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VyseofArcadia

5,106 karma · joined July 6, 2011

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VyseofArcadia··on Gravity seems holographic. What does that mean for reality?
Mathematician, not physicist, but it seems reasonable to me that you could encode a sufficiently constrained 3D space on a 2D boundary. And if you have such an encoding, it also doesn't seem insane that some things might be more easily modeled on the 2D boundary than the 3D space.

If you can convert back and forth between a 2D representation and a 3D representation, and different phenomena are more easily modeled in each, does it matter which is "real"? Unless of course you can come up with a specific prediction and experiment to test it.

VyseofArcadia··on OpenAI bots knew about the RubyGems caching vulnerability
The DMCA is a bit overly broad to be considered just a copyright law. For example, just breaking encryption on a DVD is technically illegal regardless of whether you then go on to do something otherwise illegal (make and sell bootlegs) or perfectly legal (make a space-shifted backup copy on your hard drive).

IIRC this was an intentional handout to media companies who were angry that ripping CDs is perfectly legal. They had to find a way to make doing the same with DVDs illegal.

VyseofArcadia··on OpenAI bots knew about the RubyGems caching vulnerability
That may be true by the text of the law but there are plenty of individuals who have been sued or charged with crimes for accidental hacking.

https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2016/05/armed...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Weev#AT&T_data_breach

https://cisomag.com/drone-maker-dji-cybersecurity-expert-emb...

So what's the deal with these?

VyseofArcadia··on OpenAI bots knew about the RubyGems caching vulnerability
It would seem to me that the difference between the corporate world and organized crime is that a corporation can get away with, "the responsibility is too diffuse" but the mafia at least has to go to the trouble of finding a fall guy.
VyseofArcadia··on OpenAI bots knew about the RubyGems caching vulnerability
Do you have to charge an individual? Can you not charge the corporate "person" that is OpenAI?

Sorry if it is a stupid question, as mentioned above I am legally naïve.

VyseofArcadia··on OpenAI bots knew about the RubyGems caching vulnerability
How does this work, legally? I think that RubyGems could file a civil suit against OpenAI, but for a naïve non-lawyer reading this seems like a pretty clear cut criminal violation of the computer fraud and abuse act.
VyseofArcadia··on Eating Fruit Skins
Yes, British TV chef Nigella Lawson cooks with them. https://youtu.be/kOF0Id92XRY?is=YOb6iPmPaMBeHLkJ
VyseofArcadia··on Hot coffee could cause oesophageal cancer
I thought this was well known.

Anecdata, but my wife's grandmother famously liked her coffee pretty much scalding, and we did indeed lose her to esophageal cancer.

VyseofArcadia··on How An AI math breakthrough ignited a controversy
Regardless of the end result, OpenAI's behavior would be a career-ending ethics scandal for a human mathematician. This bit alone would be a career-ender.

> According to Buckmaster, OpenAI offered to give him sole authorship on the Navier-Stokes solution—but only if Alpöge’s name was removed from the work and if the write-up would acknowledge the problem had been resolved by an internal OpenAI model.

I wonder if an appropriate response from the mathematical community would be a good old-fashioned shunning. Mathematicians are allowed to use OpenAI's tools as much as they want, but no one with any current or prior OpenAI affiliation gets published in a reputable journal, ever.

VyseofArcadia··on Meet the Ig Nobel Prize Winners
This one feels like it deserves more than just an Ig Nobel.
VyseofArcadia··on New type of dice guarantees no tie when deciding who goes first
Oh, Eric is a friend of mine. I've got a set of five non-uniform go first dice that he 3D printed for me.

Dude runs a mean D&D campaign too. And his Lego mural and sculpture portfolio are something to behold: http://www.ericharshbarger.org/lego/portfolio.html

VyseofArcadia··on Fairphone is now officially available in the United States
Fairphone products have been available in the US officially for ages. This is just the ability to purchase direct from Fairphone.

I bought a Fairphone 4 from Murena years ago (and am still using it), and I bought a pair of Fairbuds XL just in April from the same.

VyseofArcadia··on Online clinics and influencers are promoting Cialis as a longevity drug
Well they extended something at least.
VyseofArcadia··on The AI Billboards Are Killing SF
I think we should ban all billboards. We deserve as a species to have spaces where we are not being advertised to.
VyseofArcadia··on Two Paths to Memory Safety: CHERI and OMA
Could we also consider just not connecting critical systems to the internet at large? No reason, for example, for the Jaguar assembly line to depend on an internet connection.
VyseofArcadia··on Show HN: Bhvr, a Bun and Hono and Vite and React Starter
I mean, I also don't know Bun and Vite. I've at least seen React. You should probably just explain the whole stack.
VyseofArcadia··on A $20k American-made electric pickup with no paint, no stereo, no screen
Answer's in the article. There is a screen behind the wheel for the speedometer, odometer, etc. The backup cam displays there.
VyseofArcadia··on A $20k American-made electric pickup with no paint, no stereo, no screen
This is amazing. I hope it succeeds. If I had any use for a truck I'd be lining up to buy one. They make one in a compact sedan or hatchback form factor and I am in. Heck, even better a subcompact.
VyseofArcadia··on Microsoft subtracts C/C++ extension from VS Code forks
A summary:

> Embrace

Yay, MS loves open source!

> Extend

Wow, VS Code is so useful!

> Extinguish

shocked Pikachu meme

VyseofArcadia··on Avoiding Skill Atrophy in the Age of AI
That's optimistic. Sci-fi has taught us that way worse forms of AI are possible.
VyseofArcadia··on GCC 15.1
I feel like once a language is standardized (or reaches 1.0), that's it. You're done. No more changes. You wanna make improvements? Try out some new ideas? Fine, do that in a new language.

I can deal with the footguns if they aren't cheekily mutating over the years. I feel like in C++ especially we barely have the time to come to terms with the unintended consequences of the previous language revision before the next one drops a whole new load of them on us.

VyseofArcadia··on Microsoft subtracts C/C++ extension from VS Code forks
There's a special place in hell for orgs that do this. Google has been doing the same thing with Android.

IIRC Apple at least has always been fairly clear and consistent with what bits of its software are open and what bits aren't. To my knowledge they haven't been breaking off chunks of Darwin and closing them. (Although if I'm wrong do correct me.)

VyseofArcadia··on SerenityOS is a love letter to '90s user interfaces
Another roughly contemporary point of comparison, Haiku OS: https://www.haiku-os.org/slideshows/haiku-1/
VyseofArcadia··on Multipaint: Draw pictures with color limitations of 8-bit and 16-bit platforms
I wonder, does it just let you draw pictures based on the as-advertised color and resolution limitations, or does it take into account clever programming tricks that can increase the color count (with some limitations)?
VyseofArcadia··on The Subjective Charms of Objective-C
Having worked professionally with both C++ and Objective-C[0], I greatly prefer the latter. I'm not in love with either of them, but Objective-C feels so clean and well-thought out compared to the insanity of C++.

That's ok, C++23 is going to add another group of features that will be half-adopted at best in legacy codebases that will totally fix everything this time for real.

[0] in the same codebase via the unholy chimera that is Objective-C++

VyseofArcadia··on Four Years of Jai (2024)
> Also a 19,000 line C++ program(this is tiny) does not take 45 minutes unless something is seriously broken

Agreed, 45 minutes is insane. In my experience, and this does depend on a lot of variables, 1 million lines of C++ ends up taking about 20 minutes. If we assume this scales linearly (I don't think it does, but let's imagine), 19k lines should take about 20 seconds. Maybe a little more with overhead, or a little less because of less burden on the linker.

There's a lot of assumptions in that back-of-the-envelope math, but if they're in the right ballpark it does mean that Jai has an order of magnitude faster builds.

I'm sure the big win is having a legit module system instead of plaintext header #include

VyseofArcadia··on Four Years of Jai (2024)
> The net effect of this is that the software you’re running on your computer is effectively wiping out the last 10-20 years of hardware evolution; in some extreme cases, more like 30 years.

As an industry we need to worry about this more. I get that in business, if you can be less efficient in order to put out more features faster, your dps[0] is higher. But as both a programmer and an end user, I care deeply about efficiency. Bad enough when just one application is sucking up resources unnecessarily, but now it's nearly every application, up to and including the OS itself if you are lucky enough to be a Microsoft customer.

The hardware I have sitting on my desk is vastly more powerful that what I was rocking 10-20 years ago, but the user experience seems about the same. No new features have really revolutionized how I use the computer, so from my perspective all we have done is make everything slower in lockstep with hardware advances.

[0] dollars per second

VyseofArcadia··on Replacing CVE
I think end-users should always be empowered to be cavalier with their own cybersecurity. Organizations managing the data of others, however, should be held to a higher standard. If this means that an organization is using curl, they should have a PE responsible for auditing curl for security flaws.
VyseofArcadia··on Replacing CVE
I feel like requiring software "engineers" to be actual capital E Engineers would fix a lot of problems in our industry. You can't build even a small bridge without a PE, because what if a handful of people get hurt? But on the other hand your software that could cause harm to millions by leaking their private info, sure, whatever, some dork fresh out of college is good enough for that.

And in the current economic climate, even principled and diligent SEs might be knowingly putting out broken software because the bossman said the deadline is the end of the month, and if I object, he'll find someone who won't. But if SEs were PEs, they suddenly have standing, and indeed obligation, to push back on insecure software and practices.

While requiring SEs to be PEs would fix some problems, I'm sure it would also cause some new ones. But to me, a world where engineers have the teeth to push back against unreasonable or bad requirements sounds fairly utopian.

VyseofArcadia··on Nintendo Bled Atari Games to Death
It's not about visual quality so much as the complete inability of Atari to understand that people's taste in games had moved on. In 1986, Super Mario Bros was still hottest game in the world, over a million sold in the US alone. Platformers were in, big time. And the Atari 7800 launched with... Centipede.
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