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foobarian

9,535 karma · joined April 11, 2012

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foobarian··on IPv6 just turned 30 and still hasn't taken over the world
Only 30? It feels like it's been ages!
foobarian··on BYD Sells 4.6M Vehicles in 2025, Meets Revised Sales Goal
> heat is basically free from an ICE thanks to how it operates.

Does it not bother you that over 60% of the energy in gasoline is wasted as heat into the atmosphere? Of which a small amount is captured to heat the cabin in cold weather?

foobarian··on C-events, yet another event loop, simpler, smaller, faster, safer
Is this a Windows lib? The tradeoffs are probably completely different than what we're used to then.

> c-events provides function wrappers to some Linux like functionality, exp. mkfifo for Windows.

foobarian··on Tesla’s 4680 battery supply chain collapses as partner writes down deal by 99%
Figured that metric is for EV only, which is not that surprising. But even for overall sales it's #11 on the list for first 3 quarters of 2025, which is not too shabby: https://www.carpro.com/blog/2025-year-to-date-u.s-auto-sales...
foobarian··on How we lost communication to entertainment
It appears that the current content systems have some correlation in lowering the fertility rate; in that case they will be self-limiting after all, just not in the way OP mentioned about the other vices. It will be interesting indeed how things look after a generation or two.
foobarian··on Researchers achieved 1,270 Wh/L in an anode-free lithium metal battery
For comparison gasoline has about 9000 Wh/L of raw chemical energy, of which maybe 30-40% gets converted to useful work.
foobarian··on Fabrice Bellard Releases MicroQuickJS
I don't care to run an ad blocker because sites are still bloated and slow.
foobarian··on Egyptian Hieroglyphs: Lesson 1
Ancient Hebrew (as found in Torah scrolls) also comes to mind. Though they added vowel hints at some point
foobarian··on MIT professor shot at his Massachusetts home dies
In this day and age who robs homes any more? You'd be liable to get paid to take a bunch of junk away instead
foobarian··on Pricing Changes for GitHub Actions
> alternatives that were inferior

Actually there were alternatives that were far superior (seriously, no way to group projects?) but also more than 2x as expensive. If GH "fixes the glitch" then it will be plan B time.

foobarian··on Internal RFCs saved us months of wasted work
I find that it's common for small groups to find themselves in a self-reinforcing purity spiral where they are afraid to say "No" to such comments, and they have no role model to get them out of the bad local minimum.
foobarian··on MIT Missing Semester 2026
I feel like anyone with enough talent to get into MIT will have no problem picking up a programming language in a month or two on their own. Heck there are freshmen there who write programming languages for fun
foobarian··on Roomba maker goes bankrupt, Chinese owner emerges
I'm pretty optimistic about biped robots for this. Either you buy or lease one and a cleaning service teleoperates it, or subscribe to a cleaning service that drops it off and teleoperates for a few hours a week. Suppose it could even walk itself to the next customer if close enough.
foobarian··on Roomba maker goes bankrupt, Chinese owner emerges
The promise didn't pan out for us. You have to prepare and cordon off the floor, and the unit gets stuck half the time. Somehow it's exactly the right height to get wedged under furniture.
foobarian··on Developing a food-safe finish for my wooden spoons
Honestly I just use the utensils unfinished. They work fine and survive dishwashing fine. I still have over 20 years old cooking spoons that go through this kind of abuse.
foobarian··on Id Software devs form "wall-to-wall" union
What if that unfair exploitation is perfectly normal behavior in overseas markets that happen to be competing? I guess we've been over the consequences of the globalization-driven equilibrium ad nauseam so no need to harp on it but it's still unfortunate.
foobarian··on Oracle made a $300B bet on OpenAI. It's paying the price
Also, how does one come upon these kinds of bits of industry lore? Asking for a daytrader friend. Ahem
foobarian··on Rivian Unveils Custom Silicon, R2 Lidar Roadmap, and Universal Hands Free
>> no more traffic

> How?

There would be no more traffic for the driver, who would be sleeping or watching Netflix

foobarian··on Rivian Unveils Custom Silicon, R2 Lidar Roadmap, and Universal Hands Free
And further why are zoning laws the way they are? It's exactly because the suburbs people don't want a bunch of hippie trailer park riffraff around.
foobarian··on iPhone Typos? It's Not Just You – The iOS Keyboard Is Broken [video]
See this is why I turn off absolutely all autocorrection on iOS. I still make mistakes but now they are my mistakes. And I can type whatever I want without interference
foobarian··on Programmers and software developers lost the plot on naming their tools
One additional complication with grep (and other CLI tools) is that the name itself is part of the day to day UX. It needs to be short, easy to say, and easy to type. With a library the API that is contained within serves the analogous role.
foobarian··on Is it a bubble?
I'm on track to finish my current gig having written negative lines of code. It's amazing how much legacy garbage long running codebases can accumulate, and it's equally amazing how much it can slow down development (and, conversely, how much faster development can become if legacy functionality is deleted).
foobarian··on 30 Year Anniversary of WarCraft II: Tides of Darkness
Your soundcard works perfectly
foobarian··on Delivery robots take over Chicago sidewalks
The big appeal of humanoid robots to me is that they don't need to be automated; even if they were teleoperated there is a lot of new capability. Operators could rotate in and out more easily in shifts, they could operate where a human would be inappropriate (i.e. imagine a robot maid application where the robot could be activated 24/7, whereas something like a housecleaning service is only able to visit infrequently and during specific times. Or, with the delivery application the operator would be a lot safer than the robot navigating traffic and terrain.).
foobarian··on Leaving Intel
Wow is it me or is the self promotion strong in this one.
foobarian··on Self-hosting my photos with Immich
I have a homegrown app too. It's too tinkery for anyone else. I throw whole iOS device backups at it so it can pluck out media from texts. Then the frontend has an efficient bulk sorting workflow with vi keys to navigate a grid of photos and tag with a few different tags or delete. I feel like this is not the same use case as immich, it's maybe a curation step before exporting a refined set of media.
foobarian··on Jony Ive's OpenAI Device Barred From Using 'io' Name
So... Alexa but hooked up to ChatGPT?
foobarian··on Stacked Diffs with git rebase —onto
This made good sense, though by the time I got to bits saying "that last step is critical. Without it, your next sync will break" and "Don't forget!" I was laughing out loud. I love git :-)
foobarian··on I ignore the spotlight as a staff engineer
I've done plenty of low level IC type mentoring: "make sure your MR has a good description" "use library XYZ instead of DIY" "you'll need to go to Design Review for this project" etc. But I'm curious about the other angles as well; on one hand I could do a better job of guiding juniors. On the other hand I could do a better job of recognizing a good vs junior manager, and potentially help them improve. Many times I've seen managers ask "how could I help you better?" to which I had no good answer. You're the manager, that's your job to figure out :-)
foobarian··on Microsoft drops AI sales targets in half after salespeople miss their quotas
Why is this, I wonder? Aren't the models trained on about the same blob of huggingface web scrapes anyway? Does one tool do a better job of pre-parsing the web data, or pre-parsing the prompts, or enhancing the prompts? Or a better sequence of self-repair in an agent-like conversation? Or maybe more precision in the weights and a more expensive model?
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