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evilduck

5,012 karma · joined May 26, 2010

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evilduck··on Surprisingly complex waves reveal the brain's inner workings
There are things like magnetic stimulation of the brain, but there's no EM-field equivalent to Propofol.
evilduck··on NASA asked several former SR-71A staffers to help secret restart
We've had public reports of space based weapons usage this month. The environment is changing.

Perhaps this is placing a bet that Kessler syndrome is a real threat to surveillance capabilities and they want these in case the satellites go down.

evilduck··on California farmers are struggling to sell grapes as demand for wine drops
Your numbers are completely made up.

Extract a sugary liquid from fruit or malted grain, expose it to the pervasive and random yeast in the air around us and if it doesn't mold over first you'll probably get something in the 8% ABV range before the alcohol waste product inhibits the yeasts' metabolism. With some deliberate cultivation, which humans thousands of years ago figured out, you can selectively breed the yeast slurry in your vessels up to a 11-14% alcohol tolerance. They didn't know the science but they knew the process.

Leave it exposed and you'll eventually get a random acetobacter infection and ta-da, now you have a vat of vinegar. Which would still have utility, but is much less fun.

The 1-2% alcohol drinks were called "small beers" and were the second runnings off the grain that was used to make full-strength beers or barleywines. Humans liked variety.

And people drank water, not just alcoholic small beers, there are depictions of water filters dating back at least 3500 years, and a long history of water purification techniques, and a ton of ancient wells which were dug.

evilduck··on Rusty thoughts on "Parse, don't validate"
You absolutely do have to deal with this in your untyped language otherwise you're just letting edge cases and runtime errors happen. The syntax will be different, it will have to happen at runtime instead of compile time, the chosen wording and language to represent the concepts and the work may even vary, but you are not exempt.
evilduck··on Classified estimates show the NSA is paying billions to test AI models
The supply chain thing was just an embarassing attempt at politicking by a laughably useless Hegseth.

My understanding is that Anthropic doesn't really have a lot of say in the matter of keeping their models out of government hands. The government can do pretty much anything they want with a domestic company in the name of national security. They might first choose to be polite about it with an open request and payment, then they might choose to infiltrate and extract by any means necessary (the NSA has a literal army of hackers on hand to point at the task) and Anthropic may not even know about it leaking, either way they do what they want and serve a national security letter to silence the event.

Ultimately they can just offer something Dario can't refuse. Every one of these "oops, our models are just so powerful our agents hacked something by mistake" PR fluff pieces is admission to federal crimes and they are leverage they're giving the government to exert control over them. Refusal means prison.

evilduck··on Claude Code reads AGENTS.md only when telemetry is on [fixed]
Local is becoming ever increasingly scarce and cost prohibitive. It's kind of bleak out there right now. A minimum bar to entry for decent local AI (something that can run a 27B tier model with some reasonable context) is going to set you back a year or five worth of AI API token costs.
evilduck··on I said no and Apple said yes
Did you chase those references? A core premise and complaint is entirely false.

This is an article and author that is tailored for AI curmudgeons or an AI rejectionist to self-assure themselves that their worldview is the only correct one. Facts seem to be a nuisance at best here for the author, and helpful phrases like "garbage", "vile", "human toll", "psychopaths" undermine all chances or credibility for a reasonable take or conversation.

evilduck··on 28% of job postings on company career sites have been open over 90 days
It's not really an analogy, it's just facts of life. In a large enough company or over a long enough time period at a job or in your career, realistically people actually will eventually die and cause vacancies. I've had two coworkers die, one because of illness, the other because of an auto accident. I stopped using the "bus factor of one" phrase as a result even and use "redundancy or succession planning" since it's not outside the realm of possibility that someone might get hit by a vehicle.
evilduck··on I said no and Apple said yes
Because the author's proud ignorance sheds some light on the article's authenticity and validity of claims (or the complete lack thereof).
evilduck··on I said no and Apple said yes
Welcome to every Apple discussion for the last 25 years.
evilduck··on Human brain is two separate organs, Stanford Medicine-led research finds
The right and left hemispheres do different things… unless you had a hemispherectomy as an infant and then one half is able to mostly perform the duties of both.
evilduck··on Hister: A private search engine for the pages you visit and the files you keep
Saw on Discord that they have to change their name, since https://histre.com sent them a letter.
evilduck··on Benchmark: CadQuery vs. OpenSCAD for agentic CAD work
Is your question any different than how LLMs are impacting software engineers? A software engineer’s job isn’t just banging out lines of code either and you can’t effectively vibe code software without knowing how to describe what you want to build and having SWE domain language, and yet LLMs are having a massive impact on the industry and career.

I see no special barrier for mechanical engineering either. CAD can be represented in text. Statics and dynamics are already calculated in software, simulations are already ran in software. Specs for things are already formalized in both format and notation. All the pieces are there if you squint at it a little, they’re just not quite as easy as software tooling was, but it’s certainly closer than a surgeon’s or plumbers job.

evilduck··on We got admin access to Baseten's production GitHub
Background agents being spun up on your behalf with guidance and instructions you didn't get to approve or even see, and now you're potentially liable for every decision it makes with any tool at its disposal because you initiated it with what you thought was a benign request.
evilduck··on Benchmark: CadQuery vs. OpenSCAD for agentic CAD work
For OpenSCAD, AI models from about GPT4.5 onwards have been able to build and combine shape primitives pretty well, but that was never immensely useful.

Just last week I had Gemini 3.8 Flash and Antigravity take an existing STL of a part and swap out a piece of it with another design (fan shrouds on a computer case front plate). In the process it created exploded parts diagrams from the STL, created 2D renders from each axis (for its own visual re-ingestion, presumably, since I neither asked for or needed them), projected measurements, and then it implemented my design swap request. Which it didn't do with SCAD, it wrote a Python program and directly manipulated the STL geometries. It went perfectly. A week before that I had GLM 5.3 and Hermes take one model that was intended to fit into a part from another designer's part and change it; I didn't really like the interior part's design so I gave both STL files to Hermes and asked for a new interior part design that could be printed with vase mode to speed it up. It did and the new part is better than the human-designed part I grabbed off the internet.

I had another task mid week where I needed a case for something but didn't have the dimensions, so I just had Gemini do deep research lookup for dimensions and to then spit out a case STL for me. It was boring but functional and a good enough starting point for me to work with.

Right now my wife is enamored with a 3D printed purse design for halloween but the separately printed hinges are a weak design (a circular mortise and tenon rotating hinge). Working with Antigravity again, it's been able to take measurements, rotate parts in space on its own and create me a new object design that's better suited to be printed in TPU. It's held dimensional accuracy and even inferred some dimensions and spacing I didn't have out of the primary purse's shape. It's gone great. Next up will be having it combine all the parts into a single STL so I can do a multimaterial print in one shot, printing the purse in PETG but the living hinge in TPU without assembly needed.

I think "it's here, now" for home and hobbyist CAD needs for functional prints. It's not displacing a mechanical engineer's job yet, but this recent iteration is markedly better than the previous generation of models at spatial reasoning and 3D design because it's suddenly capable of it at all when even 4 months ago it was not.

In your other comment you mentioned "just learn CAD", and I have already, I could have cobbled together all of this myself in Fusion 360, but that would have taken far more time than a few minutes of prompting and walking away. I know enough domain lingo to describe the task well, and if it falls flat I will do it myself, but it's coming along faster than you seem willing to accept.

evilduck··on Muse – Meta’s personal AI agent
Intern?
evilduck··on The "$60 Gaming PC" – AMD BC-250 (2025)
$300 is too high, but $50 is too low. 3D print sellers aren't doing injection molded parts at scale, nor offshoring the labor. For GP's linked case file; between the filament, the compatible linked switch and fan hardware not purchased by the thousands, and someone paying themself at least minimum wage to print all 46 individual parts and then to partially assemble and package it up nicely (and not counting printer hardware depreciation or electricity), $50 for it is not a viable product to sell or to run as a business. That's the price I would budget for making it myself with the 3D printer I already own and not counting my time as a cost, not something I would waste my time with selling.
evilduck··on IBM Bob
The throwback nostalgia of that package might actually sell well, even if purchased ironically. HTMX did a Gameboy release and everyone gushed over it for no serious technical merits.
evilduck··on GPT-6 Astra
Nvidia does have one of the best completely open models. Open weights are nice but Nemotron is open training data too.
evilduck··on Introducing Ad Blocker for Firefox on iOS
Yeah release notes, in-app help, intuitive UIs, and version documentation hosted on your own website are definitely not possible. Gotta instead cater to the LCD of people who won't be using Firefox in the first place, it's reddit spam or nothing.
evilduck··on Hang on to Your Firefox
Epiphany on Linux is a pretty straightforward Webkit browser. Konqueror still exists. Ladybird is up and coming. Servo is still making progress.
evilduck··on Dwarf Fortress is getting the mother of all magic updates
FWIW DF and DFHack work flawlessly through Crossover on macOS on my M2 and my M5
evilduck··on Smartphone LED detects hidden cameras with AI
That's actually much easier to detect, any camera without an IR filter would show an LED emitting where your eyes did not, no complicated solution necessary.
evilduck··on Smartphone LED detects hidden cameras with AI
Perhaps to avoid tipping off the entity recording you by blasting their hidden cameras with bright lights. Granted, the PoC device in the article is not exactly subtly looking, but if you could turn it into a sleek device it would be more useful. Not playing your hand while you're under surveillance lets you control the information they're receiving.

Though the bigger issue with my theory is that while most cell phone and webcam devices have IR filters, many surveillance cameras intentionally do not.

evilduck··on Just the rumour of a bug is enough to find an exploit these days
Your tech manager is likely very aware of the imperfections and is making prioritizations and compromises to keep you employed.
evilduck··on Omarchy development practices lead to predictable security issues
Yes, if you're jumping on some hypetrain OSS distro built around a cult of personality and it has very few merits otherwise and that project's creator has racist views, absolutely yes. People's distro alignments are a little bit different than some small utilities or OSS libraries, nobody writes jokes like "how do you know someone uses libxml? They'll tell you" like they do for Gentoo, Arch, etc.

But keep defending it, we can see what you're ok associating with.

evilduck··on Omarchy development practices lead to predictable security issues
Omarchy is just a pile of settings and a branding, you could have configured Cachy similarly and wouldn't have to associate yourself with the racists. Be careful of the company you keep.
evilduck··on Apple introduces M6 and M5 Ultra
Maybe https://mlx-framework.org

FWIW, Ollama, LM Studio and Lemonade (and oMLX) also wrap Apple's MLX framework.

evilduck··on Fast and Hard Code
This sounds like you don't like to dig for digging's sake and are projecting.
evilduck··on Making holograms with a pen plotter
Something tells me you didn't open the posted link.
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