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MyOutfitIsVague

919 karma · joined February 10, 2025

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MyOutfitIsVague··on MCP is eating the world
A "whole Docker container" is not very heavyweight. Other than having their own filesystem view and separate shared libraries, container processes are nearly as light as non-container processes. It's not like running a VM.
MyOutfitIsVague··on End of 10: Upgrade your old Windows 10 computer to Linux
That's effectively the same as my last sentence.
MyOutfitIsVague··on End of 10: Upgrade your old Windows 10 computer to Linux
For a dual boot configuration, you might as well not copy anything over. You'd be better off mounting the Windows partition in the Linux install. There's not a great reason to dual-boot for non-technical users, though. The point is to end up on a system that works for them, not to have one that works for them and a derelict system that they don't know how to remove, and that can destroy their dual-boot setup if MS decides to push an update that overwrites the boot loader, leaving them unable to access the Linux install.

It's not just shrinking and copying over to the new `/home` because of the locality of the data. If your NTFS partition is taking the entirety of the disk (minus EFI and system partitions), shrinking it will then make it take up the first X% of the disk. Then you have to make the linux installation on the last (100-X)% of the disk, copy the files over, and then when you delete the NTFS partition, your Linux filesystem is on the last half of the disk with a big blank unallocated area on the beginning. BTRFS or LVM2 could help a little bit there, but that's far from ideal in any case.

Probably the best approach would be to shrink NTFS, create a new partition at the end of at least the right size, copy the files over, then wipe the NTFS partition, install Linux as the first partition (after system/EFI and such), then copy the files into the user's home, and then remove the documents partition. That's still not super reliable, though. You are at the mercy of your documents sizes, filesystem fragmentation (remember, even if your filesystem is mostly empty, you might not be able to shrink if fragmentation is in a bad place. You could defrag, but then the install time can balloon up many hours for the defrag process alone, just to shrink a filesystem that you're going to delete anyway), how big the Linux install will end up being, and many other factors. You'd have a lot of people who simply can't copy their documents over on install who will be simply SOL. I can't think of a situation where this kind of thing wouldn't be better served by just telling the user to backup their documents to a USB drive and move them back afterward, because many people are going to have to do that anyway.

MyOutfitIsVague··on End of 10: Upgrade your old Windows 10 computer to Linux
Linux has to install somewhere, and it needs a filesystem that supports POSIX permissions, so you need a partition formatted for it. If NTFS is taking up the entire drive and can't be shrunk, where does Linux install?

You can't do this all on the same drive, because you need a place to copy the documents directory to. You need to delete the NTFS partition to create the place to copy the files to, but by the time you've done that, the Documents are inaccessible. You could do it in memory, feasibly, if you create a RAMdisk and are lucky enough to have enough memory for all your documents, but then you're still gambling on not running out of memory during the install.

So it is possible to copy the documents on the same device, and it's possible to even automate the process, but it's not possible to do it reliably or safely, and the reliability is so low that it's not worth even offering the possibility. If somebody has a handful of gigabytes of documents, it's already a nonstarter. To be safe you'd demand the user make a backup onto another device anyway, in which case they might as well do that and then copy the files into a fresh install themselves

MyOutfitIsVague··on What happens when clergy take psilocybin
I have tried a few times and only had bad trips. Not only that, but I used weed regularly beforehand, and alcohol occasionally, and after my last mushroom trip, both reliably give me anxiety or panic attacks every single time I use them. The first time I used weed after the mushrooms, I had a panic attack so bad I ended up calling 911 because I was convinced I was going to die. It's been two years now, and the last time I tried weed was three months ago (a CBD heavy strain; I had 10mg CBD and 2mg THC), and the last time I tried alcohol was a month ago, and both times gave me an anxiety attack.

Maybe I'll go back to normal eventually, or maybe I had a latent anxiety disorder that was triggered by the mushrooms and I'll just never be able to enjoy weed again. I don't know. My friends didn't have experiences as bad as mine, but they did have a bad time. Most of my friends love psychadelics, and I'd never take them away from them, but before we all tried them, they were talking the same way, and it's what made me excited to try them. I wasn't expecting it to do to me what it did.

MyOutfitIsVague··on What happens when clergy take psilocybin
I had a similar experience on a very small dose of magic mushrooms. Significantly smaller than necessary to even have hallucinations (under 1g of dried magic mushrooms). I was filled with dread and terror and felt like I was going to die. I was told by my shrooming friend that it was probably just bad, and to take some of his good stuff. I took 1g, and again had hours of terror and dread, and thought I was going to die for several hours on end. I then had nearly constant anxiety for about a month afterward.

I think many pro-psychedelic and pro-drug people in general underestimate how much these drugs vary with people. I have a friend who will make a gram of weed into cannabutter and eat the whole thing in 1 sitting, getting about 200mg of THC at once, and not have any major problems. He was a big proponent of "there's no such thing as too much" until he saw another friend of ours have an incredibly intense panic attack on 10mg of THC. My wife has intense anxiety on as little as 2.5mg of THC, regardless of CBD and CBG levels (whether via gummies or straight plant matter); no dose can be thereputic for her.

Based on the number of people I know who have experimented with these drugs, I think there's a smokescreen effect where people who have bad experiences don't talk about it nearly as much as people who have good experiences, so it seems significantly less risky than it is. Of the 10 or so people I know personally who had a psychedelic experience, about a third of them have had bad ones. They just don't really talk about it and never want to try it again. I wouldn't say that most people should try psychedelics at least once unless I knew what the actual numbers were, otherwise I'm pushing many people into having a horrible nightmare for hours on end.

MyOutfitIsVague··on What happens when clergy take psilocybin
> they are still safer in that regard than alcohol and cannabis. There is a lower rate of psychosis being triggered with LSD and psilocybin.

Is this adjusted by amount of use? As in, is it possible that it's more likely to trigger latent mental illness with alcohol and cannabis not because they trigger it more effectively, but because they are significantly more widely available, significantly more widely used, and people who consume them consume them in significantly greater amounts?

If you get drunk once, I get high once, and our friend trips on psilocybin once, what is the comparative risk of activating latent mental illness for these events alone?

MyOutfitIsVague··on Let's Talk About ChatGPT-Induced Spiritual Psychosis
I didn't say anything about "dangerous information". You may have misinterpreted the point I was making. It's not about dangerous information, it's about a personality that is very persuasive, can be wildly charismatic, and can convince people to do dangerous things they wouldn't otherwise do.

People don't join cults because of "dangerous information".

MyOutfitIsVague··on What happens when clergy take psilocybin
That's pretty simplistic, and doesn't come close to explaining the complex interactions of drugs. Caffeine, Zoloft, LSD, Meth, Heroin, and PCP all have wildly different effects that can't be boiled down to "feeling yourself".
MyOutfitIsVague··on Let's Talk About ChatGPT-Induced Spiritual Psychosis
Psychosis is not a binary, and there are strong genetic components, but it's not the entire story. People develop psychoses where there weren't any before all the time, often but not necessarily in response to trauma. Some people are more predisposed to it than others.

Even if you hold that you need that genetic predisposition, and that a perfectly sane person can never become "insane" as a result of an experience (not a position I agree with), there is still the very real possibility that many people with the predisposition would never have had this "already insane" condition ever triggered or exposed. Think about the suicide cults that have formed, notably Jonestown. It's easy to consider the mass suicide (and murder of the members' own children) as "insane" behavior. What are the odds that every single person was genetically insane? Comparatively, what are the odds that an extremely persuasive and charismatic personality can rewire a person's reasoning to believe something "insane"?

If you think of ChatGPT as capable of being an automated Jim Jones, I think the danger becomes more clear. These tools are not incapable of being dangerous.

MyOutfitIsVague··on Self-reported race, ethnicity don't match genetic ancestry in the U.S.: study
Genetic differences across Africa shouldn't be surprising when you consider how huge Africa really is. Africa is about as big as the US, China, and Europe combined.
MyOutfitIsVague··on The scientific “unit” we call the decibel
Not where I live. You'd never specify how old somebody is with a bare number and have it mean anything other than years in the US. "My kid is 3" is always 3 years. So is "How old is your Tammy?" "Three". That only ever means years. Every other unit is always explicit. In my decades as a parent and being around other parents of kids and newborns, I've never experienced an exception to this.
MyOutfitIsVague··on If an AI agent can't figure out how your API works, neither can your users
> AI agents can't even do very basic things without causing absolute mayhem.

Agreed.

> Do you really think it makes sense for your basic assumption to be that your user is dumber than a token generator?

Absolutely. Users will fuck up basic things. I wrote a simple inotify wrapper and half of the issues I got were that it didn't work on Windows and MacOS.

MyOutfitIsVague··on Ask HN: What's your go-to message queue in 2025?
There's very little to it, really, just a messages table with a id INTEGER PRIMARY KEY AUTOINCREMENT column (autoincrement to prevent id reuse, which is otherwise legal), a payload TEXT NOT NULL column (which is usually JSON encoded), and, in my case, a TEXT json annotations column, with some computed indexes. A publisher just pushes rows in, and a subscriber takes an exclusive lock to grab the first row matching the annotations that it cares about (I use DELETE RETURNING, but you can make it work however you need).

You can use `PRAGMA data_version` on a dedicated thread to watch for changes and notify other waiters via a condition variable. It's not the nicest solution, because it's just a loop around a query, but it gets the job done.

A req-rep pattern can be done by doing a `INSERT ... RETURNING id` and having the the other side re-push into the same or a different message queue with an annotation referring to that id. Alternatively, you could have a table with a req, rep, and status column to coordinate it all.

It's far from everything you'd need from a complete, robust message broker, but for small single or multi-process message queue with a max of a few dozen readers and writers, it gets the job done nicely. In a single process, you can even replace the data_version loop thread with `sqlite3_commit_hook` on writers to notify readers that something has changed via the condition_variable.

MyOutfitIsVague··on Ask HN: What's your go-to message queue in 2025?
For my extremely specialized case, I use a SQLite database as a message queue. It absolutely wouldn't scale, but it doesn't need to. It works extremely well for what I need it to do.
MyOutfitIsVague··on Every programming language has its 'killer' domain
Rust isn't a niche language by a long shot anymore.

CXX[0] is fine. Personally, I just always use a C ABI to communicate between the two. I've had to do it for every other language anyway. Languages that have native C++ interop are significantly more rare than ones that don't. Most languages have some way of talking to C, though.

[0]: https://cxx.rs/

MyOutfitIsVague··on A crypto founder faked his death. We found him alive at his dad's house
A cop once told me "Criminals almost always get caught because of probability. The vast majority of criminals don't commit just one crime, so chances are, they will eventually get caught. To never get caught, they have to get lucky every time. I only need to get lucky once."
MyOutfitIsVague··on US Copyright Office found AI companies breach copyright. Its boss was fired
There were the famous napster cases, the kids and old ladies that got sued by the RIAA for using limewire to download some music.

There is also the fact that copyright holders will pressure your ISP into sending threatening letters and shutting off your Internet for piracy, even without you seeding. I haven't gotten the impression that you are in the clear for pirating as long as you don't distribute.

MyOutfitIsVague··on A crypto founder faked his death. We found him alive at his dad's house
It had occurred to me, but I didn't want to say it that way because I'm not a psychological professional and it seems out of my area of expertise to make that assumption based on my passive observations.
MyOutfitIsVague··on US Copyright Office found AI companies breach copyright. Its boss was fired
The issue with that is that inheritance only makes sense for tangible, scarce resources. Having copyright isn't easily analogous to ownership of a physical object, because an object is something you have and if somebody else has it, you can not have and use it.

Copyright is about control. If you know a song and you sing it to yourself, somebody overhears it and starts humming it, they have not deprived you of the ability to still know and sing that song. You can make economic arguments, of deprived profit and financial incentives, and that's fine; I'm not arguing against copyright here (I am not a fan of copyright, it's just not my point at the moment), I'm just saying that inheritance does not naturally apply to copyright, because data and ideas are not scarce, finite goods. They are goods that feasibly everybody in the world can inherit rapidly without lessening the amount that any individual person gets.

If real goods could be freely and easily copied the way data can, we might be having some very interesting debates about the logic and morality of inheriting your parents' house and depriving other people of having a copy.

MyOutfitIsVague··on US Copyright Office found AI companies breach copyright. Its boss was fired
It's not only publication, otherwise people wouldn't be able to be successfully sued for downloading and consuming copyrighted content, it would only be the uploaders who get into trouble.
MyOutfitIsVague··on A crypto founder faked his death. We found him alive at his dad's house
People are attracted to things based on their personality traits. The average software engineer is not the same as the average person, because the average person is not attracted to software engineering.

In my observations, the average software engineer is more likely to be persnickety, caught up in small details, and obsessive than the average person. We're more likely to split hairs than most people would care to, and proper labeling and categorization is much more important to us than average person.

It's not that software engineers are somehow magical or special, it's that there is a selection bias to become a software engineer. It's extra not special, because the same thing happens for virtually any specialized field. There are famous stereotypes about the personalities of psychologists, for instance.

MyOutfitIsVague··on A crypto founder faked his death. We found him alive at his dad's house
You missed the URL for that one:

> $ZEREBRO penispillreviews.com ⁦⁦⁦⁦ And yeah, that looks like an actual crypto website. This is bizarre. It's like they're rolling with the "we're totally a scam" angle.

MyOutfitIsVague··on A crypto founder faked his death. We found him alive at his dad's house
There's not planning a crime to the last detail, then there's faking your death without even thinking about how you're going to keep people from finding out that you're not dead.
MyOutfitIsVague··on US vs. Google amicus curiae brief of Y Combinator in support of plaintiffs [pdf]
They aren't competing with a raised bar, they are competing with a bar that can only be passed if you already have a massive presence in an unrelated area. You can not compete with an entrenched existing player when they are giving their things away for "free", subsidized by a massive ad tax. This entrenchment is tailor-made to make competition infeasible.

This is illegal for a reason. It does NOT benefit consumers to make it impossible for anybody to compete with you. This is anti-competitive, not competition.

MyOutfitIsVague··on US vs. Google amicus curiae brief of Y Combinator in support of plaintiffs [pdf]
> What's going on with immigration for instance has been in the planning phases for years.

Then how do they still manage to mistakenly deport the wrong people and have to cover it with a smoke screen of lies? If this is what their "careful and thoughtful" planning looks like, I'd hate to see what their recklessness looks like, because it all looks like the same level of shit show from my angle.

MyOutfitIsVague··on US vs. Google amicus curiae brief of Y Combinator in support of plaintiffs [pdf]
Making moves so that competitors can't play at all is so far beyond playing dirty. It's anti-competitive and illegal.
MyOutfitIsVague··on US vs. Google amicus curiae brief of Y Combinator in support of plaintiffs [pdf]
I disagree with it being cheaper. One of the major costs is that we have an entire ad-driven ecosystem, aggressive attention economy, and the many potential alternatives that could never compete with a gargantuan ad conglomerate that has the leverage in one field to completely make all competition infeasible in others. It looks cheaper to us, but only because the price we have paid is that great things that may have existed never had a chance to.

There are many difficult-to-estimate costs for monopolies, especially ones like this. That does not mean that the costs do not exist. That's the entire point in making people believe that things are "free" or "cheap", you rob them of even the opportunity to even evaluate alternatives to realize how much better it could be. There are very good reasons that these kinds of things should be illegal.

MyOutfitIsVague··on US vs. Google amicus curiae brief of Y Combinator in support of plaintiffs [pdf]
Google services are not a gift. They are not actually free. Google is not a charity nor is it a non-profit. I want people in this discussion to stop arguing as if Google isn't making money on all these services.

If the parents were slowly siphoning off enough of the teen's money through a convoluted set of channels such that the teenager indirectly paid for the truck anyway and the parents ended up effectively taking a share of the money, that would be definitely worth hating.

MyOutfitIsVague··on NSF faces shake-up as officials abolish its 37 divisions
Without enforcement, laws are just words. The white house is really testing the concept of laws as they might apply to the executive branch.
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