ericbarrett

Soon they’re going to be flying large, noisy drones over our houses and apartments all day.

https://www.pcmag.com/news/texas-residents-are-fed-up-with-a...

It wasn’t just the LLM language, the sections “The corpus” and “What the data supports” were disjointed and unconvincing. Likely due to lack of human wrangling. Unfortunately they were the core of the analysis.

I'm in the same age range. Never had those issues (with GLP-1s, anyway) and I'm sorry to hear you did. Fiber is good regardless :)

Have you taken them? Because I see this “you still need virtue^Wdiscipline” refrain a lot, but it doesn’t match my experience or that of many others I know who use GLP-1s.

For me, I lost 50 lbs not exercising and not actively managing my diet. I felt better and all my biomarkers got better (blood pressure, cholesterol, etc.). Later, I started to exercise and cleaned up my diet because I wanted to. Healthy food just tastes better now, and moving my body is satisfying rather than tiring. They are the closest thing to magic I’ve ever experienced.

Sadly yes, a lot of people are

Mildly disagree. "Fix" is exasperating but immediately tells me I need to look at the diff. With unconstrained Claude spew, I need to wade through three levels of deep fried LLM-speak before realizing...I need to look at the diff

“Froogle” was an actual Google offering (years ago) that now redirects to Google Shopping.

If I may compare written work to restaurants, a title and byline are like the storefront; I get an idea of what's being served, and if I'm hungry, I'll walk in and order. Sometimes the meal is amazing. Usually it's pretty good. Occasionally it's bland, or even bad, but not often enough to discourage future ventures; of course, I'm unlikely to revisit that particular proprietor.

With LLM writing there's an additional outcome. I walk in and the walls are pleasant, if beige. I follow the smell and promise of food down a hallway. At the end is an unmarked door, which I open and peek through. Myriad hallways lead away, each more chaotic and disheveled than the last. Say I am very hungry and have the guts to explore; I may find that I can never actually reach the food, that it's just an endless hall of mirrors, presenting structure but with nothing at its core.

Sometimes I do find food, but it's never better than bland.

The facade of these places, at first glance, still looks like human-run restaurants, though we're all learning the tells. Nowadays, when I open the first door and see more hallways, I'll turn around and look elsewhere.

It would orbit the moon as a satellite, presumably in a fairly tight and low orbit; the article says a 2 hour period, which is < 100 km above the surface. About half the time it would be on the "far side" and Earth would be blocked by the Moon below it.

The other half it would have line-of-sight with Earth and be able to communicate, but also exposed to radio pollution. Presumably the mission designers would hibernate the experiment for this period.

It will almost certainly hit the moon one day. The moon has many mascons (mass concentrations, a.k.a. lumps) and destabilizes anything orbiting it over a long period of time. Or even a short period of time: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apollo_16#Particles_and_Fields... But an orbit can be chosen to give at least a couple years, which is the mission goal.

It takes a bit of stationkeeping to stay at L2; like keeping a ball at the top of a low, smooth hill - needs a nudge every now and then.

A circular Moon orbit can last years with no fuel use if you pick your inclination correctly. Look up "frozen orbits" (the Moon is lumpy)

I lived in a high-rise that let you unselect a floor with a double press. Try that next time. Can confirm it's very nice!

This is a cool finding; I did not know it was still an active area of study with all the work on ML and LLMs these days. I have done some amateur exploration of the space and the result does not surprise me: https://github.com/ehbar/evol

Same. This is why I switched to Apple Maps. Sometimes the Google detours would end in dangerous situations, like a left turn with no light across a major road. And it would be to save 2 minutes-ridiculous!

But which one - SMS/RCS? iMessage? WhatsApp? Signal? Telegram? Discord?

The Linux kernel had strlcpy over 20 years ago. It was removed in favor of strscpy because the latter was judged a better interface. Here's a 2022 article: https://lwn.net/Articles/905777/

What is "IR"?

This is true of XFS too; I have run it in production on both RedHat and Debian/Ubuntu based distros for decades and have never had issues after an FS full event. I usually reboot a server that has had the root FS full because sometimes service logging will not recover from write failures, but I've never had to xfs_repair.

Yeah, just tangentially pointing out that asset depreciation rules in the U.S. changed recently. Could explain some of the crazy magnitude of this year's spending spree.

> depreciate over 10 years

I believe the One Big Beautiful Bill Act allows full depreciation in the first year: https://www.bassets.net/blog/obbba-depreciation-2025-2026-gu...

You don't, but it's so much cooler when you do! Not everything needs to be a beige utilitarian module optimized for business consumption.

I didn't need to implement an Intel RDRAND streamer in C and assembler, but it was a ton of fun: https://github.com/ehbar/rdrand-stream

OP, I really liked this project. Kudos for publishing it!

Coreutils are not only used in interactive contexts. They are the primitives that make up the countless shell scripts which glue systems together. Any edge case will be encountered and the resulting poor performance will impact somebody, somewhere.

Here's a related example of what happens when you change a shell primitive's behavior - even interactively. Back in the 2000s, Linux distributions started adding color output to the ls command via a default "alias ls=/bin/ls --color=auto". You know: make directories blue, symlinks cyan, executables purple; that kind of thing. Somebody thought it would be a nice user experience upgrade.

I was working at a NAS (NFS remote box) vendor in tech support. We frequently got calls from folks who had just switched to Linux from Solaris, or had just moved their home directories from local disk to NFS. They would complain that listing a directory with a lot of files would hang. If it came back at all, it would be in minutes or hours! The fix? "unalias ls". Because calling "/bin/ls" would execute a single READDIR (the NFS RPC), which was 1 round-trip to the server and only a few network packets; but calling "/bin/ls --color=auto" would add a STAT call for every single file in the directory to figure out what color it should be - sequentially, one-by-one, confirming the success of each before the next iteration. If you had 30,000 files with a round-trip time of 1ms that's 30 seconds. If you had millions...well, either you waited for hours or you power-cycled the box. (This was eventually fixed with NFSv3's READDIRPLUS.)

Now I'm sure whomever changed that alias did not intend it, but they caused thousands of people thousands of hours of lost productivity. I was just one guy in one org's tech support group, and I saw at least a dozen such cases, not all of which were lucky enough to land in the queue of somebody who'd already seen the problem.

So I really appreciate GNU coreutils' commitment to sane behavior even at the edges. If you do systems work long enough, you will ride those edges, and a tool which stays steady in your hand - or script - is invaluable.

> the tour is rad

As others have noted, the guides are full of tall tales. I grew up in San Jose and remember when the property next to the Winchester Mystery House was a drive-in theater, and before the House was fire-damaged. The B.S. was well-known even then. My father, who moved to San Jose in the 1950s, even explained it to me as a child after some friends who were into ghost stories told me about it.

I don't know if it's still there, but my favorite part of the site was the detached museum showing some of the earliest pieces developed by the Winchester Repeating Arms Co. Easy to miss as it is not part of the house or the guided tour.

> rather than just tearing others’ work down as I’m currently doing.

Your criticism looks authentic, based on real study and expertise. I think it is a valuable gift. It is only when such a thing become compulsive that it can fairly be called "tearing down."

Looking at your issues, you are calling out real flaws and even provide repro tests. If I were a maintainer who cared, and not just running a slop-for-stars scheme, I'd be very grateful for the reports.

I also had old Google backup codes fail a few years ago. Anybody who hasn't regenerated them in a year or two, I recommend you do so.

It's a much saner number, though probably easier to pocket dial as well. I'm not sure how far back it was chosen, but 112 would also dial a lot faster than 911 or 999 on a rotary phone.

It is astonishing how one's motor skills degrade when the adrenaline is flowing. I once tried to dial 911 on an iPhone in such circumstances. My hands were shaking so badly I kept dialing 922, 811, 914, and so on. Terrible in the moment but a very good lesson for preparedness. I really appreciate the "dial Emergency" methods on modern phone software that just need a button held down.

I disagree about baseball.

I played it in school and have always enjoyed it casually, but I attended a game with a friend who was very into MLB. He pointed out many interesting defensive and offensive moves through the innings. Some were straightforward, like the runner on second base edging forward to steal. Others were less obvious, like outfielders tightening inward since the batter was likely to bunt. There was always action and information from multiple places on the field, once you knew what to look for. It was fascinating, and I’ve always much preferred in-person attendance since.

It’s impossible for a single screen to capture all these things, so a TV broadcast director makes calls to show one camera or another, and has to sacrifice the subtler stuff so they don’t miss a pitch or a throw to first etc.

Football, on the other hand, absolutely much better on TV if you want to follow the action. It happens in a small area of the field so it’s easier to show on a screen, you are seated much farther away, and the mud-brown ball is difficult to follow when it is hundreds of feet distant. The main fun of being there is social IMO.

> GPT-4 now considers self modifying AI code to be extremely dangerous and doesn't like talking about it. Claude's safety filters began shutting down similar conversations a few months ago, suggesting the user switch to a dumber model.

I speculate that this has more to do with recent high-profile cases of self harm related to "AI psychosis" than any AGI-adjacent danger. I've read a few of the chat transcripts that have been made public in related lawsuits, and there seems to be a recurring theme of recursive or self-modifying enlightenment role-played by the LLM. Discouraging exploration of these themes would be a logical change by the vendors.

you should use your own words. i like them a lot more than with the LLM filter.

> After it’s over, they’ll like you a little more or a little less. They’ll be more or less likely to bring you problems. They’ll be more or less likely to recommend you or avoid you. And just as important, you’re training them on the type of problems to bring you.

Indeed. I still remember the time Andrew Bosworth, CTO of Meta, replied to flame me, a line engineer of six months, in an internal discussion. It must have been, what, 15 years ago? The topic is long faded from my memory. Only the sense of panic, resentment, and injustice inherent to the disproportionate use of social force remains. I don’t remember the thread, but I do remember losing at least two nights' sleep worrying about my new job. Truly, it is sage advice.