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LeifCarrotson

18,792 karma · joined April 27, 2015

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LeifCarrotson··on Why isn't the U.S. better at soccer?
Those genetic requirements come into play at elite levels, but you need to start young, when those differences are less obvious.

You need to look at what sports an eight-year-old is playing in the backyard, what sports his Dad is excited about on the TV.

An agile, fast, coordinated kid who's coachable and wants to train hard but is going to grow up to be 5' 8" is not going to make the NFL or the NBA, but if they've got the athleticism to play in the World Cup... well, in the US that kid will be the point guard on the local high school basketball team and also play safety and wide receiver on the football team.

In India, they'd be a cricket star.

LeifCarrotson··on The OnlyFans Economy of American AI
I don't even know what "make software vulnerable to a specific agency" would look like.

Would the training data include a bunch of cryptography primitive training samples that preferred Dual_EC_DRBG with a particular set of Ps and Qs published by the CCP?

LeifCarrotson··on Am I Unc?
Are you 20? I got 35 unc which is a few points less than my IRL age.

I'm curious at what (if any) age the mean score skews to greater than age in years. I expect there are multiple brackets, the very young won't check off many at all but by some of the entries are sufficiently niche that when an octogenarian takes the test they won't hit more than 80% of the options.

LeifCarrotson··on Mornings and nights no longer exist at 47C: A day in the hottest place in India
Reminds me of the opening to "Ministry for the Future" by Kim Stanley Robinson.

In that book, a wet bulb event (high humidity and high temp) in India pushes infrastructure past the breaking point, the grid goes down, AC systems still running on generators are overloaded and overcrowded and fail, the water temp goes over body temp, and millions die.

The positive cultural/societal reaction to the disaster strained my suspension of disbelief pretty hard, as is typical of KSR novels in my experience, but the idea of a heat wave causing a massive catastrophe (and the poignant description of attempting to live through it) stuck with me.

LeifCarrotson··on Ian's Secure Shoelace Knot
Content creating is not maintenance. And hosting of a static site is dirt cheap, caching works flawlessly.

It could've been a two-million-dollar website if he'd tried to roll his own CMS and Javascript framework, for zero benefit over the one-million-dollar website he actually built.

LeifCarrotson··on 3D-printed book turns its own G-code into raised lettering
Many G-code dialects contain subprogram calls, loops, and conditionals that seem like they'd permit a physical quine. The standard RepRap firmware breaks the rules by taking input:

https://reprap.org/wiki/G-code#M98:_Call_Macro.2FSubprogram

but Fanuc and other dialects allow M97 to call a subroutine chained to the end of a program.

LeifCarrotson··on How turkey hacked the hair-transplant industry
They come from lower parts of the patient's scalp. The typical "receding hairline" pattern is caused because the follicles on the forehead and top of the head become sensitive to with age to DHT, the but the hair follicles on the lower and on the back of the head don't have the same sensitivity. There's usually more than enough of these resistant follicles to maintain sufficient hair density.

The surgery just moves the follicles around your own scalp. Body hair transplant can be done but is relatively uncommon, donor hair from other people (or animals) requiring a lifetime on immune system suppressing drugs as with an organ transplant is virtually unknown.

No, it's not pubic hair and you don't need to have a hairy back or chest, and no, there are not millions of low-status Turkish men walking around with scarred heads because they sold their scalp to a foreigner.

LeifCarrotson··on ESP32-S31
Not "just", it's (presumably) 8 dedicated pins that form an RMII interface. This is not the same 8 pins as you'll find in your 4-pair Ethernet cable, it's a separate protocol which can be connected to an Ethernet PHY transciever like a TI DP83867E [1], which is further connected to "magnetics" [2], a convenient package of 8 integrated transformers and chokes that provide the galvanic isolation feature of an Ethernet connection.

A few SoCs provide integrated PHY transceivers, but usually it's an external chip.

[1]: https://www.ti.com/lit/ds/symlink/dp83867e.pdf

[2]: https://yageogroup.com/content/datasheet/asset/file/DATASHEE...

LeifCarrotson··on Three Ways to Get Paid (2018)
Yeah, but even when it was a new quote, it was inaccurate: People have always wanted to follow their own desires, always wanted to be told what they want to hear, and always disliked listening to harsh truths. Even in 64CE.
LeifCarrotson··on Gmail thinks I'm stupid, so I left
Much like planting a tree, the ideal time to use your own domain for email was many years ago, but the next best time to do it is today.

Do it! minraws.com (if that means anything to you) is available, you could be firstname@minraws.com as well as your @gmail.com before the sun goes down. Personally, I'd set it up to feed into a new mailbox with Protonmail, but if you like you can just have it forward to the familiar gmail inbox you're used to.

You can start moving your accounts over one at a time. It doesn't have to be instant. Yeah, there are probably IRL business cards in drawers and people you haven't contacted in decades that will mean that you want to forward all emails that go to your gmail to a folder/label in your new email domain forever, but that's OK.

Just start.

LeifCarrotson··on A walking tour of surveillance infrastructure in Seattle (2020)
Television courtrooms are half of it, the other is social media. Tiktok and Youtube and Facebook will show you videos all day long with notable events that were pulled from security cameras, or uploaded by bystanders with cell phones, or found in the background of videos that were intended to capture something else.

The other side of the equation is that surveillance infrastructure is already nigh omnipresent, as described by the attached article. A juror who gets alerts every day from their Ring doorbell, who drives a Tesla with an integrated dashcam, and parks in a lot covered by their apartment's security cameras, can be easily persuaded that camera surveillance should be the standard of proof.

LeifCarrotson··on Cars collect a startling amount of data about you
I've got a couple older cars (2010, 2003), but the only new one I'm excited about - the only actually new car I've ever considered buying - is the Slate truck:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5_G4OfXTlvs

It has an LCD for the gauges and backup camera, but no modem and no surveillance tech. Bring your own phone/tablet if you want navigation or audio.

LeifCarrotson··on Five frontier LLMs disagree on 67% of 1k real-world fact-check claims
I don't think that current LLMs really need an abstain option, they'll give an answer regardless of whether they're confident or not. I hope that future LLMs will, and will know when to use it.

I understand why you prompted them to output exactly one label, but I'd bet if you'd asked a parametric or parametric "thinking" model to answer eg "On May 18, 2026, Ukraine carried out a drone attack on Moscow, Russia." [1] many would say something to the effect of "May 18 is after my knowledge cutoff, so I don't know. But based on the state of the war, the distance from Moscow to Ukraine, and drone range the best option might be...[TRUE]"

[1]: https://lenz.io/c/130f1005

LeifCarrotson··on I'm Tired of Talking to AI
It's usually an email chain that they're CC'ed on, or for which they're the point of contact: Sales, project management, or (worst) a VP getting pinged by a customer who wants to jump to the front of the line: "Our new X keeps showing a message that says the brobillator needs to be froodicated, and worse it now runs at 1/4 speed, but we don't want to froodicate it already because that's expensive and our maintenance guys are busy. Can you change the interval from monthly to annually? This is a critical issue that might impact our budget to purchase 3 more X units in Q3."

The right way to solve this is for the PM to forward it to the ME who designed the brobillator and calculated the 1-month maintenance interval, CCing the controls engineer who helped ensure that machine wouldn't eat itself with the fault and low-speed mode.

The wrong way to solve this is for the PM to forward it to ChatGTP[sic], which might mindlessly suggests maintenance-free sealed bearings (that are totally inadequate for the temperatures and contaminants). If he asks the mechanical engineer to redesign it like ChatGTP suggested, that situation may be salvageable. If he told the customer that they'd have an engineer out in 3 days with new sealed bearings it's bad.

LeifCarrotson··on I'm Tired of Talking to AI
The problem is that most of the people in my circle who are returning AI answers to emails and chat messages do not understand enough about the topic to know whether a question is interesting or not, which parts of the response are interesting, and which parts apply.

They seem to think they've more or less solved the problem by posting an LLM's response to the issue or concern I've raised.

LeifCarrotson··on Toxic chemical leak at a manufacturing facility in Orange County
It's neurotoxic, a respiratory irritant, and an eye irritant.

No, if it's injected in your bloodstream it won't immediately kill you, but if you inhale a few milligrams of vapor you'll wish you could cough up a lung.

Also, the vapors are heavier than air, so if you fall in a ditch near the hypothetical blown tank you would likely suffocate and die.

LeifCarrotson··on The memory shortage is causing a repricing of consumer electronics
What was most surprising about all this to me was this line:

> So modern DRAM manufacturing is an extraordinarily complex and expensive process. Building a single state-of-the-art DRAM fabrication facility, a “fab,” will cost you about $15 to $20 billion; acquiring all the necessary equipment, like lithography tools and etching machines, will cost you another few billion; and then it’ll take you a few years of producing substandard and defective memory chips before your yields start to look competitive.

Extraordinarily complex and expensive! And yet I look at all the money being shuffled around between Nvidia and Google and Microsoft and Amazon and Apple and can't help but think that this is a tiny amount in comparison to what they're moving around on the stock market buying shares in each other.

Apple in particular has $20B in its couch cushions and is very vertically integrated and hardware-focused. Apple silicon is currently made by TSMC, but it seems they'd be a prime candidate to spin up their own memory fab.

I suppose the biggest problem to current executives at each company is the "few years" until that investment yields results, in the short term it's better to pay through the nose and buy GPUs with HBM at any price.

LeifCarrotson··on Tracking Starbucks' 'widely recyclable' cups: none ended up at recycling
I worked at a plastic furniture manufacturer in Indiana for a few projects.

They got paid to accept bales of recycled "HDPE" that they could mix at between 10 and 30% into their virgin materials. They get paid to accept it! Negative profit for the waste management company, pure profit for the "user".

This worked best on black, coffee, slate grey, mahogany - you get the idea - the whites and tans and bright colors were basically pure virgin material (and their own internally-recycled offcuts of dyed virgin materials of matching colors) even though their FAQ states:

> What percentage of recycled materials are used?

> The percentage of recycled materials in our lumber can vary depending on the availability of post-consumer and post-industrial plastics. We continuously strive to maximize the use of recycled content in every piece of lumber.

Personally, I don't think that the fact that you started with pure virgin material, extruded some plastic, cut it up and used most of it, but put some of what was virgin material a few hours ago back into the grinder and extruder makes the resulting plastic "recycled".

LeifCarrotson··on Map of Metal
Oh, that kind of metal and EDM.

I clicked into this thread expecting hobbyist/hacker machining with steel and brass and aluminum, and was surprised to see someone getting into electrical discharge machining. Those hair-fine wires, milled graphite electrodes, and ultrapure water baths can achieve incredible precision but are challenging even in an industrial context, though I know a few have made it work in their garage.

But you meant electronic dance music.

LeifCarrotson··on Tennessee man jailed 37 days for Trump meme wins settlement after lawsuit
Potentially winning a drawn-out lawsuit against that sheriff, investigator, and county would have been a big improvement for the rights of his neighbors and friends, but I'd wager that with even half of those settlement winnings that he could do a lot more good than one lawsuit.

For example, there are surely dozens of others who are taking plea deals because they can't afford a lawyer to bring such a lawsuit, a few hundred thousand could multiply the impact tenfold.

LeifCarrotson··on Google’s AI is being manipulated. The search giant is quietly fighting back
> In just 20 minutes, I tricked ChatGPT and Google into telling the public that I am a world-champion competitive hot-dog eater. The joke was dumb. The problem is serious.

The problem is worse than astroturfing a Wikipedia page, because Wikipedia has highly public sourcing and review systems. It's actually quite difficult to make a lasting edit to Wikipedia, especially if it's fraudulent, because you're trying to trick a horde of human editors who have been fighting other people trying to do that for decades. Even if you're trying to be accurate and helpful it's a difficult clique to break into!

Google's search snippets are the opposite. They're desperate to ingest data of any kind, do so automatically, and their algorithmic system to decide what information is good and what's spam is proprietary.

It doesn't take much of an imagination to think of ways this could be used maliciously. How would you like a search for your own name to include something embarrassing? Don't expect potential employers or customers or friends to be as demanding as a Wikipedia editor when it comes to citing their sources...

LeifCarrotson··on Qwen3.7-Max: The Agent Frontier
I'm running Qwen 3.6 via https://huggingface.co/Qwen/Qwen3.6-35B-A3B-FP8 and it's pretty great. I'll update to the 3.7 equivalent when that's ready.

It's not nearly worth it to me to get an incremental improvement in performance if it means I have to move to hosted environments with Qwen 3.7 (or Claude or Gemini or whatever).

LeifCarrotson··on Energy return in running shoes explained (2025)
RunRepeat is THE place to go for actual measurements and objective data about running shoes.

I'm currently recovering from blisters due to racing a 25k two weeks after my debut marathon in Vaporfly 3 shoes. Poor planning, but it wasn't the shoe's fault: My form fell apart in the marathon after about 23 miles, cramping up and running out of strength and mobility to maintain a midfoot strike.

But I've done my own testing - tempo runs holding a target heart rate in each of my Nike Pegasus trainers, Zegma 2 trainers, and the Vaporflys.

It's not even close.

At 165-170 bpm, I can hold about 7:15/mile for 40 minutes in the Pegasus trainers. On the same route, same weather, same sleep, same heart rate, just a week later, I was able to do 6:40/mile for 40 minutes.

I'm sure a good deal of that comes from weight - I've also got some spike flats for interval training that are really fast but have ordinary EVA foam with low drop and a very low stack, but I wouldn't attempt a marathon in them.

My younger brother was an All-American swimmer in the era of supersuits (2007-2009). I hope that the same doesn't happen to supershoes.

LeifCarrotson··on Chess puzzle I found in my dad's old book
It's a bit disappointing, then, that the page's action on clicking the "solution" button is just to set the pieces to:

    const solution = {
      a8: "b1",
      b8: "q1",
      f7: "q2",
      a4: "q3",
      e3: "q4"
    };
It would be cool if it randomly selected one of those 388, so you could click repeatedly and develop an intuition for what kinds of distributions were a valid solution.
LeifCarrotson··on Testing UPS Output Waveforms
The capacitors in your PSU's rectifier have to float through 8.333ms interruptions every. single. cycle.

20 milliseconds is barely distinguishable from a single 60 Hz sine wave period. 10 milliseconds just over half a cycle.

LeifCarrotson··on Bambu Lab is abusing the open source social contract
> On my home Voron,

You're not the target market for Bambu customers.

This is like complaining that on your dirt track racer it's a trivial process to swap the rear end spur and change final drive ratios. Someone who has their dealership do the oil changes on their leased BMW does not care.

Maybe they should care a little, because the long-term repairability of their BMW or Bambu is going to put a real dent in their resale value. But they're not the ones dealing with tweezers and ZIF connectors and flex PCBs, so it's mostly just not their problem.

3D printers used to be exclusively the domain of people who enjoyed doing all this work themselves, who loved a well-designed machine that was a joy to work with like a Voron. That's no longer the case, Bambu is offering unrepairable black boxes that "just work" for enough time that some people can afford not to think care how it's made.

LeifCarrotson··on Someone allegedly used a hairdryer to rig Polymarket weather bets
That's effectively what all the 99% or 1% prediction markets are: a bet that an asteroid will destroy the planet or that the Rapture will occur or that we'll all upload our consciousnesses into computronium or whatever is not actually a bet that those events will happen (and that the site and enough of the economy will survive to allow you to collect and spend your winnings), it's a bet that the market will resolve incorrectly.
LeifCarrotson··on Removable batteries in smartphones will be mandatory in the EU starting in 2027
The problem is that consumers want to buy a phone with 24 hours of runtime and an EV with 200 miles of range, and they want the phone to be thin and light and the car to be fast and light, and manufacturers want to achieve those capacities with as little electrochemistry as possible. The number of charge cycles at full capacity will be a big deal a year or two in, but on the sales floor it's a secondary concern for typical buyers and sellers.

Playing fast and loose with the numbers, I'm sure that if 100% on the display was 80% in the battery and 0% was 20%, you'd have an amazing number of charge cycles. You could program that 40% of unused capacity to be reduced as the battery ages very slowly, and by the time the used capacity is only at 80% of its original revealed capacity you're at many thousands of cycles. But you'd have a phone or car that weighed 40% more and cost 40% more than one that had no buffer and ran at the bleeding edge on day 1.

Absent breakthroughs in battery chemistry, this basically regulates the amount of buffer capacity that manufacturers are required to include in their ~~lies~~ marketing materials.

LeifCarrotson··on Removable batteries in smartphones will be mandatory in the EU starting in 2027
I want removeable batteries in my phone, largely because it means I don't have to buy them a lot!

I ran my LG G5 with replaceable batteries from 2016 through 2021, at which point there were no affordable replaceable-battery phones left. I bought quite a few replacement batteries, even trying aftermarket batteries with varying levels of success after the OEM LG ones were discontinued.

That is, of course, a problem for manufacturers that want to sell a lot of phones.

LeifCarrotson··on Becoming a father shrinks your cerebrum (2022)
As the father of a 9-year-old I have to warn you: the sleep deprivation does not end at 6 months.
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