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cptroot

698 karma · joined February 11, 2015

[ my public key: https://keybase.io/cptroot; my proof: https://keybase.io/cptroot/sigs/7NYzDwS4rCWbDmXkfjDs20FjcGK4QMDJg9ew6O6ddlY ]
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cptroot··on U.S. appeals court upholds designation of Anthropic as supply chain risk
Your "but then" is off-base. This is selling steel for the express purpose of nuclear reactors, with a contractual clause against its use in tanks, and the US government deciding that it doesn't feel like abiding by the rules in the contract.
cptroot··on We found a division by zero bug in FFmpeg with a vibecoded fuzzer
This is not a real bug in FFmpeg. This is a demonstration that if you control a custom AVIO module it is possible to crash FFmpeg by giving it bad data.
cptroot··on MIT's Ad Hoc Committee on AI Use in Teaching, Learning, and Research Training
I don't agree? By the time you get to the specific policy sections (3.x.x) there are concrete changes outlined in bold, several of which are requests for the institute to invest large amounts of resources changing the current teaching process. Even the non-bolded text occasionally contains real insights, like this gem from the end of 3.1.9:

> Students should not feel policed. Durable change will require instructors to be as clear as possible about their expectations and students to understand AI misuse as an unacceptable deviation from shared peer norms and community values rather than a violation of an arbitrary bureaucratic rule.

cptroot··on Illinois just passed a law that puts Linux on the hook for age verification
Declaration, not verification
cptroot··on Mea Culpa – Dark Hours
> Name a game whose settings screen added to the gameplay in any meaningful way

Most of these are going to be smaller indie games that already don't have many settings to set. Off the top of my head, I'd probably say Ultrakill takes the cake with its opening screen. Based on the description of the expectations, my guess is you're mostly basing your expectations off of large AAA games with multiple pages of settings? Fair enough that they should mostly be implementing "standards" correctly, and theming and character take a back seat.

It sounds like your overall point mostly relates not to settings screens, but things that "don't meaningfully affect gameplay". I think that's a much better argument than the one your example point led me to understand.

As a final note, it's worth reiterating that Steam does not require disclosure for AI-gen code. That settings menu example you were mentioning would be fine, as long as it used art assets generated by a human.

cptroot··on Yahtzee – Ballpark Figures
YouTube Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DOgb5wrb7mM
cptroot··on I got an email about resistance
Every time "Luddites" come up in tech discussions, I notice that people have very little engagement with the history. Here's my favorite treatment of the source material: https://bsky.app/profile/ironcircuscomics.bsky.social/post/3...
cptroot··on Mea Culpa – Dark Hours
> Don’t argue against this one example, that isn’t the point

What is the point then? The best games have all of their elements working together in service of their intended experience.

> someone who uses AI for internationalization

Do you think this would be an ok use of AI for a game? Did you not see the outrage over Hollow Knight: Silksong's translation last year? How every time a game is discovered to have used AI for translation there is an immediate backlash?

cptroot··on Sony deletes more movies from the accounts of people who ‘bought’ them
In my experience it's a pretty clear warning, but I might not be the best person to judge. The thing to remember is "buying" a revocable license is pretty different from "renting" a temporary license, and those words have pretty different connotations.
cptroot··on The Three-Second Theft: Why AI Voice Fraud Outruns Every Defence
It's worth noting that TFA addresses this in the context of the scam: When the scam depends on the emotional reaction in response to a loved one's distress, it doesn't matter if the number the scam is coming from is unfamiliar. This means that the scam can use "technically correct" numbers that pass SHAKEN/STIR with no loss in conversion.

TFA also mentions that by routing calls through older non-IP networks you lose the accurate information, although it sounds like the FCC is slowly cracking down on this.

cptroot··on Theo de Raadt: "You've been smoking something mind altering" (2007)
I would love to know how OP came across this email nearly 20 years after the fact
cptroot··on We moved our Bluesky data to Eurosky
You might want to answer two questions before we start this discussion:

1. "Censored" by whom, and for whom?

2. "Censored" for which "right of center" views?

P.S. I should also mention that I can see the posts on that account, even if they all have flags for intolerance by the default moderation service (a service you can opt out of by the way).

cptroot··on A data race that doesn't compile
I know this is a small point, but you likely mean "race condition" here. Rust already guarantees safe code to be free of "data races", and this blog post doesn't discuss unsafe in any way.

Two other points that came up while I was reading:

1. I get that this is something you did once for an internal project, but this is what macros and derive_macros are made for.

2. The AI that you used to help write the post left its mark a little too deep. The cliched phrases make an appearance at the start of every section and it really starts to grate by the end.

cptroot··on Correlated randomness in Slay the Spire 2
The motivation boils down to trying to make runs with the same starting seed feel "similar" in meaningful ways. It's "better" in a vibes way if both you and I were offered the same card choices in runs with the same seed, even if we took different amounts of turns on the first battle.
cptroot··on Measles surge in Utah sparks fears US could undo decades of progress
This is likely about Orin Hatch's dedication to the idea of a "balanced federal budget", to be paid for with program cuts instead of taxation.
cptroot··on "Don't You Just Upload It to ChatGPT?"
> AI can currently do if given enough context

It's worth noting that you can substitute "dollars" for "context" in that sentence, which seems to be where many of these impressive achievements are coming from. As ever, it's unclear whether these models will get cheaper while remaining better, since all of the recent breakthroughs appear to be of the "think more" kind. For translation specifically, I'd be very surprised if the "think more" LLMs would help given the per-unit cost expected of the output.

cptroot··on Nitpicking the shell history scene in 'Tron: Legacy'
> and squeezed a lot more juice out of it than I’d realised was there to be squozen.

I barked out loud when I read this.

cptroot··on On Labubu and the Hyperreal
I recently watched an excellent video about that incident. [1]

The takeaway was that this was yet another move by rich assholes designed to siphon money from the pockets of small time gamblers just so that the rich could get richer. They did it to Pokemon cards, destroying the experience of playing the actual game, and they tried to do it to Manga (although they hopefully won't succeed there).

[1] https://youtu.be/W2x-UQpiARc?si=eVwXhHAtD0keH2ON

cptroot··on He Lost It at the Movies
Film Crit Hulk continues to put out good essays on film and much more besides, over on Patreon [1]. I agree that finding good critique is hard now that we're past the heyday of magazine critique.

[1] https://www.patreon.com/filmcrithulk

cptroot··on Bun Rust rewrite: "codebase fails basic miri checks, allows for UB in safe rust"
Man that issue got way too many comments from non-contributors. I agree that this shouldn't have been merged in in it's current state, but that doesn't mean posting about it on GitHub is a worthwhile way to fix the problem.
cptroot··on Stephen's Sausage Roll remains one of the most influential puzzle games
If we're talking about recursion, Patrick's Parabox is another stellar pick.
cptroot··on Surelock: Deadlock-Free Mutexes for Rust
I appreciate that this appears to be an incremental improvement on Fuschia's tree_lock, with the sharp edges sanded off. Good work! I hope I won't have to use it :p
cptroot··on We Built It with Slide Rules. Then We Forgot How
I really appreciate how this finds a common thread through all of my current engineering anxieties.
cptroot··on Torturing Rustc by Emulating HKTs
This was incredible, even as it rapidly outpaced my PL and mathematics knowledge.
cptroot··on Illinois Introducing Operating System Account Age Bill
Please explain how this law (or the CA one for that matter) require government IDs. It is worded specifically to _not_ require ID.
cptroot··on I built a programming language using Claude Code
If you read TFA, you'll find that the author agrees with you - at least on your first point.

While I agree "AI is bad", well-written posts like this one can provide real insight into the process of using them, and reveal more about _why_ AI is bad.

cptroot··on Redox OS has adopted a Certificate of Origin policy and a strict no-LLM policy
I think you'll find the luddites to be a more informative historical analogy. A new tool arrives in an industry staffed by craftsmen, providing capital a lever to raise profits at the expense of quality. Is it surprising that worker co-ops would choose not to pull that lever?
cptroot··on A new California law says all operating systems need to have age verification
So because there is no requirement for the age to be accurate, it would be pretty easy to say "all student accounts are the age of the youngest allowed school entrant for that school year", right? That resolves the age issue and also prevents both PII leakage as well as possible school bullying opportunities.
cptroot··on 2028 Global Intelligence Crisis
Here's an annotated version of this post (TW Ed Zitron) that I found more informative than reading the original: https://www.dropbox.com/scl/fi/1p1n0y1ip48ianok9dvbp/Annotat...
cptroot··on Loon: A functional lang with invisible types, safe ownership, and alg. effects
Aha, here's the syntax in case you're curious (using an example lifted from the playground)

  [type Shape
    [Circle f64]
    [Rect f64 f64]
    Point
  ]

  [sig test_sig : Shape -> Float]
  [fn test_sig [shape]
    [match shape
      [Circle r] [* 3.14159 [* r r]]
      [Rect w h] [* w h]
      Point 0.0
    ]
  ]
Unfortunately it seems like this doesn't currently work as expected when I use it in the playground, so I'm going to go file an issue
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