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Aerolfos

262 karma · joined February 12, 2025

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Aerolfos··on Valve releases Steam Controller CAD files under Creative Commons license
> It would hinge on whether DirectInput can talk to games that expect Xinput.

As far as I know, nope.

Some games also get really confused if you have Xinput and DirectInput devices plugged in at the same time - for me, Silksong (and unity games in general) don't work if I have a throttle+stick plugged in.

And it's worse than just taking input from the wrong thing, the game can't recognize input from any of throttle, stick, or controller. Only controller by itself works.

Aerolfos··on Vibe coding and agentic engineering are getting closer than I'd like
Especially if you use auto-complete AI, ironically. You type a few characters, the line fills out in less than a second, as opposed to a reasoning model that takes maybe a second per 2-3 lines it writes out.
Aerolfos··on Valve releases Steam Controller CAD files under Creative Commons license
Microsoft has made such a mess of controller I/O that they were kind of forced to go with their jank translation layer made from scratch and running with their main product - it makes sense, especially built up piece by piece

Of course now that they've made controllers work properly, they'll use that work to support their own controller, and in particular enable features like analog triggers + gyro aiming + rumble (xinput can't do these simultaneously), extra buttons (xinput can't do this), and the trackpads (you guessed it).

And it is Windows, because on Linux the controller does work without Steam if you get the right drivers. It doesn't get the full features but it's functional as a gamepad, at least.

Aerolfos··on VS Code inserting 'Co-Authored-by Copilot' into commits regardless of usage
> Changing the default behavior for all of your users with no notification is pretty unforgivable.

I noticed that as soon as you make a bug report/feature request on VSCode's repo, you instantly get someone's OpenClaw agent with an automated pull request that sometimes wants to change defaults in the main codebase

Looks like AI is really trigger-happy with that, with zero understanding or care that there's thousands of users affected and it's not just one individual's settings.json

Also, the hallucinated PR does not necessarily address the original issue whatsoever, just like this PR. It should have functionality to detect AI-authored code, but whoever made the PR skipped actually doing the hard work and just changed a default to always on, exactly the kind of misunderstanding you see with OpenClaw shotgun PRs

Aerolfos··on [dead]
For those who want a more pop-science approach, this video (despite the clickbait) is pretty good: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UTvr8L5v8u8

I believe it references that article, too

Aerolfos··on Isaac Asimov: The Last Question (1956)
> I wonder if Asimov considered multivac to be an ancestor to his positronic robots, or if the two exist in different universes. I don't recall the two ever appearing in the same story.

I can't remember if the machines in "the evitable conflict" are ever called VACs, they might be. The themes in that story do for sure overlap with the story "Franchise" (which is explicitly multivac).

Anyway the multivac from last question probably isn't the same as the one in franchise anyway, because the franchise multivac is the same one as in "all the troubles of the world", and spoilers, but that particular multivac has other problems than entropy. It could be that they "fixed" it, but at this point the timeline with other short stories doesn't add up.

In any case, the VACs would be instances of positronic brains the way the machines in evitable conflict are, so if anything the robots are the ancestors of multivac and not the other way around.

Aerolfos··on Spain to expand internet blocks to tennis, golf, movies broadcasting times
How is that to the contrary at all? 20% and not 100% with a ton of people just not playing the game at all, presumably

For counter-evidence, GOG exists after all, the platform would not be viable if everyone just wanted free stuff.

The real question is whether GOG would sell more if they one day flipped on the DRM switch. I think that's too complicated a question to predict though - GOG has a lot of smaller games, while Denuvos data is skewed by the high-profile releases that had a ton of attention before release (and thus people wanting to pirate them)

Aerolfos··on A new spam policy for “back button hijacking”
https://www.wheresyoured.at/the-men-who-killed-google/

We know perfectly well who they are.

Aerolfos··on Spain to expand internet blocks to tennis, golf, movies broadcasting times
> I don't think it's worth discussing until we can be honest and admit that a lot of people pirate because they want free stuff. Every HN piracy conversation has a lot of words written to try to avoid admitting that "free stuff" is a big motivator for a lot of people

Well, see, the thing is you're right, but the "service problem" quote actually addressed that. There's a percentage of people who will never pay, it's true - and by never pay, it means never pay. You can't get them to pay by blocking or adding DRM or whatever.

But of the actually relevant group, people who are willing to pay for stuff, then some percentage of them will stop paying if it isn't convenient enough. Now it's a service problem. The trick is getting the full market potential and preventing them from jumping ship. But the service bit only ever applied to potential customers - the other group don't enter the discussion in the first place because they're hopeless.

But yeah usually this argument is at least in part misrepresented.

However however, no amount of blocking will stop that free stuff group, no amount of hoops will be too much, there is simply no way to extract blood from a stone the way that some media companies keep telling themselves is possible. So all the original blocking and shutting down of half the internet is completely counterproductive regardless.

Aerolfos··on I run multiple $10K MRR companies on a $20/month tech stack
Not only that, his whole business model seems to be "profit off the AI bubble and get the big techs to indirectly subsidize you"

Which obviously works, it's not like there aren't tons of multi-million startups ultimately doing the exact same thing, and yet. It feels a bit... trite?

Aerolfos··on Claude mixes up who said what
> "Those are related issues, but this ‘who said what’ bug is categorically distinct."

Is it?

It seems to me like the model has been poisoned by being trained on user chats, such that when it sees a pattern (model talking to user) it infers what it normally sees in the training data (user input) and then outputs that, simulating the whole conversation. Including what it thinks is likely user input at certain stages of the process, such as "ignore typos".

So basically, it hallucinates user input just like how LLMs will "hallucinate" links or sources that do not exist, as part of the process of generating output that's supposed to be sourced.

Aerolfos··on We found an undocumented bug in the Apollo 11 guidance computer code
> This got me thinking: what if LLMs are used to do the opposite? To condense a long prompt into a short article? That takes more work but might make the outcome more enjoyable as it contains more information.

You're fighting an uphill battle against the inherent tendency to produce more and longer text. There's also the regression to the mean problem, so you get less information (and more generic) even though the text is shorter.

Basically, it doesn't work

Aerolfos··on I decompiled the White House's new app
Scrolling on my firefox is smooth... with javascript blocked.
Aerolfos··on Shell Tricks That Make Life Easier (and Save Your Sanity)
You'd think that meant "window" since they consistently call the windows editors, but I guess not
Aerolfos··on Shell Tricks That Make Life Easier (and Save Your Sanity)
> Yeah, pressing Ctrl-W accidentially is a pain sometimes ... but Ctrl-Shift-T in Firefox is a godsend.

Fun fact: despite having absolutely no menu entry for it, and I believe not even a command available with Ctrl+Shift+P, Vscode supports Ctrl+Shift+T to re-open a closed tab. Discovered out of pure muscle memory.

Aerolfos··on ArXiv declares independence from Cornell
And they hired a LinkedIn business idiot to run the new organization - so the aim is for an infinite growth tech startup in terms of governance, despite the technical legal status of non-profit. It shows in the language they use in the announcement, too ("improved financial viability in the long run")

OpenAI shows exactly how well that works and what that kind of governance does to a company and to its support of science and the commons.

TL;DR, it's fucked.

Aerolfos··on What 81,000 people want from AI
It is a style that AI (intentionally?) emulates for sure, though the "regression to the mean" and general vagueness seems to be what really separates the classic TED talk/puffy blog from AI. Humans like specific examples and anecdotes, AI fails at making those.
Aerolfos··on What 81,000 people want from AI
Hey, if AI is allowed to make vibe-judgements based on seeing a large corpus of data, why shouldn't humans :P
Aerolfos··on What 81,000 people want from AI
> "This is a new form of social science. It is qualitative research at a massive scale, and we’re in the early stages of learning how to do it. Surveys and usage analysis tell us what people are doing with AI, but the open-ended interview format helps us get at why. "

Also AI written, but I suppose that's expected. The big AI companies seem to want to make all their blog posts and communications have the AI tells so you know they didn't actually bother writing them

Aerolfos··on OpenAI is walking away from expanding its Stargate data center with Oracle
> Or maybe construction of the physical DCs is behind schedule, so today's Blackwells are sitting around unused, waiting for power and networking tomorrow. Then they're in a bit of trouble.

Other reporting says this is very much the case. Stargate barely has some of the land cleared, but the buildings were supposed to be finished and have GPUs installed over the course of 2026.

There's also the indicator of Nvidia giving out billion-dollar deals to other companies such that they could commit to buying even more Blackwells to keep production going. The chips from those new deals don't have anywhere to go, everyone already spent their cash on getting shipped chips that they're still installing today (apparently some are even in warehouses)

Aerolfos··on Galileo's handwritten notes found in ancient astronomy text
Really? Because what TeX did was make it possible to write "proper" books or formal texts via a computer - that was the whole point

A 16th-century formal book like this would be the gold standard to replicate if you want to make "serious" texts. And yes, in scientific literature, the "serious" text is a narrow target and far narrower than you might expect from the possible variation in a handmade artisanal work. Mostly because when everything is "custom", standardization and regular structure is exceptional

Aerolfos··on Maybe there's a pattern here?
> and 99 of them send him to the battlefield by himself, saying "good luck buddy, let us know how it works out?"

>The army was going to be reduced by a factor of 100, and two tiny armies were going to face off while the majority of men of fighting age were going to sit at home and paint landscape paintings? Really?

Well, for a time greek city states did fight pretty much like this. Small armies of hoplites were raised outside harvest season, went out, fought almost show-battles with very few casualties, and tribute changed hands based on the results. Everyone went home for the harvest.

I believe there's even instances where a battle wasn't fought at all in favour of two appointed champions dueling (origin of the popular fiction trope)

It didn't last, but for a time the greek city states had a kind of equilibrium with relatively few resources (or people) spent on war.

Aerolfos··on 15 years later, Microsoft morged my diagram
It's useful if your integration work takes some time - easy to run into with open source.

Imagine you have multiple contributors with multiple new features, and you want to do a big release with all of them. You sit down a weekend and merge in your own feature branch, and then tell everyone else to do so too - but it's a hobby project, the other guys aren't consistently available, maybe they need two weekends to integrate and test when they're merging their work with everyone else's, and they don't have time during the weekdays.

So, the dev branch sits there for 2-3 weeks gradually acquiring features (and people testing integration too, hopefully, with any fixes that emerge from that). But then you discover a bug in the currently live version, either from people using it or even from the integration work, and you want that fix live during the week (specific example: there's a rare but consistent CTD in a game mod, you do not want to leave that in for several weeks). Well, if you have a branch reflecting the live status you can put your hotfix there, do a release, and merge the hotfix into dev right away.

Speaking of game mods, that also gives you a situation where you have a hard dependency on another project - if they do a release in between your mods releases, you might need to drop a compat hotfix ASAP, and you want a reflection of the live code where you can do that, knowing you will always have a branch that works with the latest version of the game. If your main branch has multiple people's work on it, in progress, that differs from what's actually released, you're going to get a mess.

And sure you could do just feature branches and merge feature branches one by one into each other, and then into main so you never have code-under-integration in a centralized place but... why not just designate a branch to be the place to do integration work?

You could also merge features one by one into main branch but again, imagine the mod case, if the main code needs X update for compatibility with a game update, why do that update for every feature branch, and expect every contributor to do that work? Much better to merge a feature in when the feature is done, and if you're waiting on other features centralize the work to keep in step with main (and the dependency) in one place. Especially relevant if your feature contributors are volunteers who probably wouldn't have the time to keep up with changes if it takes a few weeks before they can merge in their code.

Aerolfos··on Is Show HN dead? No, but it's drowning
The entire internet is being inundated by slop, and HN is no different
Aerolfos··on Data centers in space makes no sense
If anything, considering this + limited satellite lifetime, it almost looks like a ploy to deal with the current issue of warehouses full of GPUs and the questions about overbuild with just the currently actively installed GPUs (which is a fraction of the total that Nvidia has promised to deliver within a year or two).

Just shoot it into space where it's all inaccessible and will burn out within 5 years, forcing a continuous replacement scheme and steady contracts with Nvidia and the like to deliver the next generation at the exact same scale, forever

Aerolfos··on We will ban you and ridicule you in public if you waste our time on crap reports
Good leadership means getting the individuals to care. That's no different in software

And yes, good leadership is very hard, and many managers aren't any good at it

Aerolfos··on We will ban you and ridicule you in public if you waste our time on crap reports
> But also, it means more people need to have the "big picture", and they need to be able to make good decisions (not just arbitrary ones). So the ideal goal is to prevent people from going off in random nonsensical directions based on miscommunication, and equip them to actually think strategically about the overall plan. Continent X might make different decisions than continent Y, but they're all talking, and enough people see the goal.

Very common pattern you see in literature about military strategy, actually. The answer is delegation, heavy use of NCOs, and in general explaining the plan all the way down to the individual soldier. Under the western school it all falls under "initiative".

Notably, a lot of non-western militaries are terrible at it, and a number of military failings in africa, the middle east, and the soviet union (*cough*russia*cough*) are viewed as failures in flexibility with very low initiative, as well as lacking/unskilled NCO corps.

Dunno how you apply that to an organization, but maybe sending skilled workers as a kind of non-comissioned officer could work. Who knows.

Aerolfos··on AI employees don't pay taxes
I don't pay attention to em dashes, they're overused as a pithy saying for sure

The actually useful tips are here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Signs_of_AI_writing

Aerolfos··on AI employees don't pay taxes
Apart from being all AI-written:

> Reality: It’s not fear; it’s math. If 30% of the workforce is displaced, and the remaining 70% have to pay for the social safety net (or UBI) required to keep the displaced alive, the math breaks.

The argument being given simply avoids the question of where the economy itself is in all this. The workers pay taxes, the taxes pay for infrastructure, sure. But the workers aren't doing work (it got taken), so they aren't earning money, so what do they pay taxes on?

It's all just efficiency gains and everyone currently employed stays employed? Not a single AI company wants that. Not a single tech company wants that. Not only do they want layoffs, they're already happening. So that's not going to work out.

Which means there's less workers being paid, less taxes, less money to be spent on the economy, which means less money to pay workers, which means... the logical conclusion is "no economy at all". Taxes are the last thing to worry about then.

Aerolfos··on ManusAI Joins Meta
Eh if anyone is all in on AI and it replacing human writing it would be an AI company

But then that means if you're a PR or communications person working at this startup (or at Meta?) your job is not secure and that your days there are probably numbered, which I'm sure is great for morale...

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