extra air-conditioning will be spent to cool those buildings compared to if they had been built more reflective.
3eb7988a1663··on The relay market powering token resellers and fraud
How do you know the reseller is even giving you the genuine article? Could they be advertising Fable but repacking Deepseek?
3eb7988a1663··on Running a 28.9M parameter LLM on an $8 microcontroller
Unless I am mis-reading the benchmarks, some of those are run as CPU only, no GPU involvement.
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