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beeandapenguin

270 karma · joined August 30, 2016

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beeandapenguin··on Black hole singularity is a surface not a point
Kinda sounds like a "linguistic manifold."
beeandapenguin··on Great Salt Lake Tracker
Thanks for the TIL, always just assumed it was some digital artifact
beeandapenguin··on Claude Fable 5
By what measure?

I wonder how much of design capability improvements is related to our collective ability to recognize AI design tropes.

beeandapenguin··on Claude Fable 5
If the task is so simple why use a model like Fable 5? Wrong tool for the job?
beeandapenguin··on YouTube to automatically label AI-generated videos
Submitted some pretty harsh feedback about this back in Jan after my old school technical father in law sent me a few AI generated “news” videos in a row about Trump and Venezuela. The AI label was technically on all of the videos but 3 taps away hidden in the video description, and not visible from the search results at all. So thankful YouTube is doing something about this.
beeandapenguin··on SingleRide: Longest route on NYC Subway without visiting the same station twice
The Prospect Park S is such a weird train. I love it.
beeandapenguin··on Vibe coding and agentic engineering are getting closer than I'd like
Reminds me of Gall’s Law from his book Systemantics.

A complex system that works is invariably found to have evolved from a simple system that worked. A complex system designed from scratch never works and cannot be patched up to make it work. You have to start over with a working simple system.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Gall_(author)#Gall's_law

beeandapenguin··on Ti-84 Evo
Q: Who else had their first exposure to programming on a Ti-83/4 calculator?
beeandapenguin··on Ti-84 Evo
Same for me, it was also my first time ever seeing code, and I still remember it well. While getting ready for swim practice in a locker room, my friend challenged me to beat his score on a button mashing game he programmed earlier that day in school on his TI-84. My 12 year old self was in awe of his BASIC skills.
beeandapenguin··on Girl, 10, finds rare Mexican axolotl under Welsh bridge
Fun fact: Axolotl have the largest animal genome ever sequenced with ~32b base pairs, 10x more than humans.
beeandapenguin··on Girl, 10, finds rare Mexican axolotl under Welsh bridge
Axolotls have also been used for over 200 years for medical research related to regenerative biology. They’re unique among vertebrates in that they can regenerate nearly every part of their body, even parts of their brain. https://orip.nih.gov/about-orip/research-highlights/amazing-...
beeandapenguin··on 5,200 holes carved into a Peruvian mountain left by an ancient economy
Agreed. I just traveled to Peru for the first time a few months ago and visited Cusco for 7 days. For me, it was not enough, since all I wanted to do was go back immediately upon leaving. I'm normally the kinda person that wants to travel to as many new places as possible, but Peru was different. I can easily say I want to go back there at least 5 more times in my life.

Reflecting on it when I got home, I couldn't understand what made me not decide to go earlier in my life. I had Machu Picchu at the top of my bucket list since childhood as I'm sure many do, but it was never at the top for some reason. That was such a big mistake and I wish I went to Peru a long time ago, there's no other place like it, and it only gets harder to travel there the older you get since the altitude is rough. The number of elderly and retired people I saw struggling in Cusco from altitude sickness was too high. I heard a horror story of someone needing to spend a week in the hospital and unable to see a single site.

beeandapenguin··on Static sites enable a good time travel experience
Was wondering the same thing. Couldn't they just load https://web.archive.org/save/{site_url} once a month in their Github action instead of managing the storage of these images?
beeandapenguin··on The Polymarket users betting on when Jesus will return
Newton spent the majority of his life trying to answer this question. It'd be more interesting if the question asked “Will Newton’s prediction that the Second Coming won’t happen before 2060 be correct?”, but that might be a bit too long for Polymarket.
beeandapenguin··on Blog hosted on a Nintendo Wii
OP's been preparing for this moment: https://blog.infected.systems/posts/2024-12-04-hugs-of-death...
beeandapenguin··on Useful built-in macOS command-line utilities
Looks like the site's down.

https://archive.is/kGmn6

beeandapenguin··on How we migrated onto K8s in less than 12 months
Extremely slow times - from development to production, backend to frontend. Depending on how bad things are, you might catch the microservice guys complaining over microseconds from a team downstream, in front of a FE dev who’s spent his week optimizing the monotonically-increasing JS bundles with code splitting heuristics.

Of course, it was because the client app recently went over the 100MB JS budget. Which they decided to make because the last time that happened, customers abroad reported seeing “white screens”. International conversion dropped sharply not long after that.

It’s pretty silly. So ya, good times indeed. Time to learn k8s.

beeandapenguin··on Ernest Hemingway's brother established a floating republic in the Caribbean
Seems like a precedent for the Conch Republic https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conch_Republic
beeandapenguin··on Venezuela is first Andean country to lose all of its glaciers
A related article from NASA Earth Observatory has a slider to compare satellite images of the glacier.

https://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/images/152893/humboldt-gla...

beeandapenguin··on Engineering for Slow Internet
This is why we need more incremental rendering[1] (or "streaming"). This pattern become somewhat of a lost art in the era of SPAs — it's been possible since HTTP/1.1 via chunked transfer encoding, allowing servers to start sending a response without knowing the total length.

With this technique, the server can break down a page load into smaller chunks of UI, and progressively stream smaller parts of the UI to the client as they become available. No more waiting for the entire page to load in, especially in poor network conditions as the author experienced from Anartica.

[1]: https://www.patterns.dev/react/streaming-ssr

beeandapenguin··on Egypt's pyramids may have been built on a long-lost branch of the Nile
The Sphinx wasn't built with stone from a quarry, it was carved from the bedrock. It has since been restored a number of times, one of which added layers of limestone block which is easily distinguishable from the original shape.
beeandapenguin··on Egypt's pyramids may have been built on a long-lost branch of the Nile
At Wadi al-Jarf[1], one of the oldest harbors in the world (~2600 BCE), they discovered numerous stone anchors, a stone jetty, and storage galleries carved into limestone that contained several boats, sail fragments, oars, and rope. They also found jars that have been discovered at another site across the Red Sea, indicating they may have been used for trade.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wadi_al-Jarf

beeandapenguin··on Three million malware-infected smart toothbrushes used in Swiss DDoS attacks
Which toothbrush company/product are they referring to? The stock image implies Phillips, but I don't see any mention of that in the article.

Never thought I'd be judging a toothbrush based on cybersecurity, but here we are...

beeandapenguin··on Google Drive misplaces months' worth of customer data
Tangentially related, if you've ever had the pleasure of migrating away from Google Photos/Drive with Google Takeout, prepare to spend some time fixing photo metadata in your library and re-embedding exif data with exiftool. Takeout strips out the exif data into a non-standard JSON sidecar, as opposed to something more standard/well supported like XMP.

It's unfortunately hostile for non-technical users that care about their photo metadata, which I assume is most people since it includes data such as creation timestamps and location. It's not too bad to script this if you're savvy (and careful), but otherwise you'll have to pay for a third-party tool[1]

[1]: https://metadatafixer.com/

beeandapenguin··on Ask HN: Any LAN alternatives other than PowerLine or MOCA?
Depending on how far apart your rooms are, it's not too difficult to wire up a long, flat ribbon ethernet cable[1] between rooms. They usually come with clips to help install it cleanly as a fixture. Then you can just connect it to a separate switch/WiFI access point in the other room and have the same connection speeds. However, if you have two WiFI access points, you'll likely run into radio interference if they don't have mesh capabilities.

I use an 100ft cable to go from living room to basement, and have an mesh AP for each. The Eero devices are relatively affordable compared to Ubiquiti for how powerful they are, if you want a seamless experience using multiple WiFi APs.

[1]: https://www.amazon.com/Cat-Ethernet-Cable-White-Connectors/d...

beeandapenguin··on Interaction to Next Paint (INP)
He’s referring to the P75 from Chrome’s field data. Now, Reddit definitely could do more here and get that LCP at the same time as the FCP (eliminate load and render delay). But a big purpose for these metrics is to make the web more accessible/usable, and the reality is most of the world doesn’t have iPhones or fast networks[1].

[1] https://infrequently.org/2022/12/performance-baseline-2023/

beeandapenguin··on Interaction to Next Paint (INP)
Yep, and this also is referring to the P75 LCP. Notice how’s he referencing the field data from Page Speed Insights, which is reporting Core Web Vitals. Anytime these metrics are discussed it’s always the 75th percentile.
beeandapenguin··on Roll your own JavaScript runtime (2022)
Agreed, I felt the same when toying with this concept for the first time. I initially thought I could just build directly off of deno_core, but quickly learned there's a lot you'll have to implement. Much of what I perceived as deno is really just the cli crate and other dependencies that feel somewhat "internal". Some examples of things you'll need to implement and reference from the cli I ran into were:

1. module loader: https://github.com/denoland/deno/blob/main/cli/module_loader...

2. runtime interfaces (workers): https://github.com/denoland/deno/blob/main/cli/worker.rs

3. invocation of the runtime: https://github.com/denoland/deno/blob/main/cli/tools/run.rs#...

4. permissions: https://github.com/denoland/deno/blob/main/runtime/permissio...

You can wire up some of these other packages or potentially even the CLI itself to avoid re-implementing much of the runtime over again, but it's a heavy dependency for a few crucial utilities that feel like they could exist in more lightweight runtime crates.

At the end of the day, I feel like most people potentially want to offer APIs through the runtime as opposed to a package or framework (think Netlify edge functions, Shopify functions). I wonder if they are reserving this interface for Deno subhosting customers rather than making it more ergonomic for a self hosted runtime. Kind of similar to how the runtime crate injects Deno's Web Platform JS implementations: https://github.com/denoland/deno/tree/main/ext

beeandapenguin··on Exploring competitive features in Node.js v18 and v19
Yea for real. I’m sure there’s tons of reasons why it took so long, there’s gotta be some devil in the details. Maybe the standards compliance, complexity of the code base, something something “ecosystem”, all the above…

Feels like a similar situation to CJS/ESM, which is still a headache in Node regardless of its support

beeandapenguin··on Exploring competitive features in Node.js v18 and v19
That’s the thing. I think Node is struggling to keep up with pace of web platform standards.
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