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RichardLake

139 karma · joined May 4, 2016

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RichardLake··on Ubuntu 26.10 completes transition to Rust-based coreutils
If they followed the license nothing. My uninformed knowledge is that the rust based rewrite is MIT, the originals are GPL, and you can't include GPL code in a MIT licensed project without making it GPL.
RichardLake··on Nearly 3M Teslas recalled in China over hidden door handles
The current top three auto-makers by sales in Australia are Toyota, BYD, then Ford. They might not have quite the same market penetration in Europe but BYD vehicles are sold there, and some have 5 star safety ratings.
RichardLake··on A California aquifer may have crossed the point of no return
You could only allow the conversion for farms that grow corn for ethanol at first. Isn't that around 10 million hectares on the low estimates?
RichardLake··on Bitcoin miners are losing on every coin produced as difficulty drops
Might be wrong about what Aperocky is alluding to but there is an entirely theoretical edge case. The time to the next difficulty adjustment is based on the current speed of mining, and the possible change in difficulty is capped. With enough minors leaving it will drop the speed of mining/network speed/ and push out the expected time to the next difficulty adjustment. I can't think of any realistic way this can occur given the miners that stay will (personally) be producing blocks as often, the increase in time being balanced out by being a larger proportionate of the mining rate. They don't care if they get 1% of the blocks, which average about 20 mins per block or 5% of the blocks that average 100mins per block.
RichardLake··on Alzheimer's disease mortality among taxi and ambulance drivers (2024)
Hmm, never played LoL myself but is keeping track of were the opposing hero can be given were you last saw them a big part of the strategy?
RichardLake··on Ripgrep is faster than grep, ag, git grep, ucg, pt, sift (2016)
Was the file in a .gitignore by any chance? I've got my home folder in git to keep track of dot/config files and that always catches me out. Really dislike it defaulting to that ignoring files that are ignored by git.
RichardLake··on Grammarly is offering ‘expert’ AI reviews from famous dead and living writers
Maybe because I work on a legacy programming language with far less material in the training? For me it makes a difference because it partly needs to "learn" the language itself and have that in the context, along with codebase specific stuff. For something with the model already knowing the language and only needing codebase specific stuff it might feel different.
RichardLake··on Grammarly is offering ‘expert’ AI reviews from famous dead and living writers
That isn't learning, it can read things in its context, and generate materials to assist answering further prompts but that doesn't change the model weights. It is just updating the context.

Unless you are actually fine tuning models, in which case sure, learning is taking place.

RichardLake··on Wine-Staging 11.1 Adds Patches for Enabling Recent Photoshop Versions on Linux
Isn't the xbox market dead after after having to code for the weaker series s lead to the last generation of consoles being outsold massively by the PS5?
RichardLake··on My insulin pump controller uses the Linux kernel. It also violates the GPL
No it doesn't. It can not bind someone that has not agreed to it. A failure to agree might mean they are infringing on copy-right and is liable for damages, but it is wrong to say it binds everyone that distributes it.
RichardLake··on My insulin pump controller uses the Linux kernel. It also violates the GPL
Would you disagree with this logic? You distribute GPL code to me on a dvd. I give that dvd to someone else. I have not made a copy of the source code, so copyright does not come into this. If instead I copied the dvd and emailed the iso to someone else I would be distributing and copyright comes into it.
RichardLake··on Gunmen kill 9 people at Sydney's Bondi Beach
To quote a summery from https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/live/2025/dec/14/...

* 12 people are confirmed dead, including 1 gunman. Police described the figures as an evolving situation. * 29 people have been transported to area hospitals in a range of conditions, but officials described the injuries are serious. That figure includes two police officers. * Chris Minns and Anthony Albanese described the shooting as a targeted attack on the Jewish community during the first day of Hanukah. * NSW police commissioner Mal Lanyon has designated the shooting a terrorist incident. * Lanyon said the gunmen used long arms. Police are investigating what’s believed to be several improvised explosive devices in a vehicle at Bondi beach. * Both Minns and Albanese have vowed to support the Jewish community and eradicate hate.

For context by number of deaths this is the second worse mass shooting in post WW2 Australian history.

RichardLake··on Testing shows automotive glassbreakers can't break modern automotive glass
Check the class of the fire extinguisher and if it is suited for liquid fires before using it on a oil fire.
RichardLake··on Way past its prime: how did Amazon get so rubbish?
How is Japan's customer protection? Here in Australia it is enshrined in law that the seller, Amazon, must handle warranties and such for the expected life of the product.
RichardLake··on JetBrains will start training AI on your code on non-commercial license
Cancelled my subscription. I can't take a risk of installing it and having a paid trial or something mean I'm using the non-commercial version for a bit.
RichardLake··on Managing dotfiles with Make
Only downside to this are tools that default to only acting on stuff under version control. Whenever I use rg inside my home directory I'm caught out by this.
RichardLake··on Bullfrog in the Dungeon
The possess creature was in the first game. Have you tried the original with keeperFX? It improves the UX for building rooms so if that was your issue with the first game.
RichardLake··on Red Hat Technical Writing Style Guide
The phase "maybe you should do xyz instead" is active, not passive. Qualifying with maybe doesn't change it from active to passive. Passive would be something like "Maybe XYZ should be done" or "Maybe XYZ would be better".
RichardLake··on The scientific “unit” we call the decibel
That depends, the dropped unit could be either a year or a month.
RichardLake··on 100 Years to Solve an Integral (2020)
I imagine it was more useful when using tables to lookup/approximate the values before calculators with trig support were a thing.
RichardLake··on Kagi Assistant is now available to all users
The other point of view is that they are now forcing users to pay for both search and AI, even if they do not want to use or fund the development of the later. You used to be paying 9$ for search, now you are paying 9$ - x for search and an unknown amount for AI.
RichardLake··on Cloudflare takes legal action over LaLiga's "disproportionate blocking efforts"
Legally is it collateral damage to unrelated parties. It is cloudflare's servers providing the infringing content, and the cloudflare's servers being blocked. Does Spain net neutrality protections grant some kind of common carrier protections to CDN networks? Would be nice if they did.
RichardLake··on DOGE has 'god mode' access to government data
The enforcement of these laws should be a function of the executive. There are ways for the supreme court or congress to intervene when the executive isn't doing their job. Sadly that requires them to believe a series of checks and balances is necessary.

Given that it is down to the voters, and they thought a racist, rapist, conman should be president giving them the power of the executive - which has been growing increasingly powerful for my adult lifetime.

RichardLake··on Speeding up the Rust edit-build-run cycle
Doesn't rust have overflow checks in debug and skips them in release?
RichardLake··on How does cosine similarity work?
By `two vectors exist in a two-dimensional space` are you talking about how two (linearly independent) n dimensional vectors will span a 2d space?
RichardLake··on Fighting Fantasy Collection
Not custom models but LLM but https://infiniteworlds.app/ is using commercial models for that kind of thing. Edit: Should warn that the site has nswf user content, may be best not to visit from work.
RichardLake··on Mystery as 4k-year-old axe-heads sent to museum
My understanding is that the context in which the pieces are found is of enormous import to archaeology. It would be better to one site done properly with the rest in the ground than lose the context from a larger number of sites when the artefacts donated anonymously.
RichardLake··on Show HN: Resurrecting a dead Dune RTS game
To be clear the article isn't about Dune 2; it is about Emperor: Battle for Dune.
RichardLake··on Voyager 1 is back online: NASA spacecraft returns data from all 4 instruments
The chance of another live form discovering us due to the Voyager probes is ~0. Atmospheric changes and EM emissions from Earth are both detectable from far longer ranges.
RichardLake··on Inner Speech
For myself I can learn a written word without having any idea of how it is pronounced. Growing up there were multiple occasions when I was speaking and mid way through a sentence realize I don't know the pronunciation of the next word I was going to say.

Also I can read text and completely miss rhymes unless the formatting draws attention to it like how poetry is often written with lines split. (More likely to miss rhymes like half and graph where the word endings visually are different.)

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