HNHacker News
TopNewBestAskShowJobs

Shekelphile

352 karma · joined February 12, 2023

submissionscomments
Shekelphile··on The path to detecting extraterrestrial life with astrophotonics
Phase #2 is only a thing in a strict scientific definition. Nobody will remember the decades of overt denial that life could ever exist off of earth and obstruction of exploration efforts, and handwaving away of biosignature evidence when we do finally observe life on mars, after all. Even then naysayers will claim panspermia in order to kick the can down the road further.
Shekelphile··on Apple's iPhone 15 and 15 Pro: Imaging tech examined
In terms of sales the low end camera market is already dead and has been for years. In terms of image quality current smartphone cameras do not compare at all. Even a 1" sensor point and shoot or low end micro four thirds mirrorless camera won't fall apart in terms of quality nearly as fast as a smartphone camera will in bad situations and doesn't need severe computational photography/AI smear processing to make decent looking photos.
Shekelphile··on enron :: discover the power of WHY (2001)
We would probably be talking about Tesla as the new Enron already had the COVID boom not happened, which threw the car market into a pro-seller extreme. Before COVID they were so desperate for money that they were stiffing vendors, not paying the ones they had to be until after financial statements for the quarter had been generated (to appear profitable on paper), literally taking scrap parts out of the dumpsters in the back of the factory to cobble together cars that they tried to pass off on people by making them take delivery before seeing the vehicle, etc. Not to mention the 'financially delivered' nonsense.

If Tesla is still continuing those practices then there is simply no future for the company. Hopefully they have fixed those issues.

Shekelphile··on Sag-AFTRA votes unanimously to expand its strike to include the games industry
> Good thing valve has made it clear that if you’re using AI generated content that you don’t have fully copyright over it they’re not going to accept your game.

Valve isn't really a good example to use here... they have a policy of not hiring union VAs (and the few they have worked with in the last 5 years or so have been publicly mistreated, see how they treated Merle Dandridge) and have definitely made new lines by piecing together old recording sessions in cases where the actor wanted more money or in cases where the actor was deceased.

Shekelphile··on Amazon CEO reportedly told remote employees: It’s probably not going to work out
If you want to go down this route I would argue that no office worker is ever very productive relative to what a blue collar employee deals with every day. You won't make them work harder by dragging them into the office, it will simply burn them out faster (1-2 hours more per day devoted to commute and cooloff from work once getting home) and employees forced into office will just steal time by taking long bathroom breaks/long lunch/sitting around chatting with buddies.
Shekelphile··on Amazon CEO reportedly told remote employees: It’s probably not going to work out
> Doesn’t that tell anyone that there MIGHT be facts or at least good research on this that it isn’t producing good work for the money?

I'd wager that most people are just as productive or more productive when WFH, but there will always be unethical people who will abuse the privilege when given the chance. There are tons of anecdotes of people just being straight up lazy, defeating naive monitoring solutions with mouse jigglers etc, or committing fraud by working multiple full time jobs concurrently.

Shekelphile··on Amazon CEO reportedly told remote employees: It’s probably not going to work out
They are afraid of overemployment. It's very easy to slip through the cracks once you're a few years deep in some companies and stop working for months/yeahs before you get terminated. Someone I know is doing exactly that, got a new job anticipating being laid off/RTO from their big company job and still hasn't been terminated, despite not working beyond being present for random emails/meetings in over 6 months.
Shekelphile··on Block YouTube ads on AppleTV by decrypting and stripping ads from Profobuf
It seems to me that all of google's most successful services (search, youtube, gmail and gsuite, maps/earth, android) are next to impossible to monetize profitably and have significant utility to the general public. It feels like these are services that governments should be building and funding themselves.

Youtube specifically has a plethora of useful information made by normal people. You can find hundreds of thousands of videos, in most languages, about doing most basic and complex repairs for almost any model of car made in the last few decades, for example. It is essentially a giant public library.

Shekelphile··on Block YouTube ads on AppleTV by decrypting and stripping ads from Profobuf
No.
Shekelphile··on Block YouTube ads on AppleTV by decrypting and stripping ads from Profobuf
> Adblocking Google is morally right.

All ads should be blocked. I do not consume ads, and am not interested in paying a ransom to hide them.

Shekelphile··on Block YouTube ads on AppleTV by decrypting and stripping ads from Profobuf
I don't see a point in giving google any money when the price of premium seems to go up every time I open the page for it (it's literally gone up 50% in the last 2 months, with the cheaper tier also no longer being offered) on top of actively being worse than using normal adblockers since you won't get any equivalent to sponsorblock by paying for premium. It's literally worthless, at least until google begins clamping down on ad blocking.
Shekelphile··on 2009scape
r-s =/= rs (runescape)
Shekelphile··on 2009scape
Permabanned from r-s gang wya?

I miss laughing at 2speced Tyler and Nikki not actually being a girl wasn’t much of a surprise.

Shekelphile··on A search for technosignatures around nearby stars
Earth is highly unlikely to support intelligent life 500 million years from now. Multicellular life entirely won’t exist in 1 billion years.
Shekelphile··on Naomi Wu and the Silence That Speaks Volumes
They started doing that day one.
Shekelphile··on RFC 9446 Reflections on Ten Years Past the Snowden Revelations
It’s actually worse than that. He was forced there by Sarah Harrison and Assange.
Shekelphile··on Ask HN: What if we discovered LLMs 10 years ago?
The gulf between the hardware of 2013 and 2023 is huge. Modern GPUs are probably close to ~100x faster for ML (thanks to the use of mixed precision math and hardware level optimizations for that usecase) than the Titan, which was the best consumer NVIDIA GPU you could buy at the time in 2013. Not to mention the huge change in the ML software landscape, tensorflow and pytorch didn't exist back then.
Shekelphile··on India bans import of laptops, tablets with immediate effect
What's the point in engaging in this kind of trumpian bluster for India? They're not going to become a world leader in semi fab. They can't even build enough toilets for the average Indian.
Shekelphile··on Ask HN: What buggy software is relied upon by the most people?
Old versions of embedded windows and the ancient versions of android that zebra devices run. Anyone who has worked in a factory or warehouse or shipping hub etc can attest to that.
Shekelphile··on Making the most of Apple Silicon power: 2 Core capabilities (2022)
I don't think it's completely guaranteed that you can choose such things anymore. Some scheduling work has to be done at the hardware level and it's certainly going to be hijacked as heterogeneous CPU micro architecture becomes more pervasive and the gulf of difference in feature set between efficiency and performance cores becomes wider.
Shekelphile··on Shopify employee breaks NDA to reveal firm replacing laid off workers with AI
Basic income is a horrible idea. It resigns 80%+ of the population to being unproductive for life and living in abject poverty.

If AI is going to automate away all 'meaningless' low and middle class jobs then the government should be stepping in to tax the productivity gains and use the money to educate and employ those people in roles that AI can't (maybe ever) fill. Having the government pay tens of millions of people to further scientific research and innovation would be a massive boon for our society rather than the current ratcheting incrementalism and lack of innovation the pervades in our current system where innovation is always shunned unless it can provide immediate short-term gains.

Unfortunately it's moot to even think about. Nothing will change and the elites will simply let the majority of the population starve to death.

Shekelphile··on Ford slashes prices of F-150 Lightning trucks as EV wars heat up
I live in rural upstate NY and get coal rolled just for having a normal sedan. Anything perceived as inferior makes you a target for trumpy idiocy here.
Shekelphile··on Teddit Is Shutting Down
They already have 'come out fine' from the whole fiasco. The majority of users already used new reddit and the official app because they haven't actually used old reddit or the third party apps that were available to begin with, and with few exceptions pretty much every subreddit that went dark was already back and fully open a week or so after the blackout.

Stripping API access was just a giant 'fuck you' and experience downgrade to the small group of savvy users who won't ever use new reddit no matter what roadblocks are put in their way.

Shekelphile··on Teddit Is Shutting Down
> Seeing all Reddit apps shut down, I can't help but wonder — what is it that made everyone play by the rules? What happened to the adversarial interoperability spirit? What forces people to use their own API keys instead of pretending to be one of the official apps?

The official reddit app uses a seperate, undocumented graphql based api rather than the public REST one they allow for public use. I suspect someone is/will be already using it to emulate the 'old' API soon enough.

Shekelphile··on Xbox360 –> Windows Executable Converter (2017)
> The point is that it's still HLEing all of the imports (like CXBX).

You have a fundamental misunderstanding here. HLE in the style that CXBX does it is not possible for 360 games as every userland library is static linked and LTCG is enabled by default (maybe required for MS cert?) for release builds. Nearly everything is inlined and impossible to replace with calls to matching windows APIs as a result. Xenia and rexdex both emulate the kernel at the syscall level and don't touch userland at all.

> Just going the extra mile and full system emulating pays massive dividends.

Maybe for security research and correctness purposes, it has little practical value for ps3/360 gen emulation and beyond.

Shekelphile··on Xbox360 –> Windows Executable Converter (2017)
This emulator isn't taking the 'CXBX approach'. CXBX does not recompile the binary and relies on common system/graphics api calls not being inlined and easily replaceable with windows equivalents, which absolutely doesn't exist in any 360 game binary for all the important things.
Shekelphile··on RPCS3 – Open Source Playstation 3 Emulator
100% lack of interest. There's been like 5 people total in the og xbox emu scene in the last 10 years, one of them didn't even do any actual work besides getting mad in reddit comments (jayfoxrox) and another put all his effort into working on an hle/binary translation emulator which by definition cannot work with half the library of games as xbox api and dx api calls are inlined in those games.
Shekelphile··on RPCS3 – Open Source Playstation 3 Emulator
I haven't looked at RPCS3's codebase in quite a few years at this point but when I last did there was still a bunch of x86 specific stuff that prevents it from being buildable for aarch, if it compiles and runs at all you will be stuck with having to use rosetta and moltenvk translation layers so performance is gonna suck.
Shekelphile··on What do you think of Threads, Meta’s new Twitter Alternative?
Twitter is dead. Anyone left on twitter that didn’t go to fedi will jump to threads now that a bunch of high profile accounts have. The only people left will be alt right musk fanatics and twitter will be relegated to being on par with gab/truth/parler etc.
Shekelphile··on I stopped buying new laptops (2020)
> Assuming Framework's thesis bears out, that their customers will actually upgrade their laptops piece by piece when given the opportunity to do so, rather than buy a whole new laptop, then it's a matter of increasing their market share, especially through corporate IT contracts.

You can't upgrade a framework laptop 'by piece', unless you mean swapping in more ram or a bigger/faster ssd. Not really any different from other mainstream laptop vendors in that regard. The CPU is soldered, so you can't upgrade within the CPU platform generation, there's no drop in replacement options for the screen except the IPS panel they ship with (so no high dpi options or OLED/microled, no high refresh rate option, etc), and only proprietary recessed USB-C dongles for changing ports. It's a joke product.

> When I used Apple laptops for software development, I only got around three years out of them before they felt uncomfortably sluggish

Sounds like your usecase calls for a desktop system then, I know plenty of people still using 2013-2015 retina macbook pros for daily development work and they do just fine. There wasn't much performance improvement after those years until the apple silicon transition, you could get 6 and 8 core coffee lake CPUs on the last year of the intel macbook pros but they were essentially unusable for laptop usecases since they had to aggressively thermal throttle and nuked battery life as a result (something that is an even worse problem now with Intel and AMD both juicing core count and clock speeds to chase benchmark wins rather than improving perf per watt and overall system usability).

← PreviousPage 6 of 8Next →