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drabbiticus

122 karma · joined June 16, 2014

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drabbiticus··on Git-bug: Distributed, offline-first bug tracker embedded in Git
I can somewhat understand your point about issues tied to branch, but have some remaining questions about how this working in practice:

- If I am on a branch where this issue exists and unaddressed, is it easy to find out if there is another branch where this issue has been addressed

- I am on a branch that does not have the issue reported, but know it's reported on another branch -- does that mean the issue doesn't exist on this branch? Is it on the reporter to correctly identify the root branch where the issue was first created? Do you have to somehow merge to make this work "right"?

drabbiticus··on Human brain is two separate organs, Stanford Medicine-led research finds
It's cool, but the headline is really pretty misleading.

The new result seems to be that researchers have identified different progenitors for fore/midbrain vs. hindbrain and have found that they can be identified by some specific developmental gene markers. That's genuinely cool.

However, organs are not typically defined by a single tissue characterized by a progenitor that can be labeled with a single gene marker. I suppose it's fine if on a functional and anatomical level you want to split the fore/midbrain and hindbrain into two different "organs", but whether you think of the brain as 1 organ or 2, it really doesn't change much in terms of how you would think about these regions.

It isn't at all surprising that different regions of the brain have localized functions; some of the earliest evidence of this was how focal injuries (like strokes) have characteristic deficit patterns depending on brain region affected, and obviously there has been a lot of work since then further showing the organization, function and development of different brain regions.

drabbiticus··on LLM Classification Is Feature Engineering
Thanks, a lot of this helps.

Having said that, if

    - y is a binary "ironic"(1), "not ironic"(0) label and
    - x is the content of a tweet and
    - LLM(x) is meant to represent some probability range [0,1] representing p(y=1|x)
then it seems that p(y=1|x) === LLM(x) already.

Why bother with p(y=1|x) = σ( α + β*LLM(x) ) as in the article? You are right that I missed the case where LLM(x) = 0, but that just means that p(y=1|x) has exactly 2 values when defined as above and β -> inf.

    - when LLM(x) = 0 then p(y=1|x) = 1/(1+e^-α)
    - when LLM(x) = (0,1] then p(y=1|x) = 1/(1+e^-inf) = 1
This is substantially lossy and converts a continuous output LLM(x) of range [0,1] to a step function not even defined as a set {0,1} but instead the set {1/(1+e^-α),1} for unclear gain. It also loses all sensitivity to LLM(x) near 0, and only detects/changes value when LLM(x)=0 exactly. It might make more sense if LLM(x) is not limited to [0,1] like you have claimed because then at least the logistic regression is clamping the output to [0,1]. If you were wrong about the range of LLM(x), this would come back to asking authors to actually define their terms.

My point is that when math is used to justify something or communicate something, it should be explained or very apparently right. If when someone goes to try to understand the math it doesn't match the claims being made in the article ("recovering the LLM") then it throws the rest of the article into doubt.

drabbiticus··on LLM Classification Is Feature Engineering
I really wish people would define terms when using math. What is y? What is LLM(x)? Presumably it evaluates to some real number so that it can be fed to the logistic sigmoid function. If it is the logistic function, then why does beta going to infinity matter? It seems to just collapse the output of the sigmoid function to 1 and make the value of LLM(x) meaningless instead of their claim that it recovers the LLM classifier. What is the function I()?

Maybe these are well understood terms in some field? Maybe I'm just lost?

drabbiticus··on Scientists Find Worms in Almost Every Fish in a Tuna Haul – 96% Were Infected
I don't think that the Anisakis species discussed in this article would generally be considered microscopic, as demonstrated by various photos included in the article. The Trypanorhyncha larvae are smaller, but also likely to be visible without microscopy as well, on the basis of the scale I'm inferring from the included photos vs. the muscle striation in the tuna.
drabbiticus··on GrapheneOS says Pixel 11 has MTE support after all
12 hours before this was posted to HN: https://grapheneos.social/@GrapheneOS/117198980596943121

GrapheneOS: "Multiple Google engineers we've contacted have said they aren't able to give us any information about this so we're left doing reverse engineering and relying on leaks. The leaks do not seem reliable and do not match what we see. Our concern is that MTE may actually be broken due to CPU errata."

drabbiticus··on GrapheneOS project: pixel 11 no longer supports hardware memory tagging (MTE)
I would argue that "works fine" != "direct support" when discussing vendors and platforms. Support is a commitment signal, not just a technical capability.
drabbiticus··on Identifying fake cosmetics using AI
Seems likely to be another example of LLMs replicating training corpus. My expectation is that there will be more writing showing why something is counterfeit than why something is genuine, in part because disproving that something is counterfeit from visual/physical clues alone is essentially impossible. Lack of any definitive counterfeit proof is not proof of authenticity, hence why provenance and trust as such integral market factors. For example, even if the packaging were to be identical (e.g. say it's stolen from the factory), this is still not proof that the contained product is the one advertised.

And yes, packaging mistakes with chemical names and typography are quite common for anyone who occasionally pays attention to these things.

drabbiticus··on Tell HN: PayPal blocks GrapheneOS
The presence of social constructs is advantageous to group survival, and an individual operating within a given set of such constructs may choose to adhere to or reject the norms of those constructs. As you say, you do learn things about people through interacting with them. I think ideally this interaction includes discovering what their norms are, whether they believe they are conforming/rejecting/otherwise to a status quo, and the reason for it. The action itself is may not be sufficient to infer an individual's values without the context and reasoning, especially in the absence of clear communication. Social constructs are local to social groups and subgroups, with differing levels of conservation and generalization between groups.
drabbiticus··on Tell HN: PayPal blocks GrapheneOS
Who is making these rules up? Why do you think they apply universally?
drabbiticus··on Tell HN: PayPal blocks GrapheneOS
This seems likely to be cultural, possibly even microcultural.

I know many adults who believe that splitting bills is a normal and reasonable thing to do.

drabbiticus··on One corner of China’s internet is insisting that the Tang Dynasty never existed
> quite a bit younger than

You have introduced a comparison, which thus begs the following questions:

1. What is the event that defines "China proper"? 2. What is the event that defines "Europe [proper]" to you?

drabbiticus··on Firefox is now the last major browser that still supports uBlock Origin
I don't think Firefox should automatically spoof a Chrome user agent.
drabbiticus··on Morten Linderud resigning from Arch Linux development team
Not even saying you are wrong, but the linked article does not appear to support your premise that AI was related to this decision at all.

Is there further evidence you have that specifically relates to the specific decision of this particular dev to step down from Arch?

As you yourself say, being a maintainer is a big commitment, one that many people naturally tire of as their interests, goals and other life needs change over time.

drabbiticus··on How to survive boiling water
Just imagine a "Missing Milk" [1] on the side of a milk carton campaign. I'd be so confused haha.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Missing-children_milk_carton

drabbiticus··on IRGC claims it destroyed Amazon's Bahrain data center
I admit I've had the privilege of not following the war between Russia/Ukraine very closely, but your question seems to assume that Russia has been clearly delineating between civilian and military targets. "UN Meetings Coverage and Press Releases : Russian Attacks in Ukraine Show ‘Clear’ Pattern of Targeting Civilians, UN Officials Stress, as Security Council Speakers Call for Urgent De-escalation" [1] from Jul 9, 2026 suggests that is not the case and claims "16,402 civilians, including 802 children, have been killed in Ukraine"

[1] https://press.un.org/en/2026/sc16408.doc.htm

drabbiticus··on Show HN: Bento - An entire PowerPoint in one HTML file (edit+view+data+collab)
Can you clarify the collab architecture and what gets shared vs. not shared with Bento servers to enable this collaboration?
drabbiticus··on Late.sh – a command-line Clubhouse for computer people
The site does include a way to use a throwaway key and IIRC it was there last night too.

    ssh-keygen -t ed25519 -f ~/.ssh/late_throwaway && ssh -o IdentitiesOnly=yes -i ~/.ssh/late_throwaway late.sh
Based on what another user said, you might want to modify the above command to use throwawayUsername@late.sh instead if you are going the throwaway route to be more certain you aren't leaking your OS username.
drabbiticus··on Late.sh – a command-line Clubhouse for computer people
This is helpful to know, but also pretty general security practice. If you are auditing an artifact, only use that audited artifact after, don't assume that a network endpoint can never change what it serves. If you must use a newly downloaded artifact, verify it matches whatever you audited by comparing some sort of hash or derived value.
drabbiticus··on Why does kinetic energy increase quadratically, not linearly, with speed? (2011)
> I get that involving a human body complicates the analysis. That was the point: that you can’t appeal to it as a simple example to ground the intuition in other case.

Yeah, fair enough. It's unfortunate that the comment you were responding to involved "caloric intake" suggestive of a biological system when it could just as easily have involved a mechanical pulley. Their intuition would have been stronger phrased as: Within a gravitational field that is approximated as a uniform force field, the amount of energy/work to raise a weight by a fixed distance is independent of the initial position of that weight on a (massless) rope attached to a (frictionless) pulley.

> I was referring to a human holding it. What would have been a better way to keep you from missing that?

Since you are asking, for me, it would helped to have the following inserted text: "In fact it takes positive energy [for biological muscle] just told a weight at a fixed height, doing zero mechanical work!" so that the statement stood on it's own, or else including within your post a more definitive statement to the effect of "intuitions involving the human body complicates the analysis", as you did in this reply. If "that was the point", go ahead and state it.

To be fair, I often have the same problem. It's easy for me to write a lot of text that goes around a statement without actually getting to it.

drabbiticus··on Why does kinetic energy increase quadratically, not linearly, with speed? (2011)
> In fact it takes positive energy just told a weight at a fixed height, doing zero mechanical work!

Stacking a weight on top of a table holds it at a fixed height and requires zero mechanical work.

The failure in intuition here relates to physiology and the mechanism by which muscles work, not physics. Myosin and actin are constantly cycling through bonding and release during muscle contraction, as this is how the shortening action actually occurs. In fact, muscle contraction is particularly unintuitive because people frequently consider ATP the "energy currency", yet the ATP-consuming steps are actually the release/relaxation and preparation for binding, not the pulling action. This is also why the phenomena of rigor mortis upon death occurs.

drabbiticus··on Beer CSS – Build material design in record time
Because they were more focused on the stills than the movie.

IOW, a screenshot when you scroll it to the "right" spot looks clean and balanced. Personally, I think it's a bad UX decision, but also easy to scroll past once you know.

drabbiticus··on Thunderbird Littering My Home
`rmdir` is not `rm -rf`. It only removes empty directories.
drabbiticus··on Nordstjernen Web Browser
slop is such a poorly defined term that it's very hard to answer your question meaningfully. Is all code generated by AI slop? Many different opinions on this and questions to be answered as LLMs continue to shift the programming landscape.

Having said that, you could have just clicked the link and found https://github.com/nordstjernen-web/nordstjernen/commits/mai... with a bunch of commits by claude. It took longer to write this than it took to figure out whether AI was used.

drabbiticus··on IBM didn't want Microsoft to use the Tab key to move between dialog fields
As far as I'm concerned, it's a feature when the viewer controls the number of spaces per tab, it's a bug when someone else does (as is often the case online via css `tab-size`).
drabbiticus··on Let's Buy Spirit Air
We may be getting off-topic, but I despise how LLMS made em-dashes a thing that people associate with slop posts.
drabbiticus··on Borrow-checking without type-checking
Great, thanks for the clarification!
drabbiticus··on Borrow-checking without type-checking
Can someone help confirm whether I understand correctly the semantics difference between the final-line eval of

    x^
vs.

    x*
?

It seems like either one evaluates the contents of the `box`, and would only make a difference if you tried to use `x` afterwards? Essentially if you final-line eval `x^` and then decide you want to continue that snippet, you can't use `x` anymore because it's been moved. Awkwardly, it also hasn't been assigned so I'm not sure the box is accessible anymore?

drabbiticus··on I made a terminal pager
> holds my place

can you give an example of what you mean and how you might expect it to be achieved with a reloaded diff? otherwise `while true; git diff --color=always |less -r; done` gets you most of the way to what you are asking for

drabbiticus··on Show HN: I built a social media management tool in 3 weeks with Claude and Codex
Thanks for sharing!

> Before writing any code, I spent time on detailed specs, an architecture doc, and a style guide. All public: https://github.com/brightbeanxyz/brightbean-studio/tree/main...

> It took me tho 4 full days to get the specs to the level I was happy with.

When I click on history there I see only a single commit for these docs. Would you be willing to share some or all of the conversation you had with the LLM (in a gist or in the repo) that led to these architecture docs? Understand if you can't, but I'm sure it would be super instructive for people trying to understand the process of doing something like this and the types of guide rails that help to move the process forward productively.

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