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OJFord

24,256 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 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.
OJFord··on How Hollywood stopped making movies in Hollywood
A lot of non-LA/desert scenes are LA sets.
OJFord··on Pushes to arch AUR are suspendended right now.
AUR packages consist of packaging a third-party software (whether binary or source built as part of the package) for use on Arch.

Most updates are just bumping the upstream software version and its checksum, as GP describes, and yes arguably you should be reviewing the change to that software too, but that's a separate threat. And it may be a proprietary binary, in which case on update you've already decided to trust the third-party, so the diff shows you that nothing has changed in that regard, the trusted party simply released a new opaque version.

OJFord··on How the words we teach English language learners changed
It's a wordy (/AI?) way to say it, but I took it to be commenting on our lives being more 'abstract'/digital than they were, so naturally a lot of our language is less physical.

Oughtn't really affect emotive language like 'keen', though.

OJFord··on How the words we teach English language learners changed
I'm also a native English speaker, sounds perfectly normal & commonplace to me.
OJFord··on Arch Linux disables AUR package adoption
There is more risk in someone adopting something with established users though. Some people (cough) might be a bit less careful if they see something has tonnes of users, votes, comments; people actively using and liking the package.
OJFord··on How the words we teach English language learners changed
Interesting one if you look at Google Ngram Viewer – usage dropped off massively to 70s/80s, and it's picked back up since but not to 1953 or earlier levels, so even that doesn't explain it.

Must just be the combination of that increase as well as other words decreasing in usage I suppose. E.g. perhaps we're a bit less keen, but also much less passionate, so keen ends up making the cut.

OJFord··on RamenHaus
Cries in London
OJFord··on Arch Linux disables AUR package adoption
Yeah, I don't disagree there should be more of a barrier, I remember being surprised I could just adopt things. Just explaining the intended use.
OJFord··on Arch Linux disables AUR package adoption
I've used it (not for abuse). It's simply volunteering to maintain the package after previous maintainer(s) have explicitly disowned it, knowing they no longer have time for it or don't care because they stopped using it, etc.
OJFord··on Elevators
I think this comparison is also assuming the distribution of request & requested floor is uniform? When actually near pairs are less likely (I'll just take the stairs) than bottom to top, so even analysing it is more complex than at first glance.
OJFord··on Stacked PRs are now live on GitHub
Spicy opinion: a reinvention of commits by and for people who use commits like 'File > Save'.

...but if the end result is more popularity of 'stacked' logical changes, yay anyway?

OJFord··on The only road in London where you have to drive on the right
Bit of a stretch... It's a dead-end private road, also sometimes called a driveway, where the owner has their own rules for how it should be used.
OJFord··on DMARC has been public since 2012 but most company domains still don't enforce it
68.4% still don't enforce it, i.e. adoption is just over 30%, not nearly 70%.
OJFord··on French firefighters face 'pyrocumulonimbus' for first time
Nobody asked that. Information about the local ecology was volunteered, and was much more interesting than yet another argument (being had against nobody) that climate change is a major contributor.
OJFord··on French firefighters face 'pyrocumulonimbus' for first time
You misunderstand. Dibby053 provided interesting context for why specifically that region is so badly affected right now, on a background of global climate catastrophe. Rico98gg is derailing what could have been a more interesting thread with 'no, it's global warming', which is obvious and irrelevant.
OJFord··on French firefighters face 'pyrocumulonimbus' for first time
And global warming reached a critical point of worseness specifically in Landes & Médoc?
OJFord··on Git rebase -i is not that scary
> but it's still often hard to understand which side of the conflict represents what, and what would be the desired outcome for that step in the history.

Are you using diff3/zdiff3? I ask because you seem to be describing exactly the problem it solves, or at least the way I try to sell people on it.

Basically in addition to 'current' & 'incoming from the rebase' hunks you get 'parent commit of incoming from the rebase' – which allows you to see 'what was I trying to change', i.e. how does the intent of it apply to the different thing that's now on master (whatever I'm reading onto).

OJFord··on Man convicted of child sex crime by added _ char "Fus Ro Dah" Skyrim username
Thanks, it was:

> "This is not a situation where an acquittal is entered because the Crown has failed to prove beyond a reasonable doubt the essential elements of an offence or an error during the trial made the verdict unsafe," the appeal panel wrote.

That confused me – but I see now it's supposed to connect to the next paragraph (?!) – "it's not that there was procedural error, it's that he was completely innocent all along". (I do think it's written poorly, but I also haven't had a coffee yet..)

OJFord··on Man convicted of child sex crime by added _ char "Fus Ro Dah" Skyrim username
This is an error by US (Wisconsin) police misidentifying a man in (Halifax, Nova Scotia) Canada. Why do you want to hear from a UK lawyer?

It sounds like the appeal hasn't actually happened/completed yet anyway, that they're trying to raise public interest/outrage to help the case.

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