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aldonius

177 karma · joined May 7, 2020

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aldonius··on Show HN: Navigator Mode (Like Claude Code) for Aider
Presently, just Anthropic and DeepSeek.

https://aider.chat/docs/usage/caching.html

aldonius··on Apple M3 Ultra
I think betting on low-power NPU hardware wasn't necessarily wrong - if you're Apple you're trying to optimise performance/watt across the system as a whole. So in a context where you're shipping first-party bespoke on-device ML features it can make sense to have a modestly sized dedicated accelerator.

I'd say the biggest problem with the NPU is that you can only use it from Core ML. Even MLX can't access it it!

As you say the big world-changing LLMs are scaling up, not down. At the same time (at least so far) LLM usage is intermittent - we want to consume thousands of tokens in seconds, but a couple of times a minute. That's a client-server timesharing model for as long as the compute and memory demand can't fit on a laptop.

aldonius··on Things I've learned about building CLI tools in Python
previous discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38008987
aldonius··on New York claims a small victory in 'forever war on rats'
Australian checking in. Our wheelie bin lids cark it every decade or two, but I'd attribute that to sun exposure degrading them. The mechanical impact is just what finishes the job.
aldonius··on Regulations Enabling 6 GHz Wi-Fi
I think on net it works out - surely the average number of access points per network is less than 1.1
aldonius··on The semver trick (2019)
I see it not so much as getting the compiler to ignore semver but rather giving it more granular information about the nature of the changes.

As I understand it:

- Anything which is breaking-changed in any way for 0.3.0 (e.g. in the article a type change from i32 to u32) is the exact same code in 0.2.1 as it was in 0.2.0.

- Anything which stays the same for 0.3.0 is re-exported in 0.2.1 (from 0.3.0). The code is replaced with a `pub use ...;`

- Anything which moves around in the submodule hierarchy (but is otherwise unchanged) in 0.3.0 is re-exported in 0.2.1, from where it used to be.

If crate Baz depends on something in Foo 0.2.x which changes in Foo 0.3.0, then when (if!) Baz updates to Foo 0.3.0 it will need to deal with that. But Baz can upgrade to Foo 0.2.1 without concern, and any types unchanged in Foo 0.3.0 will be interoperable.

aldonius··on Siyuan: Privacy-first, self-hosted personal knowledge management software
The Ardour DAW is kinda like this. Downloads of prebuilt images through the website are paid, but you can download and build yourself from source. (Most Linux users probably have free access via distro package manager anyway.)
aldonius··on AmpereOne: Cores Are the New MHz
> I'm also happy to see systems like this that run without exotic water cooling and 240V power.

Always funny to see 240V power described as exotic (or at least exotic-adjacent). It's the standard across practically the entire world except North and Central America!

aldonius··on Elderly dementia patients are unwittingly fueling political campaigns
Most of the issue with PR is when your assembly has to select an executive.

But the US has a very powerful executive (the President) which sidesteps the problem. The US House of Reps could be multi party PR without any big issues (well, they might need to switch to a "last year's budget is this year's budge unless we vote to change it" model).

aldonius··on Zero-latency SQLite storage in every Durable Object
Aren't the HFT boxes usually stock exchange colocations? Each trader gets a rack (or multiple racks depending on size) in the exchange's datacenter, every rack has the same cable length to the switch, etc.
aldonius··on Just use Postgres
> Also column type is not strict and you can write strings into integer column.

FYI, as of late 2021, you can opt into strictness.

https://sqlite.org/stricttables.html

aldonius··on Is a 'slow' swimming pool impeding world records?
> Brisbane 2032

The current plan is a temporary pool in a new inner-city arena (15k seats) for the major swimming events, with diving, artistic swim and water polo prelims at an existing (to be refurbished) sports centre.

aldonius··on Taking command of the Context Menu in macOS
msephton's sibling comment notes that Pages files are a ZIP bundle. (I just tested this, and that's the case - actually they're not even compressed, just stored.)

Inside this zip file there's a number of things:

- three preview JPGs at varying sizes (roughly 50px, 250px, 1000px) - a Metadata folder with a couple of plists and a UUID file - an Index folder which contains a bunch of .iwa files which appear to be some Apple iWork suite specific thing. I'm not sure if there's a real file format there or if they all have a different format keyed on the file name. If you run `strings` on one of them you could plausibly recover document text.

aldonius··on IRS collects milestone $1B in back taxes from high-wealth taxpayers
Also there is more than one government (and currency). And sometimes people would like to trade goods and services internationally...
aldonius··on Joe Biden stands down as Democratic candidate
By more-or-less eliminating spoiler effect RCV actually benefits major and minor party candidates (and of course, voters!).

For majors the benefit is clear: you don't get spoiled.

For minors, you don't have to overcome the barrier of being a spoiler if the race looks remotely close.

And of course voters are not disadvantaged just for having two acceptable choices rather than one.

aldonius··on Some Florida cities are living off red light cameras
If places are shortening the yellow light to juice camera revenue then yes, that's bad.

America is the land of the lawsuit right? Surely someone - or the state legislature - could take action on safety grounds alone to ensure a reasonable minimum duration (adjusted for the speed limit) for a yellow light.

aldonius··on Some Florida cities are living off red light cameras
Red light cameras are good. Minimal bias (fn) compared to an all-too-human police officer.

And it's not like speed traps, where the posted limits are well below the design speed of the road. A red light is a red light!

fn: We can argue the toss around discriminatory placement of cameras e.g. there's probably more of them in neighbourhoods with certain demographics, but there's a simple solution here: every signalised intersection getting a camera, or at least the top half by traffic volume.

aldonius··on macOS Sequoia Preview
Yeah I do this too, I can't imagine not having different wallpapers. But when I'm pinning apps to desktops via the Dock it'd be nice to have the names then.
aldonius··on macOS Sequoia Preview
If you can _rename_ desktops though, I've never seen how.

e.g. in Mission Control right now I have "Desktop 1", "Desktop 2", and full-screened iTerm2 on my external monitor, plus "Desktop 3" and about 6 other fullscreen apps on my laptop.

I have somewhat semantic meaning for what each of those three numbered desktops are, but it'd be nice to _name_ them.

aldonius··on Bollards: Why and What
oh yeah, that's it!
aldonius··on Bollards: Why and What
If your roadway is designed so that the average driver only feels comfortable going about 30 km/h / 20 mph, you don't really need to have separate cycle lanes because bikes can match car speed.
aldonius··on Bollards: Why and What
> floppy bollards

The technical term near me seems to be something like "delineator posts" (or just "orange posts" after the colouring) and I think that's pretty reasonable. As you say, they don't provide any protection against a car or truck, but they do signal where not to be a bit better.

aldonius··on US prepares to exempt AUKUS nations from ITAR
As an Australian - fuck me sideways, that was a shitshow on every possible level (and it's barely begun)
aldonius··on Terraform makes carbon neutral natural gas
That's great, but how do I take one of these underground caverns around with me? :P

More seriously, I'm sure hydrogen will make a valuable contribution to the stationary grid-level energy storage situation. I'm not convinced about other applications.

aldonius··on Postgres is eating the database world
The query hints thing is actually quite useful in an educational context.

There's DB internals/performance course which I'm a TA for and we lean heavily on being able to force Oracle's rule-based or cost-based optimisers --- because then we can get the students to analyse and compare the plans.

aldonius··on EFF to Ninth Circuit: No Software Exception to Traditional Copyright Limits
> Anyway, do we know what Oracle was actually suing Rimini for?

Making money in the Oracle ecosystem without Oracle getting a cut, presumably :)

aldonius··on Simpson's paradox
I think it could be consistent.

In Australia we usually think about undergrad competitiveness in terms of the minimum ATAR rank of last years' admissions, right?

But you could also think about competitiveness in terms of admission fraction.

And I think those two metrics can be consistent if a very popular degree has a disproportionately low fraction of high-ATAR applications.

aldonius··on Diseconomies of scale in fraud, spam, support, and moderation
Makes sense to me.

The admins of the groups are responsible for managing the discussion in groups including frontline anti-spam against the porn bots and the shoe bots and whatever. So it's semi-distributed moderation. (Assuming group admins care, but if they don't then users just abandon the group.)

Compared to e.g. Reddit, FB groups aren't as world readable or writable as subreddits are so you don't really get that classic inter-subreddit drama.

Where global moderation is still needed from FB's perspective is when group activities start spilling outside of that group, e.g. because they're coordinating extremist activity.

This probably won't be the result of user reports though. For privacy and scalability that implies an automated system which (hopefully reliably but only rarely) flags posts to a human working for FB.

aldonius··on Cloudflare defeats patent troll Sable at trial
alternative: anyone is able to make it public domain for that price
aldonius··on Nations don't get rich by plundering other nations
IIRC, the early stage US didn't respect European IP either...
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