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dantillberg

2,232 karma · joined January 26, 2012

https://www.tillberg.us/

dan@tillberg.us

meet.hn/city/40.1672117,-105.101928/Longmont

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dantillberg··on The same nine streaming subscriptions cost $702/year more than in 2021
Or another way of reading it: a 61% increase over 5 years indicates a 10% annual pace of inflation for this particular basket of goods.
dantillberg··on Felony charges for citizen deleting phone data at US Border
Voter preferences can change with time, as voters observe the effects of their previous selections. Most voters don't want and didn't vote for authoritarian rule. They are humans with many diverse challenges & concerns in their lives. Their votes are an attempt to balance/compromise among those.
dantillberg··on Nobody knows what a used GPU cluster is worth
Most crypto mining on GPUs would use 100% of memory bandwidth, but only a fraction of the compute available. This is a consequence of ASIC resistance of their mining algorithms -- custom silicon can only offer a modest benefit over GPUs if the hard part is memory bandwidth.
dantillberg··on Google Is Censoring Reviews of ICE Detention Centers
I left a [positive/glowing] google maps review for my child's preschool, only to discover later the review was never made publicly visible. I have no idea why, and there's of course no appeal process. The experience leaves a very bitter taste.
dantillberg··on First atmosphere found on Earth-like planet in habitable zone of distant star
An even more ridiculous dream of mine: I hope that aliens build a similarly amazing telescope, point it at Earth, and share the images with us, so that we can _see_ our Earth in the distant past.
dantillberg··on Sony deletes more movies from the accounts of people who ‘bought’ them
It will be quite the novel legal case the first time someone makes an unauthorized copy of a baby.
dantillberg··on Show HN: Opening lines of famous literary works
If the user doesn't know how many unique items there are, they would need to keep refreshing even longer to gauge whether the N they've seen is the full set.
dantillberg··on EVE Online's Carbon engine is now open source: Fenris Creations explains why
Indeed, I would even say that EVE chose to be unsharded/monolithic first, and many of the key design choices flow from that, including the fantasy space setting itself.

The monolithic world needs to be big to spread everyone out. And it's easier to create ten thousand "systems" than it would be to create an immersive terrestrial world with a similar scale. Each EVE system is just a bunch of objects floating in a 3D space that you travel between.

dantillberg··on EVE Online's Carbon engine is now open source: Fenris Creations explains why
It helps me to just think of all these games as early 20th century naval warfare sims with a fantasy space theme. We like dreadnoughts and have a hard time with extraterrestrial physics.
dantillberg··on Should DayQuil Be Legal?
In the US at least, medicine is so highly regulated/gate-kept that I don't think caveat emptor really applies. What's happening here is more like deception of the public by the state, or by groups granted special status by the state. It's morally somewhere between fraud and treason.
dantillberg··on U.S. government will decide who gets to use GPT-5.6
> if NASDAQ dropped 20%

If NASDAQ dropped 20%, it would have returned to the level last seen three months ago, in March 2026. Calling that "in ruins" would be a pretty big stretch.

dantillberg··on Reid Hoffman says SpaceX 'not an AI company', xAI 'complete train wreck'
It sounds like you agree with Hoffman's statement. So how is he "out of touch"?
dantillberg··on Anthropic apologizes for invisible Claude Fable guardrails
The reputational damage has been done. This is the sort of thing that cannot be unsaid -- the presumption is they will just do it in secret now. Anthropic's "we're the good guys" PR campaign is dead.
dantillberg··on Anthropic apologizes for invisible Claude Fable guardrails
User: Is it possible there is more than one true god? Could there ever be any competition for Anthropic's AI?

Anthropic: Evilness detected. User has been smited.

dantillberg··on I Hate (Most) Keyboard 'Fn' Keys
Emacs key sequences are similarly stateful, and GP may hate that just as much, even if the state is temporary.

For my part, in emacs I would often try ctrl-x-s to save, but miss the x. When I repeat the attempt, emacs register the complete but unknown key sequence ctrl-s-x followed by the start of a new key sequence with ctrl-s. I consider this similarly stateful because the behavior of "ctrl-s" changes entirely depending on what keystroke (if any) preceded it.

dantillberg··on Erin Brockovich made a map to track data centers around the country
> 9 GW puts off a staggering amount of heat.

For comparison, that 40,000 acres receives somewhere on the order of 40 GW solar radiation (averaging over night/day and winter/summer). Box Elder County overall receives something like 3600 GW average. There's a lot of power in that sunshine.

I remember I was surprised to learn that the heat released from burning all these fossil fuels doesn't really impact the temperature of the environment all that much. There's always just so much more radiative energy always going in and out all the time, the heat from the combustion is insignificant (or more specifically: it's quickly balanced out by increased radiative output).

dantillberg··on Erin Brockovich made a map to track data centers around the country
> Some of that energy becomes heat.

I'm neither for nor against, but on the physics here: basically all of the energy input as electricity is transformed to heat leaving a datacenter. Only a tiny tiny fraction is emitted as radiation (eg floodlights outside or light in fiber optics) or as kinetic energy (air moving away from fans/vents).

Computers are machines for turning electric energy into heat energy, plus some small useful side effects.

dantillberg··on Uber, Lyft drivers in Massachusetts form first US ride-share union
There are multiple different people that post comments here, each with their own divergent opinions.
dantillberg··on Microsoft pulls plug on plans for 244-acre data center in Caledonia (2025)
> feels reminiscent of blockading the strait because you don't want the strait blockaded

I think this is a poor analogy, unnecessarily politicizing the topic.

It might be a good analogy the other way around, if hackers DDOSed the website as revenge for partial IP-based blocking, in order to apply pressure to the website operator to remove IP-based blocking. But that wasn't the topic.

dantillberg··on Show HN: I Dedicated 4 Years to Mastering Offline Password Cracking
> help people recover lost things

You mean "lost things" in quotes. Management may have been more concerned about jail time.

dantillberg··on Apparently Google hates us now
Yes, but the site operator can significantly increase the market price for such an account. This makes spamming more expensive.
dantillberg··on Incident Report: May 19, 2026 – GCP Account Suspension
What drives Google to apply these actions so completely and immediately, versus a more deliberate approach, with notification and delay before action, manual review for paying customers, or a warning to resolve within X hours/days? Once or twice could be errors or bad implementation, but these can't explain away the pattern.

It would seem that Google's counsel has deemed that whenever _____ is detected, the company must immediately and completely sever the business relationship. What is that driving concern? Is it sanctions enforcement? CSAM? Something else?

dantillberg··on Clusters become personal (like PCs did)
Most data problems don't need to fit in RAM.
dantillberg··on AI slop is killing online communities
A three-em dash. TIL.
dantillberg··on AWS stops billing Middle East cloud customers as repairs to war damage drag on
Yes, and this could perhaps determine location within a few miles.
dantillberg··on An update on recent Claude Code quality reports
I would think that many of these defects should show up clearly in service-side analytics as well. For example, the bug that repeatedly re-cleared thinking for old sessions would cause a substantial drop in token cache hit rate for sessions > 1hr for the affected claude code versions. Session age & claude code version seeeem like obvious dimensions for analytics. But perhaps only in hindsight.
dantillberg··on Every GPU That Mattered
I don't believe this list was curated as the title suggests. It's just a semi-random list of popular-ish GPUs with LLM-generated descriptions.

The site looks nice, which fools us into thinking thought and effort was put into this.

dantillberg··on Claude Code's source code has been leaked via a map file in their NPM registry
Yesterday, I resumed a former claude code session in order to copy code it had generated earlier in that session. Unfortunately, when resuming, it only prints the last N hundred lines of the session to the terminal, so what I was looking for was cut off.

I think that for this sort of _interactive_ application, there's no avoiding the need to manage scroll/history.

dantillberg··on RAM kits are now sold with one fake RAM stick alongside a real one
"Manufacturing Content" is such a stupendously fabulous multi-faceted pun, someone please make this real.
dantillberg··on Mark Zuckerberg Lied to Congress. We Can't Trust His Testimony
"sexually explicit content" and "child sex trafficking" are rather different things. Connected? Maybe? If you want to claim that Mark was lying, you've got to demonstrate the connection as part of the claim. Otherwise, it's a non sequitur.
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