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MBlume

3,253 karma · joined January 29, 2010

Googler, opinions are my own.

[ my public key: https://keybase.io/michaelblume; my proof: https://keybase.io/michaelblume/sigs/nPA42qYgKL4i50lGEdkemWBEr_lowZWgZFc6YwtGqqI ]

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MBlume··on Pixel Watch 5
I'm coming around to the possibility that I may want a Fitbit Air on one wrist and a dumb watch on the other.
MBlume··on Ending respiratory infections
I would love to move to whatever planet you're living on. To me the estimate seems low.
MBlume··on The AirPods Effect
As is driving alone in a car
MBlume··on The AirPods Effect
I'd much rather be surrounded by people wearing earbuds than have people watching tiktoks through their phone speakers on the subway
MBlume··on Waymo Premier
Yes, and? What is your threat model here?
MBlume··on X offices raided in France as UK opens fresh investigation into Grok
You cannot build a CSAM generator, period. CSAM means Child Sexual Abuse Material -- material created through the sexual abuse of children. If it came out of a generator, it is not, by definition, Child Sexual Abuse Material.
MBlume··on Toll roads are spreading in America
This is an easy fix. Ditch the HOV element and make the lane toll-only. Tolls already encourage carpooling -- more people in the car means less toll per occupant.
MBlume··on Tom Lehrer has died
I assure you we sing it sometimes!
MBlume··on Ocarina of Time Randomizer
> given the incredible preservation that Dolphin provides for their original versions.

Does cemu not provide comparable preservation for the HD versions? I played through both WW:HD and TP:HD on my Steam Deck using cemu and found it a great experience.

MBlume··on Amazon to display tariff costs for consumers
Trump will certainly consider this provocation, so perhaps the news here is that Amazon considered this worth it, even given the inevitable retaliation.
MBlume··on The optimised version of 7-Zip can't be built from source
I would be shocked if the rust documentation didn't explain very clearly how to bootstrap rustc starting from gcc
MBlume··on Dockworkers at ports from Maine to Texas go on strike
The strike emphasizes the importance of automation. We should be prioritizing the investments that will allow us to fire as many of them as possible as soon as possible.
MBlume··on ts-blank-space is a fast type-stripping compiler
I'm a little confused about when I'd use this, if I'm quickly iterating on code as I develop it, probably I also want to know whether it type checks, right?
MBlume··on Git-absorb: Git commit –fixup, but automatic
I've been using this workflow with hg and it's great, happy to see a git port
MBlume··on Debugging a memory leak in a Clojure service
The article makes it sound like the system was using eval (probably on a per-request basis, not just on start-up), and also like ceasing to use eval was pretty trivial once they realized eval was the problem. I'd be curious why they were using eval and what they were able to do instead.
MBlume··on Reformatting 100k Files at Google in 2011
Seems like the solution here is to set up buildifier so that it can send out robot CLs on an ongoing basis.
MBlume··on Statement from Scarlett Johansson on the OpenAI "Sky" voice
As I recall McCartney didn't like the idea of Live And Let Die being parodied as Chicken Pot Pie, since he's vegetarian. Funny thing is so's Al.
MBlume··on OpenAI departures: Why can’t former employees talk?
Submission title mentions NDA but the article also mentions a non disparagement agreement. "You can't give away our trade secrets" is one thing but it sounds like they're being told they can't say anything critical of the company at all.
MBlume··on AI Doesn't Threaten Humanity. Its Owners Do
The article doesn't seem to make any attempt at all to defend the first half of its thesis.
MBlume··on Hacking on PostgreSQL is hard
Coming at this from a naive outsider perspective, the central problem described in the post (commits to PostgreSQL frequently have serious defects which must be addressed in follow-up commits) seems like one that would ideally be addressed with automated testing and CI tooling. What kind of testing does the Postgres project have? Are there tests which must pass before a commit can be integrated in the main branch? Are there tests that are only run nightly? Is most core functionality covered by quick-running unit tests, or are there significant pieces which can only be tested by hours-long integration tests? How expensive is it, in machine-hours, to run the full test suite, and how often is this done? What kinds of requirements are in place for including new tests with new code?
MBlume··on Git Bisect-Find
I actually prefer to add a passing test asserting the bug exists in one commit, then fix the bug and reverse the sense of the test in a second commit. The second commit is now more or less self documenting -- this case used to produce this buggy behavior but now produces correct behavior -- and the fact that the test originally passed provides proof that the test is capable of detecting a regression.
MBlume··on The happiest kids in the world have social safety nets
Sounds nice. I've personally spoken on the phone with a police officer who told me he'd involve CPS if he saw my daughter walking (two blocks!) to school again.
MBlume··on The happiest kids in the world have social safety nets
This was my experience. There's this narrative that you move away from your parents and you have the freedom and independence they were previously denying you, and I'm sure that's very much the case for many people but it's not as though my parents were ever trying to keep me from going places and seeing people, the built environment where I grew up (suburb of Los Angeles) did that.
MBlume··on The happiest kids in the world have social safety nets
I'm strongly in favor of expanding the US social safety net, but I don't want to neglect other obvious factors here. Dutch children are able to walk or bike outside unsupervised. In the US they'd risk either being killed by a driver, or stopped by an overzealous neighbor or police officer. I think this kind of freedom of movement has a big effect on happiness, it certainly did for me.

ETA relevant links: https://youtube.com/@NotJustBikes https://letgrow.org/

ETA again: I glibly mentioned "being killed by a driver" but of course navigating the typical US built environment if you're under 16 or otherwise unable to drive is a miserable experience in a number of ways even if you survive it. Highways make pedestrian paths unnecessarily roundabout. Parking lots make everything further from everything else. Crossing major roads requires getting drivers to notice and stop for you (harder when you're short!), or waiting through interminable signal cycles, etc.

MBlume··on Why you've never been in a plane crash
If you're a child, or someone too disabled to drive, driving is consistently something being done to you
MBlume··on Why you've never been in a plane crash
I would never recommend this methodology to a friend or a family member. Drivers are vindictive, violent people and the risk is too high to be worth it.

Still, I appreciate the people who do it.

MBlume··on The shortest papers ever published (2016)
This neglects the classic paper published in The Annals of Improbable Research, The Effects of Peanut Butter on the Rotation of the Earth: https://improbable.com/airchives/classical/articles/peanut_b...
MBlume··on The Hot Water Rectangle (2022)
The author refers to no metrics at all other than their invented one (the hot water rectangle) and then makes no attempt to motivate it by connecting it with something someone living in the home might care about. Does a smaller hot water rectangle mean less energy consumed? Faster hot water at the tap? Hotter water at the tap in steady state? Would other interventions (insulation on the pipes, say) improve these metrics at lower cost? We don't know.
MBlume··on Apple clarifies why it abandoned plan to detect CSAM in iCloud photos
The article keeps saying that Apple has responded or that Apple has clarified and then linking other Wired articles. Is there an Apple press release somewhere? If so, I'd rather read that.

ETA: looks like they directly provide documents from Apple at the bottom of the article

MBlume··on That people produce HTML with string templates is telling us something
Clojure's great for this too, I've never seen a Clojure programmer generating HTML with string templates and that's not because Clojure programmers are more disciplined, it's because Clojure's syntax is flexible/simple enough to make generating HTML in a structured way the natural solution.

https://github.com/weavejester/hiccup

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