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andy81

291 karma · joined February 3, 2021

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andy81··on Creepy Crawlies
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hashcash
andy81··on Crypto in 2026: Oh, This Is the Bad Place
More than similar. Another word for the same thing.
andy81··on Space Cadet Pinball on Linux
It's crazy that license laundering is still the primary use case for LLMs.
andy81··on Talkie: a 13B vintage language model from 1930
Digit is the English word for finger.
andy81··on An AI agent deleted our production database. The agent's confession is below
Agents will happily automate away intentional friction like a confirm prompt, even if you organise it as multiple API calls.

The fix needs to be permissions rather than ergonomics.

andy81··on 'Hairdryer used to trick weather sensor' to win Polymarket bet
Because Polymarket creates an incentive to change the real-world result.

If you create a bet on {person} getting assassinated by {date}, you greatly increase the chances of somebody on the "Yes" side thumbing the scales.

andy81··on Bitcoin miners are losing on every coin produced as difficulty drops
Price isn't affected by mining difficulty, only the other direction.
andy81··on Microsoft: Copilot is for entertainment purposes only
The only thing "clear" about that License agreement is it contradicts all their other marketing about Copilot.

So either that document is fraudulent or everyone else at Microsoft is committing fraud daily.

Examples from the first search result: https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/topic/microsoft-365-copi...

Support page with ~25 tutorials provided by Microsoft about how to "Create a document with Copilot" or "Create a branded presentation from a file" or "Start a Loop workspace from a Teams meeting".

Do you actually believe that creating branded presentations (from Microsoft's own examples) is something people do for "entertainment purposes"?

andy81··on C# strings silently kill your SQL Server indexes in Dapper
The way to do enums in SQL (generally, not just MSSQL) is another table. It's better that they don't offer several ways to do the same thing.
andy81··on Most-read tech publications have lost over half their Google traffic since 2024
We've all tried to ask the LLM about something outside of its training data by now.

In that situation, they give the (wrong) answer that sounds the most plausible.

andy81··on Bus stop balancing is fast, cheap, and effective
LA is sparse by European standards, or rural by Asian standards.

http://www.demographia.com/db-worldua.pdf CTRL+F for "BUILT-UP URBAN AREAS BY URBAN POPULATION DENSITY: 2025"

America is the exception for population density in general.

andy81··on Spain to ban social media access for under-16s, PM Sanchez says
There are more options -

Banning advertising targeted at the user rather than the context

Enforcing Do Not Track

Enforcing GDPR (especially sites that use cookie banners)

andy81··on Total monthly number of StackOverflow questions over time
SO also isn't afraid to tell you that your question is stupid and you should do it a better way.

Some people take that as a personal attack, but it can be more helpful than a detailed response to the wrong question.

andy81··on OpenAI's cash burn will be one of the big bubble questions of 2026
Amazon paid no dividends, that's their big debt financing.
andy81··on Privacy Badger is a free browser extension made by EFF to stop spying
There's no reason that contextual ads couldn't be automated at scale.

It might even be easier than automating targeted ads, given the incredible level of research and compute that gets wasted on targeting.

andy81··on Canadian math prodigy allegedly stole $65M in crypto
> That is a philosophical argument completely unrelated to whether or not something is illegal.

Most comments saying that cryptocurrency holders should abide by "code is law", are not actually saying that we should abide by "code is law" and abandon the legal system.

It's a classic argument to show that the purported benefits of cryptocurrency are a farce.

andy81··on A 10x Faster TypeScript
F# isn't in the running for third either.

Maybe top ten behind MSSQL, Powershell, Excel Formulae, DAX etc.

andy81··on 400 reasons to not use Microsoft Azure
Powershell was 2006, so I suppose the real "peak windows server UX" was 2016 when PS was relatively mature and came out-of-the-box with the latest version.
andy81··on How about trailing commas in SQL?
What would it offer that you can't already get from DBATools, LINQ, and ORMs more generally?
andy81··on Leaking the email of any YouTube user for $10,000
Exactly the reason that you should always use yyyy-mm-dd.
andy81··on How about trailing commas in SQL?
Not in e.g. MSSQL
andy81··on Supersizing vehicles offers minimal safety benefits – but substantial dangers
No mention of crash frequency, non-car collisions (roll etc.), or handling either.

Despite the title, the entire article seems to have missed the mark and become a marketing piece for SUVs.

andy81··on VSCode’s SSH agent is bananas
It's Microsoft's actions which lose them trust, regardless of what they might state in official communications.

Actions like the C# dev kit license footgun/rug pull, the closed source remote development extensions, and training copilot on GPL while pretending that you own any code it generates.

You don't need even need a rant on the Windows team, it would be beating a dead horse.

andy81··on Hoppscotch: Open source alternative to Postman / Insomnia
The CLI tools have a great record.

curl and invoke-restmethod and hurl etc.

It's the GUI tools that keep getting monetised.

andy81··on No Bitcoin ETFs at Vanguard? Here's why
Being anti-cryptocurrency as an organisation really is an important differentiator.

Fidelity knows that investors in their cryptocurrency products will lose money in aggregate, but offers them anyway. It's a black mark against their integrity.

andy81··on The Microsoft 365 Copilot launch was a disaster
Power Query, Powershell, and .net core were revolutionary in their niches.
andy81··on The GPU, not the TPM, is the root of hardware DRM
Bit of an understatement, should be "always have access" if state attackers are included in the threat model.
andy81··on Costco’s butter recall, explained
The government could apply a fine, and shops selling that butter could put up a sign warning that butter is made from milk.

That achieves the same result without the destruction of perfectly good food.

andy81··on Non-elementary group-by aggregations in Polars vs pandas
Here's an example implementation in MSSQL - https://data.stackexchange.com/stackoverflow/query/edit/1873...

No need to filter within the window function if you use subquery or CTE, which is supported everywhere.

andy81··on Switch 2 will be backwards compatible with Switch
League of Legends and Minecraft came out ~15 years ago and never left the top 10 most played PC games.

It's hard to release new live-service games too. Many people will just be happy to play LoL for the rest of their lives.

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