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OJFord

24,240 karma · joined February 25, 2015

Any views expressed are mine & not on behalf of my employer past or present. And not even always mine once I've had another coffee.

Currently a software engineer at GoCardless. Formerly:

  - (IC) TL @ Yagro (AgTech)
  - Engineer @ Arm (R&D, IoT)  
  - Student @ Imperial (EIE - an EE & CS mix)
[ my public key: https://keybase.io/ojford; my proof: https://keybase.io/ojford/sigs/n2lqA-lzhIHABwLfMAZVHJBC94-3l42EgvM7tfmv4F0 ]

Email: hn@${username}.com

CV: https://cv.ojford.com

submissionscomments
OJFord··on The August 17 outage
> I suspect that Microsoft would even prefer to have Github operate at a loss,

I assumed it does, do you know that it doesn't?

OJFord··on The city of Cupertino is 70.9% Asian. A new TV show set there ignores this
> Expecting media to keep up with the exact demographics of the USA when the rate of change is so drastic, is a pretty high bar.

They don't have to 'keep up with' it all the time though, is 'do your research' and 'maybe visit the place' for the show you're writing about 'a pretty high bar'?

(I'm not even sure I agree it's important to reflect, or at least not that it's always necessarily required, but I certainly don't think it being difficult is the reason not to, because I don't see how it is.)

OJFord··on Feature Request: Support AGENTS.md
It's not a moat, or much of a barrier because you can literally just rename it, but it is 'good' marketing/branding. People talking about CLAUDE.md is much better for Anthropic than people talking about AGENTS.md.
OJFord··on fx :Tiny, open, native coding agent.
Didn't Anthropic stop allowing it, can only use the subscriptions with first-party tools?
OJFord··on Japan's Gen X workers are struggling
Also an aging population problem I believe though right? So if nothing else changed, today might not be the 'worst' it could get, with lower GDP and increased health and social care costs.
OJFord··on Apple announces changes for apps in the European Union
I can't see them doing anything that stops homebrew working.
OJFord··on How Bluesky draws its logo on screenshots
Probably, but to the extent that was at all a problem to begin with, multiply it by another 0.0001 or whatever for the threat of the screenshot being taken mid switch away!
OJFord··on St Lucie Nuclear Reactor Unit 1 manually shutdown, 3 control rods drop into core
https://www.nrc.gov/reading-rm/doc-collections/event-status/...

Event 58408, 'manual reactor trip'.

OJFord··on Anthropic Risk August 2026 [pdf]
R&D productivity. Pretty sure they claim more for e.g. Claude Code.
OJFord··on Count Binface receives over a quarter of votes in Clacton by-election
Because the PM technically isn't anything but the leader the majority party has chosen for itself, they don't even have to be an MP.

This is muddied a bit in modern times with press and overseas engagements and higher salaries for PMs than MPs.

OJFord··on Thanks to social media, canned sardines are a scarcity on the supermarket shelf
I'm also in the UK, and yes, around 4 whole where no one of them cut up would fit in the tin.

(49p is a cheap tin though, and I'm not sure Aldi has a fish counter? Observation conducted at Waitrose with £1 tins and 3 by weight for 80p.)

OJFord··on Thanks to social media, canned sardines are a scarcity on the supermarket shelf
Tinned sardines are convenient for toast, but if you want to cook with them it's crazy how much more you get your money from the fish counter.
OJFord··on London Underground begins scanning passengers' faces
> You describe mobile handheld scanners

Aka 'my phone', but yes. It's the same self-checkout machine (just only need to pay if you already scanned). Widespread in the UK at least.

OJFord··on London Underground begins scanning passengers' faces
I scan and bag while I shop, so self-checkout is just paying. It's barely a shift of work from cashier to me, because I have to pick things up and place them in my bag/basket/trolley anyway, scanning them as I do is barely an increase in work.
OJFord··on Andrew Wiles on proving Fermat’s Last Theorem (1995) [video]
Do you mean Atish Joygobin, for the background music?
OJFord··on My server is a phone now
I doubt it was OP's goal. Commenter I responded to on the other hand said that the original was more 'attention grabbing' than my clarifying amendment, and that's what I said ought not be the goal.
OJFord··on My server is a phone now
The goal as a blog author should not be to grab attention and mislead readers into starting your article only to realise it's not what they expected and were interested in.
OJFord··on My server is a phone now
I actually think it's just a poor title, "my server runs on a phone now" would be better.

As it is, I expected the server to now have a modem, to be operating as a phone.

OJFord··on Fastmail offers EU data region
But whose cloud infrastructure do they use? (I don't know, but it might likely be AWS, GCP, or Azure.)
OJFord··on Framework discloses data breach via Metabase 0-day
I'd have expected an email too, but surely 'preorder accepted' acknowledges the payment?
OJFord··on 2027 memory capacity is reportedly sold out
I didn't say anything about USB? If you're referring to upthread wanting RAM to be standardised like USB (not standardised on something like USB), I took that to mean backwards compatible slots. (And maybe handicapped forwards compatibility, though why would you.) M.2/PCIe is this way.
OJFord··on The Golden Age of British Ice Cream
Sure, but it's not the only reason to use them, you can improve mouth feel and prevent melting even if the fat content's higher.

I'm struggling to prove a point because Waitrose doesn't seem to have any as high as 18% (the highest at 15-16% being own label & YeoValley, notably both using egg) – the more expensive brands like are lower fat and do have LBG/guar.

Also bear in mind low-fat can be a goal itself, or vegan compatibility.

OJFord··on 2027 memory capacity is reportedly sold out
Yeah but DDR3 was faster then and still is now - I can't imagine my M4 Mac having a slightly older version RAM would meaningfully affect me, but another 24GB of it (or whatever I have) would certainly be an improvement.

CPUs have L1, L2, L3+ caches too after all.

OJFord··on Software development with AI is starting to feel like cooking steak
It's not wrong for all food, surface temperature measurement has its place, you just have to understand it is surface measurement.
OJFord··on I'm switching my phone from Android to Linux
..sure? I don't personally care what either enforces, since I'm in neither jurisdiction. I wouldn't have thought the US is any more (or even as) likely to personally, but sure. I said Brussels because comment I replied to said EU.
OJFord··on I'll be stepping back from leading product for X
Ime those people don't want to see the content at all; xcancel is used mainly by people annoyed by login walls (I even have an account! It's just annoying.).

(By 'those people' I mean those who tie their app experience to its CEO's politics or whatever. I'm no supporter, nor in the US so don't feel particularly affected anyway, but mainly I just don't care about the CEO one way or another when I use a website.)

OJFord··on LLMs won't break symmetric crypto
I think the thing most of us missed in dismissing GPT 2-3 as 'next word in sentence predictors' was that recursively this allows something resembling thinking, 'reasoning'.

LLMs are capable not just of calculating the most likely next word from a prompt according to a corpus of training text, but of doing so & feeding back into themselves, the most likely word now based not only on the corpus but on the basic prediction, a second (nth) stage of thought.

Yes it's all still token prediction, but it's predicting conversation between let's say not experts but capable speakers with all the information at hand. Undergraduates if you like. And such conversation can yield real results.

OJFord··on I'm switching my phone from Android to Linux
I expect everyone who can conceive of something other than Android or iOS* on a phone is on HN, and not a bureaucrat in Brussels.

*(or BB, webOS, Windows Phone 7 Phone OS Phone Microsoft, Symbian, etc. if old enough)

OJFord··on The Golden Age of British Ice Cream
Xanthan, guar, and locust bean gum are to control melt and improve texture – many people add them to homemade ice-cream even.
OJFord··on Don't be a meat proxy
"AI says" – if you interpret it and think it's correct and stand by it (and I trust your judgement) then I really don't care where you got it from initially, you don't need to tell me you used AI. But if you're just taking my question and 'meat proxying' it for me, what value are you adding? I can also do this.
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