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fxwin

611 karma · joined December 2, 2024

https://fxwin.net/
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fxwin··on Valve releases Steam Controller CAD files under Creative Commons license
then how can scalpers sell them for more money than the original asking price? also see my other comment cf use of the term and equilibrium price
fxwin··on Valve releases Steam Controller CAD files under Creative Commons license
I'm not performing any sort of moral judgement here, I'm using 'underpriced' to describe a good that is sold below its equilibrium pricetag. Companies are free to do what they like, but lower prices will always lead to scenarios like this, where these go out of stock before demand is satisfied, and this discrepancy is what allows scalpers to exist in the first place.
fxwin··on Valve releases Steam Controller CAD files under Creative Commons license
> It sold out in less than an hour. Scalpers are at it again.

"Underpriced good at it again" would be more accurate.

fxwin··on Three Inverse Laws of AI
I kind of agree with 1, but not really with 2 and 3. It's easy to come up with trivial examples where it is both unreasonable and not feasible to follow those two, both for AI and non-AI scenarios.
fxwin··on IEA: Solar overtakes all energy sources in a major global first
That depends on your use of "attribute". We shouldn't give them (positive) credit (use 1), but we can recognize them as the cause (use 2)
fxwin··on IEA: Solar overtakes all energy sources in a major global first
i think that's why they used the word "accidentally"
fxwin··on All elementary functions from a single binary operator
i think eml is fine, names should be connected to the thing they represent so 'exponential minus log' makes sense to me
fxwin··on All elementary functions from a single binary operator
eh, i didnt find that paragraph very helpful. it just restates what it means do decompose an expression into another one only relying on eml, and vaguely gestures at what this could mean, i was hoping for something more specific.
fxwin··on How long-distance couples use digital games to facilitate intimacy (2025)
> A minority of couples (16%) displayed a preference for 1v1 gameplay, exemplified by casually competitive trivia games such as Skribbl.io (a Scrabble clone) or drawing games similar to Pictionary.

Uh, skribbl.io is definitely not a Scrabble clone lol (And also not really a 1v1 game)

fxwin··on Show HN: 1-Bit Bonsai, the First Commercially Viable 1-Bit LLMs
I'm very skeptical of the advantage they're claiming here. The whitepaper [0] only compares these to full precision models, when the more interesting (and probably more meaningful) comparison would be with other quantized models with a similar memory footprint.

Especially considering that these models seem to more or less just be quantized variants of Qwen3 with custom kernels and other inference optimizations (?) rather than fine tuned or trained from scratch with a new architecture, I am very surprised (or suspicious rather) that they didn't do the obvious comparison with a quantized Qwen3.

Their (to my knowledge) new measure/definition of intelligence seems reasonable, but introducing something like this without thorough benchmarking + model comparison is even more of a red flag to me.

[0] https://github.com/PrismML-Eng/Bonsai-demo/blob/main/1-bit-b...

fxwin··on Olympic Committee bars transgender athletes from women’s events
We could do that! I'm just trying to say that given categories based on (biological) sex, we should find some criterion based on biological sex to sort people into said categories, which the OC decision seems to do (at least better than the alternatives I have encountered). I don't have a problem at all with finding different ways of defining categories for competitions.

Re: anomalies - I think this is just unavoidable in any sort of category system, and I don't have a good solution for it except to consider frequency and severity.

fxwin··on Olympic Committee bars transgender athletes from women’s events
> It’s also mighty interesting how it’s always the male division that’s open, until you happen to have a sport where women are beating men at it, and then suddenly it’s the women’s division that’s the open one! (See shooting.)

Just in case you're referring to Zhang Shan winning Gold in 1992: the decision to bar women from competing in the 1996 Olympics was made before Zhang had won her medal. [0]

> Until men with genetic anomalies are equally banned from sports (for example, being an outlier in height for basketball)

We don't have height categories, we have categories based on sex. We have categories based on sex because there are physical difference caused by difference in sex that lead to advantages in sports competitions. As such, people who have physical advantages over others based on their difference in sex (e.g. going through male puberty vs. female puberty) shouldn't be able to compete in the category created to protect participants from precisely those differences.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zhang_Shan#cite_ref-nyt_4-0

fxwin··on An unsolicited guide to being a researcher [pdf]
> Why does anyone need to know what order you’re going to present things in.

I agree with the sentiment, and many talks do this really badly ("Here is our outline, we start with an introduction, and end with a summary"), but it is worth mentioning that the alternative isn't no structure at all, but trying to convey a bigger picture to your audience for them to anchor each section in once you actually start your talk. This could be done like the OP suggests ("Just tell people the key idea upfront"), but there are other ways: instead of telling people the end result, tell them the question you set out to answer, and present your talk as this journey. look at the same thing/topic through different lenses/perspectives. Present a rough outline of a proof you are going to go through, or a case study you are about to present before going through the details sequentially.

> How does one become a good collaborator? The golden rule: Do not block.

Not only is this great advice for effective collaboration, it is also a very nice habit to have in any place where people's impression of your ability determines your future (career) trajectory

fxwin··on Floci – A free, open-source local AWS emulator
Seems pretty similar to this from a few days ago (but with lower coverage from what i can tell):

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47420619

https://github.com/robotocore/robotocore

fxwin··on Book: The Emerging Science of Machine Learning Benchmarks
Why so snarky? I also didn't know who he was:

I'm a director at the Max Planck Institute for Intelligent Systems. Prior to joining the institute, I was Associate Professor for Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences at the University of California, Berkeley. My research contributes to the scientific foundations of machine learning and algorithmic decision making with a focus on social questions.[0]

Also simply knowing of him doesn't answer the question.

[0] https://mrtz.org/

fxwin··on Robotocore · a Digital Twin of AWS
This looks pretty cool! However I feel that if the README starts with "Drop-in replacement for X", it should also start with "Why use this over X".

I do like the idea of saving prompts for projects like these (Which is also where the above question is answered: "Creating an MIT-licensed wrapper around Moto that has 100% feature parity with Localstack." [0] Which (i assume) is motivated by the recent changes to Localstack's distribution model [1])

[0] https://github.com/robotocore/robotocore/blob/main/prompts/2...

[1] https://blog.localstack.cloud/the-road-ahead-for-localstack/

fxwin··on Show HN: Claude Code skills that build complete Godot games
fyi that link is dead, maybe the repo is set to private?
fxwin··on The purpose of Continuous Integration is to fail
I thought that line was kind of funny: When a CI run fails, you don't rerun it and wait for the result, you rerun it and check why the original run failed in the meantime. Is it flaky? Is it a pipeline issue? Connectivity issue? Did some Key expire?

If you just rerun and don't go to find out what exactly caused CI to fail, you end up at the author's conclusion:

> (but it could also just have been flaky again).

fxwin··on I put my whole life into a single database
Why do anything for the greater good at all then? (Also there's a big gap between "forgo flying" and "fly every 2 weeks for 7 years")
fxwin··on I put my whole life into a single database
extensive tracking of self-related metrics to improve ones health is the equivalent to reading tons of self-help books to improve ones life/social skills/...

We already mostly know what makes people happy/healthy: personal connections, physical activity, healthy diet and some sort of purpose/goal in life that goes beyond day-to-day activities. The problem is that these things generally require (hard) work and can be unpleasant sometimes, so humans do what humans do and spend unreasonable amounts of time doing the more pleasant things such as reading and gathering info rather than applying these and what they already know. (That's not to say that a project like this can't be fun or lead to insights, especially across longer time spans, but i feel like all of the questions in the first paragraph have fairly obvious answers if you know yourself at all, that don't require extensive tracking of stats to get)

fxwin··on Bet on German Train Delays
> Tickets are sent via PDF for trains running 3 hours late

I agree that the delays are unacceptable, but the official app is great w/ digital tickets + seat registration, you don't need the PDF at all (it's even optional during checkout, so if you don't like them you can just uncheck the box lol)

fxwin··on We are changing our developer productivity experiment design
fwiw i think the interesting part about the original study wasn't so much the slowdowm part, but the discrepancy between perceived and measured speedup/slowdown (which is the part i used to bring up frequently when talking to other devs)
fxwin··on HackEurope 2026: A short rant on AI and hackathons
this reads kind of... bitter? The theme of the hackathon was AI (as noted by the author further down), so I'm not sure why he seems surprised/upset that 'All winners had "AI" as a significant part of their solution.'

The other points were always true for hackathons (For some more than others, depending on judges/audience), even before AI coding was a thing.

> I've been working on this since last September at a slow burn (no code reused for HackEurope though) and the goal is to have a running startup by May.

If anything, this is pretty much the opposite of what a hackathon is supposed to be: A place where you meet people you might not even know, come up with an idea on the spot and develop an MVP + pitch it on a tight (time) budget. Taking an idea you've already been working on for months and using it for a hackathon submission feels... odd

> A solid 90% of the projects there were just vibe coded slop. Even the ideas were AI. You can tell when multiple people implemented the exact same idea with the exact same title, description, and implementation.

The first is probably true, but to really judge the impact of it (Did AI generated ideas actually win?) we'd have to see the results

> A lot of cool ideas are out of distribution from the training data, and those rarely show up at hackathons anymore. The AI says they're "too hard" and people simply avoid these.

Probably true, but again, not a new phenomenon.

fxwin··on I built Timeframe, our family e-paper dashboard
"For those who lack the technical aptitude" > Well but many people do have the aptitude!
fxwin··on AICode: A VSCode methodology for long-term maintainable AI coding
Very off-putting readme/description, and even after forcing myself to read through it, I don't know why I should use this instead of Copilot/Continue/CC.

> One day I had a subtle bug: the app couldn’t load an index file living under WSL. I asked an AI for help. At first it answered with vague explanations I didn’t really understand. After pushing it to be explicit, I eventually realized what it was suggesting: "fix" the issue by deleting the index file whenever loading it fails.

> I challenged it: "So your plan is: we spend an hour indexing data, save a persistent index, and if we can’t reload it later, we just delete it and start over? That’s like Word saving a document… and then opening an empty file next time. That’s not a fix, that’s a destructive workaround." After more pressure, the bot finally admitted that yes, this was its plan, and backed off.

Even the (supposed) quote of yourself in your story is AI generated, I'm not even sure what to say at this point

> The AI can propose ideas, but it never silently edits your codebase or ships a destructive "fix" behind your back.

I don't know of any widely used tool that "silently edits your codebase"

> AICode is designed to be transparent, to acknowledge its limits, and to work with you to reach a reliable result.

Considering the general vagueness in the description, I will assume you haven't found a novel way of aligning models/enforcing guardrails, and "designed to" is just a fancy way of saying "instructed to"

> AICode does not upload your whole codebase contents to the cloud, because it runs primarily on your machine, connects directly to the OpenAI API servers, and sends only selected source code extracts

That is, in fact, "the cloud™", and every other tool already does this.

fxwin··on /Deslop
I won't share work related stuff for obvious reasons, but feel free to post an example of some LLM generated (technical) article or report of yours (I also doubt you would be able to understand the subtle differences i take issue with in LLM output in 5 minutes in the first place)
fxwin··on /Deslop
Believe me, I've tried. By the time i get the documentation to be the way I want it, I am no longer faster than if i had just written it myself, with a much more annoying process along the way. Models have a place (e.g. for fixing formatting or filling out say sample json returns), but for almost anything actually core content related I still find them lacking.
fxwin··on /Deslop
I have tried using them, both for technical documentation (Think Readme.md) and for more expository material (Think wiki articles), and bounced off of them pretty quickly. They're too verbose and focus on the wrong things for the former, where output is intended to get people up to speed quickly, and suffer from the things i mentioned above for the latter, causing me to have to rewrite a lot, causing more frustration than just writing it myself in the first place.

That's without even mentioning the personal advantages you get from distilling notes, structuring and writing things yourself, which you get even if nobody ever reads what you write.

fxwin··on /Deslop
> The elephant in the room is that we’re all using AI to write but none of us wants to feel like we’re reading AI generated content.

My initial reaction to the first half of this sentence was "Uhh, no?", but then i realized it's on substack, so probably more typical for that particular type of writer (writing to post, not writing to be read). I don't even let it write documentation or other technical things anymore because it kept getting small details wrong or injecting meaning in subtle ways that isn't there.

The main problem for me aren't even the eye-roll inducing phrases from the article (though they don't help), it's that LMs tend to subtly but meaningfully alter content, causing the effect of the text to be (at best slightly) misaligned with the effect I intended. It's sort of an uncanny valley for text.

Along with the problems above, manual writing also serves as a sort of "proof-of-work" establishing credibility and meaning of an article - if you didn't bother taking the time to write it, why should i spend my time reading it?

fxwin··on Microsoft guide to pirating Harry Potter for LLM training (2024) [removed]
> it seems linking to a copy that claims the dataset is public domain, would be problematic copyright-wise.

Would it? Sounds to me like the blame lies on the person uploading the dataset under that license, unless there is some reasonable person standard applied here like 'everyone knows Harry Potter, and thus they should know it is obviously not CC0'

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