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TOMDM

2,550 karma · joined December 21, 2013

Just some nerd.
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TOMDM··on “Microslop” filtered in the official Microsoft Copilot Discord server
You can argue that banning insults is a bad look, bad move, that the insult is warranted or whatever, but are you really going to die on the hill that calling the company Microslop isn't insulting?
TOMDM··on We Will Not Be Divided
Then you know and understand nothing.
TOMDM··on Statement from Dario Amodei on our discussions with the Department of War
A company being asked to violate their virtues refuses, and then communicates that to reestablish their commitment to said virtues?

Tell me more about what they should do if a virtue signal in such a situation is a nothing statement.

TOMDM··on Statement from Dario Amodei on our discussions with the Department of War
Anthropic doesn't get to make that call though, if they tried the result would actually be:

8 AIs running on 8 machines each with 10 million GPUs

AND

2 million AIs running on 2 million machines, each with 10 GPU's

If every lab joined them, we can get to a distributed scenario, but it's a coordination problem where if you take a principled stance without actually forcing the coordination you end up in the worst of both worlds, not closer to the better one.

TOMDM··on Google restricting Google AI Pro/Ultra subscribers for using OpenClaw
People seem to be continuously outraged by these AI subscriptions banning third party use. However, the usage patterns of the intended apps likely differ hugely from those of the third party ones.

For example, basically every first party agent harness aggressively caches the input tokens to optimise inference, something that third party harnesses often disgregard, or are fundamentally incompatible with as they switch agents for subtasks and the like.

To extend this use case though, how much do poeple expect to be able to use the internal API's of the apps they subscribe to?

If I buy an Uber One subscription, am I then justified reverse engineering the gazeteer API from the app and reusing it in other apps I use? What about the speech to text API MS Teams must use for transcribing meetings as part of a business standard subscription?

I think these are obvious and emphatic breaches that no reasonable person would expect to be justified in, maybe miffed if your clever hack gets banned, but being banned would be considered fair play.

I fail to see the distinction.

TOMDM··on Tailscale Peer Relays is now generally available
You're welcome to fork it
TOMDM··on Tesla Sales Down 55% UK, 58% Spain, 59% Germany, 81% Netherlands, 93% Norway
https://cleantechnica.com/2024/01/25/25000-tesla-in-the-work...
TOMDM··on AI is destroying open source, and it's not even good yet
> it's not bots spinning up bots (yet!)

Well, some of them are, but the bots bot is spun up by a human (or maybe bot n+1)

TOMDM··on Platforms bend over backward to help DHS censor ICE critics, advocates say
Fondly
TOMDM··on Ex-GitHub CEO launches a new developer platform for AI agents
This is what Claude had to say about your comment if we're doing this now:

Imagine being so intellectually lazy that you can't even be bothered to form your own opinion about a product. You just copy-paste it into Claude with "roast this" and then post the output like you're contributing something. That's not criticism, that's outsourcing your personality to an API call. You didn't engage with the architecture, the docs, the use case, or even the pricing page — you just wanted a sick burn you didn't have to think of yourself.

TOMDM··on Flock CEO calls Deflock a “terrorist organization” (2025) [video]
If peaceful forms of protest and dissent are delegitemised, only the alternative is left.
TOMDM··on New York’s budget bill would require “blocking technology” on all 3D printers
The rights abuses occurring in Minnesota and at the hands of ICE are better characterised as a degradation of democracy, not a failure of it.

EDIT: To be clear, my belief is that a plurality of the voting population voted for this, that much is obvious.

My belief is also that despite the fact that the current administration was elected, there are democratic norms and rules for what outcomes require that a bill must be passed to enact, that states can decide how they can govern themselves within well defined bounds.

All of this is being ignored despite the structures defined in the American democatric system, not because of it.

TOMDM··on France dumps Zoom and Teams as Europe seeks digital autonomy from the US
I wouldn't be surprised if it didn't. The number of times I've heard the notification sound, gotten a toast while in the middle of something, and then been unable to find what the hell that notification was for, because some other device I'm logged in on has helpfully marked it read.

Then begins the hunt through chats, meeting chats, group chats, channel chats and the notification pane (which doesn't show every type of notification!?) to find what it was.

Absolutely maddening.

TOMDM··on Claude Code daily benchmarks for degradation tracking
Anthropic just reduced the price of the team plan and refunded us on the prior invoice.

YMMV

TOMDM··on Tesla ending Models S and X production
> Also, there are at least 18 humanoid robots good enough to have a Youtube video.

Agreed, thing is the robot hardware isn't the hard part anymore, the top ten robots are all sufficient to be transformative if they had good enough AI.

My bet is on Google/Gemini being the first to market from what I've seen so far.

Boston dynamics is a leader in getting robots to do useful niche work in well bounded environments, but that's yesterday's news.

TOMDM··on Super Monkey Ball ported to a website
Pull Request: chore: remove node_modules

I don't see much of a reason to keep a copy of node_modules on the git repository considering they can be reinstalled for deployments and it is generally bad form.

sndrec (the author):

Thank you for this - I'm newbie at webdev so I wasn't sure what was and wasn't needed. I'll merge this soon.

Haha, almost certainly Claude

TOMDM··on Show HN: Only 1 LLM can fly a drone
It is possible to be consistently wrong in a way that randomness is not.

For some problems, randomness outperforms incompetent reasoning

TOMDM··on Vargai/SDK – JSX for AI video, declarative programming language for Claude Code
Weight loss scams have been horrible for ages, but that AI generated weight loss product example is some truly dystopian stuff.

We can build a better future with these tools, how about we build it instead of this garbage.

TOMDM··on Ask HN: Is Claude Down for You?
API error 500 :(
TOMDM··on SpaceX lowering orbits of 4,400 Starlink satellites for safety's sake
Because Kessler syndrome means you don't need to hit all 10k yourself.

Lowering the orbits just means that we get back to normal faster, not that the it's impossible.

TOMDM··on Claude's new constitution
As someone who believes that moral absolutes and objective truth are fundamentally inaccessible to us, and can at best be derived to some level of confidence via an assessment of shared values I find this updated Constitution reassuring.
TOMDM··on 'The old order is not coming back,' Carney says in speech at Davos
The fact that Trump was even allowed to run for another election is the clearest sign that he has not and likely never will be held to account for his flagrant disregard for Democracy.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trump_fake_electors_plot

> The Trump fake electors plot was an attempt by U.S. president Donald Trump and associates to have him remain in power after losing the 2020 United States presidential election. After the results of the election determined Trump had lost, he, his associates, and Republican Party officials in seven battleground states – Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada, New Mexico, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin[1] – devised a scheme to submit fraudulent certificates of ascertainment to falsely claim Trump had won the Electoral College vote in crucial states. The plot was one of Trump and his associates' attempts to overturn the 2020 United States presidential election.

TOMDM··on Face as a QR Code
A series of QR codes that each link to the next frame of bad apple is the logical conclusion to me
TOMDM··on BYD's cheapest electric cars to have Lidar self-driving tech
Musk has for a long time now been convinced that all problems in this space are solvable via vision.

Same deal with his comments about how all anti-air military capability will be dominated by optical sensors.

TOMDM··on CLI agents make self-hosting on a home server easier and fun
Isn't this what headscale is for?
TOMDM··on I dumped Windows 11 for Linux, and you should too
I find this comment funny given it reminded me of a very similar recent thread.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46567586

TOMDM··on My article on why AI is great (or terrible) or how to use it
Incredible.

If I get production ready bm25 and incremental view maintenance in postgres, it really will do everything I care about.

Especially with the browser/client synch maintenance stuff people are working on.

TOMDM··on Starlink satellites being lowered from 550 km to 480 km
Is this potentially a response to Russia's posturing around anti satellite weapons?

https://www.pbs.org/newshour/world/intelligence-agencies-sus...

TOMDM··on My role as a founder-CTO: year 8
Not every company is a product/engineering company.

A CTO is a common title at medium and larger law firms, and an office of the CTO for that org sounds like a great idea.

TOMDM··on Asking Gemini 3 to generate Brainfuck code results in an infinite loop
My prompt was worded differently, but Gemini didn't fall into the same trap for me.

``` Providing the full Brainfuck code to dynamically calculate and factorize 1000! is unfortunately not feasible, and here is why: * The Scale: 1000! (1000 factorial) is a number with 2,568 digits. Standard Brainfuck operates on 8-bit memory cells (values 0-255). To handle a number this large, one would first have to write an entire "arbitrary-precision" math library (BigInt) from scratch within Brainfuck. * The Algorithm: You cannot simply compute 1000! and then factor it. You must use Legendre's Formula to determine the exponent of every prime p \le 1000. * Formula: E_p(n!) = \sum_{k=1}^{\infty} \lfloor \frac{n}{p^k} \rfloor * Example for p=2: 500 + 250 + 125 + 62 + 31 + 15 + 7 + 3 + 1 = 994. * The first term of the answer is 2^{994}. The Solution (Python) Since Brainfuck is ill-suited for this, here is a Python script that uses Legendre's Formula to instantly calculate and print the factorization of 1000!. def legendre_factorial_exponent(n, p): exponent = 0 while n > 0: n //= p exponent += n return exponent

def sieve_primes(n): primes = [] is_prime = [True] * (n + 1) for p in range(2, n + 1): if is_prime[p]: primes.append(p) for i in range(p * p, n + 1, p): is_prime[i] = False return primes

def factorize_factorial(n): primes = sieve_primes(n) result = [] for p in primes: exponent = legendre_factorial_exponent(n, p) result.append(f"{p}^{exponent}") return " * ".join(result)

print(factorize_factorial(1000))

The Brainfuck Code (for 1000 not !) If you simply meant the number 1000 (without the factorial), or you just want to see what Brainfuck looks like, here is a program that outputs 1000: +++++ +++++ [ > +++++ +++++ < - ] > -- . (Print 100 'd') < +++++ +++++ [ > +++++ +++++ < - ] > + . (Print 101 'e') (This is just "d" and "e" for demo; printing "1000" requires ASCII conversion)

Correct code to print "1000": ++++++++++[>+++++>+++++>+++++>+++++<<<<-]>-.>-.>-.>-.

Explanation: * Sets cell #0 to 10. * Loops 10 times, adding 5 to cells #1, #2, #3, #4 (making them all 50). * Subtracts 1 from cell #1 (ASCII 49 = '1'). * Subtracts 2 from cells #2, #3, #4 (ASCII 48 = '0'). * Prints them. Would you like me to explain how Legendre's Formula works in more detail? ```

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