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addled

290 karma · joined November 27, 2015

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addled··on Anthropic Is Building a Predictive Surveillance System to Monitor Activists
I think I missed this one (or lost in the flood of news). Got a link?

All I can find now is him pushing conspiracy theories about it.

Him actually celebrating would be the sort of thing that might convince some MAGA leaning folks I know to change their mind.

addled··on D. Trump Jr. and Eric Trump Running Felony Fraud Scheme Prosecutable in New York
“…this article does not rely on Sun as a sympathetic victim.”

Right. The article is saying the basic argument stands whether you like Sun or not.

addled··on To Protect and Swerve: NYPD Cop Has 547 Speeding Tickets
Does the person have children? If so then the law benefits more than just the driver, even if they are the only one on the road.

We already have a precedent of compelling parents to pay child-support.

I don’t know if I’m really advocating for a nanny state, but last month I went to the funeral of a friend that was driving without a seatbelt and was alone on the road. Now his pregnant wife has to raise their child alone.

I guess what I’m trying to say is: Wear a seatbelt.

You may not have any concern for your own safety, but there’s probably somebody who does.

addled··on AI Added 'Basically Zero' to US Economic Growth Last Year, Goldman Sachs Says
Agreed. I noticed myself having a harder time stopping at the end of the day since I started using AI tools in earnest.

I naturally have a hard time stopping when almost done with something, but with AI everything feels "close" to a big breakthrough.

Just one more turn... Until suddenly it's way later than I thought and hardly have time to interact with my family.

addled··on The Feynman Lectures on Physics (1961-1964)
I remembered enjoying the book, so having not read it in a long time, I tried sharing Surely You're Joking with my kids at bedtime.

That chapter wasn’t the only thing I ended up skipping or heavily editing.

* Picking a room at Los Alamos with a window facing the women’s housing, but being disappointed that a tree or something blocked his view. (Wasn’t he also married at this point?)

* Starting a new Uni faculty position and hanging out at student dances, dismayed that girls would stop chatting & dancing with him when they learned he was a prof and not a fellow student.

* Hanging out at strip clubs to practice his drawing skills.

* Considering a textbook sales rep’s offer to help him find “trouble” in Vegas.

So maybe that one chapter turns around some at the end, but it’s not the only cringe-worthy moment in the book, and I can see why some people may have an overall negative opinion.

If I were going to do this with my kids now that they are teens, I wouldn’t filter as much and use the more questionable events as points of discussion.

addled··on Reverse-Engineering Raiders of the Lost Ark for the Atari 2600
When I was six, a cousin about to leave for college gave me his 2600, my first console.

With it came not one, but two (!) copies of E.T. So I had a backup in case I accidentally dropped one in a pit or sinkhole…

addled··on The Netflix Simian Army (2011)
Anyone have experience chaos testing Postgres?

I was reading this the other day looking for ideas on how to test query retries in our app. I suppose we could go at it from the network side by introducing latency and such.

However, it’d be great if there also was a proxy or something that could inject pg error codes.

addled··on WikiFlix: Full Movies Hosted on Wikimedia Commons
I feel like you should check out https://youtu.be/5GFW-eEWXlc?si=w3KTUkIprSeBYH3f

Enjoy.

addled··on Don't tug on that, you never know what it might be attached to (2016)
I mean, the title is a quote from Buckaroo Banzai. Lack of context is part of the fun!
addled··on Rotatum of Light
Nice! I worked on something similar as an undergrad project years ago, setting up beams with different orbital angular momentum characteristics. Was a lot fun working in the lab. Sadly I didn’t have the focus/grit to finish writing a paper (sorry Dr. Singh). Side note, this was in 2007 and the folks in our optics lab would check the location of beams by grabbing from the stacks of ancient punchcards lying around and waving them next to the apparatus.

This paper has a pretty similar setup, but adds a spatial light modulator (like a DLP projector that can control phase as well as brightness).

What is wild to me is that the researchers here are able to create a beam where the angular moment changes as you move away.

Plus the really cool spiral patterns.

addled··on Show HN: Offline SOS signaling+recovery app for disasters/wars
Might be rough on battery life, but perhaps pulsing an SOS with the flashlight?
addled··on Functional Tests as a Tree of Continuations (2010)
An approach we've done is to use Postgres' "create database foo2 template foo1" syntax to essentially snapshot the db under test at various points and use those to rollback as needed.
addled··on US bill proposes jail time for people who download DeepSeek
Ah, nevermind, just saxophones:

> ... tenor processing unit...

addled··on US Bill Proposes Jail Time for People Who Download DeepSeek
Am I reading the bill text wrong or is it really so general it would also apply to devices assembled in China that can perform AI operations?

Seems like there'd be pushback from Apple, MS, etc on that one.

addled··on How shut-down Bay Area tech companies ditch their fancy gear
Yeah, I’ve been waiting for bidding to open on https://hibid.com/lot/214229120/comino-gando-rm-long-fully-l... just see what it gets up to. (5955wx + 4x RTX 4090’s)
addled··on Fluid Simulation Pendant
What about a fluorescent dye with one (or few) UV LEDs on the edge facing inward to illuminate it?

Maybe not “better” than OP’s design, but could be interesting in its own way.

addled··on Database mocks are not worth it
If your table setup process starts to get slow like ours, checkout psql TEMPLATE (https://www.postgresql.org/docs/current/manage-ag-templatedb...). Do the setup once to a db with known name, then use it as the template when creating the db for each test.
addled··on 4100 / 4200 Series Graphic Terminals (a.k.a. Unicorn)
I snagged one of those keyboards at an auction. Haven't been able to get it to work with a modern PC. Hard to find much info on this line of computers.
addled··on Why did clothing become boring?
> Don't get me started on grown-azz men wearing bead or string bracelets.

Unless it was made by their young daughter/granddaughter, it which case it is the mightiest of talismans.

addled··on U.S. women are outpacing men in college completion in every major group
It's only around 6000 students, but Missouri S&T (a mostly engineering and mining school) is still like 75% male.
addled··on The Impact of Jungle Music in 90s Video Game Development
Now I desperately want to see drum breaks made with brake drums.
addled··on DOSBox-X: Enhanced Fork of DOSBox for Expanded DOS and Retro PC Support
One of my crowning achievements(?) was using DOSbox for actual work purposes.

In 2010-14 I worked at large retailer that still did almost half their development in RPG running on IBM iSeries.

Part of onboarding for new devs was this series of training software modules that went over the fundamentals of the RPG language. It was boring, but very thorough. It clearly had been purchased in the late 90s and kept in use since not much had really changed.

I think it was with Windows 8 that it finally stopped working. My supervisor, in charge of intern program, started stressing after none of the built-in compatibility options worked.

I immediately thought of DOSbox, and sure enough, it worked like a charm. For the next couple years I was there, one of the first things all new devs did was install DOSbox and it gave me a smile every time.

addled··on Cox slows Internet speeds in entire neighborhoods to punish any heavy users (2020)
An additional option to consider is to file a complaint with the Better Business Bureau.

I had an issue with my wireless carrier repeatedly refusing to issue credit for a months-long ongoing problem on their end.

Within 2 days in filing a BBB complaint, I had a rep from the company asking how much I thought seemed fair and if I wanted a bill credit or a check.

addled··on CrowdStrike ex-employees: 'Quality control was not part of our process'
Sure, and even if the surgery happened on time, they still might have had a stroke once they got home and had the same outcome.

But as other posts on HN have discussed, anecdotes, especially your own, hit differently.

It makes me thankful the software I work on isn't involved in life and death situations... But then again, it causes me to better consider the things my work could be responsible for (banking). Rushed work that causes a loan application to fail or transaction to be held unnecessarily shouldn't kill someone outright, but there can be real consequences that affect real people just like Rita.

addled··on CrowdStrike ex-employees: 'Quality control was not part of our process'
Yesterday morning I learned that someone I was acquainted with had just passed away and the funeral is scheduled for next week.

They recently had a stroke at home just days after spending over a month in the hospital.

Then I remembered that they were originally supposed to be getting an important surgery, but it was delayed because of the CrowdStrike outage. It took weeks for the stars to align again and the surgery to happen.

It makes me wonder what the outcome would have been if they had gotten the surgery done that day, and not spent those extra weeks in the hospital with their condition and stressing about their future?

addled··on Engine Sound Simulator
On the one hand, yes!

But more realistically, think of the headache of trying to keep your engine's Hampsterdance in sync with the Hampsterdance blaring from your car's stereo, (as it naturally would be).

Not to mention all the other excellent tracks on https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hampsterdance:_The_Album

addled··on The regenerative urban garden I: No-till gardening
I know a lot of people have praised cardboard and I've used it too, but after sniffing some particularly smudged boxes from an Amazon order, I'm pretty hesitant now.

I'm less nervous about things like pizza boxes (if not too greasy). Even if there are contaminants, they are already in my food.

addled··on Electing the Doge of Venice: analysis of a 13th Century protocol [pdf] (2007)
But did it have someone's face on it? Was it ever a Doge's?
addled··on Making a Flute-Controlled Mouse
How long until someone speed runs Ocarina of Time on an ocarina?
addled··on Monowheels: Vehicles with Insufficient Wheels
Vehicles Within Sufficient Wheels?
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