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bognition

3,841 karma · joined October 22, 2013

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bognition··on Updated Google Maps shows destruction of the city of Rafah
Its really telling to see the destruction limited to where the structures used to be rather than to all of the surrounding green spaces. If the destruction of civilian dwellings was purely an accident you'd expect to see the destruction spread evenly over the area. Instead it looks much more like a prolonged set of surgical strikes to destroy the buildings while preserving as much of the surrounding areas as possible.

For a great example of this, look at this pin https://maps.app.goo.gl/ZcMbdFcx87PrqoYNA

And here's a pin of where the farms were spared https://maps.app.goo.gl/iZbbTH4iH27FCz4s9

bognition··on AI coding has made CI a bottleneck, so we reworked ours to keep up
CI -> Continuous Integration

Its best thought of as the testing systems that are run as part of pull request review / merge to main / build processes.

bognition··on Attention is all you have
That and google had a major interest in killing bookmarks. Bookmarks were actively competing with google search traffic, so they put in a lot of effort to get you to stop using them. Why bookmark something when you can just search for it.
bognition··on Towards Self-Driving Codebases
I built this in one shot cube-sweeper.com

(If that doesn't load try cube-sweeper.onrender.com some isps block it)

I did make a bunch of changes after the initial "one shot" but the bulk of the game was done after a single prompt

bognition··on Gmail to end support for "Send as" for third-party addresses, such as @yahoo.com
Honestly i'd love to migrate off of google, but its been a pain. My family is a heavy user of google calendar so I either have to migrate them off or I have to keep my google calendar account.

I tried fastmail but honestly its not as easy to use as gmail.

Has anyone pulled off a migration like this? how did you do it?

bognition··on Dynamical dark energy and the week that broke cosmology
Its fundamentally different. Science doesn't ask you to accept unknowns on faith, its provides evidence that there is something we dont yet understand and that evidence has predictive value.

If science operated like religion it would say "We dont know what dark energy is, but you have to accept it or your wrong".

Instead the argument is "Hmm... our current best understanding of the universe is lacking, when we add in these extra variables many of our predictions go from wildly inaccurate to nearly accurate. There must be something going on here we cannot observe, so lets call it "dark"."

Dark energy is "Wow, there's a factor at play here that we dont understand, without it our equations do not predict what we see, with it the equations are very accurate. Additionally we can predict multiple different things with this."

And the most important part, as soon as there is evidence that refutes the Dark Energy/Matter hypothesis scientists will quickly (over a few years, a decade at the most) walk away from it. Versus religious systems take centuries for people to shift their beliefs.

bognition··on Watching TikTok and Instagram deactivates the cognitive control network: Study
Hmm... this doesn't quite add up. Do we have brain scans showing that critical thinking centers of the brain turn off when people read books or play table games?
bognition··on CipherX applies painless permanent tattoos with dissolving microneedle patches
It depends on a few factors.

1. The location of tattoo, some regions of skin are VERY sensitive.

2. The skill of the tattooer. How deep do they go, how fast do they pull, etc...

3. The size of the lines and shading A fine line tattoo feels very different that a block shaded piece. (One needle vs up to 7)

4. The style of the tattoo. Black and gray realism tattoos require the artist to go over an area many times. Going over an already inflamed piece of skin feels way worse than fresh skin.

bognition··on Alphabet's cash burn raises alarm for Big Tech as AI spending climbs
Diversify! Historically, the average length of a recession has been 12-24 months. So set up a system whereby you won’t screw’s yourself over by selling when things are low, but instead you can weather the storm.

Build a rainy day fund. Determine how much cash you will need if you are out of a job and how long you think that will last, allocate some portion of that amount into low risk bonds. Russ way if you need cash you aren’t selling investments at a big loss.

If you have enough liquidity put some in real estate as a forced savings vehicle as it’s harder to liquidate than stocks. Then just sit out any coming storm.

bognition··on Grok 4.5
I'm not preaching anything here just pointing out the hypocrisy of the "america good, china bad" line of reasoning that is pervasive.
bognition··on Grok 4.5
By the same logic if you pay money to United States based companies (FAANG) you're directly funding genocide, mass incarceration of people of color, the undermining of digital privacy, and a techo-fascist regime.
bognition··on Salesforce to Acquire Fin (formerly Intercom) for $3.6B
Cursor at 60B is WAY overvalued. At this point you have to assume that anything that gets touched by Elon is hyper driven financial engineering.
bognition··on Green card seekers must leave U.S. to apply, Trump administration says
Is this a surprise? This is hardly anything new. The United States was built with slavery.
bognition··on EU to crack down on TikTok, Instagram's 'addictive design' targeting kids
> some folks aren't able to control themselves

I get that there are some people who have anomalous abilities to self control, and i understand that they might have a hard time empathizing with those of us that dont have that level of control. However to chalk up the solution as be a better person, when in reality corporations are spending billions on research and design of addictive products is just short sighted.

We saw the same thing with smoking. Plenty of people said "meh, why cant the smoker just quit, I did". Which missed the point. The tabacco companies knew if they could get kids smoking at a young age it was less likely they'd ever quit.

Its naive to assume that the social media companies are not doing the exact same thing.

Yes there is room for individual accountability, but also we need to be realistic about the amount of energy that is being spent subverting people's attention and self control.

bognition··on DAG Workflow Engine
Production Ready?

That is a is a pretty bold claim for a repo that existed for a few days, has 0 issues, PRs, etc...

bognition··on You don't need advice from editors on rejected manuscripts
I heard very similar advice from some investors. They said:

> If you ignore what we tell you its possible we'll fire you. However, if you do everything we tell you to do its almost certain that we'll fire you.

bognition··on Open source security at Astral
> what if Github is compromised/buggy

What if? GitHub has is extremely buggy! I'm getting increasingly frustrated with the paper cuts that have become endemic across the entire platform. For example its not uncommon for one of our workflows to fail when cloning a branches of the repo they are running in.

bognition··on Ask HN: Distributed data centers in our basements
One of the key problems you have to solve is the how do you execute code on an untrusted device. The major cloud providers do a ton of work so you can "trust" the compute you pay for.

Without a truly zero-trust compute platform its going to be difficult to get anyone to trust their workloads to a random compute resource that isn't carefully guarded.

bognition··on Ask HN: Distributed data centers in our basements
It turns out, if you build it correctly, you can get BETTER reliability SLAs. There's a company https://www.storj.io/ thats been doing this for years.
bognition··on Tell HN: Litellm 1.82.7 and 1.82.8 on PyPI are compromised
The decision to block all downloads is pretty disruptive, especially for people on pinned known good versions. Its breaking a bunch of my systems that are all launched with `uv run`
bognition··on Show HN: Oxyde – Pydantic-native async ORM with a Rust core
Oh this is super cool. Coming from Java I've long missed JDBI and Rosetta which makes writing SQL Queries in Java a dream. I've toyed around with a similar style interface for python, and looking at this give me hope I can achieve it.
bognition··on USDA is closing buildings, relocating staff, and downsizing-a lot
Interesting, where are you running into trouble buying meat from local farmers? I've often visit rural farms that have a store houses. Nearly all of them haver refrigerators and freezers with meat to buy.
bognition··on Show HN: OpenWork – An open-source alternative to Claude Cowork
My take on the OP is that its commitment to an idea is what matters, not how quickly its created. I love seeing people insta-clone things but is this a side project that going to see updates for a few weeks or is this something that is going to be maintained actively for years to come.
bognition··on We rolled our own documentation site
It is the sites job to make documentation available to the users, no?

It’s so odd for a tech focused crowed to be so opposed to newer technology.

Users are getting used to natural language search, not having it will be perceived as friction.

Users are increasingly turning to agentic coding tools, those tools do best when documentation is available via an MCP server. Not having one will make it harder for people to use your product.

bognition··on Anxiety disorders tied to low levels of choline in the brain
I can understand why this may seem simple, but when it comes to the brain almost nothing is simple.

Choline a key component in Acetylcholine is the primary neurotransmitter used in your hippocampus. Its an excitatory neurotransmitter meaning it turns neurons on. The hippocampus is a massive parallel feedback circuit that when over stimulated can and will begin to seize. In fact many people who suffer from seizures have over active hippocampal circuitry. Simply "flooding" the brain with more choline could have very very bad effects.

Likewise, taking choline might not work as the brain actively controls and regulates the contents of the cerebral spinal fluid. Unlike the rest of your body, the capillaries in the brain are not leaky, but instead are enshrouded in the blood-brain barrier and there are active transport proteins for anything that isn't lipid soluble.

Choline is actively transported into the brain and the brain has additional internal mechanisms to regulate the levels of choline.

Lastly, neurotransmitters aren't just floating around in the soup of your brain. They are released by specific neurons which are integrated into specific circuits. Parkinson's disease is a perfect example here. There is tiny region of the brain involved in regulating voluntary movements that is rich in dopamine neurons. For Parkinson's these neurons die off while the rest of the brain remains relatively strong. Simply putting dopamine into the brain doesn't fix the issue you need to up the dopamine released by these specific neurons.

The treatment here is l-dopa which is a precursor to dopamine which does this, but once those neurons are gone they're gone and there is little we can do to stop the disease.

So if this works for l-dopa why won't it work for choline? My guess is because of the tight regulation the brain has around choline levels as its needed to prevent the hippocampus from seizing up.

bognition··on Modular monolith and microservices: Modularity is what matters
Hard agree with this article. Split up your application by domains, create public apis between modules, understand your dep tree and keep it clean.

The devil in the details is how you pull something like this off. At the end of the day is boils down to how do you enforce that your team does the right thing. You can have a single person that enforces standards with an iron fist, but this doesn't scale. You can teach everyone how this should work, but you're going to experience drift over time as people come and go. Or you can enforce it using technology and automation.

In the cases of the first choice, its going to restrict how big your team can get and will end up eating all of the time of your one person.

In the case of the second choice, a combination of the tragedy of the commons and regression to mean will degrade the system to spaghetti code.

For the third scenario language choice matters here a lot. In Java with multi maven modules you can setup maven to forbid imports of specific module types allowing you to make modules as private/public. In Python you can't do any of this.

bognition··on Smartphones manipulate our emotions and trigger our reflexes
Not sure if you’re being coy or pushing the trope but you’re right guns don’t actually kill people. The bullets and blood loss tend to do that.

That said, denying people access to guns does result in fewer gun related fatalities.

bognition··on Rivian's TM-B electric bike
Its an interesting idea and the engineer in my agrees with you. Then the product skeptic says that anyone who wants to ride a bike as a form of exercise and get around using a bike, would probably just ride a normal bike.
bognition··on Uv overtakes pip in CI
Why not?

In my docker files I use `uv sync` to install deps vs `pip install -f requirements.txt`

And then set my command to `uv run my_command.py` vs calling Python directly.

bognition··on Uv overtakes pip in CI
Honestly, I was skeptical when I learned about uv. I thought, just Python needs, another dependency manager… this was after fighting with pip, venv, venvwrapper, and poetry for years.

Then I gave it a try and it just worked! It’s so much better that I immediately moved all my Python projects to it.

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