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emeraldd

2,041 karma · joined April 2, 2011

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emeraldd··on Why do Macs ask you to press random keys when connecting a new keyboard?
Honestly, the mac approach makes much more sense from an ease of use perspective for non-experts. On other platforms, you have to know the layout to choose and hope things work until you do or have a second keyboard that's close enough tl the default to get by. On Mac, it just figures it out based on the information you tell it when the keyboard is connected. Much less error prone in the majority of cases.
emeraldd··on Desk for people who work at home with a cat
yeah, this is no go. What you want is a way for the cat to be in a box front and center. So an underdesk keyboard tray that doesn't have room for a cat to sit on, but is big/deep enough for your hands, keyboard, and mouse and a "box" on the desk proper that the cat will naturally gravitate too. Of course, this works best with desktop machines or external monitors and keyboards instead of just a laptop.
emeraldd··on No as a Service on two potatoes and a grater
Your welcome.
emeraldd··on AI Lazyslop and Personal Responsibility
There are a number of cases where this is not really possible. For some classes of updates, the structure of the underlying application and the type of update being made requires that you do an "all or nothing" type of update in order to get a buildable result. I've run into this a lot with Large Java applications where we have to jump several Spring versions just due to the scope of what's being updated. More incremental updates weren't an option for a number of time/architectural reasons and refactoring the application structure (which really wouldn't have helped too much either) would have been time and cost prohibitive... Really annoying but sometimes you just don't have another option to actually accomplish your goals.
emeraldd··on AI company has released an app that lets people converse with avatars of dead
Couldn't find a better link for that one, the tech looks interesting, but the Add is disturbing.

https://www.unilad.com/technology/news/2wai-avatar-app-evil-... may be a better link .. not sure ..

emeraldd··on Get an AI code review in 10 seconds
My experience with AI code reviews has been very mixed and more on the negative side than the positive one. In particular, I've had to disable the AI reviewer on some projects my team manages because it was so chatty that it caused meaningful notifications from team members to be missed.

In most of the repos I work with, it tends to make a large number of false positive or inappropriate suggestions that are just plain wrong for the code base in question. Sometimes these might be ok in some settings, but are generally just wrong. About 1 in every 10~20 comments is actually useful or something novel that hasn't been caught elsewhere etc. The net effect is that the AI reviewer we're effectively forced to use is just noise that get's ignored because it's so wrong so often.

emeraldd··on Revisiting "Let's Build a Compiler"
This is something I've noticed on academic vs "practicing" coders. Academics tend to build in layers, though not always, and "practicing" coders tend to build in pipes give or take. The layers approach might give you buildable code, but is hard to exercise and run. Both approaches can work though, especially if you build in executable chunks, but you have to focus on the smallest chunk you can actually run.
emeraldd··on Uv overtakes pip in CI
> by letting you just make another environment

This is actually what I'm talking about .. Why do I need a whole new python environment rather than just scoping the dependencies of an application to that application? That model makes it significantly harder to manage multiple applications/utilities on a machine, particularly if they have conflicting package versions etc. Being able to scope the dependencies to a specific code base without having to duplicate the rest of the python environment would be much better than a new virtualenv.

emeraldd··on Uv overtakes pip in CI
This is still a complete pain to work with. Virtualenv in general is a "worst of worlds" solution. It has a lot of the same problems as just globally pip installing packages, requires a bit of path mangling to work right, or special python configs, etc. In the past, it's also had a bad habit of leaking dependencies, though that was in some weird setups. It's one of the reasons I would recommend against python for much of anything that needs to be "deployed" vs throw away scripts. UV seems to handle all of this much better.
emeraldd··on Historical Tech Tree
I'd also recommend the "How to Make Everything" YouTube channel.
emeraldd··on What went wrong inside recalled Anker PowerCore 10000 power banks?
Or the changes weren't immediately visible externally.
emeraldd··on Let's Learn x86-64 Assembly (2020)
There's always arm assembly. It's a differen ISA of course, but a lot of the concepts transfer pretty nicely. You could also look at something like the Zimaboard or similar machines.
emeraldd··on Dev jobs are about to get a hard reset and nobody's ready
In a situation where the transformations are explicit and can almost be mechanical with little to no involved reasoning. With those requirements, the LLM just has to recognize the patterns and "translate" them to the new pattern. Which is almost exactly what they were designed to do.
emeraldd··on When will tech workers start creating Unions?
Honestly, what is the value proposition of a Union to Tech workers? Tech workers tend to well paid and given somewhat wider latitude and freedom than a lot of other professions. In most cases, there isn't really a reason we need to look to a Union for anything.
emeraldd··on Notes on rolling out Cursor and Claude Code
If you're forgetting to use the tool, is the tool really providing benefit in that case? I mean, if a tool truly made something easier or faster that was onerous to accomplish, you should be much less likely to forget there's a better way ...
emeraldd··on Proposed bill to make it a crime to download DeepSeek in the US
The actual text of the bill, referenced elsewhere, refers to import or export, which would theoretically make it illegal to download.
emeraldd··on Crunchyroll Is Currently Getting Hacked and They're Sharing Login Information
It would also seem that the information about Crunchyroll not currently allowing password changes is true as well.
emeraldd··on Comment on 2015 mRNA paper suggests data re-used in different contexts
Could this be a repeat of the Xerox image duplication bug? https://www.dkriesel.com/en/blog/2013/0802_xerox-workcentres...
emeraldd··on Snyk Security Labs Testing Update: Cursor.com AI Code Editor
This feels like the equivalent of pen-testing without a contract ... Which is basically breaking and entering. (Slightly different context of course.)
emeraldd··on H5N1 virus isolated from infected dairy worker is 100% lethal in ferrets
I’m sorry for the ferrets, but can someone explain the significance of that lethality to humans? Other than those with pet ferrets? Are they a good proxy to humans that I wasn’t aware of?
emeraldd··on Dumb website only lets one user in at a time
Anyone actually get into the size and see what's there?
emeraldd··on Sir, there's a cat in your mirror dimension
Considering the title of the article, this comment had me thinking of some supernatural. Took me way to long to realize what it was talking about...
emeraldd··on XZ backdoor: "It's RCE, not auth bypass, and gated/unreplayable."
If I'm reading this right, would there be any persistent evidence of the executed payload? I can't think of a reason anything would have to go to disk in this situation, so a compromise could easily look like an Auth failure in the logs .... maybe a difference in timings .. but that's about it ...
emeraldd··on Boeing Halted from Further Max Production Increases by FAA
Let me clarify a bit here, there was a flaw (the MCAS issue) the caused a crash and a lot of people died. Supposedly the issue was fixed and steps were taken to correct the culture problems that led to the MCAS issue in the first place. Politics are involved etc.

Now we see a second serious (the door plugs) issue and another undocumented "feature" (the cockpit door behavior). So not only were the culture issues not fixed, but we have more problems and the same class of problem in the same line of planes that we've already seen. That burns political capitol and public good will very fast, plus tends to piss off investigators...

emeraldd··on Boeing Halted from Further Max Production Increases by FAA
My guess: people died, then people almost died.

The repetition of different problems in the same line of aircraft probably had something to do with it too ...

emeraldd··on New $3k Couch Might Be Garbage in Three Years
I've been surprisingly happy with a Big Fig mattress: https://www.bigfigmattress.com

Ours is a little on the firmer side, but that can be remedied with a topper.

emeraldd··on ASCII FacePalm
If you don't know the story... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Darmok
emeraldd··on 16-bit Serial Homebrew CPU
Home brew computers! The Magic-1 was one of my favorites to read about .. http://www.homebrewcpu.com/index.htm
emeraldd··on Why isn't Titan classed? (2019)
This has to be one of my favorite sentences in the whole page:

> However, this does not mean that OceanGate does meet standards where they apply, but it does mean that innovation often falls outside of the existing industry paradigm.

in particular:

> ... this does not mean that OceanGate does meet standards where they apply ...

emeraldd··on New warning messages might as well be fatal errors
Output to Stderr can also break things, particularly in dot files or from applications that tend to output meaningful information to stderr.
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