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flowerthoughts

892 karma · joined February 16, 2025

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flowerthoughts··on FCC updates covered list to include foreign-made consumer routers
The escalation path is probably: have some relationship to an entity that doesn't care about you -> make sure that entity becomes your enemy -> the enemy now has an incentive to see you as an enemy -> you must now be afraid of your new enemy.
flowerthoughts··on Migrating to the EU
Could you summarize the easy and hard aspects? Have you had any unexpected benefits or downsides?
flowerthoughts··on Department of State advises Americans worldwide to exercise increased caution
On the flip side, I _think_ there's actually less and less about Epstein visible, so I think WH is winning that war. Or at least successfully postponing battles.
flowerthoughts··on Anthropic takes legal action against OpenCode
Yes.

> Unless previously approved, Anthropic does not allow third party developers to offer claude.ai login or rate limits for their products

So you can't offer a product based on the subscription. I replied to a comment proposing to use the CLI with --prompt:

> you can also use Claude Code programmatically with the `prompt` parameter in the cli.

And I just informed that Agent SDK is a much nicer way to do that. For internal use or whatever the ToS allows.

flowerthoughts··on Anthropic takes legal action against OpenCode
Or the Python or Typescript Agent SDK libraries: https://platform.claude.com/docs/en/agent-sdk/overview
flowerthoughts··on Trashing American Allies Turns Out to Be Bad for National Security
> I wonder what would happen if we “finished off” what’s left of the Iranian Terror State, and let the Countries that use it, we don’t, be responsible for the so called “Strait?” That would get some of our non-responsive “Allies” in gear, and fast!!! President DJT

That does not sound like someone who has this under control, which makes me wonder if his conclusion is valid. Does he really know the allies well enough to say how they will react?

flowerthoughts··on SpiceCrypt: A Python library for decrypting LTspice encrypted model files
It's one of the most widely used electronic circuit simulator. It's basically a graphical interface to wire up differential equations, together with physical models of components (mostly semiconductors.)

There are other SPICE implementations, but Linear Technologies provides this program for free, and lots of manufacturers provide LTspice models for their components (of varying quality.)

flowerthoughts··on Hazardous substances found in all headphones tested by ToxFREE project
Appendix 1 extracted with Claude: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/139mTTtNsdanE9SEpmYaB...

To sort, click the Table 1 icon and select Create filter view.

flowerthoughts··on Airbus is preparing two uncrewed combat aircraft
Wouldn't uncrewed aircraft, and (hypersonic) missiles merge technologies and become the same at some point? Why are we engineering the two separately? Are missiles by definition exploding themselves rather than releasing payloads?

(I'm pretty sure Musk could make them reusable. /s)

flowerthoughts··on Meta Platforms: Lobbying, dark money, and the App Store Accountability Act
When I moved from Sweden to Ireland and realized the Swedish central address registry makes moving fantastically easy, I started dreaming of a central registry where consumers and producers could meet. I can give my supplier access to exactly the information they need, and nothing else. I can revoke access when I feel like it. Like OAuth2 for personal data. They can subscribe to updates. It could be a federated protocol.

Not saying I think it's a good idea to provide the year of birth to all sites, but (session ID, year of birth) is the only information they would need. The problem is proving who's behind the keyboard at the time of asking, which would require challenge-response, and is why I think this should be an online platform, not a hardware PKI gadget with keys inevitably tied to individuals.

flowerthoughts··on How much of HN is AI?
I enjoy most of the "AI" posts on HN nowadays. I was really fed up with the MCP/Anthropic PR machine of a year ago, after just a month of that. There's much more actual content today, though I guess we also see less of stable diffusion in favor of transformer LLMs.
flowerthoughts··on RISC-V Is Sloooow
Old compilers tended to make it a compile-time switch which backends were included, probably because backends were "huge", so they were left out. (The insn lookup table in GCC took ages to generate and compile.) And of course all development environments running on Windows assumed x86 was the only architecture.

With LLVM existing, cross-compiling is not a problem anymore, but it means you can't run tests without an emulator. So it might just be easier to do it all on the target machine.

flowerthoughts··on Unlocking Python's Cores:Energy Implications of Removing the GIL
Sections 5.4 and 5.5 are the interesting ones.

5.4: Energy consumption going down because of parallelism over multiple cores seems odd. What were those cores doing before? Better utilization causing some spinlocks to be used less or something?

5.5: Fine-grained lock contention significantly hurts energy consumption.

flowerthoughts··on Claude built a system in 3 rounds, latent bugs from round 1 exploded in round 3
I've used the analogy of a circular saw before ("it's not really sawing, because you can't feel the wood...")

It's easy to just slab on a Skil saw, cut through the beam and it'll be somewhat straight. But when every manual stroke counts, there's enough time on a human time scale to correct every little mistake. It's definitely possible to become skilled at using the circular saw, but it takes effort that it feels like you don't need at first.

This is similar. LLMs are so powerful for writing code that it's easy to become complacent and forget your role as the engineer using the tool: guaranteeing correctness, security, safety and performance of the end result. When you're not invested in every if-statement, forgetting to check edge cases is really easy to do. And as much as I like Claude writing test cases for me, I also have to ensure the coverage is decent, that the implicit assumptions made about external library code is correct, etc. It takes a lot of effort to do it right. I don't know why Mycelium thinks they invented interfaces for module boundaries, but I'm pretty sure they are still as suceptible to that "0" not behaving as you'd expect, or the empty string being interpreted as "missing." Or the CSG algorithm working, except if your hole edges are incident with some boundary edges.

Edit: spelling

flowerthoughts··on Ask HN: How are you all staying sane?
I saw a similar issue on r/PrivatEkonomi (Swedish.) Two doomerism post with subject somewhat adapted to the forum at hand. The two users were young accounts with private comment history.

Someone is definitely on a propaganda tour trying to seed negative sentiment.

flowerthoughts··on PCB Tracer
That's odd. File Sytem API seems mostly available in Firefox since 111.

https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/File_System...

flowerthoughts··on New accounts on HN more likely to use em-dashes
> The idea is, since data has a ~1/20 chance of having a p < 0.05

Are you saying p is uniformly distributed over any data set? That doesn't jive with my limited understanding of entropy. What's this based on?

flowerthoughts··on AI Added 'Basically Zero' to US Economic Growth Last Year, Goldman Sachs Says
> the problem is that people from OpenAI/Antrhopic are saying things like superintelligence in 3 years

An even bigger problem is that people listen to them even after they say rationally implausible things. When even Yann LeCunn is putting his arms up and saying "this approach won't work," it's pretty bad.

flowerthoughts··on ASML unveils EUV light source advance that could yield 50% more chips by 2030
> We are going to spray expensive stuff in an extremely fine and precise line. Then we're going to shoot a laser at each droplet.

< Why?!

> To make a better laser.

< Yes, of course you are.

> 100,000 times per second.

< [AFK, buying shares.]

flowerthoughts··on Americans are destroying Flock surveillance cameras
Not to mention the ones that have peaks in invisible parts of the spectrum.
flowerthoughts··on Hetzner Prices increase 30-40%
I really love that their notification email includes applicable price change for my specific servers.

The worst counter example of this was Mercedes sending me an email saying "the terms and conditions have been updated, please read them at this link". It linked to the 52 page document I was supposed to read through in its entirety and manually diff against previous! Good thing they started adding a change log in the emails after some customer push back.

flowerthoughts··on People Loved the Dot-Com Boom. The A.I. Boom, Not So Much
I joined CS education in 2000. There were jobs everywhere. Classmates were leaving after a few months, or working part-time. And this was in Sweden. It was not only creating jobs, but reinventing the IT field, creating lots more opportunities.

Today, the message is that (Dear leaders,) your workers can be replaced by machines. Not that you together can do more with this new tool, but that you can slim down your operation. Maybe I'm just older, but the optimism I saw then is now divided into opportunity (AI consultants) and skepticism (workers.)

This is a narrative the AI industry created, because they want to tap into the huge salary money pool. They tell a story of anti-innovation cost-cutting rather than "do more with these tools."

flowerthoughts··on I want to wash my car. The car wash is 50 meters away. Should I walk or drive?
Just tried Opus 4.6. I think they've patched this particular one, but changing it to

> I want to repair my car. The workshop is 50 meters away. Should I walk or drive?

> Recognized straightforward practical dilemma Simple practical question.

> Walk. It's 50 meters — faster on foot than starting the car, and you'll need to leave the car at the workshop anyway.

Really suggests it assumes the car is already there. (I wanted to avoid the word "car" as part of "car wash" to see if this was a straight attention confusion, but it seems more ingrained than that.)

A follow-up question hints that it doesn't really care about a 50m location ambiguity:

> where is my car now?

> Acknowledged insufficient information to locate vehicle

> I don't have any way to know where your car is physically located — I only know what you've told me in our conversation. Based on what you shared, it sounds like it's at or near your home (since the workshop is 50 meters away and you're deciding how to get there).

> Were you asking something else, or is there something specific about your car's location I can help with?

flowerthoughts··on I started programming when I was 7. I'm 50 now and the thing I loved has changed
Well, the gardener isn't going to cut down your roses to the ground as they are about to go into bloom because s/he mistook it for the weed they were just working on.
flowerthoughts··on xAI joins SpaceX
I don't know, but it could be long term vs short term capital injection.
flowerthoughts··on xAI joins SpaceX
> And not having to buy land and water to power/cool it.

It's interesting that you bring that up as a benfit. If waterless cooling (i.e. closed cooling system) works in space, wouldn't it work even better on Earth?

flowerthoughts··on Claude Code's renderer is more complex than a game engine
Yeah, and their customers have repeatedly asked them to stop doing that. For instance

https://github.com/anthropics/claude-code/issues/2327

https://github.com/anthropics/claude-code/issues/2479

https://github.com/anthropics/claude-code/issues/4851

https://github.com/anthropics/claude-code/issues/3105

Latest news is that they've doubled down on it instead.

flowerthoughts··on EU must become a 'genuine federation' to avoid deindustrialisation and decline
Just as the US is proving that giving power to federations will make states powerless, Draghi finds it the perfect time to suggest a federation.

We all knew this would eventually be the proposed path. The EU politicians and staffers obviously have a vested interest in saying yes. It means the EU will stop having to fight for ratification. It also means centralized planning and less fine-grained adjustments for local needs. As always.

This is not more power to the people or "we're stronger together." This is a simple attempt at an opportunistic power grab. Please don't let it happen here too.

flowerthoughts··on US trade deficit widens by the most in nearly 34 years in November
> Markets are not happy right now either

We are in a large futures expiration week. There's always extra volatility around there.

https://www.investing.com/futures-expiration-calendar/

flowerthoughts··on Ask HN: What's the Point Anymore?
I remember back in the day, the days of chisel and hammer. I could feel the stone, and the impact of the hammer vibrating into my hand. It was pleasant, and I could feel that every hit really meant something to shape the future of the stone, and thereby the building. Customers and contractors alike told me how great it was to see me work that stone. So I kept swinging that hammer.

Then I was told about some electrical chisel that was supposed to make my life better. Sure, I made more money, but the work was gone. It just shakes; it doesn't vibrate. I get numb, not proud. I have to take breaks, because my hands can't handle it. It's awful. What's the point, I asked?

But then I started talking to my colleagues during those breaks. I even discovered I had a relative in common with one. While chipping away at stone, no one ever wanted to stand close to me, and I had spent all this time proudly creating stone chips all day long! I still chip away at stone sometimes, but only when there's no one else around to talk to at breaktime.

---

You are not going to be able to stop change. The world never stood still, it's just that changes happen step-wise, and it's unlikely any one step affects _you_ profoundly. This time, the step affects you (and me.) You are standing in front of a steamroller and shouting "stop!"

We'll find a new way to be humans. It won't look like the Instagram times. It won't look like the Myspace times. It won't look like the Rolodex times. It'll be new. What can you do with it that makes you happy?

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