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alloyed

1,662 karma · joined March 22, 2014

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alloyed··on Codeberg Bans Cryptocurrency Projects
iirc, it's a consumer co-op. So think of it as a vote of all users willing to pay for the membership to the service, who (correspondingly) are more likely to be power users/"activist" in the "activist investor" sense.

This can be contrasted with a private company, which will often have a "activist investor", the actual owner!

alloyed··on What AI did to stackoverflow in a graph
yep! 90% of the time if i have a question about a project there's a discussions tab that can take my question with a nearly identical interface to stack overflow's, and I can be reasonably sure there will be contributors or maintainers who will see it. Not much point to stack overflow as a second, silo'd site in that world
alloyed··on Interview with Mitchell Hashimoto about Ghostty and Zig
the point is well-taken, but i do want to show the bash version just for fun:

    podman image ls --all | sed 's/\s\s\+/\t/g' | tee >(head -n 1) >(tail -n +2 | sort -hrk 5) >/dev/null
this is _still_ all text, and we're relying heavily on sort to do a bunch of internal parsing and be in agreement with podman about how sizes should be formatted. also, for "real world" work, i dunno if the tee trick here has any kind of order guarantees, just that it works fine in this case. I'd probably just end up dropping the header and living with worse output in reality
alloyed··on SANA-WM, a 2.6B open-source world model for 1-minute 720p video
silly question: what's "world" about what's being generated here? is the an actual abstract representation of physical space (like, eg, a game-engine style scene graph?) or does it just mean "this video generator is more coherent physically than other video generators"
alloyed··on Ask HN: By what percentage has AI changed your output as a software engineer?
So, in my professional work environment, which is a complex C++ app with long build times and lots of proprietary domain-specific knowledge, LLMs were worse than useless. Not totally surprising, but I originally had hopes for something like Cursor being useful in terms of simplifying the process of large mechanical refactors, which it decidedly wasn't. It could suggest interesting and complex uses of C++ templates, but its application were very slop-adjacent, and even for less complex refactors it would attempt and fall apart in the "check" part of the "guess and check" loop, probably because of the whole "long build times" thing. So we're still paying for visual assist and just wishing it had more (and more specific!) kinds of mechanical refactors available.

for personal projects (more polyglot but rust, js, python, and random shell scripts are bigger and more important here) it's been more mixed to positive; and this is (i think?) in part because i have the luxury of writing off things I'm _not actually_ interested in doing. maintaining cmake files sucks, and the free tier of Cursor does a good enough job of it. I have a few small plugins/extensions for things like blender, and again, I don't know enough to do a good job there, and the benefit of making something extremely specific to what i need without actually knowing what's going on under the hood works fine: I can just verify the results, and that's good enough. but then, conversely, it's made it _wayyyy_ harder to pick and verify third party libraries for the things i do care about? I'll look something up and it'll either be 100% AI vibe coded and not good enough to sneeze at, or it'll be fine, but the documentation is 100% AI generated and likewise, I would rather just have the version of this library before AI ever existed.

more and more I'm convinced LLM agents are only fit for purpose for things that don't need to be good or consistent, but that there is actually a viable niche of things that don't need to be good that it can nicely slot into. That's still not worth $20/month to me, though. and it's absolutely ruining the online commons in a way that makes it hard to feel good about.

(my understanding of claude code is that it's a non-interactive agent, which is worse for what i have in mind. iteration and _changing my mind_ are a big part of my process, so even if I let the computer do its own thing for an hour and work on something else, that's less productive than spending even 10 minutes of focused time on the same thing.)

alloyed··on Solidjs: Simple and performant reactivity for building user interfaces
so i managed to convince my company to try solid on a new project, pretty much on the basis of "this looks like react but solves many of our existing problems with react". since the JSX and project structure is basically the same, we could take our (pretty tiny at the time) demo project and do a 1:1 diff and show the differences inline. and it was pretty compelling! the code was simpler, and faster, and we still got to keep lots of the unique patterns/other stuff we were used to when creating react apps
alloyed··on Valve to open source 'GameNetworkingSockets' for developers, Steam not required
Probably the most equivalent existing open source thing out there is ENet, which doesn't do encryption or detailed stats. If you've signed the steam NDA (which is free of charge iirc) you can check out the existing docs for the closed source version, which has extra features on top of this.
alloyed··on Netflix and Spotify Ask: Can Data Mining Make for Cute Ads?
What if you were the person who watched that show N times, and then saw that ad? It'd be a weird feeling, right?
alloyed··on I can no longer recommend MailChimp
The concern here is revenge-spam: someone takes your email and submits it to every mailchimp default form they can find automatically, and then your inbox is flooded with ostensibly legitimate email that you have to manually unsubscribe from, for each individual list.
alloyed··on The New York Times Is Now Available as a Tor Onion Service
This is pretty defineably public record:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Donald_Trump%E2%80%93Russia_do...

notably: it's not the GOP the organization that initial funded the oppo, but a private news org with conservative leanings. and the FBI did not fund the dossier, but were provided it during its creation. (side note: who cares)

When it comes to corroboration: I would think the special investigation is good enough evidence that the claims of Russian cooperation are being taken seriously, no? Significant is a weasel word but there is actual smoke here.

alloyed··on Diminishing returns of static typing
I would say it's mostly a matter of use: In C you deal with void* or typecasts all the time, whereas in higher level languages it's much less common, either because the type system is smarter, or the constraints that it does have are more strictly enforced. For example: you can happily compare a char* and an int in C, but other languages like python might error at the thought.
alloyed··on Google Will Survive SESTA – Startups Might Not
I don't see a transcript anywhere, but here is the full hearing (I just googled the quote and found a link in another article)

https://www.commerce.senate.gov/public/index.cfm/2017/9/comm...

alloyed··on The tech sec­tor might be evil
If your intent is to improve the world, and not just act superior, I don't see what this accomplishes. Hear dissent without action long enough and it becomes noise.
alloyed··on Atom 1.20
it can still be an issue with memory even if it isn't as blatant as "out of memory".

The easy example being a datastructure growing over time and getting slower to manipulate and query. This is a problem where being cavalier with the amount of memory you allocate and use will hurt you, even if you've got lots of memory to spare.

alloyed··on Washington Post integrates Talk – Mozilla’s open-source commenting platform
I absolutely agree that our current situation needs to be improved, but looking at the history of media leads me to believe that by progressing past the centralized and regulated system of TV and radio we've left a local maximum when it comes to "civility". Older forms of "ugly" news, like the press of the french revolution or turn-of-the-century america, didn't get fixed over time, but by the law "catching up", either through oppression or the increase of regulation causing regulatory capture. Of course, the idea of recentralizing speech is more or less unacceptable: what would that even mean when the problem is not a small group of newsmakers, but literally everybody? I don't see any other solutions in our long past, though.
alloyed··on Introducing Atom-IDE
yes and no? Unlike a traditional daemon, this isn't a system service that always runs in the background.

The IDE (in this case atom) spins up the process and shuts it down when necessary, and then both sides communicate to each other using an implementation-defined IPC mechanism.

So it's a server more in the sense that the IDE requests info as a client, and then the server provides it (pull, not push).

alloyed··on Introducing Atom-IDE
I appreciate the extended support for LSP, but this seems to repeat the mistake VSCode made of requiring custom plugins for each backend you'd like to integrate. This increases the overhead for server authors and makes it less likely that language servers and clients actually match spec, if people give in to writing custom integrations that can paper over bugs.
alloyed··on [dead]
They did add it though, didn't they? What makes this particular case malice and not just a case of overzealous response to what was the largest polling shock this season?
alloyed··on Venezuela’s currency is dying
Wouldn't those instruments (I'm assuming stocks/retirement, I'm not an economic smart guy) be implicitly tied to everyone else doing more work then they "have to"? That's exactly economic growth, just reworded.
alloyed··on Why Thieves Steal Soap
One way to think of it is that torrenting movies requires an (expensive) internet connection, where all you need for a DVD player is electricity and some DVDs someone else ripped.
alloyed··on Apricity OS: A Beautiful Arch Linux Distro
Quick note, the layout seems to break when the piwik.js script is blocked:

https://imgur.com/JdB5UK3

alloyed··on Professors’ unprofessional programs have created a new profession
That headline really is something.
alloyed··on U.S. Supreme Court Declines to Referee State Disputes Over Marijuana
Have a source for that? That one's novel to me.
alloyed··on Ubuntu trademark nonsense
From http://www.ubuntu.com/legal/terms-and-policies/intellectual-...

>You will require Canonical’s permission to use: (i) any mark ending with the letters UBUNTU or BUNTU which is sufficiently similar to the Trademarks or any other confusingly similar mark, and (ii) any Trademark in a domain name or URL or for merchandising purposes

That sounds like it covers *buntu too, unfortunately

alloyed··on Learn the Command Line
Securing multiuser linux is not an easy thing. Even if you set process limits, restrict permissions, etc. you can still be very easily hit with a priv escalation bug in a utility you allow users to run or even in bash itself.
alloyed··on Beyond Bash: Shell scripting in a typed, OO language
Powershell is primarily a repl to a homogeneous .NET-based set of tools, which doesn't describe Unix very well. If you want a type-safe repl that interacts with all the handy tools written for the text-stream-only Unix world you're going to have to do some interpretation.
alloyed··on Lawrence Lessig wants to run for president in an unconventional way
Absolutely not. As he's said, he's a one-issue candidate: anything else would be up to whoever the democrats pick for VP.
alloyed··on Understanding map and apply
>their content will be shunned due to using the proper terms for concepts being discussed.

I think this is exactly it. Consider that a lot of people looking at F# are already using C# in "business"-type applications, with or without formal training, and might have negative associations towards the FP weenie club.

alloyed··on Training Officers to Shoot First, and He Will Answer Questions Later
The time window on that particular number isn't actually a full year, but the year up till may 30 when the article was published. Considering that crime tends to go up in the summer months instead of staying flat over the year you're probably better off looking at last year's numbers, instead.
alloyed··on Inside the sad, expensive failure of Google+
Most people consider their gmail, drive, etc. accounts as private because their immediate acquaintances don't have access to them. Maybe a better word would be not shared?
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