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chubs

1,829 karma · joined March 9, 2010

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chubs··on Japan develops a method to recover up to 90% of lithium from used EV batteries
I have a theory: Japanese car's have excellent reliability, their interiors and design are lacking. If every car in the world is an EV, which due to their relative simplicity tend to be reliable, what remaining unique selling points does eg a toyota have?
chubs··on For first time, a cell built from scratch grows and divides
Layman, so bear with me. I'm wondering where they got the amino acids and proteins from? I was under the impressino that cells needed them to be "homochiral" to function, and the artificial 'built from scratch' amino acids are 50:50 of each chirality. In my reading of the NYTimes simplification of this story they mention that the genes were "borrowed from a virus and the ubiquitous microbe Escherichia coli". Mainly just curious how far they managed to get to the 'from scratch' goal. Or is what they've done a bit more of an assembly of bits and pieces? Cheers all.
chubs··on India's surprise baby bust
I go to church. Everyone has 3 kids. Thanks for bringing it up!
chubs··on India's surprise baby bust
I remember reading that in certain areas/communities in the USA, it's pretty close to 50:50.
chubs··on Microsoft builds MacBook Pro rival with NVIDIA-powered Surface Laptop Ultra
What if computers simply rendered 300dpi PNG files and sent that to the printer?
chubs··on Maybe you shouldn't install new software for a bit
Oh good point, I didn't think of transitive dependencies. A lot of languages i've worked with unfortunately have a 'do not check in the lockfile' culture, and a common 'blow away the lockfile when the package manager gets stuck' workflow, so that does concern me. Perhaps Cargo is better than average though, and the lockfile never needs nuking, providing this safety. This sounds like a good reason to check in the lockfile! Thanks for the response.
chubs··on Docker images are hundreds of MB; a full game engine compiles to 35MB WASM
I recently ported an old brickout clone I made to Sokol (a C header-based game library). The whole executable is 500kb (macos), surely could be smaller with eg symbols stripped, and it has a whole 3d engine (not that i'm using much more than one custom shader to blit the screen, but it is using 3d engine infrastructure nonetheless). I was impressed that in this day and age such efficiency is still fashionable in some corners. The whole game is about 2mb zipped. Are shameless plugs allowed? If you're curious have a peek! github.com/chrishulbert/brickwarrior
chubs··on Maybe you shouldn't install new software for a bit
To mitigate supply chain attacks like this, I've taken to specifying exact versions in my Rust cargo.toml, and when importing new crates, select the previous-to-latest version. Is this a reasonable mitigation? It bugs me that Swift deprecates the concept of specifying exact versions, it actively pushes you towards semver which leaves the door open to this.
chubs··on A. J. Ayer – ‘What I Saw When I Was Dead’ (1988)
"All I could think about was how bored I would eventually get" I used to wonder this. I read the religious answer to this relies on the concept of infinitude: what if an infinite god can invent an infinite number of exciting new... things to do?
chubs··on A. J. Ayer – ‘What I Saw When I Was Dead’ (1988)
The traditional concept of an 'embodied' resurrection (as opposed to ghosts playing harps) makes me lean towards: yes (eg the gut is part of the body). Who knows though, it's a fun question!
chubs··on A. J. Ayer – ‘What I Saw When I Was Dead’ (1988)
I believe you resolve it by the concept of spirit/body dualism, where your body/soul degenerates but the spirit is still fine.
chubs··on Filing the corners off my MacBooks
Holy moly, that guy in the reddit post needs to see a dermatologist asap and figure out why their skin is emitting acid.
chubs··on US private credit defaults hit record 9.2% in 2025, Fitch says
I don't understand: Who's lending the $2B in situations like this? Wouldn't they be worried that the above situation (company gutted, then going down the drain) is going to play out and they won't get their $2B back? Or is that the root problem with this whole YC submission: banks are being hit by defaults because of this exact problem?
chubs··on BMW's Newest "Innovation" Is a Logo-Shaped Middle Finger to Right to Repair
BMW resale values make it very clear: these cars are actively hostile (in many many ways) to their owners the second they go out of warranty. Pity, their interiors are lovely. In the long term, is this strategy going to work out for them? I won't buy another one. I know... anecdata :)
chubs··on Hyundai Paywalls Brake Pads replacement on Ioniq 5 N
I believe this is already what happens with Volkswagen - recently I had my brakes replaced by an independent mechanic, and they had to charge me $50ish for some software lock as part of the process.
chubs··on Report: Tim Cook could step down as Apple CEO 'as soon as next year'
Is it worth mentioning that there are almost countless Chinese EV brands nowadays? I wonder if Apple was really trying. I’m sure it’s difficult, of course, but it seems like every week there’s a new car manufacturer. To quote Clarkson ‘how hard could it be’ ;)
chubs··on Show HN: A CSS-Only Terrain Generator
Also reminded me a lot of simcity 2000. Congrats, it's very neat!
chubs··on Kirigami-inspired parachute falls on target
I wonder if this would be suitable for drone delivery of small groceries, to keep the drone high enough that people don’t have to hear the noise.
chubs··on $2 WeAct Display FS adds a 0.96-inch USB information display to your computer
Anyone know if this or similar devices can display information sent from some code I write in, say, rust without drivers or libraries (eg should not be too complicated to write to) on macOS? Could be a lot of fun to be had!
chubs··on I feel Apple has lost its alignment with me and other long-time customers
I largely agree with you. I used to work at Cochlear (hearing aid implants) - their "headphone" equivalents actually had neatly replaceable batteries 10 years ago, it's doable! Larger than airpods, to be sure, however i'm sure Apple could shrink them nicely. But... would anyone want the ability to replace batteries? I wouldn't know. I suspect most people misplace them before the batteries go bad.
chubs··on Why do we keep gravitating toward complexity?
I have a bee in my bonnet about this software complexity issue. Perhaps it takes large amounts of humility to accept that your job is fairly mundane, and only needs simple code to get the job done? I mean: who wants to turn spanners on a Toyota when you can imagine you're working for NASA, and introduce fascinating new paradigms to your work, that ultimately add complexity. I suspect that's why i've joined so many teams that have tied themselves up in knots of un-grok-able indirection. Another theory I have is that people encounter bad code, and misdiagnose it, identifying the (wrong) solution as needing a big complex architecture.
chubs··on Meta accessed women's health data from Flo app without consent, says court
This is really disappointing. I used to have a fertility tracking app on the iOS App Store, zero data sharing, all local thus private. But, people don’t want to pay $1 for an app, and I can’t afford the marketing drive that an investor-backed company such as this has… and so we end up with situations like this. Pity :(
chubs··on Facial recognition vans to be rolled out across police forces in England
You say that hamas is no "credible military threat" - may I beg you please reconsider this in light of the 1195 killed when they attacked on October 7? They're no world-class army, to be sure, but it's not like they have no teeth whatsoever...
chubs··on Young graduates are facing an employment crisis
Anecdata: Recently spoke with a friend's son who graduated compsci a year-ish ago, he reckons none of his year got jobs, now working in a kitchen. (in australia for context). Very sad. For comparison, I graduated just after the dot-com crash, and our year mostly found jobs, just not very good ones, so maybe they're doing worse than we did. Good luck convincing anyone to study compsci any more.
chubs··on Endangered classic Mac plastic color returns as 3D-printer filament
I printed a few for a friend. They seem to work just fine, but if you look close you can see the ‘terraced’ steps in the printing. Probably feels a bit rough. I guess you could smooth that with acetone vapour and ABS filament if so inclined.
chubs··on A $20k American-made electric pickup with no paint, no stereo, no screen
The article does talk of it being a relatively simple proposition to embiggen the range with an bigger battery kit if that helps. But yeah, it's not a ton of range.
chubs··on A $20k American-made electric pickup with no paint, no stereo, no screen
I'm very positive, however note that when they mention "injection molded polypropylene composite material" - this (i think) is the same material used for Seadoo Spark jetskis. I owned one and had a minor crash, and because this material cannot be repaired, the entire hull needed replacing, it was an insurance write-off. I hope they've thought about how to make this car repairable and not 'disposable' after the first inevitable minor crash. Of course this may not be a fair comparison because jetski hulls are exposed, whereas car chassis' have panels and bumpers.
chubs··on The DOJ still wants Google to sell off Chrome
Speculation: Perhaps Google accelerated the Manifest V3 change to get anti-adblocking 'baked in' and benefitting their interests, before they're forced to sell off Chrome?
chubs··on Uchū – Color scheme for internet lovers
Ok this is beautiful, I love it, I was looking for something exactly like this earlier today. Nice one.
chubs··on Basis of the Kalman Filter [pdf]
As a developer I always found these maths-first approaches to Kalman filters impenetrable (I guess that betrays my lack of knowledge, I dare cast no aspersions on the quality of these explanations!). However, if like me, it helps with the learning curve to implement it first, here's a 1-dimensional version simplified from my blog:

  function transpose(a) { return a } // 1x1 matrix eg a single value.
  function invert(a) { return 1/a }

  const qExternalNoiseVariance = 0.1
  const rMeasurementNoiseVariance = 0.1
  const fStateTransition = 1

  let pStateError = 1
  let xCurrentState = rawDataArray[0]
  for (const zMeasurement in rawDataArray) {
    const xPredicted = fStateTransition * xCurrentState
    const pPredicted = fStateTransition * pStateError * transpose(fStateTransition) + qExternalNoiseVariance
    const kKalmanGain = pPredicted * invert(pPredicted + rMeasurementNoiseVariance)

    pStateError = pPredicted - kKalmanGain * pPredicted
    xCurrentState = xPredicted + kKalmanGain * (zMeasurement - xPredicted) // Output!
  }
https://www.splinter.com.au/2023/12/14/the-kalman-filter-for...
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