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firebones

1,328 karma · joined March 18, 2010

firebones@firebones.com
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firebones··on Ask HN: Why is every company encorporating AI everywhere?
There's a lot to your point. Tech companies with barely functioning enterprise software products (or worse, companies that can acquire other companies and their enterprise products) can burn the bridge to the past by de-investing in legacy maintenance (laying off staff and expertise, cutting support), and forcing the existing user base to accept AI-fueled reboots. Buyers are sent back to market and the choice is between Behemoth Who's All in on AI's Latest VaporWareAI or Legacy Software that Works But Is a Sitting Duck.

It's an industry-wide excuse/opportunity to force what was a stagnant commodity enterprise software market back into a new buying cycle with enough face-saving modernization chrome that buyers can make spending justifications.

At best, this will be a de-evolutionary enshittification local minima era followed by a slow rebuild. More likely, the enshittification era will collapse under its own hyperinflated weight when the logrolling bubble pops, and there will be a consolidation of incremental gains, with a few new benefits being added to what would otherwise look on a long term scale as typical linear innovation if it were not for the hype bubble.

firebones··on What AI developers could learn from Charles Bukowski?
My reaction to the title was "AI is learning enough from misogynistic assholes in its crawled data already, it doesn't need Bukowski's help."
firebones··on Ask HN: Why aren't companies hoarding AI talent?
Assume for a moment that the code of cost is zero, and the barrier to entry for coding is gone. Furthermore, let's say you don't want to do anything innovative, you just want to clone, so a huge part of your product management burden goes away.

The playing field is now completely level with any and all comers who want to attack Adobe. You now not only have one huge competitor, but the potential for hundreds of other competitors.

How are you going to convince someone that your execution is the one that's going to displace Adobe and steal market share? Why would I invest in your variant rather than one of your competitors?

The logical conclusion of this is that even if Adobe released its source and the theoretical price drops to zero, you're finding yourself at best in the same situation as Linux distro companies in 1999.

Assuming perfect LLM code generation (a huge assumption that is nowhere close to reality), a company built on this is going to replay the same open source dynamics, with additional steps/expense.

firebones··on Since the '60s, Ford has stored cars underground in a Kansas City cave
First thing to note is that while the pictures are from the 1960s, the article merely says that Ford uses (and has used, for years) these caves to store cars in transit.

The Kansas City Ford plant manufactures more trucks/vans in a day than it can ship to their destinations, and Ford uses almost any surface lot it can rent (including a nearby amusement park's lot in the offseason) to hold cars until they can be transferred by rail or truck--it's very demand-driven. It's completely natural they'd use these caves as well based on their proximity to the rail and interstate transport near the river.

I don't see in the article anything that implies there's a cache of 1960s cars down there gathering limestone dust. That space would quickly be reclaimed for temporary storage of Transit vans awaiting their buyers.

firebones··on Since the '60s, Ford has stored cars underground in a Kansas City cave
There's a Ford manufacturing plant 3-5 miles from many of Kansas City's limestone caves along the Missouri river. And as the comment-linked video down below shows, these warehouses are vast and even used for commercial businesses. You can play paintball in a cave at Subtropolis.

Not too far away (3-4 hours), the salt mines in Hutchinson, KS store a lot of Hollywood memorabilia.

One big plot point of "The Day After" back in the 1980s was that people sought shelter in the underground caves around Kansas City.

firebones··on The whale fact chapters in Moby-Dick are among the most memorable
Here's my suggestion.

Find a good audiobook version at your local library through Libby or Hoopla. The one I listened to was about 24 hours in length, but shorter at 1.25x.

After every chapter or so, check out the annotated version here and read/skim what you just listened to: http://www.powermobydick.com/

I found it helpful to listen to the language and flow first, then seek out the explanations in the annotations of the old language or the nautical terms.

This made it far more approachable with respect to the jargon. Helped even this native English speaker!

firebones··on Could we stop Yellowstone from erupting with a geothermal power plant?
Strong "I drink your milkshake!" vibes from these proposals.

Both of these proposals require political stability we're unlikely to see over 600 or 50,000 years. You have to be thinking some kind of self-sustaining and monumental Pyramids-type project.

firebones··on Lumber prices down 11% YoY
Same size is important. There's likely also 12-15% shrinkflation that increases this significantly.
firebones··on Lumber prices down 11% YoY
>> $2.50/box today relative to $2.00/box in 2019 represents +25% inflation...so nowhere near purported pre-COVID levels.

Annualized, that is 5.7% inflation. (1.25 increase ^ 0.25 for 4 years elapsed). So not pre-covid levels, but not nominal 25% annual inflation. Still a little over 2x desired annual growth rate.

firebones··on Ask HN: What is the purpose of the “press any key” screen in video games?
Have you all read any old Apple II source? One reason very early on was to seed the PRNG (rnd() function) with variable input.

https://www.applefritter.com/content/random-number-generatio...

Maybe it carried over to modernity in the same way the apocryphal pot roast tale did: https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/thinking-makes-it-so...

firebones··on Ask HN: Anyone else feel like their whole career will just be tech debt?
It is certainly worsened by the period of zero interest rates, which fueled a massive viral outbreak of promotion-driven development cultures among most of the largest tech employers. Recent mass layoffs in tech really aren't an antibody--the marauding bands simply reconstitute and find other hosts to infect and value to destroy. It will take a decade for that boom to unwind with a lot of carnage along the way. /remindme 10 years
firebones··on Have you noticed how, during Apple presentation, all watches always show 10:10?
10:10 wasn't always dominant. Look at some print ads for watches from the 1920s and 1930s. 8:18 was used just as frequently if not more so. It's the "other" time where the hands are balanced and equidistant from the 12 and 6. I grew up (pre-web) having heard (probably from some trivia book) the false explanation that 8:18PM was the time of Lincoln's death.

https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/the-ten-ten-tenet/

firebones··on Why do studios use Roman numerals in the copyright notice in the end credits?
I suspect it's a little of column A and a little of column B. I asked my pop this question in the early 1970s and his answer was the first part of the SO answer--so that it wasn't dated as old. This predated the internet, predated video and cable TV, and seemed conventional wisdom at the time. I'm inclined to believe that the reason it was used after all those other technical advancements was simply tradition.

See also car model years beginning in September as another shelf-life improvement technique.

firebones··on Ask HN: Best Uses for Old iPads?
Dedicated https://www.dartconnect.com/ scorepad.
firebones··on Southwest cancels 5,400 flights in less than 48 hours
Very interested if it's my area suburb, as an occasional Enterprise customer.
firebones··on Ask HN: Books about full text search?
I am biased, but building the Intro to Information Retrieval chapters in your favorite language, bit by bit, is really good to get the feel of the tradeoffs for index capabilities.
firebones··on Twitter to start layoffs -internal email
It's typical for unvested RSUs to accelerate and vest on change in control. Based on the 10k, there were about $2.2B worth of unvested RSUs at the start of 2022. Musk's $44 billion likely covered some or all of that (or whatever % vested and/or wasn't already forfeited) so it's unlikely there is any real savings. Unless some of those RSUs converted to Private MuskBucks, then he may be saving something.
firebones··on Ask HN: What are some of the best books you have read in 2022?
Silence by Endo is amazing.
firebones··on Ask HN: What software do you miss that no longer runs on modern hardware?
The soundtrack to Railroad Tycoon II was amazing. I miss that game most. Second place might be Falcon 3.0 for Mac and 4.0 for PC. Third place Crystal Quest for the old Macs.
firebones··on The Nettle Magic Project: Scanner for decks of cards with bar codes on edges
So in that one, with the hand motions and the emphasis on "thread" and "well lit" and the motion across (where the Christmas lights connected the two lamps) they were implying that a thread was hanging from the Christmas lights. But since he said he "tried that" and he had to come up with something else, I assume it's some sort of front facing edifice that allowed him to circle the whole thing with a pencil (at about 85% depth) to sell it. Maybe he technically fooled them since the Christmas lights had nothing to do with it and it was something between the two lamp arms themselves.
firebones··on The Godfather almost never happened
Naw, King's novella "Rita Hayworth and Shawshank Redemption" was totally solid in its own right before the movie. Same with "The Body" and its earlier subsequent "Stand By Me". Both of those from "Different Seasons".
firebones··on Ask HN: What Happened to Pinboard?
What you are all witnessing is that the proverbial bus hit. (Was there a proverb about busses?)

This is just a drill. Only a drill. Use your backups.

firebones··on The computer built to last 50 years (2021)
My HP-11C is going on 36 years old, flawless, and is reportedly Turing complete [1]. Echoing the @dbtc comment that there are likely many special purpose computers that are closing in on this.

[1] https://www.hpmuseum.org/cgi-sys/cgiwrap/hpmuseum/archv020.c...

(If this is inaccurate about the 11c, and I'd love to hear why, then in a few years I'll see how my MacSE is doing. Just doing a casual assessment due to...late night.)

firebones··on Six Architects on their Dream Desks
I once toured an iconic Frank Lloyd Wright home and a lot of what I learned there was about the impracticality around the maintenance of the home, and the challenge of subsequent restoration efforts. Was not surprised to see that architects' ideal desks were ergonomic disasters.
firebones··on Arkham Quixote (2020)
For reference: https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2021/03/hacker-reduces-gta-on...
firebones··on Arkham Quixote (2020)
From my experience, performance issues like this would only arise during integration, and if integration is late, there's no time to optimize. By the time all the requisite pieces came together to make a playable game, there was no time to optimize, since any devs who might be able to fix this were pulled into other stability issues uncovered in integration.
firebones··on Six dead after tornadoes destroy Amazon warehouse near St Louis
Not a warehouse, but there are data centers in the tornado belt where the whole building is designed and built that way.

https://www.computerworld.com/article/2497174/tornadoes-and-...

firebones··on 100 years of whatever this will be
>> Can you describe an environment where this wouldn't occur?

One in which any amount of self-awareness of the negative effects of gluttony (see: Willy Wonka) temper the urge to accumulate and consume more resources above a certain point.

There is only so much French silk pie I can consume after Thanksgiving.

firebones··on I wrote a children's book / illustrated guide to Apache Kafka
caffeine gets it...
firebones··on Pitch doctoring should be the biggest scandal in sports
Nearly every ball touched by a bat is tossed out of the game--foul balls, balls in the dirt, balls that get tossed back by the pitcher. Games typically use between 84 and 120 balls. It would be trivial to detect if the ump did a check on every ball in play or after random outs. It's not like the umps can't see the same action the batter sees.
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