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em500

6,949 karma · joined February 28, 2016

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em500··on AI Will Be Met with Violence, and Nothing Good Will Come of It
> Why do you think an employer would waste resources like that?

The parent post specifically mentioned large organizations, where the "employer" is not some person who hires and pays employees from their own funds. Hiring and personel management is done by middle managers with their own interests and incentives, which can differ substantially from those of the owners or capital providers.

em500··on Gold overtakes U.S. Treasuries as the largest foreign reserve asset
> The price of a loaf of bread in gold now is still similar to what it was in the Roman Empire 2000 years ago.

That seems pretty unlikely, when the price of a loaf of bread in gold now is less than half of what it was only 3 years ago.

em500··on Run Linux containers on Android, no root required
Yes, under How It Works:

> libqemu-system-aarch64.so (QEMU TCG, no KVM)

TCG means software emulation

em500··on Mark Zuckerberg creating new Applied AI engineering company, reorganises teams
You mean his terrible financial decisions of founding a company in 2004 that IPO at 104B within eight years, and now 14 years on is valued at 1.6T? Are we looking different track records?
em500··on How to run Qwen 3.5 locally
This also works

persona: emotionless vulcan

em500··on A new bill in New York would require disclaimers on AI-generated news content
> I'm worried that this will lead to a Prop 65 [0] situation, where eventually everything gets flagged as having used AI in some form.

This is very predictably what's going to happen, and it will be just as useless as Prop 65 or the EU cookie laws or any other mandatory disclaimers.

em500··on A flawed paper in management science has been cited more than 6k times
Most of these studies get published based on elaborate constructions of essentially t-tests for differences in means between groups. Showing the opposite means showing no statistical difference, which is almost impossible to get published, for very human reasons.
em500··on The struggle of resizing windows on macOS Tahoe
Non-tech people tend to think similarly about developers, breaking things that worked fine until yesterday / last week / last month, for no user-visible benefit.
em500··on Calling All Hackers: How money works (2024)
Here's John Cochrane take on Fed vs Narrow Banks: https://johnhcochrane.blogspot.com/2019/03/fed-vs-narrow-ban...

TLDR: Cochrane thinks the Fed wants keep a lid on narrow banking because it believes it can cross-subsidizing lending to households and businesses from retail deposits.

em500··on Calling All Hackers: How money works (2024)
Rather than leaving some oblique references to "many good books", why not provide the actual references?
em500··on Databases in 2025: A Year in Review
"Production" can mean many different things to different people. It's very widely used as a backend strutured file format in Android and iOS/macOS (e.g. for appls like Notes, Photos). Is that "production"? It's not widely used and largely inappropriate for applications with many concurrent writes.

Sqlite docs has a good overview of appropriate and inappropriate uses: https://sqlite.org/whentouse.html It's best to start with Section 2 "Situations Where A Client/Server RDBMS May Work Better"

em500··on Why does a least squares fit appear to have a bias when applied to simple data?
Sorry for my negativity / meta comment on this thread. From what I can tell the stackexchange discussion in the submission already to provides all the relevant points to be discussed about this.

While the asymmetry of least squares will probably be a bit of a novelty/surprise to some, pretty much anything posted here is more or less a copy of one of the comments on stackexchange.

[Challenge: provide a genuinely novel on-topic take on the subject.]

em500··on Understanding the bin, sbin, usr/bin, usr/sbin split (2010)
I'm believe /sbin was introduced/standardized in System V Release 4. It's present in SVR4 (1988) but not in SVR3 (1987). Another candidate is would be some old BSD (check 4.2 or 4.3 (1986) if anyone has a running system).

I'm guessing it was introduced to finally move out all the (mostly system) binaries from /etc, which in ancient Unix from Bell Labs in the 1970s really meant "etc", as in stuff that didn't fit elsewhere rather than system config files, so it contained binaries like init, mount, umount.

em500··on Understanding the bin, sbin, usr/bin, usr/sbin split (2010)
macOS has all of that (mostly inherited from NeXTSTEP which was significantly based on 4.3/4.4BSD). It's hidden by default in the GUI, visible in Terminal.

Nowadays most end users just use /usr/local or /opt/local or whatever is managed by Homebrew or Macports.

em500··on Unix v4 (1973) – Live Terminal
This is Unix V4 from 1973. The total number of installations world wide was around 20, all inside Bell Labs. There was no networking support at all, so security was mostly physical, i.e., office building security (though you could dial in with a modem). Multi-user support was a bunch of serial-line terminals. Pretty much everyone knew everyone else who was on the system.
em500··on Kidnapped by Deutsche Bahn
Yes. AFAICT, catering to the needs of tourists ranks very low among German voter priorities.
em500··on Kidnapped by Deutsche Bahn
I'd reverse the question ask why Germany (or any other country where English is not an official language, and does not majorly rely on tourism for income) would provide any public information in English? Commercial services can choose to do so a matter of self interest, but why would state financed services?
em500··on Kidnapped by Deutsche Bahn
Deutsche Bahn is completely state owned, UK rail is privatized. They're both pretty bad. China's new high speed rail is state owned, while the Japanese network is largely private. They're both far better than UK and Germany. I wonder what are the main determinants of the quality of large infra networks? State ownership only seems to have a very loose correlation, where even the sign of the relationship is unclear.
em500··on Growing up in “404 Not Found”: China's nuclear city in the Gobi Desert
What are you looking for exactly? And what issues did you hear from others who grew up in China? Most of the historical / political events (Great Leap Forward, Cultural Revolution) are fairly accurate, while personal / family experiences are necessarily subjective. China is a huge, diverse country with a vast range of experiences from people growing up in different regions and eras (just like the US, or Europe), so it's hard to dispute any personal / family experience.
em500··on Debian adds LoongArch as officially supported architecture
I thought they pivoted to RISC-V

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RISC-V#Strategic_background

em500··on Spain fines Airbnb €65M: Why the government is cracking down on illegal rentals
Almost everywhere the issues with housing boil down to 1) location constitute a large part of the value and desirability, 2) substitutability between houses in different locations is limited, 3) the most desirable locations will have the strongest opposition from local residents to increase supply.
em500··on If AI replaces workers, should it also pay taxes?
> Sure the 4,995 unemployed might be able to afford the gizmo, but the state does not receive the same taxes. So what happens to those 4,995 unemployed people ? who is paying for their health benefits and social security (retirement) ?

So are we're simultaneously facing a big unemployment crisis, and a big shortage of health care providers and retirement care takers?

em500··on Programmers and software developers lost the plot on naming their tools
- Almost everything on blogs and HN are opinions, so don't take things things too seriously

- Fun and humour are subjective, and a substantial part derives from novelty and subvertin expectations. It's hard to make something fun for an audience that has already seen such dozens of times.

- The audience('s background and expectations) is diverse and varies with time. So what's considered "fun" is audience specific and often cyclical.

em500··on New benchmark shows top LLMs struggle in real mental health care
Do you have some better alternatives for a country where private mental health care costs €150/hr, while the government/insurance paid care have 3-6M+ waiting lists?
em500··on What is “literate programming”? (2024)
This essay seems to be missing the main primary references for literate programming:

https://www.cs.tufts.edu/~nr/cs257/archive/literate-programm...

https://www-cs-faculty.stanford.edu/~knuth/lp.html

Knuths intention seems clear enough in his own writing:

Literate programming is a methodology that combines a programming language with a documentation language, thereby making programs more robust, more portable, more easily maintained, and arguably more fun to write than programs that are written only in a high-level language. The main idea is to treat a program as a piece of literature, addressed to human beings rather than to a computer.

and

Let us change our traditional attitude to the construction of programs: Instead of imagining that our main task is to instruct a computer what to do, let us concentrate rather on explaining to human beings what we want a computer to do.

em500··on Cloudflare Down Again – and DownDetector Is Also Down
Yes, marketing often works via fear. And decision making in organizations often works through blame shifting and diffusion of accountability. So organizations will just stick with centralization and Cloudfare, AWS, Microsoft et al regardless of technical concerns.
em500··on Accepting US car standards would risk European lives
If there is a significant mismatch between what people are looking for and what manufacturers provide, why would some other manufacturer not jump in to capture the underserved demand? It doesn't seem like there's only a very small number of car (or laptop) manufacturers.
em500··on Isn't WSL2 just a VM?
At high level, WSL2 provides a single optimized VM and Microsoft-compiled Linux kernel. Optimized here means that the VM only provides a small set of devices to the Linux kernel, and the kernel operates with exact known hardware, which is much smaller and simpler compared to a full blown kernel (which detects a large variety of hardware) and fuller featured VMs (c.f. qemu emulated devices: https://kashyapc.fedorapeople.org/virt/qemu/qemu-list-of-emu...).

And when you run multiple "distributions" or instances, they all share the same running VM and kernel. So after a one-time startup of the VM+kernel, opening more distributions/instances is like starting new system containers (similar to lxc/lxd or systemd-nspawn, which are also very quick to spawn on Linux) rather than new VMs. The architecture is quite similar to Linux-on-ChromeOS (Crostini).

em500··on WebR – R in the Browser
That entire library/dataset is less than 5Mb compressed, which is barely larger than the size of modern commercial websites. An entire bible in uncompressed plaintext is only about 4Mb (compressed about 1Mb). Computers can really handle tons of data really fast; we've just become too accustomed to inefficiencies everywhere.
em500··on Why I (Still) Love Linux ?
Is Devuan not an option? It's explicitly advertised as Debian without systemd.
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