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allannienhuis

1,073 karma · joined May 12, 2013

self-employed full-stack developer specializing in web & mobile.

allan+hn@gardenbaysoftware.com

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allannienhuis··on Google's first Suncatcher orbital data center test launches October 1
I read your statement as just stating what they had done (or planned to do), not that you had calculated that as the correct/sufficient amount. If you read it that way it sounds like 'they provided X amount, why shouldn't that work?' which reads like a statement without evidence of why it would work.

Sorry for misinterpreting your statement.

allannienhuis··on Google's first Suncatcher orbital data center test launches October 1
What you said was just a statement, not something with evidence or reasoning for why it should work. How large of an area is required to dissipate that much heat in a vacuum at a constant rate?
allannienhuis··on Global warming will exceed 1.5-degree limit, UN says
Culture can be changed - we changed the attitude toward and prevalence of cigarette smoking in 2-3 generations, we could change other practices as well. Success doesn't need to mean 100% adoption - material changes in attitude toward meat consumption (luxury/celebration vs everyday) would make a material difference in the overall impact. And yes, some/many ranchers, butchers, etc would need to turn to some other industry for income. Solar farms should do pretty well on ranchland. Full disclosure - I'm NOT a vegetarian and love a nice steak. My doctor has recommended I incorporate more plant protein in my diet. But I'm not really trying to convince anyone that they should do the same. I'm mostly reacting to the opinion that it's impossible/silly. My 2 pack a day smoker dad thought the same thing back in the 1960s. By the time he was in his 70s, he was a firm non-smoker. Things can change.

Edit: I'm also not trying to equate eating meat with smoking - one is obviously more harmful to society than the other. I'm just thinking about the cultural change that happened. Culture is malleable. Laws aren't a great way to affect culture, but social pressure is really effective.

allannienhuis··on I trained a small transformer in 1.5hrs and it beats many LLMs
I've been on statins for years, and I don't remember anyone talking to me about rhabdo. To be fair the education I received about my medications was a firehose of information after a heart attack and major heart surgery, so perhaps it's possible I missed a few things.
allannienhuis··on Rakuten Kobo returns to U.S. retail as sales double
Sure, those are fair questions, but they've got nothing to do with the comment I was responding to, which was about the problems with reading (originally) epub books on a kindle.
allannienhuis··on Rakuten Kobo returns to U.S. retail as sales double
using https://www.amazon.com/sendtokindle it's trivial. I just bought the Greg Bear humble bundle (27 epub books), dragged all of them in one step, clicked the submit button and that was it. Books showed up on my paperwhite kindle in a moment. Couldn't have been easier. Books sent that way don't disappear from your device as far as I can tell - I've done similar large batch uploads for ages, and they're all still in my library, and available on all of my devices.
allannienhuis··on DeepMind's WeatherNext model achieves breakthrough forecasting cyclones
I've always assumed that insurance and/or government departments that would spend money due to storms would be the ones funneling money to these sorts of efforts. It's not exactly something you can easily sell directly to individuals who would benefit. It would be pretty dystopian for them to sell subscriptions for an extra 24 hrs notice on the next typhoon :P
allannienhuis··on Show HN: Elevators
On the ground/lowest floor, there's only one button as there's only one way to go.
allannienhuis··on I wanted a clock that never needed setting. Things escalated
I use the clock feature on my iPhone (pretty sure there's equivalents for android), where if your phone is horizontal and charging, the lock screen shows one of several large clock face options. I 3d printed a phone stand for it. It's sensitive to both light levels and motion - so it's completely black when there is no motion detected. If you happen to wake up at night and open your eyes, everything remains dark. If you turn to look at your phone/nightstand, it usually turns on the display. Sometimes I need to wave my hand a bit. The balance is pretty good. I choose the giant Comic Sans type numerals as I wear glasses and that makes it still legible for me. [edit - it's called 'standby mode']
allannienhuis··on Producing ammonia and fertiliser using wind power in Morris, Minnesota
you might be thinking of https://www.greenlightning.ag/ - seems really cool tech. combined with variable cheap power source like solar or wind, seems like a good way to give ai bit more control over inputs for farmers.
allannienhuis··on First atmosphere found on Earth-like planet in habitable zone of distant star
Generational ships would of course need to be very large, but I doubt it would need to be as large as you think. And it doesn't need to look like metal tubes. Many northern cities have extensive underground or between-building pedestrian bridges and large shopping malls, etc that can provide quite a lot of variety and the feeling of open and green spaces that is pretty attractive during long cold winters. Whether that's 'enough' to avoid mental health issues in a permanent setting is of course a different story, but that's just one of thousands of problems that would need to be solved before that ever comes close to reality :)
allannienhuis··on Sleep regularity is a stronger predictor of mortality risk than sleep duration (2023)
what is a good test for magnesium deficiency?
allannienhuis··on How to stop Claude from saying load-bearing
Whenever I use AI generated content in direct communication - ie slack, email, jira tickets, etc, I always prefix any AI content with an obvious label: 'Claude says' or 'AI analysis: ' etc. In some cases I get claude to update jira tickets (really nice use case btw) with testing notes, I make sure the team knows that any notes in that format come from the AI based on the related commits.

I still keep the AI label even if I edit the result for correctness or clarity etc. The last thing I want to do is have someone read AI content and think it came directly from me. I really don't understand the thinking of people that do that - it's like they're hiding or intentionally cheating somehow.

AI generated content can be really, really useful (with some guidance, AI is way better at creating useful git commit messages and jira ticket comments than I am), but pretending that content is yours just seems way too much like straight up lying.

allannienhuis··on The bottleneck was never the code
I get much better results the more thought I put into crafting my prompt. including using llms to help create that prompt. There's definitely a declining rate of return on that time, but thinking about the problem and carefully describing the context can take fairly deep thought. I do think it's in shorter bursts than when doing all of the work, but I get that same feeling of 'bah, where was I?' if I get interrupted while creating the prompt for a more complex feature. On the other hand, I spend a lot less time in flow state while debugging - it's way easier to describe a bug to an llm (often can just paste in the exception or link to error log).
allannienhuis··on Statement from Dario Amodei on our discussions with the Department of War
what rock have you been living under?
allannienhuis··on I'm not worried about AI job loss
Yes, I certainly don't think taxing the richer is the only dial available. that was my point about the problem being the wages - the labor or non-capital portion of the pie is one of the key things that needs to be adjusted. But the entire system is designed to reward the risk takers. I don't really have any answers. I'm just naively hoping that the the real wealth that technology creates (real-world efficiencies) can somehow benefit everyone, not only the risk takers. That's one of the scarier parts of the AI and robotics boom - it seems virtually all of the benefits are going in one direction. I know we've seen this type of thing before with the industrial revolution, and we somehow got to a point where most of us really did benefit with higher living standards (including the poorest) but it hard seeing most of the really rich ones not doing much to balance that out (most trying their hardest to keep the scales unbalanced).
allannienhuis··on Ratchets in software development (2021)
sorry didn't see this question earlier.

we didn't run into this problem, as we just accepted a popular set of linting rules, and lived with them.

but I imagine you could just manually bump the ceiling number when adding a new linting rule.

allannienhuis··on I'm not worried about AI job loss
> Having someone work themselves to a bone with no real hopes of retirement, so you can have other people live a much easier life than they are.

But isn't the real problem that the janitor isn't being paid enough to save for retirement _and_ pay a 'fair' share of taxes? I read about the fear and complaints of high taxes to pay for the lazy, but the actual tax load on countries with strong socialist policies is not really all that much higher than in the U.S.

This sort of thinking reminds me of the old cartoon with three people at a table, one obviously rich person with a whole pile of cookies on his side of the table, and two other ordinary-working-class people each with a couple of cookies, with the rich guy saying to one of the other guys - watch out, that guy wants to take away one of your cookies!'

There are so many working class people convinced that the problem is the other poor people around them, instead of the very small number of people with > 50% of the resources. Those super-rich have somehow convinced everyone that the current balance is best.

I'm not some revolutionary; far from it. I've always hoped that technology would be the thing that allowed virtually everyone to rise up out of poverty (and it has to some degree), but what I've seen instead is the gains from all of this tech we've created in the past 200 years primarily going to a small class of people, and that just makes me sad.

allannienhuis··on I'm not worried about AI job loss
> I ain't giving people something for nothing but I suspect you do, or would do that for your children or immediate family.

I'm just some dude on the internet, so my opinions are worth exactly what you're paying for them (nothing). But when I try to understand this type of thinking, this is what I come up with:

In the old days of scarce resources (vast majority of civilization), children were expected to 'repay' their elders for the care they received by taking care of them in their old age. And the competition for resources made this idea of keeping those resources for your family only important for survival.

But with the resources available today, the dynamics a very different. Currently only about 25% of total employment is in agriculture, worldwide. In the rich countries this is very significantly less. Canada is 1%, USA is 2% [worldbank]

But we're living with the cultural baggage of generations of scarcity and tribalism, which still shape our policy in a time of incredible resources provided by technology. So instead of more sharing, we choose higher standard of living for ourselves. I know it will take time to change this culturally - generations - but I'm still disappointed it's not happening faster.

[worldbank]:https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/SL.AGR.EMPL.ZS

allannienhuis··on I'm not worried about AI job loss
who do you think is responsible for all of those things, if not the ownership class?
allannienhuis··on Ratchets in software development (2021)
I did something like this years ago for a really large team (~50 devs) when first introducing linting into a legacy project. All we did was count the gross total number of errors for the lint run, and simply tracked it as a low-water mark - failing the build if the number was > the existing number of errors, and lowering the stored number if it was lower. So in practice people couldn't introduce new errors. The team was encouraged to use the boy-scout rule of fixing a few things anytime you had to touch a file for other reasons, but it wasn't a requirement. We threw up a simple line chart on a dashboard for visibility. It worked like a charm - total number went down to zero over the course of a year or so, without getting in the way of anyone trying to get new work done.
allannienhuis··on Bruno Simon – 3D Portfolio
Bruno’s Threejs course is great. I’m about 2/3 the way through it, taking my time. Well organized and extremely well documented. Highly recommend, if a recommendation from a threejs novice is worth much.
allannienhuis··on Copenhagenize Index 2025: The Global Ranking of Bicycle-Friendly Cities
yes, seems the site is completely broken and I suspect someone is in the middle of a panicked reinstall or reconfigure of WP. I feel for them. [edit] back up now, it seems.
allannienhuis··on US to target more businesses after Hyundai raid
That last statement isn’t true. I know people with a blueberry farm that machine processes (with extra human qa step) blueberries packaged for retail sale.
allannienhuis··on 3,200% CPU Utilization
I did this with a project that was worked on by a large team (50+ devs, many, many, many kloc) when we first added linting to the project (this was very early 2000s) - we automatically tracked the number of errors and warnings at each build, persisted them, and then failed the build if the numbers went up. So it automatically adjusted the threshold.

It worked really well to incrementally improve things without forcing people to deal with them all the time. People would from time to time make sure they cleaned up a number of issues in the files they happened to be working on, but they didn't have to do them all (which can be a problem with strategies that for example lint only the changed files, but require 0 errors). We threw a small line chart up one one of our dashboards to provide some sense of overall progress. I think we got it down to zero or thereabouts within a year or so.

allannienhuis··on Those correction notices, in full
Perhaps its because your comment seemed to equate errors with crimes, or at least malicious intent. The language seems a bit provocative for many, detracting from whatever message was intended.
allannienhuis··on SpaceX Super Heavy splashes down in the gulf, canceling chopsticks landing
I think you are both using different meanings for the word 'least'.
allannienhuis··on How 'Factorio' seduced Silicon Valley and me
I rarely need to open the software to make my car open the door automatically. Once in a blue moon I need to actually open the app to force it to connect. I actually can't remember the last time I needed to do that. It's normally completely seamless. The phone stays in my pocket - the doors unlock when I'm nearby, and lock when I leave.

That's my experience of course, other car apps might be much different. But that's an issue with the implementation, not the concept.

allannienhuis··on How 'Factorio' seduced Silicon Valley and me
Then what I'm carrying around is a bunch of codes in my head which is its own form of baggage, or I re-use the codes and that comes with the same risks as reusing passwords has. Using the phone for everything has risks too, but I think not much differently than a password manager does, and most phones I've used have a reasonable device recovery process (not that I've had to use them or have expertise in that area...).

Carrying a single thing (which has a bunch of other uses than just access control) doesn't feel like a burden to me.

That said, I don't disagree at all that the typical keypad for access control on everything pretty much sucks. My front door has like 4 buttons only and does the telephone keyboard thing of using the same button for multiple 'numbers' in your code. Time to jump on amazon to look for a decent front door lock that works with my phone :)

allannienhuis··on How 'Factorio' seduced Silicon Valley and me
"Why anyone wanted to unlock their door with their phone instead of tapping a fob, "

I would want to do it with my phone because then I only have to have one thing to carry around with me. I haven't carried a key ring in years. I don't even carry a wallet these days. It's really quite useful. Way fewer trips back to fetch the keys/wallet, etc.

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