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Sophistifunk

2,357 karma · joined April 29, 2013

Australian Hacker.
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Sophistifunk··on The Beam Engine
You might enjoy How to Make Evertything on YT.
Sophistifunk··on No-One Escapes the Permanent Underclass
Everybody is missing the point. Companies that dump all their white collar employees for AI will all disappear overnight. If there's nobody being employed by the company to do a thing, what value does the company provide? Customers will always have more information to ask an AI for the work than some manager who is serving a dozen customers but also has the company's interests ahead of those customers.
Sophistifunk··on I Love the Computer
Back then the whole system was designed to do stuff for us. Now, so much of it is designed to work against us. Monstrous towers of complexity for the sole purpose of stopping you getting a high definition output without copy protection, or download a permanent copy of a video you are watching, or learning how your video card works without a million dollars and an NDA. And there was so much less of it. There's huge swathes of unexecuted code just for rendering text backwards in case I wake up Arabic tomorrow, etc.
Sophistifunk··on Honda is killing its EVs
This isn't reporting, it's propaganda.
Sophistifunk··on Apple loses UK App Store monopoly case, penalty might near $2B
Thing is that's a question for the market to decide. Which is why we have anti-trust / anti-monopoly laws in the first place. We don't want the state setting "fair" prices for anything, it always backfires. We want them ensuring the market is free to set prices. Monopolies granted by the state (trademarks, copyright, patents) are specific and limited, and ideally we want monopolies that arise naturally to be similarly limited, or broken up if they are being weaponised against the public.
Sophistifunk··on Claude Memory
Claude is (in my limited experience so far) more useful after a bit of back and forth where you can explain to it what's going on in your codebase. Although I suspect if you have a lot of accurate comments in your code then it will be able to extract more of that information for itself.
Sophistifunk··on YouTube is a mysterious monopoly
The idea that what's needed is for these alternative platforms to switch to "free with ads" is amazingly short sighted and disheartening. Everything bad YouTube does is driven by this business model. Switching to it might make a few people rich at the top of these alternative platforms, but it won't make anything better for any user or creator.
Sophistifunk··on The History of Windows XP
Race cars have heaps of safety systems not present in road cars. They don't have ABS and traction control because they don't actually increase safety on track with a professional driver. SRS airbags also offer no additional safety when in a 6 point harness and wearing a helmet and neck brace.
Sophistifunk··on A Rust shaped hole
True, but I think the "low-level" complaint against Go in the article was just referring to all the stupid repetitive ceremony required for error handling, which Zig mostly skips over.
Sophistifunk··on Ex-Waymo engineers launch Bedrock Robotics to automate construction
The wasted time and money in construction comes entirely from two places: a small percentage of crooked builders (and their local council mates), and the bureaucracy that is trying to protect the citizens from same. Big brother puts in a lot of hoop-jumps standards and supposed checks and balances that end up creating massive delays and costs for the consumer, but the actual standards (while usually quite sensible) are easily sidestepped by the crooked builders, so the war continues, and the overhead constantly increases with the usual expansion-only government regulation ratchet.

None of these things are susceptible to "AI" and other such automation. We have had prefab construction for decades.

Sophistifunk··on A Rust shaped hole
I very much enjoy reading and writing TS code. What I don't enjoy is the npm ecosystem (and accompanying mindset), and what I can't stand is trying to configure the damn thing. I've been doing this since TSC was first released, and just the other day I wasted hours trying to make a simple ts-node command line program work with file-extension-free imports and no weird disagreements between the ts-node runner and the language server used by the editor.

And then gave up in disgust.

Look, I'm no genius, not by a long shot. But I am both competent and experienced. If I can't make these things work just by messing with it and googling around, it's too damned hard.

Sophistifunk··on A Rust shaped hole
Sounds like a Zig-shaped hole to me ;-)
Sophistifunk··on The time is right for a DOM templating API
When are we done adding everything into the browser API?
Sophistifunk··on Using an 8K TV as a Monitor
I'm much more interested in going the other direction, in order to get a TV without all the crapware.
Sophistifunk··on B-Trees and Database Indexes
It's very interesting to me that we have to keep telling people this, but it hasn't become part of the "hive folk knowledge" we all seem to develop. I think DB vendors have been sleeping on an opportunity to encourage better practices.
Sophistifunk··on NASA investigation finds Boeing hindering Americans' return to moon
Boeing haven't exactly been covering themselves with glory with their non-NASA work over the last decade or two, either. But I'd still go with "both" :)
Sophistifunk··on Strategy for EU Bootstrapping Hardware Startups: Don't Sell to Anyone in EU
An ARM computer running a BSD and x stack. What's interesting about it, that makes it a "flying car" as opposed to everybody else's 140 characters?
Sophistifunk··on How to Know When It's Time to Go
There's plenty of people who want to build that thing, and most of us have a good idea how it probably should be, at least at first. The problem isn't building it, it's funding it without selling out the user.
Sophistifunk··on ExectOS – brand new operating system which derives from NT architecture
That's pretty damned impressive.
Sophistifunk··on Why isn't anyone signing up?
Most image sharing is ephemeral. Nobody cares if the image is gone 3 weeks from now, or if some private equity firm destroys the host company entirely in a year. Nobody's going to go through the hoop jumps required to pay for such a service, even just constantly having to re-log-in if you don't use it too often.
Sophistifunk··on Mass timber is great, but it will not solve the housing shortage
I didn't mean you need the house to work on it, FWIW, but there are a lot of hobbies that will scratch that itch, and are impossible or make you a real dick if you live in an apartment complex. Sorry for not making that clear.
Sophistifunk··on Mass timber is great, but it will not solve the housing shortage
I am not an American.
Sophistifunk··on Mass timber is great, but it will not solve the housing shortage
This idea that the problem with western society is that we allow people to live in detached houses with yards instead of inner-city apartment buildings is bollocks. People need privacy, something to work on, freedom to move about, and agency over their environment to thrive psychologically. That's why prison is the opposite of this. "Something to work on" is partially being met by video games, and it's not going well for us. The rest are much harder to fake out. It's possible to have those things in the city, but only if you are extremely wealthy. For everybody else, it's a life of being tolerated by the people who own and control your world, so long as you keep paying out most of what you earn, don't make any noise or waves, and aren't interested in doing anything that doesn't already have the required space or vendor already within your designated, walkable, or public transport-safe area.
Sophistifunk··on Alan Kay's talk at UCLA – Feb 2024 [video]
The audio gating on this makes it incredibly difficult to watch
Sophistifunk··on The SuperH-3, part 1: Introduction (2019)
Super Hot like they were named in Japan in the early 90s
Sophistifunk··on We Are Doomed: A pessimistic point of view of "modern software engineering"
A software guild wouldn't make software better, only much, much more expensive. Existing terrible practices would become enshrined in what is effectively law, and simply wrapped in additional bureaucracy that serves only to muddle and diffuse responsibility, rather than improve anything for the general public.
Sophistifunk··on Link's Awakening DX HD
If you like this, get the Switch version. It's wonderful, and will still exist 24 hours from now.
Sophistifunk··on The Stanford Prison Experiment was hugely influential. We learned it was a fraud (2018)
I'm still waiting for my anti-mosquito star wars system. Maybe the "AI" will help.
Sophistifunk··on Ask HN: What side projects landed you a job?
yawn I guess you're in the wrong place, innit?
Sophistifunk··on Ask HN: What side projects landed you a job?
Nothing I'd love to work on that sort of thing. The point wasn't that the kind of job is bad, but that even if you're working on stuff that shouldn't be secret, you still have to jump through all those hoops.

And imagine how many middle-managers they have who think a) they're the next Steve Jobs, and b) that what drove his success was being a dick to his workmates.

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