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fer

3,381 karma · joined September 2, 2013

Beware: these are just my Internet opinions

fer at fer dot ex why zee

https://www.fer.xyz

meet.hn/city/53.3493795,-6.2605593/Dublin

Socials: - github.com/fejiso

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fer··on Humanity isn't ready for the coming intelligence explosion
>the result could be an intelligence explosion of a kind for which there is no precedent and no map.

Or it will simply reach the end of the softmax faster.

fer··on Ask HN: What are you working on? (June 2026)
For a while a "cv2vec" lingered in my mind, but abandoned it due to the sheer volume of PII I'd need.

How do you deal with CVs like mine that refuse to list every <fancy keyword> I'm familiar with because it's pointless clutter? In that sense, and IME, the companies that only hire perfect fits are, more often than not, toxic.

fer··on GLM 5.2 Is Out
If you have systemd-resolved, it tries to validate DNSSEC by default and replies with SERVFAIL if it fails. Same happens here, I go through some privacy focused DNS servers and they sometimes remove the signature.

$ resolvectl query z.ai

z.ai: resolve call failed: DNSSEC validation failed: no-signature

fer··on A low-carbon computing platform from your retired phones
I have Nexus 5, Xiaomi A1, Redmi Note 7, Samsung S7, and a Kindle Fire HDX, all running either LineageOS (Kindle) or PostmarketOS (the rest). PmOS ones run some not very demanding containers (scrapers) on k3s.
fer··on Anthropic requires 30 day data retention for Fable and Mythos
The alternative of not hyping the IPO enough
fer··on Policy on the AI Exponential
Or simply we use AI and see on the ground what it can and can't do. I can generally trust an agent for solved problems, but the more something deviates from established industry standards (i.e. what was relentlessly scraped) I have an increasingly harder time not having constant oversight of what it's doing, no matter the specs I put on the md.

Personally I feel most of the improvement in the last year comes from tooling/integration (MCPs, realtime documentation access, treesitter support, orchestration) than from the models themselves, in the last year. And still frontier models would routinely come up with bs until you tell them to actually use those tools.

fer··on xAI is looking more like a datacentre REIT than a frontier lab
It has already become economic. While not exactly the same, the NVIDIA 2080 11GB cards are notorious for being upcycled with extra RAM: https://www.reddit.com/r/nvidia/comments/146us12/nvidia_gefo...
fer··on GrapheneOS user reported to authorities for using GrapheneOS
>The Palestine Action ban was overturned by the courts.

Which is exactly what I said, courts generally do the right thing. The people were still arrested, and the dissent was still crushed, though. Israel is a strategic partner so all protests are equal, but some are more equal than others.

>they're not instances of what the far right would call two-tier policing (i.e. the bogus claim that the police treat white people more harshly than other ethnic groups)

While far-right popularized the term, the awareness is now, at least among the people I know, full-spectrum. The tiers are independent according to the issue at hand and the priorities of the powers and lobbies involved. Simply some camps were unaware until it was their turn, and become confused when they overlap.

>The more nuanced reality is that the police are extremely imperfect and treat all sorts of different groups of people unfairly in all sorts of different ways. That's indeed a problem, but it's not a political conspiracy.

Personally, I think that statement has a pass in many places, but not in the UK. The "policy projection of values" (to give it some name), with the growth of identity politics mixed in to make it worse, attempted to make everyone feel equally protected, but instead succeeded in convincing almost every demographic in the UK that the system is rigged against them.

We are not racist -> certain crimes by given little publicity or ignored depending on the background of who committed them. Two tier.

Israel is a strategic partner -> pro-palestinian/anti-zionist groups labeled as terrorists. Two tier.

Hate has no place here -> police dispatched for nasty online comments, but dragging their feet for actual physical crime. The fact that "Non-Crime Hate Incidents" is an actual term is just baffling. Two tier.

Net Zero -> right wingers complain about blockades of ecologists going unpunished. Two tier. Police, Crime, Sentencing and Courts Act 2022 and the Public Order Act 2023 passed, ecologist arrested (and sentenced!) for protesting against not doing enough for Net Zero. Pendulum swing, still two tier.

Directing mind and will -> individuals are fully accountable by their actions, for corporations one need(ed) to prove "directing mind and will" of the executives. Two tier. See the British Post Office Horizon scandal for extra depression, or how individuals are prosecuted for dumping, yet Thames Water can dump inordinate amounts of sewage but that's just "regulatory failure". While recent acts (Crime and Policing, Failure to Prevent Fraud) are in the right direction, criminal penalties for corporations remain financial, and swallowed into operating costs. Still solid two tier.

Russia is a criminal state -> Londongrad unbothered, alive, moisturized, flourishing. Two tier.

Protect the NHS -> partygate for some, fines for others. Two tier. Don't get me into the defunding of it.

Peace above everything -> the state actors that committed crimes (often acts of terrorism) with impunity in Ireland during The Troubles, were later prosecuted, while IRA members were secretly given out-of-jail cards. Just compare John Downey vs Dennis Hutchings. Since the topic has cooled down and the Hutchings' case fueled the fire, they passed the Legacy and Reconciliation Act to, 25 years later (!) finally providing immunity to British criminals. This is particularly damning because those following orders had been prosecuted, but no single commander, general, intelligence officer, minister actually giving or overseeing those orders had been, at any point. Two tier.

The UK is in a permanent state of "fake it till you make it" of the idea of the perfect state, and in doing so it routinely over/undershoots the mark, in an endless Samsara of overcorrections, because it is all still fake. The state sets the target, but it does nothing to get there. Ultimately the consistent application of the law is second to state, corporate and geopolitical interests, meaning the two tiers will be there no matter how correct the laws are.

fer··on GrapheneOS user reported to authorities for using GrapheneOS
I wouldn't call it two-tier justice, because generally the courts do the right thing, but there's a shamefully obvious two-tier policing.

From the Jay Report [0] showing crimes swept under the rug according to ethnic/socioeconomic background of perp and victim, to arresting people for opposing genocide (sorry: terrorism!) [1] to the recent case of Henry Nowak [2], it's really hard not to see a two-tier policing in the UK. And this very submission; caring about privacy is seen grounds for being reported and potentially investigated, by a private company! Which suggests it's something already internalized, too, for people who resist big corp surveillance.

Back in the 90s and before, the two-tier heavily punished the minorities, and in an overshooting overcorrection, now it's the other way around. Nowak getting handcuffed by cops going "I don't think you have [been stabbed] mate!" says it all. Unless it's regarding opposing/supporting Israel, then the two-tier flips and people with basic human decency and actual antisemites are pigeonholed together, nevermind their background.

[0] https://www.rotherham.gov.uk/downloads/file/279/independent-...

[1] https://newint.org/action/2025/i-oppose-genocide-ok

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Murder_of_Henry_Nowak

fer··on Programmers will document for Claude, but not for each other
It mustn't always nor never. It should follow a best judgement based on the .md, toml or whatever you use; in the end it's up to the LLM to decide which registered tools/mcps are used, and if the LLM is confident about some bs it will use that confidence instead of the tool.

When people complain about it, it's more often a gap between different knowledge domains and hard to measure characteristics of the environment, than it is an actual "you're using it wrong".

fer··on Programmers will document for Claude, but not for each other
If you tell it to. Otherwise you might get the classic "You're absolutely right – I made that up. Let me look at the documentation"
fer··on Gmail thinks I'm stupid, so I left
I'm on the other end, Gmail sends to spam all sorts of legit things. Including mails from the "Google Assistant Privacy Litigation Settlement", conveniently enough.
fer··on Larry Ellison: "Citizens will be on their best behavior because we’re recording"
>That quote conflates Ellison and Oracle and I don't think that's correct.

Agreed, he's only 41% of Oracle.

fer··on Creatine raises brain energy levels and slows cognitive decline: study
As someone who's microdosed (though mostly normal-dosed and occasionally megadosed) in the distant past, the whole microdosing fad was equal parts entertaining and baffling. Anecdotal, but from all people I know that has taken psychedelics, only one doesn't find it to be a waste.
fer··on Creatine raises brain energy levels and slows cognitive decline: study
.001 for creatine levels isn't surprising; that's a lot of creatine. I'd explain the cognitive tests with the practice effect, because it is unlikely that creatine had such a massive effect and we only discover it now.
fer··on AMD pulls a bait-and-switch on Linux users with Vivado licensing changes
I'm even surprised they have so much of the console market
fer··on AMD pulls a bait-and-switch on Linux users with Vivado licensing changes
Yes, working with recent distros. At some point I spun up a vm because there was no way to make it work after an upgrade.
fer··on Claude Code as a Daily Driver: Claude.md, Skills, Subagents, Plugins, and MCPs
nix develop ensures your dev env is the same as your build/test/prod env. At least with Python everything is a flurry of requirements.txt, Python versions, poetry, pyproject.toml, perhaps automated with direnvs, a hefty Dockerfile/docker-compose, and perhaps conda (ugh) along the way; lots of moving parts.

I have a project that's mostly Rust sprinkled with C++ libs and Python helpers and it's easier to manage than the average virtualenv. Everything builds with nix build, everything runs with nix run, profiler/debugger works, IDE detects everything on any of my computers, builds and links with CUDA on x86, aarch64, NixOS, MacOS, Ubuntu or Amazon Linux. nix build can even build a Docker image for the odd need of Docker, and I haven't tried but I'm convinced that if I import the flake on my nix-config it will be built into the SD card for my Raspberry Pi just fine.

It's even replaced Ansible for me, colmena all the way.

fer··on Spain blocks prediction markets Polymarket, Kalshi over lack of gambling licence
But killing someone is a crime, and fraud is a crime, the insurance in itself isn't.
fer··on Spain blocks prediction markets Polymarket, Kalshi over lack of gambling licence
When they're not thin they're popular (sports, awards), they favor insiders and/or various levels of manipulation (throwing dildos at a match), or both (military strikes, stock market, etc). They're full of natural or artificial drama, and people love to throw money at that.

I have a bot betting on a handful of what I consider (so far) markets that are impossible to cheat (bar UMA shenanigans): nobody has any control over the outcomes, previous knowledge is very limited. It makes some money, but looking at the depth, the volume, and my metrics, even being the fastest 100% of the time without worrying about bankroll, one of them would gimme roughly $1-2k a week.

fer··on Search engines alternatives now that Google isn't Google anymore
My account is older than yours by a decade and I also like the AI overview more often than not, or rather, I instinctively know when to skip it depending on my query.
fer··on Amazon Web Services – Four Years and Out
He doesn't think that was the cause, and I don't think it was either. Much spicier material has been posted before. Also the meme is still up fwiw.
fer··on Amazon Web Services – Four Years and Out
#actual-aws-memes mentioned!

I also joined in 2022, and it aligns so much with my experience. Good manager that moves on, then a gradual erosion of "insist in the highest standards" towards a dreaded "good enough", GenAI only accelerated it IMO.

fer··on Why Japanese companies do so many different things
Right, the survival bit made me remember this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ichimonjiya_Wasuke
fer··on I turned a $80 RK3562 Android tablet into a Debian Linux workstation
I have a similar story, and while I bounced back and forth with Gemini/ChatGPT, they were not that useful, at least at the time, because they kept wanting to do things that 100% wouldn't work in this device (due to having the same chip as other devices, but also its own peculiarities).

https://www.fer.xyz/2025/03/xpi-s905x3

fer··on Microscale Thermite Reaction
It wouldn't be weird for someone in the south of France to have a rusty pétanque ball.
fer··on Twin brothers wipe 96 government databases minutes after being fired
The anomaly there is that France Télécom was a public company at the time of the hiring, and through privatisation public servant benefits were upheld for existing employees, which blocked most unpythonesque solutions.

If she had been hired after, it would have taken time but she would have been found unfit for work (she had epilepsy and hemiplegia), her contract terminated, and she would have most likely received a handicap pension instead.

fer··on All phones sold in the EU to have replaceable batteries from 2027
But replacing a replaceable battery is trivialer and cheaperer.

I've replaced more batteries (and screens) than I can count, and it's increasingly difficult and complicated. 5 years ago or so I'd agree with you, but now there's no phone I can easily open without heat gun, controlling the air so no spec of dust land on the lenses (and a blower to remove in case it happens), and almost always I need adhesive (B7000) to patch or replace the original one to keep similar level of weather proofing. It's easy if you pay 100 bucks someone else to do it, sure.

Back in the days of my HTC Desire I could carry an extra battery, or two, in the pocket, without issue. Nowadays I'm married to a power bank that needs to be plugged for the duration.

fer··on Live Nation illegally monopolized ticketing market, jury finds
Live Nation has 10x the revenue of those two, combined.
fer··on Introduction to Obsidian
Logseq, it's geared to daily notes and visualizing everything in a graph, and support KaTeX. It also supports org-mode. If it fits your workflow I'd recommend it. Personally I feel like Obsidian does too many things and none too well.
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