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bsder

18,935 karma · joined February 8, 2014

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bsder··on EFF letter to FTC on X consent order [pdf]
It's not up to the peanut gallery to disprove easily falsifiable statements from easily found public evidence.
bsder··on Bring back crappy forums
Most of the evils of the modern internet trace back to the fact that the default access device became a phone without a keyboard.

Using a phone automatically puts you in "low interaction passive consumer" mode. Once you concede that, you are now 3 steps behind the 8-ball permanently.

bsder··on Global review confirms mRNA vaccines are safe, effective and full of promise 
> Healthy children and young adults were at very little risk from COVID though.

People repeat this but there is no validation of this.

Sure, children and young adults mostly weren't at risk of dying. It is not at all clear that there are not bad side effects from getting an active Covid infection. We're still crunching the data.

We're just now beginning the process of correlating virii and bad latent effects many years later. HPV -> Cervical Cancer. Epsetin-Barr -> MS. And, of course the one we have known about for a while: Chicken Pox -> Shingles.

bsder··on Global review confirms mRNA vaccines are safe, effective and full of promise 
The Covid vaccines were and continue to be VERY effective at preventing you from winding up on ECMO.

Yes, you may still get Covid, but you don't die from drowning in your own body fluids anymore.

Of course, this only attends if you got the damn vaccine. All of the Covid deaths around me in the last couple years (7 deaths) were anti-vaxxers. But, hey, we know that reality has a well-known liberal bias.

bsder··on Global review confirms mRNA vaccines are safe, effective and full of promise 
> If these mRNA vaccines had not been pushed or mandated, more people would probably think they are safe: there will be no need for any of these reviews.

Hogwash. Wakefield predated anything Covid. And measles vaccines aren't mRNA and people would rather let their children die.

Had Trump and Co called the vaccine part of the second coming, people would be lining up at their churches to get them.

You can't reason someone out of a position they didn't reason themselves into.

bsder··on What to learn to be a graphics programmer
> Who are you to say their future career prospect is a folly?

Someone who watched an industry chew up and spit out far too many young people. That's who and that's why I'm qualified.

> The only thing that defines the talents of tomorrow is that they have ignored such advice and then pushed forward the state of the art in ways you couldn't even imagine. This is how progress works.

You would encourage an individual to walk a path that is 90%(95%/99%) likely to damage their life horribly in the name of "progress"? Really? That's ... more than a little inhumane.

Would you encourage someone who likes writing to be a "journalist" right now? I should hope not. I wouldn't tell them to not write, but I sure would try to find a better way to channel that skill.

Or perhaps, if we substituted "pro basketball player" for "graphics programming" perhaps you could see the folly? Although, at least the individual playing basketball would gain the immediate benefits of being quite fit while the graphics programmer would enjoy no such side benefit.

bsder··on What to learn to be a graphics programmer
> I really dislike people that got into a thing and then try to discourage others. “Don’t be like me! I wasted my entire life” which is bullshit from a jaded person that lost passion. Telling people to stay away from graphics programming is not how to entice tomorrow’s John Carmack.

Given that almost everyone who wants to be a "graphics programmer" is also somehow gaming industry adjacent, it is extremely fair to ward them off from the folly. I do the same for anyone wishing to do "VLSI hardware engineering." If you have the skill to do either of those, you almost CERTAINLY have the skill to do something else that is almost as interesting and not saddled by garbage employers.

The primary problem with being a "graphics programmer" beyond a tyro is that the biggest consumer of graphics programmers is the game industry which is a notoriously shitty and wretched industry. Every ... single ... employer. So, from the point of view of future potential, "graphics programmer" has very little upside over pretty much ANY other type of programmers.

Second, "learning graphics programming" is like "learning phone programming", you spend more time fighting godawful software infrastructure more than you do actual programming. AI actually kind of helps this, but it doesn't completely remove the fact that 80% of your knowledge has a half-life of 18-24 months.

Finally, saying "I want to learn graphics programming" is like saying "I want to learn engineering." What "graphics programmer" means is vastly underspecified. 3D game rendering and 3D/2D CAD rendering and 2D vector rendering are completely different skillsets. GPUs are great at the first and kinda okay at the second and kinda lousy at the third. Which kind of "graphics programmer" are you even going to be?

bsder··on Nano Banana 2 Lite
Krea2 has been remarkable for me so far, and, I suspect, the reason why Google kicked this out so suddenly.
bsder··on Claude Code is steganographically marking requests
> U.S. courts have pretty consistently decided that training on copyrighted works falls under fair use.

I don't believe that this has been resolved at all, and there are quite a few pending lawsuits about it at this very moment.

bsder··on Qwen 3.6 27B is the sweet spot for local development
> I totally struggled to find the right frame of mind to explore any of this stuff without feeling defeated and bamboozled. Because it's just huge, exhausting, jargon-drenched, unknowable, and I am over the hill at fifty-plus.

Hello, my brother, just know that you have a fellow passenger in life at the same age who thinks the same thing. I agree that the local stuff is helping my understanding a LOT.

However, my gut feel as someone who got to experience the TeleBomb after the DotBomb is that the obfuscation is INTENTIONAL--it's neither you nor your age. I remember asking people to explain to me what the OC-768 startup endgame was when roughly 10 OC-768 links could carry the world's traffic at the time--and everybody giving me blank looks. The AI Bubble has the EXACT same feel as the Telecom Bubble--just bigger.

What I really wish is that I could find a VPS-type provider where I could toss things into their NVIDIA/AMD machines for an hour or two. Alas, all of the providers seem to want massive paperwork and huge minimum purchases.

I can't wait for the bubble to pop so that we mere mortals can finally build with this stuff.

bsder··on Slisp: Simple Lisp compiler (Linux/amd64)
That's a Lisp vs Scheme kind of thing. Also, being able to take the cdr of an empty list is a Lisp vs Scheme thing.
bsder··on AI in mathematics is forcing big questions
> This is one of the great things about formalization: it would have avoided this entire debacle.

It's also a MASSIVE amount of SUPER TEDIOUS work. And it's the kind of work that folks who think up advanced math proofs tend to loathe. It's along the lines of programming by toggling in the code from front panel switches.

So what current mathematics does is judge a proof by whether or not the application of the proof somehow coincides with the result from some other adjacent branch of mathematical knowledge. So, a "novel" proof is expected to either help prove something in a slightly different branch of mathematics or simplify some already existing proof.

And that is, as I understand it, the crux of the matter with the Mochizuki proof of the "abc Conjecture." Solving the "abc Conjecture" should provide tools for solving other similar problems just like Wiles' proof of Fermat's Last Theorem provided an entire class of tools for dealing with modularity and elliptic curves. And yet Mochizuki seems to unable to do or demonstrate any of that.

So, Mochizuki's work is like someone dropping a gigantic and impenetrable proof of exactly and only Fermat's Last Theorem that doesn't apply to anything else. Sure, it would be an interesting (and true!) thing, but without the ability to use it further, it's a curiosity rather than a pillar.

bsder··on AI in mathematics is forcing big questions
> checking an existing fully fleshed out proof is simple

The controversy around Mochizuki and the "abc Conjecture" proof is a contrary example.

bsder··on The disappearance of Japan's animators
Indeed. It also looks like it hews VERY closely to Shirow's original manga art style.

I think ... a lot of people are going to be disappointed in that. I like it, but some of the characters designs are ... ugly. I believe intentionally so to draw contrast. But there's just no getting around the fact that some of the characters are ugly.

bsder··on The anxiety of the perfect loaf: the illusion of culinary precision
> You'll even get better at it till you usually get something good.

This is the crux.

Sure, if I bake a loaf of odd bread every couple of days, I will EVENTUALLY get good enough to produce something good rather than just edible. After how long? A week? A month? A YEAR?

So, in the interim, I am WASTING those ingredients and my time.

I liken this to knife sharpening. Sure, EVENTUALLY you will get the feel for sharpening on whetstones and then sharpening your kitchen knives is quick and straightforward. But how many times will it take--especially if you have no mentor to teach you? Alternatively, you can get a fixed-angle sharpener and have sharp kitchen knives tonight.

bsder··on GitHub shouldn't be a dependency for publishing Rust on crates.io
In my personal opinion, if a rogue actor can compromise your project by buying you the equivalent of a beer and a pizza, I don't think anyone should trust you as a dependency to any extent.
bsder··on GitHub shouldn't be a dependency for publishing Rust on crates.io
Can someone explain to me why the inverse domain name solution that everyone in the Java world converged on doesn't work?

It's really not clear to me why people keep avoiding that.

bsder··on OpenAI unveils its first custom chip, built by Broadcom
There is quite a lot of Verilog/SystemVerilog and VHDL code in the wild. And hardware description language code is very simple and straightforward relative to programming code.

And the two things that take up VAST amounts of time in ASIC design are testbenches and timing closure.

A LOT of hardware design is testbenches to verify things. AI is REALLY GOOD at generating things like testbenches. And nobody really cares if the quality of your testbench code sucks as long as it validates what it claims to.

I don't know how good AI is at timing closure, but I wouldn't necessarily be surprised if it is pretty good at it up to the physical point. That's lots of textual output which you can put a constraint on.

Everything involving physical design, though, tends to be a disaster waiting to happen if you let AI loose on it.

bsder··on Apertus – Open Foundation Model for Sovereign AI
Thanks. Even just a few anchor points gives me some context to get started.
bsder··on Show HN: I rebuilt the only parts of my IDE I use, in Rust, over a weekend
And dark themes hide my floaters and are easier on my old eyes.

There is not one singular answer for everybody.

bsder··on I was wrong about the Midjourney ultra-sound scanner
Tech folks have a very ... unique ... perspective on things. The following conversation would not be unusual for a tech geek--"Oh, they found something on that scan, so I need to get it looked at once a week for a month or two. Okay. Shrug.*

That is NOT a typical patient response. Go run that in front of any doctors and watch them laugh you out of the room.

1) When most people see something medical flagged, their first reaction is PANIC.

My friend's wife had something flag on her mammogram--the biopsy later showed it to be benign. In the meantime, her anxiety drove her blood pressure to something like 175 over 130 and they had to up her anxiety and blood pressure meds until the biopsy came back. Her probability of stroke was way higher than her probability of breast cancer. My grandfather had a little blood in his urine from a slowly growing bladder cancer. He forced them to treat it in spite of the fact that he was in his mid-80s, and the probability that cancer would kill him was zero. Instead, he basically died feeling miserable from the cancer treatments 6 months later.

2) Most working people cannot take off the amount of time necessary to do a weekly set of followup medical appointments for a couple months. Again, this is very different from tech geeks who can pretty much throw their work schedules around pretty flexibly.

bsder··on Apertus – Open Foundation Model for Sovereign AI
> we are losing that battle badly despite all the software being here now and viable, entirely because UX sucks.

Yep. I'm an old time Linux sysadmin, but I am COMPLETELY baffled as to what I can or cannot run on my 32GB R9700 with 128GB main CPU memory.

If I want something Claude or Codex like what do I use that would be useful? If I want a chat system, what do I use? Images--apparently ComfyUI for setup but after that what do I do?

I don't even mind spinning up something in the cloud for a bit, but I need to know how I'm going to get data up and down without racking up massive bandwidth charges.

I'd love to do some tinkering, but the field is moving so fast and so full of charlatans that cleaning the dross out is almost impossible.

bsder··on Linux eliminates the strncpy API after six years of work, 360 patches
Zero terminated string is a special case of sentinel value termination.

And sentinel value terminations make a lot of sense when you have punch cards and fixed length records that you need to carve into pieces.

Nobody expected any decisions they were making in the 1960s and 1970s to have any bearing on computing a half-century later. They all expected to have their mistakes long papered over by smarter people at some point.

But we ALL make the mistake of underestimating inertia.

bsder··on Court Records Should Be Free
Agreed. The issue isn't with individuals having access to the data but with aggregation of said data.
bsder··on Ice water drowning survival of young patient (2025)
Unlikely. The issue is cold and the speed of the cold. Children have a higher surface-to-mass ratio along with less subcutaneous fat which allows them to cool quickly. The article quotes the breakpoint:

  If water temperature is >6 °C (43 °F), survival is unlikely for submersion >30 minutes.
And even still, it isn't like the child came out unscathed.
bsder··on The AirPods Effect
It's one thing to isolate against strangers in a subway. It's another thing to be goddamn oblivious in a shared space like a grocery store--to take a random (not) example. It's getting to the point that I have to body up to people to get them to take notice that they're blocking a half dozen of us.

I also do agree with the comment that airpods do seem to get in the way of the most basic of social etiquette. Simple "please" and "thank you" are increasingly rare since you can't recognize the cues when your ears are full of something else.

bsder··on I told them forced consent was unlawful. 5 years later it cost Elkjop €1.8M
> and I am free to go away.

This is the crux of the problem when landlords are allowed to form or join an "association" that gets too pervasive.

This was at the heart of the RealPage lawsuits.

bsder··on Why do commercial spaces sit vacant? (2025)
> Adding a vacancy tax just exacerbates the problem.

The point of the vacancy tax is also to prevent the over speculation before it happens. If the operators know that they are looking at having to cough up more cash than they expect in the future, they might reign in the rampant real estate speculation. If the bank knows that they might have to start coughing up cash, they'll be more inclined to actually just drop the property into bankruptcy.

bsder··on Why do commercial spaces sit vacant? (2025)
The "problem" is that we let people claim the "rent" is X for certain people and "Y" for other people--both at the same time. Just stop that.

The "solution" is that you should have to pay tax on what you claim the rent is after a small grace period (Less than 24 months certainly. Probably less than 12 or at least prorated starting before that.).

If your financial agreement requires and claims that the rent is $5000, no problem! Then the tax authority should expect to receive the tax revenue they would expect if someone was actually paying $5,000 in rent to you. If you want to leave the space vacant even after paying the tax on the revenue--have a blast.

That would short circuit all the financialization shenanigans.

bsder··on Making glass-to-metal seals for home­made vacuum tubes
Erm, don't the guys making homemade Nixie tubes have this figured out?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wxL4ElboiuA

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