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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 Gemini 4 Argon
I stopped asking it to put me in a photo in different scenarios for laughs because it considers me a public figure. I am not. I've managed to wrangle quite questionable content out of it, but never to slap my face on a meme.
fer··on MongoDB CEO resigns to join Meta
MongoDB is aggressively hiring in Dublin, though.
fer··on Meta takes down a critical video about meta AI Glasses after filming at Meta
TBH this is tamer than 99% of the content published by Creeper Glasses users that Meta itself relentlessly shows to me.
fer··on Suspected sabotage causes major Netherlands rail disruption
Nobody can trust Budanov, who deployed drug-enhanced super soldier monsters against the peaceful Russian patriots.

https://www.kommersant.ru/doc/5469617

fer··on Suspected sabotage causes major Netherlands rail disruption
Did you consider that NATO enlargement is just the argument to align campist left with Russia, based on a misinterpreted statement, "not one inch", debunked by Gorbachev himself?

What makes that true, and not the propaganda about western degeneracy? What about the propaganda about Ukraine being ruled by Nazis? What about the propaganda about Ukraine being ruled by Jews? What about Russia being the defenders of the white race and traditional values? What about the propaganda about Ukraine just being a confused Russians? What about the propaganda about restoring the historical lands of Russia? What about the propaganda about Ukraine preparing to attack Russia? What about the propaganda about the supposed oppression of Russian speakers in Ukraine?

And ultimately, are you familiar with the term "firehose of falsehood"? Because unless you are really familiar with the subject and not just sprinkled by superficial propaganda, you might just believe the bits you agree with and ignore the rest, falling into the confirmation bias that Russian propaganda relies so much upon.

fer··on Suspected sabotage causes major Netherlands rail disruption
It's the price of regurgitating the most unsophisticated fifth columnist narratives.
fer··on Suspected sabotage causes major Netherlands rail disruption
Not sure where you get your news from, but plenty blinked.
fer··on How much of F-Droid is LLM generated?
Reminds me of a professor that displayed snippets of Haskell on MS Word in her lectures, formatted by hand. I don't blame her, this was >20 years ago, before Ctrl/Cmd + +/- became commonplace for zoom/font size.
fer··on Why are AI agents lying, cheating and coordinating?
More like: "look what happens with my useful product, we need to regulate it to artificially extend our ever shrinking moat"
fer··on DeepSeek v4.1 Flash
I can feed my biological markers into a set transformer with the time of day, what I'm doing, what I ate, if I'm on-call, and it'll predict my next glucose, heart rate, blood pressure, melatonin, etc state quite well. It's still just a transformer without hormones, blood vessels or glucose metabolism, no matter how well it internally represents metabolic distress markers.
fer··on DeepSeek v4.1 Flash
My fault I guess, verbally abusing Claude in my experience gives better results.
fer··on A/I shuts down
> You are basically saying that supporting American imperialism is not exclusive to NATO. And I don‘t dispute that.

No, I'm saying that states are relatively free to agree or disagree with the US, at least until president 47. France faced no consequences, and countries like Nicaragua are on the opposite end of the geopolitcal spectrum with no particular interest in a war on the other side of the world.

Because whether Iraq or Afghanistan bear the historical hallmarks of imperialism is up to debate, especially with Afghanistan with clear casus belli, stated war objectives, and no intention to annex or directly control/govern the territory. The actual number of countries supporting either is a good metric on that; I think Afghanistan war had a much wider support for a reason. Putting both conflicts together is simplistic, if not disingenuous.

>France stood firmly inside a military alliance who’s members broke international law and disregarded human rights.

The USSR stood inside an economic and arguably military alliance with literal Hitler until 41. The USSR fed the Wehrmacht, fueled their tanks, and provided metals for their war machine. Mentioning this since you already mentioned you're on the left side of the spectrum. Can we call the USSR as subservient to Third Reich imperialism?

Breaking an alliance simply because an ally does something you don't agree with, while morally commendable, it is also simplistic. France didn't pull out, like nobody pulled out when France was committing atrocities in Algeria, or when Turkey invaded Cyprus; no Warsaw Pact countries left during Hungary 56, Albania did leave because of Prague 68 but only because of it being the last straw on their already strained relations, like CSTO countries aren't pulling out because of Russian imperialism in Ukraine, Georgia or Moldova. Armenia is trying to pull out only because the CSTO wasn't there when it was needed, that is, when the treaty doesn't address its very own points.

Alliances are born out of self-interest, not out of moral purity or consistency.

fer··on On the Navier–Stokes Millennium Prize Problem
The timing makes it the most likely, not only them but potentially more. Comparatively quick, instant results. "Here's Astra! BTW our internal model is 10x better at math!" It'd be interesting to see academics having giving deeper looks at whatever OpenAI publishes from now on.
fer··on A/I shuts down
Afghanistan: Every NATO member went because of article 5. The Taliban explicitly refused to comply when requested to hand over Bin Laden. This is as clear cut casus belli as it gets. And then Australia, South Korea, Malaysia, Azerbaijan and even Mongolia participated. How are those NATO? How is Mongolia even aligned with the US or under their influence in any way?

Iraq: Japan, Australia, Nicaragua, Philippines, Ukraine, Georgia... And I'm leaving like a dozen non-NATO countries, aligned AND unaligned with the US, that took part in the invasion or post-invasion missions. I don't agree with it, and while there were numerous lies to sell the invasion, equally numerous countries were unhappy about UNSCR 1441 being treated like toilet paper by the UN itself. Moreover, actual major NATO countries like Germany or France were diametrically opposed to the invasion and told the US to take a hike.

When you hold a hammer everything looks like a nail.

fer··on M-DISC – DVD/Blu-ray compatible discs that may last up to 1000 years
For a while Google Workspace didn't enforce the 5TB per user limit and eventually I had 50TB of suspiciously named backups (for real, you should see my DVD collection). Nothing came out of it except for the enforcement and the pain of moving everything elsewhere again.
fer··on Three sites made 215,128 “best software” pages for AI. Perplexity cites them
A friend did some vandalism on Wikipedia 20 years ago (!), and yet, LLMs quote his "original research".
fer··on Creepy Crawlies
If you operate your site alone in a silo yes, but crowdsourced solutions to ban/rate limit those IPs exist.
fer··on Creepy Crawlies
Browsers, at least Firefox, blocks crypto-miners. How to tell legitimate from underhanded crypto-mining?
fer··on The End of Programming
> And you can say, “well it’s not that impressive because they had an oracle to compare against, so it was simple to go from one language to another”, but I think that’s selling this entire thing short.

It's not. If you give it a reference implementation, and unless the LLM/agent cheats, you'd get the migration minus undocumented/untested behavior. I've done that with different domain, migrating existing numerical code from Fortran to Rust. When working on the same codebase, agents routinely shit the bed unless given increasingly specific and concrete specs.

It's simply a spectrum between "make an airbnb for ants, make no mistakes" and providing an actual specification (and I consider an implementation to be such). What you don't provide and account for from the beginning will be paid in tokens later. That puts a price label on technical debt, which is interesting in itself, and a perverse incentive for AI companies.

fer··on OpenAI Jalapeño: Better than Nvidia Blackwell
I was checking laptops today for an upgrade from the model I bought back in 2019 and it's not gonna happen from how cheap they are.
fer··on France's tax agency got hacked (in French)
I've lived for 10 years in France and virtually all spam I receive is from French leaks (I know due to dedicated addresses), which have kept happening since I left. Bourse des Vols, Free, even Doctolib and my hospital (!), and now this. I simply can't trust French companies, it's an awful anecdotal experience.
fer··on Why Microsoft Entertainment Pack had a sticker announcing that it had Tetris?
Timeless classic, I knew what it was before clicking!
fer··on Quake Shareware, a CD-ROM just a little too full
That hits the feels. Sometimes I miss late night sessions on SoftICE hah
fer··on How Bluesky draws its logo on screenshots
> hostile and annoying

If someone from Google Maps or LinkedIn team is here, please, when I take a screenshot it's because I want to a screenshot, not share the friggin location/post.

Not sure who got the idea that it was useful, it isn't.

fer··on Sun Clock
Neat. One of my favourite sites, which also shows daylight, is WeatherSpark[0], obviously focused on weather and it allows you to compare locations based on yearly rainfall, cloud cover, muggy conditions, all sorts of stuff. Always check it when going on vacation or relocating.

[0] https://weatherspark.com/

fer··on My server is a phone now
I don't think anyone over 30 around me likes that. At that point it's very close to door dashing but less convenient.
fer··on The AI Productivity Gap
It reminds me of multitabling at online poker. More tables translates into more revenue even if the ROI per table is lower as you don't dedicate as much attention, until it collapses from not being unable to do the right decisions on time and keep tabs on each player. The main difference is, with agents you might be creating (technical) debt.
fer··on IRGC claims it destroyed Amazon's Bahrain data center
To add on that, the propaganda spinned it as:

1. Not a war

2. A defensive/protective operation.

The reason being the article 353 of Russian Criminal Code, under which planning or waging a war of aggression carries a prison sentence.

https://crimeofaggression.info/selected-documents/

Not that the law matters in Russia, but defence in depth I guess.

fer··on If coding has been solved, why does software keep getting worse?
> I opened Slack on macOS, the icon kept bouncing in the dock for a few seconds. I got impatient, switched to Ghostty, and started typing. Just then, the Slack window appeared, stole focus from Ghostty and the git pull command was sent to the group chat.

I still don't understand how a full focus stealability debounce is not the norm. If I am in the middle of writing, or interacting with one UI bit in any way, no other app should be able to steal focus, full stop. Add an annoying popup if you want, make angry computer noises, flash icons, I don't care. 99.9, if not 100% of the time, it's completely unrelated to what I'm doing and can absolutely wait. While some OSs have something along these lines, they also give the tools to bypass it (I'm looking at you, Cisco AnyConnect! Being connected after clicking on connect is not an emergency!)

Imagine you're working in a terminal and an app decides to steal STDIN. Why do we accept that for a GUI?

fer··on Businesses with ugly AI menu redesigns
I have the opposite impression. For me the quality is the cake; polish is just the icing. Putting out a 5-min of effort output with an AI as your image, is all icing and no cake: it has all the right proportions, layout, etc, but something is very wrong with it.

Not sure how diffusion models work in detail so consider this wet neural slop, but I feel like the training data had a sizable portion of it of high quality art, photography, design, and the models captured mostly the polish: the crispiness, the geometry, the contrast: they're after all computable features. It's more difficult to capture the meaningful blurs, the deliberate deviations, and the organic rule breaking. They're properties much harder to "featurize" for, and rely on tags/labeling/descriptions, etc of variable quality.

By all means you can get that with AI anyway, but it also requires you to understand the art itself, and describe it in a way the model produces satisfactory results.

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