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chrisshroba

1,573 karma · joined October 15, 2014

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chrisshroba··on Codex Resets
What do you mean by Permafable?
chrisshroba··on A metallurgist's doubts about self-replicating probes
This article contains 19 em-dashes, as well as the following direct quotes:

Not X, but dramatic Y:

- "But the missing few percent are not marginal; they are precisely the hardest items"

- "is not an engineering detail. It may be the entire problem.

- "the galaxy may be quiet not because nobody tried, but because replication is harder than arithmetic suggests."

as well as at least two other longer "not X, it's Y" type phrases.

Also, melodramatic phrasing like "Replication must outrun degradation — and degradation never sleeps."

Yes, someone could have written these manually, but these particular patterns are the things I notice most commonly in LLM outputs that I don't see in known-human writing.

chrisshroba··on A Comma and a Question Mark, Redux: Quick Terminal Helpers Using Pi
I have something similar, but it's a shell command which writes the command into a file then runs `print -z "$(cat /tmp/command.txt)"`, which prints the command directly to the command line input, so there's no copy paste step needed, it's just ready for me to hit enter (or adjust as needed). It's been wonderful!
chrisshroba··on Cursor Camp
This is such a breath of fresh air. I feel like I'm back on Club Penguin!
chrisshroba··on Show HN: Claude Code skills that build complete Godot games
Can you speak to the total api costs to create one such game? Not looking for exact numbers but I'm curious if to create, say, that snowboarding game, it cost closer to $5, $50, or $500 in usage.
chrisshroba··on TUI Studio – visual terminal UI design tool
Sometimes your system doesn’t have a graphical session, like a raspberry pi with no x server running, or a cloud compute instance I’m ssh’ed into, or a docker image running on my laptop. Sometimes your system doesn’t have a (particularly usable) text system, like a work computer that disables the terminal or a family member’s MacBook who doesn’t have the time or space to install XCode terminal utilities to be able to use things like brew install.

My point is that it’s not a given that having one means you have the other.

TUIs are wonderful for the first case.

chrisshroba··on Don't post generated/AI-edited comments. HN is for conversation between humans
> 'remembering' a rule that never existed

Probably the Mandela effect!

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/False_memory#Mandela_effect

chrisshroba··on Unix Isn't for Agents
Processes by default get stdin and stdout. If you run a command interactively from your tty, the tty shows your stdout and collects stdin from you to pass to the process. But nothing about Unix prevents you from hooking something else up to stdin and stdout. As another commenter said, you could use sockets and have a completely generic input and output stream which an arbitrary tool could read and write to. Or you could spin up a websocket server that spawns the process and converts between websocket messages and stdin/stdout bytes. Or http requests and long polled responses. Or read input from a speech to text stream and push output into a text to speech stream.

I feel like OP’s main gripe is that persistent interactive sessions should be supported without a third party tool like tmux or screen or zellij, but one of the main strengths of Unix is that it provides platform building blocks which can be composed to create whatever experience you’re looking for.

chrisshroba··on NYC Spends $200 Million on Cell Service for School Chromebooks
The contract ends in 2083 (58 years), which even by conservative estimates is well after cars will be able to self-park
chrisshroba··on Developers can now submit apps to ChatGPT
Do you have any repository of apps that support that? I’d love to browse them!
chrisshroba··on The Lucas-Lehmer Prime Number Test
Except 91
chrisshroba··on New updates and more access to Google Earth AI
> Bellwether, a moonshot at Alphabet's X, is using Earth AI to provide hurricane predictions insights for global insurance broker McGill and Partners. This enables McGill's clients to pay claims faster so homeowners can start rebuilding sooner.

Hm, I'm quite skeptical about this claim.

chrisshroba··on Ryanair flight landed at Manchester airport with six minutes of fuel left
For anyone interested, here is the flight playback:

https://fr24.com/data/flights/fr3418#3c7f91f4

chrisshroba··on Claude Code 2.0
Looks like you’re correct!

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/CJK_characters

chrisshroba··on Ollama Web Search
Are the rate limits documented somewhere?
chrisshroba··on Waymo granted permit to begin testing in New York City
This always astounds me about cities who have a reputation for people breaking certain traffic laws. In St. Louis, people run red lights for 5+ seconds after it turns red, and no one seems to care to solve it, but if they'd just station police at some worst-offender lights for a couple months to write tickets, people would catch on pretty quickly that it's not worth the risk. I have similar thoughts on people using their phones at red lights and people running stop signs.
chrisshroba··on Sixteen bottles of wine riddle
I love riddles like this.

Has anyone found any good collections of these? Whenever I try to search for riddles online, I end up with mostly results containing wordplay riddles like "what has a mouth but doesn't eat, ..."

chrisshroba··on GPT-4.1 in the API
I also like Perplexity’s 3/day limit! If I use them up (which I almost never do) I can just refresh the next day
chrisshroba··on Tailscale has raised $160M
>I'm sure they have some cloud fees, but I thought it was mostly "control plane" and not data plane

Don't they host the relay servers that are the fallback if NAT hole punching and their other bag of tricks doesn't work?

chrisshroba··on Goodbye, Slopify
Agreed. I just navigated to my home page on desktop and I see the following categories:

- A section with 8 of my recently played playlists

- A section of "Made for <my name>" with 6 Daily Mixes (which I generally like), Discover weekly (which I like now that it's tailored to me: I used to hate that it only contained pop/hip hop hits), Release Radar (love it), and the AI DJ (which I find very annoying)

- A section called Recently Played which looks like all legitimate things I've played

- "New Releases for You", which are all by artists I've listened to very recently

- "Jump back in", which has several playlists and artists I've listened to recently

- A sidebar of all of my playlists I've created or followed

Of the ~50 actionable items on the page, the only one I dislike is the AI DJ, but it by no means feels forced on me since it's just a single square.

https://i.imgur.com/RKsIgLR.jpeg

chrisshroba··on Asteroid Impact on Earth 2032 with Probability 1% and 8Mt Energy
Can we also add mass to the asteroid?
chrisshroba··on Test
It's actually 86 letters, making it TESLA
chrisshroba··on 34x34x34 Rubik's Cube
I used to be able to solve the 3x3 in high school using memorized algorithms and then I lost interest since there was no reasoning involved. Your comment makes me want to pick it back up and learn 3-style, so thank you for the clear explanation!
chrisshroba··on Feds: You Don't Have a Right to Check Out Retro Video Games Like Library Books
> not to mention their full potential as an interactive medium has only barely started to be explored.

Any examples come to mind? I’d love to try (or at least read about) some games like this!

chrisshroba··on Apple Passwords’ generated strong password format
71 bits of entropy feels rather low...

It seems like many recommendations are to use at least 75-100, or even 128. Being fairly conservative, if you had 10k hosts hashing 1B passwords a second, it would take 7.5 years worst case to crack [1]. If a particular site neglects to use a slow hash function and salting, it's easy to imagine bad actors precomputing rainbow tables that would make attacks relatively easy.

You can rebut that that's still a crazy amount of computation needed, but since it's reusable, I find it easy to believe it's already being done. For comparison, if the passwords have 100 bits of entropy, it would take those same 10k servers over 4 billion years to crack the password.

[1]: (2*71 / 1e9 / 10000 / (606024*365)) ≈ 7.5

chrisshroba··on OpenAI DevDay 2024 live blog
Right, see the "Handling interruptions" section here: https://platform.openai.com/docs/guides/realtime/integration
chrisshroba··on Conway's Game of Life, in checkboxes for some reason
"Configure this game of life to be 13 transitions before a state that spells 'Opt out' in block letters to opt out of cookie collection."
chrisshroba··on Show HN: I made a free app to calibrate your turntable by simply playing a song
A little more intuitively, 1 semitone is one "note", aka the interval between two successive notes on a piano (including white and black keys) such as C to C#, and to talk about intervals less than that, we use cents as 1/100 of a semitone.

Musically, two notes an octave apart vary by a factor of 2 (e.g. Middle A (A4) is 440Hz and the next A (A5) is 880Hz), and our ears hear frequencies logarithmically rather than linearly, so each of the 12 semitones in an octave is a factor of 2^(1/12) higher than the previous one (so that 12 of them in a row result in doubling the frequency), and therefore the 100 cents between each semitone are each (2^(1/12))^100 = 2^(1/1200) greater than the previous one.

chrisshroba··on New iPad Pro with M4 chip and Apple Pencil Pro
The gyroscope and haptic feedback in the apple pencil pro seem pretty cool for artists and other creative uses!
chrisshroba··on Easy Mode Rust
How would you interface with rust-analyzer to make it do this? As I understand it rust analyzer acts like an LSP to your IDE, which in turn doesn’t let you just make raw calls to rust analyzer
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