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anthonj

369 karma · joined August 5, 2025

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anthonj··on Ask HN: By what percentage has AI changed your output as a software engineer?
As other have have already said, this is highly context dependant but I want to bring some examples.

- It sometimes generate decent examples of linux kernel api usage for modules, which saves a lot of time digging in the limited documentation. But most of the time it will mix deprecated a new version of the api and it will very likely have very suboptimal and/buggy choices.

- for embedded C, it won't be able to work within the constraints of a very specific project (e.g. using obscure or custom hal), but for generic C or rtos applications it can generate between decent and half decent suggestions.

- almost never seen it generate decent verilog

anthonj··on NYC phone ban reveals some students can't read clocks
Uhm I don't know, I used to have a dumb phone in middle school. And since then I have always read the time in 24h format in my life. But I never struggle to read a conventional clocks, nor I get confused about the am/pm 12h format. The concept around the clock is just too simple to just forget.

This sounds like a case of sloppiness of their educators.

anthonj··on Satellites reveal heat leaking from largest US cryptocurrency mining center
If you launch a rocket at escape velocity the momentum and potential energy you create never dissipates.

Certain chemical reaction endotermic reaction require energy to start. This energy is absorbed to generate molecular bond.

Also in the generation and absorption of high energy radiation there are non-thermal processes that can transfer energy.

Even something like bending a metal bar is not 100% a thermal process.

anthonj··on Satellites reveal heat leaking from largest US cryptocurrency mining center
This violates energy conservation principles. Some power will be "wasted" into heat, some other will be used for some other work.
anthonj··on Pricing Changes for GitHub Actions
It's a bit weird, they add pricing for this, but reducwle GitHub-hosted runners by "up to 39%".

Not sure about the "up to" implications, but I guess it's just Microsoft trying to make github a bit more freemium tm

anthonj··on Netherlands – Capital Growth Tax and Capital Gains Tax for Box 3
I don't get how this works in practice. I am not wealthy, I don't even own an house. But I have a decent salary and buy some stocks occasionally.

Most of my stocks are kinda volatile, so by paying taxes on unrealized gain I am taking much higher risk for owning them every year I don't sell. I would literally be paying taxes on money I don't own yet and could easily lose at the first mayor market upset.

anthonj··on Designing a Low Latency 10G Ethernet Core (2023)
Not sure i get the implication, something wrong with the company?
anthonj··on High-resolution efficient image generation from WiFi Mapping
It is an overfitted model thst use WiFi data as hints for generation:

"We consider a WiFi sensing system designed to monitor indoor environments by capturing human activity through wireless signals. The system consists of a WiFi access point, a WiFi terminal, and an RGB camera that is available only during the training phase. This setup enables the collection of paired channel state information (CSI) and image data, which are used to train an image generation model"

anthonj··on Xeres: Uncensorable Peer-to-Peer Communications
I think you might be misunderstanding. Tox is p2p end-to-end encrypted, you still expose your ip when you connect to the p2p network. This is inevitable but nobody will know you message:

https://tox.chat/faq.html#tox-leak-ip

This project uses the retroshare protocol. It's also p2p by the only nodes you can connect to are from a "white list". So you expose your ip only to people you know.

anthonj··on The health benefits of sunlight may outweigh the risk of skin cancer
Isn't skin cancer 100% survivable if caught on time*, with the removal procedure begin a single 1-2 hour specialist visit?

Where "on time" means during the trivial yearly screening that everyone should be getting.

anthonj··on ‘Overworked, underpaid’ humans train Google’s AI
The article mentions some stories such ad the one lady requested to edit medical-related infos without having any qualifications to evaluate thir correctness.

Or the one about handling disturbing concted with no previous warning and no consueling

anthonj··on Wayland breaks the tools I use to make a living
I don't want to post the typical "work on my machine" comment, but I regularly see screen sharing failing on almost any platform.

In many in-person conferences in my field they started to request a copy of the pdf file before the talk, that will be projected and shared using a dedicated computer.

anthonj··on ‘Overworked, underpaid’ humans train Google’s AI
Not so easy. What if you get hired as a physiotherapist somewhere but on your first day you find out you will work in a brothel?

Or join an hospital as nurse, but then you are asked to perform surgery as you were a doctor?

There are serious issues outlined in the article.

anthonj··on YouTube made AI enhancements to videos without warning or permission
I going to say something controversial, bu why is this even surprising? Google and YouTube have been framing themself as the kind company that will appropriate your work and make make money out of you. "You are the product" is a repeated endlessy even on social media, and this it thier private paltform after all.

At this point getting involved with youtube is just the usual naive behaviour that somehow you are the exception and bad things won't happen to you.

anthonj··on The lottery ticket hypothesis: why neural networks work
"For over 300 years, one principle governed every learning system: the bias-variance tradeoff."

The bias-variance tradeoff is a very old concept in statistics (but not sure how old, might very well be 300)

Anyway note the first algorithms realted to neural networks are older then the digital computer by a decade at least.

anthonj··on The Chrome VRP Panel has decided to award $250k for this report
I get the feeling these kind of skills are very rare because they fall in the category "understanding and debugging other people code/mess", while most people prefer to build new things (and often struggle to debug their own work).

It takes a lot a passion and dedication to security and reverse engineering to get there.

anthonj··on Private Welsh island with 19th century fort goes on the market
Looks like this island doesn't have a real beach or even easy access to the sea for a swim or watersports.

I feel like this heavily defeats the point of owning your own island. Every other private island I've seen on Wikipedia looks like some kind of paradisiac resort. With beaches, greenery, confy gazebos etc..

anthonj··on I dumped Google for Kagi
Sounds interesting but I'm not ready to pay to use a search engine yet. Too many subscriptions for everything nowadays.

Foe now I really like Qwant, they used to relay on bing, but now do their own indexing.

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