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brianshaler

795 karma · joined January 23, 2009

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brianshaler··on I co-founded Burning Man. The festival has lost its soul
I think the point GP was making was that the co-founder was basing their judgment secondhand from stories from friends and headlines.

Another bit I found peculiar was the mentions of anarchism while seeming to have a rigid idea of what the event should or should not be. It's certainly far less anarchistic today—placements, permits, law enforcement—but it's not exactly anarchism to say it isn't allowed to evolve to fit the scale and culture of the participants.

brianshaler··on AI Adoption Rates Starting to Flatten Out
I assure you I don't have any wishes one way or another.

What tickled me into making the comment above had nothing to do with whether adoption rate was used by the author (or is used generally) to mean market penetration or the rate of adoption. It was because a visual aid that is labeled ambiguously enough to support the exact opposite perspective was used as a basis for clearing up any ambiguity.

The purpose of a time series chart is necessarily time-derivative, as the slope or shape of the line is generally the focus (is a value trending upward, downward, varying seasonally, etc). It's fair to include or omit a label on the dependent axis. If omitted, it's also fair to label the chart as the dependent variable and also to let the "... over time" be implicit.

However, when the dependent axis is not explicitly labeled and "over time" is left implicit, it's absolutely hilarious to me to point to it and say it clearly shows that the chart's title is or is not time-derivative.

I know comment sections are generally for heated debates trying to prove right and wrong, but sometimes it's nice to be able to muse for a moment on funny things like this.

brianshaler··on AI Adoption Rates Starting to Flatten Out
There's another axis on the charts.
brianshaler··on AI Adoption Rates Starting to Flatten Out
> Have you read the graphs?

Yes. The title specifically is beautiful. The charts aren't nearly as interesting, though probably a bit more than a meta discussion on whether certain time intervals align with one interpretation of the author's intent or another.

brianshaler··on AI Adoption Rates Starting to Flatten Out
It maps pretty cleanly to the well understood derivatives of a position vector. Position (user count), velocity (first derivative, change in user count over time), acceleration (second derivative, speeding up or flattening of the velocity), and jerk (third derivative, change in acceleration such as the shift between from acceleration to deceleration)

It really is a beautiful title.

brianshaler··on Carice TC2 – A non-digital electric car
> What is the price of a Carice TC2?

> Prices for a TC2 start at €44.500 excluding taxes (€53.854 including 21% btw/Dutch tax).

brianshaler··on Server DRAM prices surge 50% as AI-induced memory shortage hits hyperscalers
I think that's nearly exactly what I paid for 2x32GB at a retail store last week. I hadn't bought RAM in over a decade so I didn't think anything of it. Wish my emergency PC replacement had occurred a year earlier!
brianshaler··on Microsoft is officially sending employees back to the office
In 2008 I was given 2 offers from a company: WFH or paid relocation to work in-office. I chose the former, which came with a 26% lower salary, and have been remote ever since. Just comparing the salaries in that case is a little disingenuous, however, since the relocation was from a low cost of living city to a high cost of living city.

A large impact on the extent to which WFH may need to come at a discount is specialization: If you're easily replaceable with an in-office worker, why would the company deal with remote? If you're not so easily replaceable, the company is more likely to be willing to work with you on your terms.

There's generally been a large disconnect between the job market in the tech sector and the rest of the economy, at least until a few years ago. There's now much more of a bifurcation within the tech job market, where rank-and-file and entry level software engineers are suffering while experienced and specialized software engineers may be doing better than ever. This plays into the RTO/WFH discussion because some people may not have the option to get their preference at any discount, or given either option in the first place.

brianshaler··on Triangle splatting: radiance fields represented by triangles
You can use spherical harmonics to encode a few coefficients in addition to the base RGB for each splat such that the rendertime view direction can be used to compute an output RGB. A "reflection" in 3DGS isn't a light ray being traced off the surface, but instead a way of saying "when viewed from this angle, the splat may take an object's base color, while from that angle, the splat may be white because the input image had glare"

This ends up being very effective with interpolation between known viewpoints, and hit-or-miss extrapolation beyond known viewpoints.

brianshaler··on 4o Image Generation
Even the 18 Pro Max Ultra with Apple Intelligence?

Obligatory Jobs monologue on marketing people:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P4VBqTViEx4

brianshaler··on Two new PebbleOS watches
> can't justify buying two watches

I managed to eke out a couple more years after Pebbles were discontinued by finding replacements on ebay. If this is a low volume run, I'm contemplating the opposite—whether I can justify not buying multiple while I still can.

brianshaler··on Two new PebbleOS watches
It's absolutely essential to be able to differentiate between gross profit and net profit to establish unit economics, especially as the scale of a newly founded operation may drastically change relative to some amount of fixed capex or SG&A expense.
brianshaler··on Okta – Username Above 52 Characters Security Advisory
Re the second quote and response:

One pattern I bump up against from time to time is the delta between using a perfectly defensible technique for a given use-case (safe delimiters when constructing an input for a specific function) versus a desire to have each decision be driven by some universal law (e.g. "if you're streaming data between services, using null bytes as delimiters might not be safe if consuming services may truncate at null bytes, so NEVER use null bytes as delimiters because they can be unsafe")

It's not even a matter of one "side" being right or wrong. You can simultaneously be right that this is perfectly safe in this use-case, while someone else can be right to be concerned ("need to consider possible") because the code will forever be one refactor or copy/paste away from this concatenated string being re-used somewhere else.

brianshaler··on Smartphone buyers meh on AI, care more about battery life
I'd rather have flagship specs in a smaller package. The smallest in the iPhone (SE) and Pixel ("A"?) lines are still too big and tend to have previous-gen specs
brianshaler··on Civet: A Superset of TypeScript
> And then it ruined us with implicit returns

What was so ruinous about implicit returns? That's one of the things I missed most when leaving CoffeeScript. ECMAScript only partially adopted it (single statement fat arrow functions) which probably muddies the waters for people trying to learn and understand the language's behavior.

Since it's optional for the caller to use or assign the return value of a function, I don't see much problem with functions defaulting to returning something. Maybe it just fits with my personal preference of functions returning a value and not having side-effects..

brianshaler··on Using Euro coins as weights (2004)
You should be just as mystified about the 4€ component.
brianshaler··on SpaceX launches mission for 2 NASA astronauts who are stuck on the ISS
> If there wasn't another ride from the ISS available, would the astronauts be stranded? Yes.

Seems like the answer to this would be no. Starliner's risk was elevated, not guaranteed to fail. The presence of a flight-proven option was the limiting factor.

brianshaler··on iPhone 16's A18 Pro chip outperforms the M1 chip
Current generation computers, sure, but I think there's still steady progress toward increasing amount of compute per unit of energy. For phones, that's almost as important for heat dissipation as it is for battery life, as we're less likely to get more energy per unit of volume in the near future.
brianshaler··on Learning to Reason with LLMs
No matter the prompt, there's a significant difference between how it handles common problems in popular languages (python, JS) versus esoteric algorithms in niche languages or tools.

I had a funny one a while back (granted this was probably ChatGPT 3.5) where I was trying to figure out what payload would get AWS CloudFormation to fix an authentication problem between 2 services and ChatGPT confidently proposed adding some OAuth querystring parameters to the AWS API endpoint.

brianshaler··on Why Don't Tech Companies Pay Their Engineers to Stay?
> "With a market this hot"

Maybe the title should get a [2021] because it sounds like the market has cooled substantially in the last year or so.

The article doesn't seem to take into consideration market cycles, assuming market rate always goes up at a rate that outpaces cost-of-living comp adjustments. While this may be the case more often than not, how are companies supposed to absorb market downturns? A salary reduction, if legal (?), seems almost as bad as redundancy except you risk being saddled with disgruntled workers who might decide to jump ship at the next moment that is convenient for them.

brianshaler··on Basic ReAct webapp using FastHTML and LangGraph
For anyone like me that wondered if "ReAct webapp" was a weird way of capitalizing the React webapp Javascript framework, it appears to be about a Reasoning and Acting methodology[0] with LLMs.

Maybe obvious for anyone with more of a pulse on the latest in the LLM space, but it was new to me and took some digging to get more context.

[0] https://arxiv.org/abs/2210.03629

brianshaler··on I was a 20-something dethroned dotcom ceo that went to work at mcdonald's (2000)
I used to work in software sales in a call center. I hated my job and the highlight of my week was the Monday burrito special down the street at a place where the employees shouted "Welcome to Moe's!" whenever customers entered. When thinks ultimately fell apart at that job, I went to Moe's and somehow managed to get a job despite a lack of food service experience. I lasted a while—months, I think—but eventually got fired.

I don't know that there's a moral to that, but I guess I tend to look at the urge to bail and go to unskilled (or really, differently-skilled) labor less as a virtuous thing and more a sign that some in-place re-evaluation is needed with mental health in mind.

I still occasionally say "I should become a farmer" but take it more as a sign that there's something I probably need to address within my current situation and/or I need to get back on the wagon of going on morning walks.

brianshaler··on How to get stuff repaired when the manufacturer don't wanna: take 'em to court
In a bathroom, a hot lamp is likely intentional. It's typically on its own circuit for use while taking a hot shower.
brianshaler··on First look at the upcoming Starlink Mini
It sounds more like a building material or geography issue. I've used LTE upwards of 10km off shore. In areas where there isn't good line of sight or if buildings tend to interfere with signal, the access points need to be positioned more densely
brianshaler··on Ask HN: Freelancers, how do you get work?
Word of mouth, referral.

Put another way, freelancing means your job is part your vocation and part sales and marketing. You generally need to be proficient at both in order to be successful.

For me, personally, while I was an employee I went to monthly tech meetups—ideally cross-functional, not just programming language user groups—and travel to conferences on my own dime.

Things have changed in the last 20 years, but the principles of what worked for me still apply. I met people from around the world at conferences like sxsw interactive and kept in touch on a nascent pre-celebrity twitter. When I decided to go freelance, I had over 100 acquaintances to reach out to, whether they might want to work with me or to keep me in mind if they eventually had someone to refer. Obviously, the communities and platforms would be different today.

It helps to specialize, so when someone encounters a need for $skill or $domain they think of you. For me, that was data visualization. I also built a portfolio with a lot of automotive work, which begat more work in that industry.

brianshaler··on Nemotron-4-340B
I'm not sure what business GP is in, but being encouraged not to be unethical and explicitly forbidding illegal activity doesn't seem like much of an infringement on one's freedom more than the applicable laws. I guess being arrested for crimes is one thing, but having a license revoked on top of that is just one step too far?
brianshaler··on The American West is figuring out how to keep cool
A decade or two ago there was a push to paint as many roofs white as possible, which is why you may intuit dark is bad. Black surfaces convert absorb light energy and convert it into heat. Solar panels do get hot, but part of the point is to turn as much of that light energy as possible into electrical energy.
brianshaler··on The American West is figuring out how to keep cool
I think the point GP was making was that hot daytime temperatures in desert climates tend to coincide with peak renewable energy generation, while at higher latitudes in cloudier places the the source of energy is more likely to be from combustion.
brianshaler··on A flat map with the least error possible: The Gott-Goldberg-Vanderbei projection
I made an interactive WebGL implementation of this without realizing it was a thing: https://brian.sh/around/index.html

I don't really agree with the claims in the articles linked in OP, and don't find it to be a generally useful projection, even for the tool I made using it. It was novel as a representation that included daylight context (instead of just "what time is it there?" it helped express "is it getting dark there?") that preserved area better than a globe and was more intuitive than a day/night waveform on a rectilinear projection. But ultimately, if you're showing anything that has to do with populations (cities, people) pretty much any projection will waste large amounts of space on oceans and unpopulated land regions. That is to say, before choosing a favorite map projection, I think it's probably better to not to use a map projection at all unless you're going for a hike or setting sail.

Somebody beat me to the obligatory xkcd, but this West Wing bit is my go-to for map projection discussions: https://youtu.be/vVX-PrBRtTY

I like framing map projections by what they prioritize or sacrifice—fidelity in axis, position, size—and what projection is "best" depends entirely on which characteristics are more important. I disagree with OP's claim about this projection being "the most accurate flat map of the Earth yet" though haven't put a ton of thought into the physical, back-to-back definition of "flat" vs on-screen.

brianshaler··on A flat map with the least error possible: The Gott-Goldberg-Vanderbei projection
Here's an interactive WebGL implementation: https://brian.sh/around/index.html

It doesn't have a satellite image option, but that would arguably be simpler than drawing continents like it does now. It uses a seldom-redrawn base canvas (menu -> debug > show 2d texture) then the discs are drawn with a simple shader.

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