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downut

789 karma · joined August 22, 2016

Inactive c/c++/java/ruby/fortran/awk/perl/(c)make/bash/csh hacker. I got paid well to work in all of them.

rcarter@pinyon.org

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downut··on The Copilot+ PC brand is dead
Can't you replace the keyboard? (I'm assuming "workstation" != laptop). I have mechanicals laying around that I would just haul with me into work.
downut··on Jury finds Facebook liable for deceiving users in Cambridge Analytica case
"... seems to be ..."

Compared to what? Your string of comments are banal generalities that may or may not apply to this particular situation. Where else in this world at this time, is this particular governmental failing handled materially better?

Singapore? China? Russia? Switzerland? England?

I have sometimes learned interesting things from you (as a commenter) but there is nothing to learn here. It appears to be only diversion and distraction.

downut··on Disney+ and Hulu raise prices by up to 13 percent after doubling profits
"here"

It's a big world out there, whatever "here" means.

That last sentence makes me wonder, do you enjoy ads?

I went to a Super Bowl party a while back and the half time show glitched continuously. Random weird glitches for the rest of the time. => note to self: don't pay for this.

downut··on Samsung accidentally freezes its smart fridges with a software update
Huh, two houses back I had a really fucking POS dryer that I got expert at replacing the "Dryer Thermal Fuse" (pick your own youtube video walkthrough) and my foggy memory says in my ear that it was an LG dryer. So I'm thinking, this commenter malfist, doesn't know what he is talking about and I'll go look in my notes.org and... NOPE! It was a Samsung DV42H5000EW/A3 model!

Sorry malfist for thinking bad thoughts. I've redirected all that negative energy back to its rightful owner: Samsung.

The washer next to that dryer was an LG, and in my notes I never touched it.

Always good to reattach to reality.

Ah, I see that the washer/dryer pair we bought new 4 years ago and hauled across the country are LG ThinQs. Very happy with them. Apparently can be "smart" but I shut that down.

downut··on Singapore’s National Library Board offers micropayments to build reading habits
It is in actual fact not difficult to "drop communication with for hours at a time". This was the human norm for millenia, up to a decade or so ago. And given the toxic side effects of all this communication it's probably going to have to be worked out again.

We raised a child with the principle that "No News is Good News". She turned out great! And she lives that way still. That constant level of screen stimulation is strictly not necessary for family happiness, and I think you all who think so have not really internalized what it means for a child to learn responsibility.

See also free-range kids, and the social insanity that causes kids/parents to get arrested for eg playing in a park alone. There's a bunch of mental illness out there, and the screens are big reason why.

Oh right. My beautiful daughter reads books constantly. Weird that, huh.

downut··on Great Lakes sturgeon may be 400 years old:Scientists rethinking how to save them
It's perhaps not intuitive but it turns out organized anglers have been a big part of rescuing various fish populations. For instance, as a member of the "Backcountry Hunters & Anglers" group me and about 20 other members hiked up the West Fork of Oak Creek in Oak Creek Canyon AZ with heavy backpack tanks filled with (formerly) endangered Apache Trout fingerlings. It was absolutely wonderful to watch the little ones swim away. Trout Unlimited has a ton of conservation efforts including habitat, which helps viability of a whole bunch of other species.

Similarly, you can read the book "People of the Sturgeon: Wisconsin's Love Affair with an Ancient Fish" to learn about how the people around Lake Winnebago came together to restore the health of its native Sturgeon population.

This idea of "othering" human beings apart from the animal world might sound like the most effective way to "help" animals but humans, being complicated, don't work that way.

I couldn't care less what you eat, if it makes you happy, awesome. But there's a whole lot more going on culturally with conservation that is entwined with the evolved nature of human beings.

downut··on All grown-ups were once children, but only few of them remember it
The concepts TT describes are very patiently and pleasantly explained in the recent book "The Score", by C. Thi Nguyen.
downut··on Ask HN: Are others seeing Google's reCAPTCHA rejecting Firefox users?
Ok, debian forky, 155.0.1, successfully logged into vultr.com after a year inactive, added a credit card and a little credit. I do, however, still stupidly use google authenticator for 2FA. The captcha was just a checkbox.

That said I have run into a number of unsolvable captchas lately on firefox. Had to use chromium on a healthcorp insurer site.

downut··on De-Brainrot Vacations
It's possible that I'm in your grandparent's generation, or maybe your parents. I'm 65. I don't want to derail the conversation, but I do want to correct the bit about "exercise as a hobby was viewed as extremely weird, runners used to be arrested!". In the '70s at least, running was extremely normal. Endurance bicycling was normal. For instance, starting in 1979. I bicycled all over the South: FL GA NC, at least. These were then as they are now quite provincial from the POV of alternate ideas. 10K runs were a thing, with thousands of participants. As were Marathons. Cross country running was a popular high school sport.

If you want to talk about work, well I'm adjacent to 5th generation farmers. Self driving climate controlled machinery is a thing now, but! hard to imagine I know, people had tractors back then too.

So, plausible as it might sound to ascribe some of the causality to flow from "the physical activity transition", I don't think it holds up.

downut··on AI handles incidents, engineers lose touch with their systems
Suppose "Reflections on Trusting Trust" is not the naive rantings of some obsolete dinosaur.

Why does it not apply?

downut··on Europe's summer drought is so extreme that desertification is a growing threat
My wife and I retired to Tucson last year, and intentionally went through this first summer just to get the full experience. Never again! We've been under flash flood warnings the last several days and have only had a few sprinkles to go with the 108F days.

So... I had a look at Eureka CA weather this morning. Looks like Western Norway. Nice. Spending July and August up there might be mandatory for our mental health.

We spent 3 years in Tempe back in the '80s. It sucked then too.

downut··on Gödel, Escher, Elisp: The Beauty of Macros
Suppose I accede to every claim you make here. Where may I see the advantage in the long run, in any dimension? I'm willing to go with hearsay.

The word "dimension" is chosen to be so vague that you can surely do it. I would be easy to impress.

downut··on New Worlds: We are living in the future of J.G. Ballard or William Gibson
Stand on Zanzibar was so prescient it gave me goosebumps when I read it 5 years ago.
downut··on Gödel, Escher, Elisp: The Beauty of Macros
Ok, common-lisp newbie here.

Could you explain why Paul Graham's book "On Lisp" is wrong? Or misguided? Or misunderstood by newbies like me? 30 years of c++ with a lot of dealing with templates and I'm not feeling the mandatory function purity here.

downut··on GLM-5.2 – How to Run Locally
I am fascinated that I got down voted. I mean, isn't what I'm doing here nearly ideal? Or maybe not: why? My solar panels shade my roof under the incessant sun of the Sonoran Desert and turn a fraction of the insolation into electrical power that allows me to do almost SOTA local LLM stuff inside my house for free[1] that the parent commenter thought to be economically infeasible. Of course it's slow! So what! Right now I'm transcribing to text a podcast with whisper.cpp and it will take about as much time as the original podcast duration but I will be able to read it in 1/20th of the time.

Alternative interpretation of a downvote: we should all be enslaved to corporate electrical generation provided to "local" electric utility corporations so that we are economically incentivized to use cloud LLM providers. That's weird, no?

Teach me.

[1] It's a small nice house that cost ~$330K not too far off from my city center. This isn't rich privilege boasting.

downut··on GLM-5.2 – How to Run Locally
I have rooftop solar and I have been building credit with my electric utility even though the daily high temperature is well over 100F outside and a comfortable 75F inside. That includes running three AMD 12 thread 128GB systems with obsolete GPUs 24x7x365. I'm not a gamer, so 6 years ago I went low-end low-power GPUs. Boy am I dumb. Currently running the qwen3.6:27b, 35b, and gemma4:31b models just fine.

As soon as VRAM prices drop to sanity I'm going to load up and I could care less about the power draw.

Some parts of the future are absolutely great.

downut··on Mexican government unveils a prototype for a new homegrown, ultra-affordable EV
Have you ever paid attention to what's on the road in Mexico? I've driven there for 30 years and I've seen it all.

Then, there's the idea that Mexicans might not be able to manufacture a quality vehicle. My 2001 Toyota Tundra was manufactured in Mexico and I will drive it until I die. Basically a grail vehicle.

Places like Monterrey have multistory quite modern BYD dealerships. You might start shopping for monasteries ;-)

downut··on Mexican government unveils a prototype for a new homegrown, ultra-affordable EV
For the people who don't believe this, spend some time watching urban traffic in a place like Oaxaca. 4 is a bit of a stretch unless it's a couple of small kids (that happens) and the moto is not really a moped, but not much more powerful. There's occasional bulky cargo. I am also reminded of the multiple times we were riding in a bus in Cairo Egypt and passed a donkey cart in the left lane of a 6 lane-ish "free"way.

One of the first things I thought when I first saw this thing is, oh, there will be mods.

downut··on HP re-releases classic computer science calculator: The HP-16C
My wife and I were mid '80s chemical engineers. She liked her 15c, but I went on afterward into fundamental numerical analysis and was extremely happy with my 32S. I recently asked qwen3.6:35b|qwen3.6:27b|gemma4:31b (can't remember which one) all about the current state of replacement LR44 batteries for an "HP 32S Scientific Calculator". It was fucking adamant, aggressively so, that the calculator required 1 battery. LOL no, it sits before me and yes it needs 3. A 6 pack cost I dunno $6 off AMZ? Anyway I have now replaced the batteries in my daily tactile basic algebra calculator for the third time. If I don't have it in hand I use Free42. I... regret not remembering how to program these things, it was so intellectually elegant.

I logged on for the first time in a while to actually talk about nerd things. God I loved the 80s-2000.

downut··on Picasso’s Guernica (Gigapixel)
I'll take your word for it (Man Ray's) because... Picasso. It's interesting to contemplate though because those studies/sketches/whatever are Picasso, they're great, better than just about anybody who ever painted, but pale next to Guernica.
downut··on Fuck the cloud (2009)
"The difference is that you don't own your EV, it is a computer on wheel. Any firmware update like Tesla has done in the past and features are no longer available."

Yeah, I think that's right.

I only thought in one dimension: reliance on corporate controlled high density existing infiltration of fossil-fuel delivery infrastructure. Which is worthless if the price is occasionally exorbitantly volatile or might even run into zero supply issues.

Another equally important dimension is: that EV car might just be a puppet, and not you running the puppet.

I'm pretty sure the Prius doesn't phone home (2015), but I admit that I've not gone deep into it.

I can't stand this thing I just did in this comment where I tried not to sound like an AI. I might have to give up short comments entirely because I can't generate enough context for authenticity credibility. <= It's a fact, and that right there sounds like AI to me now.

downut··on Picasso’s Guernica (Gigapixel)
When we visited that room in 2012 or so the walls on the other 3 sides had Picasso's studies for the final painting.

The combination of those in proper size context to the astounding thing on that wall was... I dunno, very hard to bear? Chills and goosebumps. Just being in the presence of such genius. [Edited to add: I forgot! Many of the studies are clearly over complicated and colorful. And then you turn to see what was the final result. IMHO It's the same with genius software, in a different medium. Prose too, but maybe that's more contentious.]

There is no digital screen representation that can remotely approximate the psychic impact physical proximity to genius creates. I've felt this with many other greats as well.

I've sat alone in 3 different Rothko rooms. Damn. It's all I can say. You have to do it yourself. Tip: pan your eyes slowly while sitting in different corners.

downut··on Fuck the cloud (2009)
1988. On a math TA salary I paid $600 for an 80MB (That's megabytes) hard drive. I had dialup. I also had Turbo Pascal and an 8087 coprocessor. I was a MS student in computational math AKA numerical analysis.

It was goddam glorious.

Took until 1995ish to have a homelab to experiment with FreeBSD and later Linux over a 10-Base-T network with gcc/g++ and dialup access to this thing called "The World Wide Web". The browser had a throbber dinosaur.

It was even more goddam glorious.

Right now I've got three main systems with decent CPUs and 128GB of memory, and several emphemeral satellite systems. With 8GB of NVIDIA VRAM I'm running gemma4:31b just fine on my media system. Which curiously enough has, ah... media on it.

I feel like I have a good idea how EV owners feel right now. (We have a Prius.)

downut··on Phone-free bars and restaurants on the rise across the U.S.
The protocol we have always implicitly used in this case is 'no news is good news'. I.e., participants in the meetup understand that they only have to communicate 'I won't/can't be there.' The reason is optional. Could be lots of things.

But socially this has gotten inverted.

I have several very long relationships with people (>30 years) who are overwhelmed by this. Living their lives immersed in constantly buzzing irrelevant social noise.

downut··on Phone-free bars and restaurants on the rise across the U.S.
In 1989 I wrote and posted a paper letter to a college friend of ours in Northern England, asking, hey, around [June date I forget] we will be in London, want to meetup? A while later I get a reply letter saying sure, how about we meet at Piccadilly Circus on this date at this time. I posted an affirmative reply and there was no further communication. We were in Arizona at the time.

On the agreed-to date and time we were there, and so was she.

If we were talk about paper maps, it would blow people's minds. If we were to get further in the weeds and describe how we traveled around communist Czechoslovakia w/o a map, only a phrasebook entitled "Travelers Czech", well...

Ah I forgot! We, without being specific about the date, knew that other college friends of ours, originally from Czechoslovakia, had told us they were going to be in their home town of Olomouc. We got the barest help in Prague with my wife's bad German on how to get there by train. Arrived, got a room, and called them up. For the next week they showed us around the country and visited family and friends.

Other than lousy waiters in Prague we had a terrific adventure. Different times.

But you sure had to able to demonstrate you had integrity in your agreements and were open to changes of plans.

downut··on Sweden goes back to basics, swapping screens for books in the classroom
Might be a translation issue here with the commenter, maybe?

Handwritten notes help to remind yourself when studying about what the instructor thought important. You write down the emphasis. I sure made it clear to my classes that my emphasis was on this, this and that. The instructor is writing and grading the tests. Or was, back in the ancient times when we made chalk dust, as a pedagogical tool.

downut··on Sweden goes back to basics, swapping screens for books in the classroom
This is hilarious. This comment would imply that the people who got multiple degrees and were very successful through their careers (that would be everybody in my generation: we started in 1980) learning from lecturers scribbling with chalk on a blackboard, writing it all down with pen on paper, somehow had a less effective education than modern students using modern tools. Yeah, looks all around, remembers training youngs, no, I don't think so... Actually sometimes it was bad because people, but sometimes it was fucking awesome. I lectured undergrad mathematics at UF and ASU using chalk and a blackboard and to this day that was some of the most enjoyable experiences of my life. Especially for the upper division classes, my students paid attention. They asked questions. It was glorious.
downut··on Afroman found not liable in defamation case
Best to kill anything that moves; it's the only way to survive.
downut··on So you want to build a tunnel
I figure if Seymore Cray thought digging was useful for mental hygiene it's probably ok:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hobby_tunneling

downut··on Toyotas and Terrorists: "Why are ISIS's trucks better than ours?" (2023)
LC 200: 381HP V8 lol! Holy shit they are expensive used. It kinda looks like the updated version of the FJ-80 public "Mall Cruiser" actual knower "Land Crusher" concept, where the thing that looks like yer regular suburban kid hauler has got some serious off road chops. Used "Mall Cruiser" FJ-80s were considered a steal for many years.
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