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RJIb8RBYxzAMX9u

832 karma · joined January 12, 2015

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RJIb8RBYxzAMX9u··on Git 3.0's upcoming SHA-256 default will be a costly mistake
Thanks. I went back and re-watched that part, and her point's that "[a] tree's cryptographic strength is equal to the weakest hash algorithm anywhere in the tree," and that's fair. I also understand why Git 3.0 may not want to give user the choice, though I would still rather it be given.
RJIb8RBYxzAMX9u··on Git 3.0's upcoming SHA-256 default will be a costly mistake
I skimmed the video, and I didn't quite catch that. Near the end of the video, however, she did mention that interop is in the works[0].

In any case, even if Git 3.0 were completely incompatible, it would suck, but it's not the end of the world. You just treat it as if you were migrating from one SCM system to another. CVS -> SVN -> Perforce -> Git -> Git 3.0 -> [...] been-there-done-that. This is something that both open-source and commercial projects have had to deal with over the years.

Or maybe it would be a repeat of Python 2.x -> 3.x. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ With AI assistance, hopefully porting the tooling over may go a lot quicker and smoother.

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eJJp0RE7cd4&t=1134s

RJIb8RBYxzAMX9u··on I don't want the details
I agree with the gist of the author's point, but often when managers say they don't want the details, they really meant that they do want the details, just to some unspecified level, that you must divine. Give them less, and they aren't satisfied, and you risk damaging their trust in your expertise. So I've learned to give enough details until they tell me the magical phrase. Perhaps if I were better at reading people, and managers are better at managing, then there would be fewer misunderstanding, and less annoyance, from both sides.
RJIb8RBYxzAMX9u··on The truth about being a manager
>> You will encounter business decisions you think are terrible but you still have to sell to your team.

> This is incorrect. You don't have to. In fact, you shouldn't.

> There can be situation in which stuff will need to happen regardless, yes, but that does not require lying and probably works even better when one does not lie.

Selling doesn't mean lying. It's usually possible to sell, or persuade, the team to move forward on terrible decisions, without resorting to lying, if you're a good manager.

Having said that, steering a team to execute on good or bad business decisions often do involve withholding information, and some argues -- though I disagree -- that's also lying. If you subscribe to that reasoning, then I suppose you would be right.

RJIb8RBYxzAMX9u··on Corporate America Is Starting to Ration AI as Cost Skyrockets
Suppose I'm driving at 20 kph, and I set my cruise control to 40 kph. My car then goes WOT, overshoots my target speed and hits 120 kph, at which point it slams on the brakes[0], dropping my speed to 15 kph. It repeats until it finally settles at my target speed. (Rhetorical question) would that be considered "completely normal"?

Over/undershoots and corrections are of course unavoidable and normal; the absurdity is at the magnitude and rate of change. Furthermore, this is giving it the benefit of the doubt, that measuring AI spend is a good indicator; that's arguably also in dispute. To stretch my car analogy a bit more: it would be like the cruse control system has to hit the target speed, but it only has data from the O2 sensors.

[0] I know that the "classic" cruise control system cannot apply the brakes, but hey no analogy's perfect.

RJIb8RBYxzAMX9u··on Toshifumi Suzuki, founder of Seven-Eleven Japan, has died
> These days basically any ATM allows foreign cards

I thought so, too, and perhaps it's just bad luck, but I was at Tokyo Station a few months ago, and I wasn't able to withdraw cash from Mizuho Bank's -- one of the largest retail bank in Japan -- ATM from my US debit card. I ended up walking (getting lost for) ~10 minutes to a Seven Bank ATM, and withdrew cash there without issue. So YMMV.

RJIb8RBYxzAMX9u··on Steve Wozniak cheered after telling students they have AI – actual intelligence
In case this anecdote is not made up, I would implore you or your friend be a bit more subtle at tokenmaxing (ugh). At $JOB, I'm under the same mandate, and it turns out that every prompt is logged and aggregated. When someone else at $JOB asked the team PM who's in charge of the logging, s/he replied that the log is only used to correlate with commits, and nothing else, trust us (wink). I doubt this is unique to my $JOB.

Therefore, sigh burn those tokens, but make sure your prompts are at least superficially defensible, in the unlikely event that you get audited. Use multiple models for the same prompt / task, for instance. It's well know that LLMs are prone hallucinations, so it's only prudent to double / triple cross-check the results with multiple models.

RJIb8RBYxzAMX9u··on Getting Arrested in Japan
> [G]etting into a heated argument in public, accidentally taking an item you didn’t pay for, overstaying a visa, or even grabbing someone else’s umbrella or bike thinking it was yours [...]

While it doesn't detract from the article's main point, that Japanese prison conditions are poor, but arson, murder, and jaywalking much? Overstaying your visa is a lot more egregious than the other infractions.

> Damn, I want to move to Japan now.

I know this is sarcasm, but going to Japan as a tourist and _living_ in Japan as a resident -- or the same of any country, for that matter -- are very different experiences. Some, but surprisingly little, of your experience from the former carries over to the latter.

RJIb8RBYxzAMX9u··on Where to Sleep in LAX
Probably: a YouTuber tried something similar[0] and apparently was not accosted.

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DUHQ_lLD0n0

RJIb8RBYxzAMX9u··on Tell HN: HN was down
HN is how I discover whether other sites are down or not, so it serves a critical function, so of course I check it frequently.

/s

RJIb8RBYxzAMX9u··on Netflix to Acquire Warner Bros
Not as absurd as back when AOL bought them, but just barely so. I think I'll have an extra frothy latte for breakfast today.
RJIb8RBYxzAMX9u··on Running a 68060 CPU in Quadra 650
Well, 68k lived on in spirit for a while in ColdFire[0].

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NXP_ColdFire

RJIb8RBYxzAMX9u··on John Carmack's arguments against building a custom XR OS at Meta
I sympathize, but the reality is that except for very specialized cases, (hyper) optimizing for CPU performance is unnecessary, even in the embedded space. A Cortex-M0 has roughly the same performance as a 486, and is cheap and power efficient enough to be bundled in disposable test kits, vapes, etc.
RJIb8RBYxzAMX9u··on It's DOOM but you can Cut, Copy and Paste [video]
Rather than copy & paste, it should have been called a kill ring[0] (of max length one). :-)

[0] https://www.gnu.org/software/emacs/manual/html_node/emacs/Ki...

RJIb8RBYxzAMX9u··on YouTube No Translation
I won't be contributing much to rational discussion, but this "feature" annoys me so much that I just have to rant for a bit.

----

Like, is nobody in Google multi-lingual? Who the fuck thought this -- not auto-translation, but forced auto-translation -- is a good idea? Surely for an organization that purportedly only hires the cream-of-the-crop, they'll have a larger fraction of employees that speak more than one language? Look, I'm resting-and-vesting like the rest of y'all, but if I were in the team that implemented this, I'd definitely speak up, and let them, up to my skip-level, know that this is terrible. The implication of either possibilities had occurred, yet the feature still shipped, is harrowing.

Even if the developers only speak one language, they must know at least three -- cream-of-the-crop, remember? -- programming languages, right? Imagine if, when you're first hired into Google, you declare your programming language of choice, say Go; then, henceforth whenever you check out the source code, irrespective of its original form, it gets auto-translated into Go, and you can't turn that off? Checking out Pixel first-stage bootloader code, almost certainly written in assembly -- nope! We know better: you're getting that in Go. Fuck, I shouldn't be giving them ideas!

Could they not imagine how horrible this would be, and by analogy when applied to human languages, be also just as horrid?

YouTube's often been cited as a great resource for learning new things. Well, now it's useless for, that's right, learning a second language! I wonder why this Spanish for beginners video's all in English? /s

Speaking about shit features, let's throw "Stable Volume" into the pile. At least this one remembers your preferences...most of the time. When I watch ASMR -- yes I'll admit in public I'm that guy -- videos, and am just about to fall asleep, I just love to be jolted awake by a loud robotic voice's rendition of tapping sounds. Maybe my grumpiness's due to my lack of sleep!

RJIb8RBYxzAMX9u··on YouTube No Translation
I've just installed this extension, and confirmed that -- at least for now -- it works. The translated titles will be flashed first, then replaced by the original titles.
RJIb8RBYxzAMX9u··on YouTube No Translation
My configured primary language is English, but I regularly watch contents in Chinese and Japanese, where I have sufficient mastery over to not need YouTube's subpar translation. YouTube's insistence in displaying video titles in English, starting a few months ago, and now also auto-dubbing in English, is incredibly annoying.
RJIb8RBYxzAMX9u··on Price of rice in Japan falls below ¥4k per 5kg
I don't think so, because there are too many things, but not enough time in life to find out your true preferences for them all, so we all are (to varying degree of) indifferent to most things, and focus on only a few things we truly care about. For you, it's coffee and rice; for others, it may be monitor latency and keyboard switches.

I'd used coffee as an analogy, because it's something that almost everyone drinks, has many varieties, but most generally aren't too picky about it. Alas, I'd underestimated the population overlap between HN readers and picky coffee drinkers. :-P

RJIb8RBYxzAMX9u··on Price of rice in Japan falls below ¥4k per 5kg
> I'm curious if anyone has noticed a significant taste difference between Japonica rice and those imported from China, Korea, or Vietnam.

Yes, but it's like somewhere between mineral water and coffee. That is, most can tell the difference when directly compared, and may even prefer one over the other, but in many cases they are interchangeable.

> Is one generally considered better tasting than the others?

IMHO, no, but you tend to prefer the type you eat most often. Going back to the coffee analogy, most people have a roast / style they prefer, but few would claim that it's better.

RJIb8RBYxzAMX9u··on How I fixed the infamous Basilisk II Windows “Black Screen” bug in 2013
Very interesting article, but this stood out to me:

> To re-familiarize myself with this bug [...] I downloaded the broken version [...] and tried it out in some virtual machines. Windows 2000 and XP ran it without any trouble on the first try, but Vista and 7 didn’t [...]

Amazing. Emulating an older system in order to debug emulating an even older system. The amount of compute / memory / storage readily available at our fingertips today is astounding. My first computer was a 68k Mac, and back then, I would never imagine such scenarios would be possible!

RJIb8RBYxzAMX9u··on Debian bookworm live images now reproducible
Yes, the system is not closed and certainly people may simply not contribute to Debian at all. However, my main point is that reasonable people disagree on the relative importance of RR among other things, so it's not about "want[ing] non-reproducible builds" even if one has unlimited resources, but rather wanting RR, but not at the expense of X, where X differs from person to person.
RJIb8RBYxzAMX9u··on Debian bookworm live images now reproducible
> Lets turn this around. Why would you ever want non-reproducible builds?

It's not about wanting non-reproducible builds, but what am I sacrificing to achieve reproducible builds. Debian's reproducible build efforts have been going for ten years, and it's still not yet complete. Arguably Debian could have diverted ten years of engineering resources elsewhere. There's no end to the list of worthwhile projects to tackle, and clearly Debian believes that reproducible builds is high priority, but reasonable people can disagree on that.

This not to say reproducible builds are not worth doing, just that depending on your project / org lifecycle and available resources (plus a lot of subjective judgement), you may want to do something else first.

RJIb8RBYxzAMX9u··on Apple software update “bug” enables Apple Intelligence
Just like the blog author, I updated two Macs, and one got the setup wizard and thus AI got re-enabled, while the other did not. Maybe it's a bug, or maybe it's A/B testing... ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
RJIb8RBYxzAMX9u··on Americans see their savings vanish in Synapse fintech crisis
I opened an account with Yotta before they pivoted more heavily into the gambling aspects, because I wanted them to succeed and bring prize-linked savings account[0] into the mainstream. But I also wasn't born yesterday, so I'd only deposited money that I could afford to lose.

And lose I did: they were only able to recover less than a dollar. I'm not even going to bother claiming it.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prize-linked_savings_account

RJIb8RBYxzAMX9u··on Unfortunate things about performance reviews (2021)
> I've only ever heard of managers getting in trouble if at least 3 people under them leave.

That seems reasonable to me? One is a fluke, two is a coincidence, and three is maybe a pattern, as the saying goes.

RJIb8RBYxzAMX9u··on C++ proposal: There are exactly 8 bits in a byte
While we're at it, perhaps we should also presume little-endian byte order. As much as I prefer big-endian, little-endian had won.

As consolation, big-endian will likely live on forever as the network byte order.

RJIb8RBYxzAMX9u··on Traveling with Apple Vision Pro
Slightly OT but I much prefer the 9211+: the vent[*] makes a difference in comfort when worn over long periods. Or the 9105 / 9105S which sticks out further away from the face, and its elastic design makes it a bit quicker to don / doff at checkpoints.

[*] Yes I'm prioritizing my comfort over safety for others, but that's the American Way (tm), isn't it.

RJIb8RBYxzAMX9u··on Self-driving Waymos secure final clearance for expansion beyond S.F
I think the difference is that as an individual driver you have an incentive to keep your car clean, so that Lyft continues to dispatch riders to you. For Waymo the selective pressure is less direct and also spread across their entire fleet. They can accept a level of dirtiness, given some probability that the rider would reject the car x cost of rider requesting a (partial) refund x etc. etc.

More cynically, there are simply too many people that won't take care of "public" property. If every 3rd rider (exaggerated for rhetorical purposes) trashes the car, it's gonna be dirty no matter what.

RJIb8RBYxzAMX9u··on Self-driving Waymos secure final clearance for expansion beyond S.F
> - Consistently [...] clean [...]

I don't expect this to hold true once Waymo become generally available, alas.

RJIb8RBYxzAMX9u··on California could ban Clear, which lets travelers skip TSA lines
> [..] "VIP service" [...] it costs quite a bit.

Something like P/S[0] in LAX I presume. It's approximately the cost of an international business class seat. So yes it's expensive but not unaffordably so for working professionals. I've used it for international inbound a few times: being able to clear customs and immigration in ~5 minutes (!!) is almost worth the premium.

When I fly inbound I avoid LAX whenever possible. However, I've been told that Global Entry is now fairly streamlined, so perhaps I'll give that a try next time.

[0] https://reserveps.com/

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