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ebb_earl_co

187 karma · joined February 10, 2020

I'm simply what the Spanish would call a breadstick.
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ebb_earl_co··on We’re forgetting what darkness feels like
I have this as well, and it showed up suddenly about 9 years ago. Trying to observe the sky ever since is distressing because I remember how my visual field used to be.
ebb_earl_co··on The Second Plane, 25 Years Later [video]
Episode #492 of the Making Sense podcast with Sam Harris.
ebb_earl_co··on GrapheneOS Overhauled Default Apps and Secure Clipboard
From [0], it seems that RCS can use the cellular signal instead of LTE or 5G:

> In cases where RCS is able to operate over cellular networks without data, it supports messaging as well as file transfer, enriched calling, and more.

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rich_Communication_Services

ebb_earl_co··on An open DNS recursive service for free security and high privacy
Please correct me if I am mistaken, but unless there’s a local resolver for every single one of your clients, aren’t the DNS requests sent in plaintext to the upstream of your local resolver?

That might not be an issue for your situation, but I recall the benefit of something like Quad9’s offering is the encryption between client and their endpoint(s), particularly for untrusted ISP or similar.

ebb_earl_co··on Reflections on Americans' Net Worth
I was going to say something similar: invoking one’s credentials as a professor only counts for legitimacy if that 30-year legacy of thinking on the topic is applied to the problem under discussion.

In my opinion, if the analysis is offloaded to the plagiarism machine, it loses all epistemological value.

ebb_earl_co··on Show HN: LatticeDB – Like SQLite but for graph databases
Just read through the README on GitHub and this looks impressive! Kudos
ebb_earl_co··on AI is removing the middle class of software engineering?
It's a remarkable coincidence that I'm reading the book The Nothing that Is: A Natural History of Zero by Robert Kaplan, and this passage on page 96 seems precisely relevant to this situation:

"""A Roman idiosyncrasy about counting reinforced this avoidance. The 360 degrees of longitude, for example, were always measured from the vernal equinox, which lies in the zodiacal sign of Aries. This should be zero degrees, 0°. It was common, however, to call it instead 'the first degree', Aries 1°, as Pliny did around 60 AD, upsetting his calculations and those of many who followed him. It amounts to this: if you lay out four marks on the ground and step from the first to the last, have you taken three paces or four? Clearly three; yet four marks were involved. To get the right answer it helps to call the starting-line 'zero'; then the number at the mark you step on will correspond to the number of your steps. But the Romans counted so that three days after Sunday was Tuesday; the Italian for the fifteenth century is the quattrocento — and all of us still call the two steps in music from C to E a major third, taking the number from the three tones involved."""

I wouldn't say that the set that has one element, labeled 0, _has_ zero elements; it has one element with the label 0. Right?

ebb_earl_co··on AI is removing the middle class of software engineering?
Lots of (most?) programming languages are 0-indexed so it feels natural for software developers and our ilk.
ebb_earl_co··on Show HN: BitBang – Reach machines behind NAT from a browser, no account
This seems simple and utile! Reading though the white paper on GitHub, there is a malformed Markdown table in the “Why WebRTC?” section [1] that probably just needs one more | somewhere.

[1] https://github.com/richlegrand/bitbang/blob/main/whitepaper....

ebb_earl_co··on 'AI Mania Is Eviscerating Global Decision-Making'
I’m curious what makes you a supporter, as you say? Supporting the companies that make them or the developers themselves pushing the technology forward or the impacts of the proliferation of the LLMs’ usage or something else?
ebb_earl_co··on What will be left for us to work on?
I like this article because it seems to go into decent depth on the “framework” that the author comes up with.

However, this following quote has a simple reason that I don’t see anywhere in the article or framework:

“”” Why is there a huge gap between what people in various occupations could be using AI for and what they’re actually using it for? One reason could be that people are slow to adopt technology, and that’s certainly part of our framework. “””

I would like to add a reason: that the Silicon Valley companies who developed the LLMs are brigands: cognizant of their actions, they have stolen (and continue to steal) the world’s copyrighted material and are selling it back to the masses and the politicians as if they are the arbiters of information itself.

Specifically responding to the quoted question, I could be using Claude or ChatGPT or Grok or DeepSeek or any other to have come up with this comment, or to write emails, or to implement my Python for me, etc., but I use none of them for anything. Doing business with brigands is a choice, and a choice that I hope becomes less and less palatable so that the financial, political, social, and moral fever that is our zeitgeist finally breaks.

ebb_earl_co··on Encrypted Spaces An architecture for collaborative applications
“Users verify cryptographic proofs to ensure that servers behave properly.”

If this is one of the defining tenets of this data system, is it not DOA? See also: the PGP key-signing parties that never were…

ebb_earl_co··on FastCGI: 30 years old and still the better protocol for reverse proxies
I’m in the same boat. Am trying to figure out how to configure Vinyl cache (née Varnish) in my home lab.
ebb_earl_co··on Framework Laptop 13 Pro
Some System76 SKUs have Coreboot now, e.g. https://system76.com/laptops/darter-pro
ebb_earl_co··on Show HN: Zerobox – Sandbox any command with file, network, credential controls
The text says that it uses OS-level tools, specifically bubble wrap on Linux.
ebb_earl_co··on We rewrote JSONata with AI in a day, saved $500k/year
Right, this is roughly my mental situation, too. I guess that streaming JSON things can eat up compute way faster than I had any intuition for!
ebb_earl_co··on We rewrote JSONata with AI in a day, saved $500k/year
This is a helpful breakdown, thanks, @otterley.

It is, by orders of magnitude, larger than any deployment that I have been a part of in my work experience, as a 10-year data scientist/Python developer.

ebb_earl_co··on We rewrote JSONata with AI in a day, saved $500k/year
> This was costing us ~$300K/year in compute, and the number kept growing as more customers and detection rules were added.

Maybe I’m out of touch, but I cannot fathom this level of cost for custom lambda functions operating on JSON objects.

ebb_earl_co··on Our commitment to Windows quality
Is it incontrovertibly built in to macOS? I have an iPhone and have never enabled it or Siri, so maybe there is similar off switch for macOS.
ebb_earl_co··on AirPods Max 2
The AirPods Max 2 are primarily Bluetooth headphones, but support lossless audio over USB-C cable, for what it’s worth.
ebb_earl_co··on LLMs as the new high level language
No, the ultimate beneficiary of LLM-created code is the toll collectors who stole as much intellectual property as they could (and continue to do so), fleecing everyone else that they are Promethean for having done so and for continuing to do so.
ebb_earl_co··on VPN location claims don't match real traffic exits
Check out the instructions from Tailscale: https://tailscale.com/kb/1280/appletv
ebb_earl_co··on VLC's Jean-Baptiste Kempf Receives the European SFS Award 2025
How do you manage this? Just copy the stream URL from Jellyfin Web or…?
ebb_earl_co··on Microsoft Can't Keep EU Data Safe from US Authorities
This is why I still prefer Signal; this practice seems to be their modus operandi even though they, too, were affected by AWS us-east-1 catastrophe
ebb_earl_co··on NJVL: Nim's New Intermediate Representation
I am really only familiar with Python, in which I’m pretty sure that the .py becomes .pyc and then CPython translates .pyc into machine instructions.

How does this differ? Is an IR the same idea as Python’s .pyc?

ebb_earl_co··on EuroLLM: LLM made in Europe built to support all 24 official EU languages
What is the name of Maltese in Maltese? Like “el español” in Spanish, it’s neat to know what languages call themselves
ebb_earl_co··on "ChatGPT said this" Is Lazy
I’m in the same boat, and what tipped me there is the ethical non-starter that OpenAI and Anthropic represent. They strip-mined the Web, ripped off copyrighted works in neat space, admitting that going through the proper channels was a waste of business resources.

They believe that the entirety of human ingenuity should be theirs at no cost, and then they have the audacity to SELL their ill-gotten collation of that knowledge back to you? All the while persuading world governments that their technology is the new operating system of the 21st century.

Give me a dystopian break, honestly.

ebb_earl_co··on How I bypassed Amazon's Kindle web DRM
Did anyone clone this? It’s 404 on GitHub now
ebb_earl_co··on It's OpenAI's world, we're just living in it
> … stochastic parrots… What a wonderful phrase, mind if I borrow it?
ebb_earl_co··on Edge264 – Minimalist, high-performance software decoder for H.264/AVC video
I like the `VARIANTS` env. var [0] to take advantage of x86_64 newer extensions if one’s processor has them.

CachyOS is a whole distro compiled with these flags, if possible, which is appealing.

[0] https://github.com/tvlabs/edge264#compiling-and-testing

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