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commandlinefan

18,824 karma · joined January 17, 2018

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commandlinefan··on South Korean forums will need to scan every images with AI censorship tools
> the right wing has also enforced censorship

Not familiar with Korean politics, but both left and right are immensely pro-censorship here in America. For the most part, the only thing that's saving us (at least so far) is that they can't agree on what to censor.

commandlinefan··on Do the Hardest Thing
Spending time doing deep work on hard problems also doesn't go so well with the "track your hours against approved JIRA tickets and compare your logged hours against your estimates at review time" that every corporate culture devolves into. If you're looking to survive the next round of layoffs, quick wins are your best bet.
commandlinefan··on Do the Hardest Thing
Yeah, this type of advice rubs me the wrong way: I feel like the author is thinking of "hard" as though it were back-breaking day labor that any fool could do, but nobody wants to because it's so unpleasant.

The sort of people it's usually directed at, though, are knowledge workers (like computer programmers). "Hard" in our context is "something I don't yet know how to do". Always. No exceptions. Every time. If I know how to do it, it's trivial. If I don't, I have to figure it out.

And in my experience, the "do the hardest thing" VC-founder cheerleader types (who are always telling you, never themselves) absolutely lose their shit when they see somebody trying to figure out how to do something. Reading docs? Setting up controlled experiments? Why are you wasting time with all of this nonsense and not just getting to the "hardest thing" so I can bill the client and you can move on to the next "hardest thing"?

commandlinefan··on Writing Portable ARM64 Assembly (2023)
I mean, so has Microsoft, so...
commandlinefan··on When AI Crosses the Line: The Matplotlib Incident
They were trained to mimic our behavior. So they do.
commandlinefan··on Google Hates You
They just inserted an exclamation mark after the first word.
commandlinefan··on Real wages start to shrink in developed countries
Isn't this globalization working as designed? People in "rich" countries will get less and less while people in "poor" countries will get more and more until there are no more rich or poor countries. Rich and poor people will still exist, but the standard of living will regress to the mean worldwide.
commandlinefan··on Green card seekers must leave U.S. to apply, Trump administration says
I doubt it. We've seen time and time again that what the USCIS considers "extraordinary" are actually very, very ordinary circumstances. Anybody with proof of employment will qualify.
commandlinefan··on AOC displays drinking water contaminated by data center
Grandstanding and misinformation on whose part? I want this to not be true (i.e. I want data centers to not be poisoning groundwater and killing us all) and I don't think that elected representatives are above misrepresenting things for political gain, but just going by the content of the article, it would appear that data centers are contaminating drinking water.
commandlinefan··on The Letter S, by Donald Knuth (1980) [pdf]
I fear we'll never see another Donald Knuth... even if there were somebody else like him (and maybe there isn't!), there'd be nowhere for him to go in today's world.
commandlinefan··on Everything in C is undefined behavior
A lot of this stems from trying to insist that char just means "small" and not "8 bits" and that int means "bigger than that" and not "32 bits". In fairness, K&R dealt with an era where 9 bit architectures existed, but char is 8 bits now. Everywhere.
commandlinefan··on 560-610 minutes of exercise a week needed for substantial heart benefits
I don't know... If you're actually exercising an hour and a half each day, every day, you're going to be incurring some pretty regular exercise related injuries and degeneration. Your heart might like all that running, but your knees are going to make you regret it.
commandlinefan··on DHS demanded Google surrender data on a Canadian man over anti-ICE posts
Even if you fix the law today, the law can change tomorrow. As Bruce Schneier put it: "it's not enough to protect ourselves with laws. We must also protect ourselves with mathematics".
commandlinefan··on Eka’s robotic claw feels like we're approaching a ChatGPT moment
I'm having some house painting done and the painter asked me what line of work I was in. When I said computer programming he said, "ooh, bet you're worried about AI! At least painters are safe!"
commandlinefan··on The X-Files has made me nostalgic for a time I never experienced
The media landscape we have is something I couldn't have even imagined when I was young in the 80's. However, I can go back and watch, for free, essentially every movie ever made. I've gone back and watched dozens (maybe hundreds) of movies that I remember coming out when I was a kid, wanting to see, but never getting to because I was too young, or I couldn't find them at video stores, etc.

There were a _lot_ of _really_ bad movies and TV shows that came out when I was young, including movies and TV shows that I loved at the time. They were awful - we just watched them because there was literally nothing else to do. We're bombarded with entertainment choices now and our standards have gone up.

commandlinefan··on The X-Files has made me nostalgic for a time I never experienced
I was in my 20's at the time. I saw all of those guys as being inferior GnR, Motley Crue or Metallica wannabes.
commandlinefan··on The X-Files has made me nostalgic for a time I never experienced
You're making his point for him.
commandlinefan··on The X-Files has made me nostalgic for a time I never experienced
> The 90s were incredible

I was born in 1974 and I remember being vaguely annoyed in my 20's at how the 90's "ruined" the 80's - I remember things being way better in the 80's and society starting to go downhill around 1991.

I will say, though, the poster's lament that he's nostalgic for a time he never knew is one I've heard a _lot_. My kids watch "Stranger Things" and ask if it was really like that when I was a kid ("did you really just get on your bike and go over to your friends houses?") and wish they had experienced the 80's (and even the inferior 90's). I _never_ felt that way about my parents generation - the 60's were interesting from a historical perspective but I never wanted to be there.

commandlinefan··on Amazon rolls out AI hiring software to automate job interviews
By refusing to participate, but it only works if we all do it. As soon as an AI comes online during the interview process, disconnect. If _everybody_ did, they'd get the hint

(Actually, my great-grandfather was a coal miner in Tennessee. They also found ways to make the labor process humane)

commandlinefan··on How Did REST Come to Mean the Opposite of REST?
Part of the nomenclature problem here is that there's no other way to refer to an HTTP-based API. REST was originally an alternative to the horrible SOAP. I'd be fine with calling it something else (because the author is right, nobody's following Fielding's vision), but there's nothing else to call it.
commandlinefan··on How Did REST Come to Mean the Opposite of REST?
Agile definitely means the opposite of agile.
commandlinefan··on Amazon rolls out AI hiring software to automate job interviews
Sadly, this will continue until we collectively stand up against it, but I don't hold much hope that we ever will.
commandlinefan··on The quiet resurgence of RF engineering
Unfortunately for us software types, somebody with an EE degree can go into software and then pivot back into RF engineering. I doubt that somebody with a CS degree could (as in, I think they'd be intellectually capable of it, but they'd never get hired).
commandlinefan··on FDA approves first gene therapy for treatment of genetic hearing loss
Coming from somebody in the half-deaf community, please, medical science, find a cure for the problem that I have that needs to be fixed.
commandlinefan··on Scores decline again for 13-year-old students in reading and mathematics (2023)
> Much ink has been spilled

Ironically...

commandlinefan··on XOR'ing a register with itself is the idiom for zeroing it out. Why not sub?
It's still the same number of clock cycles, though, isn't it? You're using some extra circuitry during the SUB, but during the XOR, that circuitry is just sitting idle anyway, so it's still six of one/half a dozen of the other.
commandlinefan··on Running a Minecraft Server and More on a 1960s Univac Computer
> it takes 40 univac instructions to run a single risc-v instruction

Which is wild, given:

> The computer’s original purpose was to be used by the Navy to read in radar signals and direct artillery

I'd really be fascinated to see how that was done on such a primitive machine, shame that's probably been lost.

commandlinefan··on Want to write a compiler? Just read these two papers (2008)
I've seen people suggest that throughout the years, but it's never worked out for me. To get anything meaningful out of a printed book, I've had to read them cover to cover. There used to be worthwhile reference books, but those have moved on to the internet.
commandlinefan··on Michigan 'digital age' bills pulled after privacy concerns raised
> undermine every single citizen's privacy

Well, we might as well be realistic - none of us have had any privacy for a very, very long time. It's just that our governments can't quite yet use it against us the way they'd like to without revealing the scope. The goal here is really just to add some additional plausibility when our privacy _is_ violated.

commandlinefan··on EFF is leaving X
> Of course they're ideological. That's the whole point

Yes, but their ideology _was_ free-speech absolutism. This move, and this statement, suggests that they're moving away from that ideology to one of selectively free speech.

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