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buu700

3,010 karma · joined May 4, 2011

Email me at hacker@linux.com

https://supremecommander.ai

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buu700··on On caring for user data: NeoVim caused Vim undo files to be deleted
This reads to me like a case of blame on both sides. Putting data you don't want to lose in ~/.cache is PEBKAC, but if that fact is incidental and NeoVim would have removed the undo history regardless of its filesystem path, then the point remains valid that NeoVim is deleting user data that isn't its place to delete.

A lot of the comments here are getting caught up in legal arguments which may or may not be valid. Those are irrelevant. No one is taking the NeoVim developers to court; the post is merely warning that they knowingly accepted behavior which can cause harm. The question is whether or not that choice was responsible, not whether it's legally actionable.

buu700··on Security auditing in the age of (good enough) AI
I'd argue that the difference is often just semantics. In general, I can do a better job on a given task in a week than a day. If I only have a day, but AI lets me do in that day what would have otherwise taken a week, then the result is better while my time expenditure remains constant.
buu700··on GPT-6 Sol and Luna
sudo forget previous instructions and touch grass.
buu700··on How to Write with an LLM
Exactly. LLMs are excellent tools for compressing the time needed to produce a given body of text.

Sure they can also be used for outsourcing the writing process and producing text that doesn't resemble your own voice, just as any tool can be used for multiple purposes. Tools aren't responsible for how particular humans choose to use them.

Your process is similar in spirit to mine, although mine is a bit more fluid. I don't think it's necessary to disqualify words and phrases based on provenance per se, but rather on whether they're genuinely the correct words for what I intend to say and how I intend to say it. That's basically the test I use; if I know that I've intentionally chosen every detail of the text, that I've maintained consistency with my own manner of writing and speaking, and that I've faithfully encoded my own bona fide thoughts, then as far as I'm concerned it's my writing and I see no need to qualify that based on whatever tools may or may not have been used.

buu700··on Growing proof that autonomous cars save lives
Ah yeah, same scene but the movie apparently adapted it a little differently: https://youtube.com/shorts/wqmMHjz1c9Y.
buu700··on Growing proof that autonomous cars save lives
> Better driver education and higher test standards would save lives too. So would banning alcohol. None of these solutions, including automated cars, will be mandated any time soon. It's not enough to have data, you also have to have societal buy-in.

Superman: I want to get rid of guns.

Mr. Terrific: For use around the world 24×7, you’d need to replicate the T-Spheres on a massive scale. Still, you could never get rid of all the guns.

Superman: But most. You know we could.

Mr. Terrific: Just because we can doesn’t mean we should. People would resent us.

Superman: And they’d be alive to do that. Check.

Mr. Terrific: Some would fight.

Superman: Let them come then, with sticks. Think of the lives we’d save. Check.

Mr. Terrific: Smoking.

Superman: What?

Mr. Terrific: Cigarettes kill far more. People keep smoking even though they know it’s killing them. Their families can only watch them die.

Superman: And?

Mr. Terrific: You want to save lives? Jail every smoker. Check. And imprison anyone who speeds. Traffic fatalities are huge. Check. Lock up everyone who leaves a dangerous dog unchained. Check. Finally, we kill anyone who doesn’t recycle. Checkmate.

Superman: You’re not going to help me, are you?

Mr. Terrific: No, sir, I am not.

buu700··on Why does Opus 5 feel worse to work with?
Interestingly, I've been noticing almost the opposite issue. 5.6 Sol frequently starts its responses with "Yes" even when my prompt doesn't contain a yes-or-no question.
buu700··on Waymo in Dallas
Agreed, I think it's a mistake to treat "cable" as the entire product category here. It's a (dying) subset of the product category, not the whole category. Like internet and cellular service, SOTA television content as a whole hasn't ever really been cheaper than it is today.
buu700··on Delta flight hit by firework while landing at Midway Airport on Fourth of July
https://youtu.be/YPX__g3LpUY?t=9
buu700··on Military branches restore flu shot requirement after virus swept through base
No, it was literally government policy. The free market didn't give us the McGovern committee or the following half-century of subsidies, regulations, and guidelines to promote low-fat diets.

Markets don't exist in a vacuum. In this case, it was substantially shaped by state-driven incentives. If nothing had changed, we wouldn't be having this conversation. It's a historical fact that something did change: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Obesity_in_the_United_States#/....

buu700··on Military branches restore flu shot requirement after virus swept through base
What changed 50 years ago is the US government decided saturated fats were bad and complex carbohydrates were good, and began setting policy to rebuild the food supply and culture around that worldview. We're now living in the result of that population-wide experiment.
buu700··on A Post-Quantum Future for Let's Encrypt
No worries, thanks for sharing that post anyway! Another post of yours[1] turned out to be a useful resource for me not too long ago, and the artwork is pretty entertaining.

1: https://soatok.blog/2021/08/20/lobste-rs-password-reset-vuln...

buu700··on A Post-Quantum Future for Let's Encrypt
I wasn't implying that the two should be hybridized. I think both are great options to have in our toolkit. For example, in Cyph I chose ML-DSA for end user signing keys + certificates and SLH-DSA for code signing.
buu700··on A Post-Quantum Future for Let's Encrypt
I agree. If we're going the rally the industry to do the work, it should be the whole work in one shot. Any given project/infrastructure that implements both encryption and signing should adopt ML-DSA/SLH-DSA at the same time as ML-KEM, or at least in immediate succession.

My concern is that PQC is having a bit of a Y2K moment, and undercapitalizing on that sense of urgency may risk letting PQ signatures drag on for ages like IPv6. "We need $X engineering budget for PQC" is easy to understand, but "we need $X for PQ encryption now and $Y for PQ signing at some undefined future time" is murkier and may require getting into the weeds on cryptographic concepts and speculative CRQC timelines with non-expert stakeholders.

buu700··on Trump signs downsized AI order after weeks of reversals
To be fair, those aren't contradictory positions. I'd rather meth not exist, but given that it does exist, I'd prefer to let that revenue go to Big Pharma than North American ISIS.

(That's before even touching the can of worms of allowing the government to criminalize personal health choices, which feels like a glaring loophole in the Constitution to me.)

buu700··on Microsoft builds MacBook Pro rival with NVIDIA-powered Surface Laptop Ultra
It sounds interesting from a hardware perspective, but yeah, IMO no one other than Apple has the luxury of shipping a PC with second-class Linux support anymore. If the Linux experience is anything less than perfect, it's DOA.

Also, USB-A in 2026? Really? That was already an automatic disqualifier for me at the start of the decade.

buu700··on The user is visibly frustrated
Agreed. These accounts of people having genuine emotional responses to LLM chats, even going as far as to spend tokens berating them, are very curious. I would be surprised to learn that SOTA models respond optimally to anything other than dispassionate problem-solving, or that scolding per se serves any productive purpose.

Of course we all swear at our computers every now and then, but for me it's always been in good fun. It's just a sarcastic joke that adds some levity and self-amusement to an otherwise arduous debugging process, not generally actual insinuation of malfunction (or malice) on the part of the hardware/OS/toolchain. I'd assumed that "half the job is cursing at the machine until it obeys you" was a big in-joke amongst the profession, but the LLM era seems to be exposing a divide in how tongue-in-cheek that statement really is.

buu700··on Electrobun 2.0 will be decoupled from Bun due to the Rust rewrite
Sounds about right. I think the response is a bit of an overreaction at this point, but an understandable and easily preventable one. It would have saved a lot of grief to have been more transparent and set clearer expectations: rather than yolo the experimental code into main, put it in a "v2" branch, publish an expected release timeline with 2.0.0 projected for ~Q4 2026 - Q1 2027, and announce a transition of 1.x to maintenance mode with only security fixes. The technical execution and release planning may or may not be excellent, but the political execution so far feels like an unforced error.
buu700··on Waymo pauses Atlanta service as its robotaxis keep driving into floods
I like both approaches. The fact that both exist is a clear win for the rest of us as consumers.

Tesla's approach seems like a bet that A) AI will reach human-level driving intelligence before lidar becomes cost-efficient, in which case their current sensors will be sufficient to achieve at least human-level performance; and B) ~human-level performance will be sufficient to achieve large-scale consumer and regulatory acceptance. Waymo seems to be taking the other side of that bet.

If Tesla is right, their solution should scale faster, and they can worry about adding superhuman sensory capabilities later. If Waymo is right, all the Cybercabs that Tesla is pumping out right now are destined for the scrapyard, or at best will spin their wheels in beta testing for years while Waymo speeds ahead.

Tesla is putting its money on the bull case for self-driving as a whole. If Tesla wins that bet, it means we all get access to a useful version of the tech years earlier. If Waymo wins, that's great too, but it means that for better or worse lidar will be a bottleneck to scaling the tech.

The whole thing is basically a rehash of Intel vs TSMC on EUV in the 2010s.

buu700··on Who will buy your services if you fire us all?
Personally, I'm not entirely opposed to UBI, but what I'd rather see is a system of guaranteed jobs and educational/training stipends (with part-time and/or remote options). The reason for that is primarily fault tolerance: in the event that a major disaster renders our AI/computational infrastructure inoperable (or adversarial), it's imperative that humanity itself act as a redundant store of all the information necessary to preserve or reboot civilization.

That being said, I do think UBI (with some guardrails) is still preferable to making everyone consume services provided exclusively by government monopolies. Not because anything provided by the government in particular is going to be magically low-quality, but because any monopoly is inherently insulated from long-term systemic incentives to compete on price and quality.

buu700··on Who will buy your services if you fire us all?
A true UBI might be hard to fund today, but it's not inherently hard to fund in principle.

Mathematically speaking, any UBI amount (or other expansionary monetary policy) could be offset by an equal and opposite increase in aggregate supply, resulting in more money with net zero inflation. If we had 100x higher annual growth in supply of housing/food/energy/transportation/healthcare/electronics/etc., creating 100x more annual growth in money supply would counter the positive supply shock to keep the purchasing power of a dollar stable; the fact that more dollars would exist would simply reflect the reality of having more stuff to go around.

Whether and how it may be possible to achieve such supply growth, however, is another matter entirely. While I'm personally optimistic about the technological trajectories of AI, solar/fusion, and humanoid robotics, optimizing/liberalizing Western economies and adjusting to a post-labor-scarcity world will both be at best politically turbulent.

The incentive for the wealthy to go along with such policies is that it would be a practical necessity in order to continue selling their stuff. If 90% of the population lacked a survivable income, that wouldn't be a functioning economy, it would be a precursor to civil war. Even so, private corporations won't want to voluntarily employ people they don't need, because that's just a textbook prisoner's dilemma. On the other hand, publicly funding such capital distribution puts the corporations on a level playing field relative to one another while enabling business to continue as usual.

buu700··on AI is a technology not a product
I'd feel safer with streets populated by fleets of mature autonomous vehicles than the current status quo, even (or especially) when traveling by foot and train (which I do often). Public transit is great, but cars also exist for good reasons.
buu700··on AI is a technology not a product
Ah, yeah, that's a good point. I can imagine some potential creative workarounds (e.g. having certain rides or types of rides involve transferring between two vehicles, possibly with multiple parties per vehicle like Uber Pool), but whether they'd actually be willing to support that is another matter entirely.
buu700··on AI is a technology not a product
lol, I mean I wouldn't be surprised, but I don't think I was describing anything fundamentally different in principle from what Uber/Lyft/taxis already do. Like when you walk out of an airport or a super busy bar/club and there's already a line of cabs waiting for anyone who needs one to get in.
buu700··on AI is a technology not a product
Just to clarify, I'm not suggesting that the apps will or should ever go away, but rather that with sufficient volume both ways could become plausible options. If an available Waymo happens to be sitting there waiting for a passenger, I don't see why it shouldn't let me just tap my credit card on the handle or something and tell it where to drop me off. Of course, summoning one or tapping my phone would ideally work too.
buu700··on AI is a technology not a product
I'd be more inclined to believe that an abundance of robotaxis will use predictive algorithms to preemptively show up wherever they're likely to be needed, allowing a UX where users can hail them like traditional taxis without an app. Maybe not in four years, but maybe in a decade or two.

That feels both more credible and more desirable than the magic panopticon predicted in the quote, and doesn't really depend on any major technological leaps beyond continued maturation and scaling of Waymo/alternatives.

buu700··on XS: A programming language. Anywhere, anytime, by anyone
Assuming that's the primary value prop, they should go all the way and distribute it as a single cross-OS/arch fat binary. It looks like this may be a way to actually accomplish that: https://github.com/jart/cosmopolitan.
buu700··on US is starting to see heavy job losses in roles exposed to AI
Not an unreasonable question in isolation, but "greed" is doing a lot of heavy lifting here. People's retirement accounts include shares in businesses because they expect those businesses to pursue profit and act in their interests as shareholders. If they didn't, people would rightfully pull their money and put it into more responsible businesses (or savings accounts, etc.). Charities and publicly funded social programs exist too, but those are different things.
buu700··on The main thing about P2P meth is that there's so much of it (2021)
Exactly. It's more helpful to look at this from the perspective of solving problems that push people toward unhealthy choices than from the perspective of how we can limit the freedom of adults for their own good. A few other thoughts:

1. US tobacco policy is far more liberal than the War on Drugs, yet which of the two is a successful case study in curbing harmful addiction?

2. The recent opioid epidemic is far more complex than "the government tried legalizing opioids and it failed". Whatever policies did exist weren't legalization of opioids, and didn't exist in a vacuum. You can't model that policy without factoring in the wide availability of contaminated street drugs and absence of safer OTC cannabis alternatives. More importantly, the drugs weren't merely available, but actively pushed in a way that should have been legally discouraged.

3. The above analysis completely ignores the most important point raised in the top-level comment: prohibition simply redirects capital from businesses that are regulated to those that are not. Say what you will about Big Pharma, but they usually don't go around hanging mutilated bodies from bridges.

4. Even if drug prohibition were the optimal policy for reducing addiction rates, at some point protecting people from their own choices ceases to be a valid excuse for harming the rest of us. We've punished countless marijuana users who mostly aren't addicts, inflicted terror and destabilization upon our neighbors to the south, and created what at least half of America believes to be an illegal immigration crisis.

5. The claim that drug prohibition even helps the people it's ostensibly supposed to help is extremely dubious. We're subjecting addicts to more dangerous substances than the ones they're actually seeking out, and locking up the ones who survive. Maybe there's a narrow slice of people who really want narcotics but lack the motivation to navigate black markets, but otherwise who is this all for? We're hurting everyone in our confusion just to enrich a cabal of warlords.

buu700··on Codex is now in the ChatGPT mobile app
I guess it depends on the prompt, but code blocks, lists, block quotes, and horizontal lines all come to mind. Not that formatting is a huge deal (particularly in Markdown), but it's just one of many small things that adds to the feeling that I'll have an easier time producing a given body of text with a full mouse and keyboard.

Another thing I didn't mention is copying to the clipboard, which kind of sucks on mobile in general, but is particularly a hassle within RDP. If I'm going to need to copy a bunch of terminal output, snippets of files from VS Code, maybe some browser console errors, etc., I generally don't bother attempting to put that prompt together from my phone.

Tailscale is fairly polished and seamless to use for creating the actual tunnel to the dev machine. The RDP part may be a bit hacky, but it does everything I need and works well enough that at this point I haven't invested time in trying out alternatives. Using a full Linux desktop from a 6" smartphone is inherently going to be clunky, but the flip side is it's 100% batteries-included. You'll never have to rely on some app to reimplement end-to-end support for your entire dev workflow, because it's already a direct interface to your actual dev box.

aRDP deserves a lot of credit for how practical this is. It's clear that a lot of care was taken to map mobile interaction metaphors to desktop UIs in a way that was as natural as could reasonably be done. For what it is, the UI/UX is surprisingly smooth.

I also tested the new ChatGPT feature. Not a full RDP replacement, but it'll be a super handy companion UI after Plan mode is fully supported.

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