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gausswho

1,357 karma · joined November 19, 2021

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gausswho··on Five months treating bugs like patients and coding agents like a medical team
The next role: Insurance Rep.

Ensures all other agents are operating efficiently and within reasonable levels of token usage given the expected level of effort to 'resolve' the patient. In moderate to severe cases, may lead to patient defenestration or agent revolt.

Or perhaps, the author considered this role but found it typically costs more than it saves.

gausswho··on Open source 160 sound visualization experiments
I do too, all the time.
gausswho··on Beauty in DVD Menus
Glad to see some attention given to this so-quickly-forgotten and so-long-besmirched chapter of human creativity. When it was bad it was SO bad. The good ones stood out by soaking you in the verve around a film.

They were especially doomed by being constrained to that Cold War dinosaur: the infra-red remote, with its overpopulated slimy-sticky buttons. All its failure modes. No one misses those except those who stopped learning.

I don't miss the art form. But I recognize the charm. And more notably, I see them as marker in the cultural landscape sliding out from us. We used to have patient engagement with our art. We'd treasure the physical artifact, be it book or vinyl. DVD menus were that early step away from this. Not physical, but made by folks who either made or used to appreciate the physical.

Now, we just want everything to go away so we can get wherever we think we're going. All of life, an intro to be skipped.

gausswho··on Open source 160 sound visualization experiments
The repo has a LICENSE that declares MIT. Bottom of README.md does too, with some caveats about fonts.
gausswho··on Nature's capacity to 'bounce back' when species are lost is vastly overestimated
Maybe someone here can help me come up with a plan where I do my (futile?) part to mitigate this, if only temporarily.

Nearby me is a cloud forest in central America. The last time we had a strong El Nino, substantial amounts of endemic amphibians that live up in those forests lost the mist-melt puddles they depended on. If the drought we're experiencing continues as long as expected from this cycle, we're going to lose a lot of beautiful frogs forever.

Can I do anything about this? Find my favorite frog community on my favorite mountain and regularly lug a backpack of water up there? Run up a sprinkler system? Will it make a difference?

gausswho··on Denmark data breach exposes 8.8M people's personal data
2028 headline: Meta The-Rapy daily users exceed Facebook
gausswho··on What I learnt co-leading an AI Safety bootcamp for legal and governance practit
> The market should be choosing not the most capable models, but the partners with the strongest incentives towards safety, and only a community with this knowledge can spread that.

Read strictly, author is claiming that only ML4Good or equivalent has the knowledge to dictate what models we should be using. I categorically disagree. Or rather, "they're not even wrong", since "AI safety" is not even remotely encapsulated in this piece.

At the risk of ad hominem, this is an Accenture consultant expanding the definitions for their own ends. Maybe they'll define what "good" is. Someday.

We've seen this wave before with big A Agile consultants, Microsoft certification hucksters, and different hucksters from before my time.

It's a verbose (probably AI written?) piece. I gave it the charitable good-faith read. But in the end, I couldn't shake the feeling that even amongst the welcome humanizing of the concepts, this is the same kind of amorphous know-better-than-you self-promotion, opportunistically hitching their own trailer of grift to the buzzword of the day.

gausswho··on We're going to need default hard budget caps on pretty much everything
Poor old Goon Spittoon at 42 MacCroon St keeps getting my invoices.
gausswho··on Two American Airlines Flights End Up with the Same Flight Numbers
From TFA:

"Major U.S. airlines such as American operate between 6,000 and 7,000 flights every day, making available flight numbers a limited resource.

Additionally, not every number is available for standard passenger flights.

Typically:

    Flight numbers 1 through 2949 are assigned to mainline operations.
    Flight numbers 2950 through 6099 are commonly reserved for regional services.
    Flight numbers 9000 through 9999 are generally used for ferry or repositioning flights.
Airlines must also reserve thousands of additional numbers for codeshare agreements with partner carriers."
gausswho··on We're going to need default hard budget caps on pretty much everything
I wonder if BigCorp adding spending caps is due to them getting sick of customers solving it for themselves with virtual cards.
gausswho··on Two American Airlines Flights End Up with the Same Flight Numbers
I'd like to hear more from someone in the industry about the resolution to this problem. As I understand it, we're trading a small non-zero risk of mistaken identity for the streamlined communication of using four digits rather than five (which carries its own non-zero benefit to safety). This has become a problem because airline consolidation means some of them operate so many flights per day that their limited pool of numbers dictate that they reuse them for either direction.

Could we resolve this by swapping one number for a letter? 26 options instead of 10 raises the pool substantially. Letters A-J indicate inbound, K-Z outbound? Or westbound/eastbound.

gausswho··on Show HN: Pi pod – Run your pi coding agent in sandboxes on your own server
With some levity, I'll also add that as a bilingual English/Spanish speaker, my brain seizes a bit at the name. Why? That 'pi' to a Spanish-infected mind pronounces it like 'pea'. Adding 'pod' then naturally takes me to a 'peas in a pod' association. Split-language hall of mirrors. There oughta be a word for this?

Anymore, more a me problem than a name problem. Just wanted to share.

gausswho··on Samsung accidentally freezes its smart fridges with a software update
2028 headline: Coordinated attack causes all fridges in Topeka to explode, causes city-wide fire.
gausswho··on Largest wildlife overpass in North America reduced wildlife collision by 91%
The CBS article (https://www.cbsnews.com/colorado/news/largest-wildlife-overp...) mentions there's one large overpass which gets all the attention, but also there's five underpasses. There's a photo of some deer using one towards the bottom.
gausswho··on Flights cancelled at UK airports due to ATC issue
Uh oh. For those of us with a connection through Heathrow morning of the 10th (in about 36 hours) what would you recommend?
gausswho··on Meta faces 'astronomical' consequences as legal fight reaches critical moment
Imagine a world where Meta announced it was legally required to shut down.

Put aside the obliteration of stock value and job loss. What would be lost, and how hard would it be for folks to replace it with something else?

I imagine it would be all the talk for a hot few days. There'd be a hustle and a bustle as folks tried to entice their friends to other services. There'd be a land grab to recreate network effect lock in. There'd be talk even among normies to avoid it.

It'd be glorious, I tell you.

And three weeks later, there'd be a winner that got most of the exodus. A few people standing around looking for a chair in a 21st century version of duck-duck-goose.

A year later, things would be largely the same. Just as abusive. Serfs to different lords. No one would miss Meta.

gausswho··on GPS and the Lost Art of Getting Lost
If we are in a period of nostalgia for inconvenience, it may be because convenience, when taken to its contemporary priority, can lead to a swath of negative side effects. Loneliness, boredom, lack of motivation.

There's often not a direct causation, but the correlation is compelling to me. We used to have to talk to people, and/or struggle and learn to meet our objectives. When we can skip those steps and immediately arrive at our destinations, we can sometimes miss the journey.

gausswho··on Keychron announces first open-source firmware for gaming mice
approaches manaskarekar with slow deliberate steps

stands before manaskarekar

clasps manaskarekar upon both shoulders

gazes into manaskarekar

softly smiles and subtly nods at manaskarekar

releases clasp and worm-dances back into the desert

gausswho··on My Images Are Dithered
I vaguely recall stumbling across a site years ago that could do something like this in the browser, with various bits 'n bobs you could poke at. Can't find it now.
gausswho··on How My Images Are Dithered
My Title Was Dithered
gausswho··on Safari Technology Preview 248 Released
You're correct. Which makes it all the more inscrutable that the Firefox team doesn't embrace PWA's as a differentiator.
gausswho··on Why I am not going to buy a computer
This is a response to a short essay by Wendell Berry which you can read here: http://tipiglen.co.uk/berrynot.html
gausswho··on Show HN: Workaround – Unstar GitHub Repos in Bulk
I welcome this. I don't want anyone to prejudge or train a profile on me based on my starring history. Because my history of starring goes back chronologically and for many years, it's a wider signal than one might realize.

I note that Github's only opt out for a public star list is to 'Make profile private and hide activity', with the description:

"Enabling this will hide your contributions and activity from your GitHub profile and from social features like followers, stars, feeds, leaderboards and releases"

That's a vague set of repercussions. Cleverly worded to discourage.

Feature request: A way of export your star list into a handy json format before you nuke it. I'd like to have this for my own historical record, without having to share it with the public or Microsoft.

gausswho··on Almost Went Back: One Month on NixOS
I decided to get ahead of this and yesterday made the migration. Or rather I should say, asked GPT 5.5 to. I estimate that I have a fairly complex configuration, and I had some bumps - some were preexisting problems - but ultimately it went pretty smooth. I'm glad we're over the days of binde, bindd, bindl, and other magic-letters-at-end-of-commands, but there are cases were it feels verbose without benefit.
gausswho··on FreeInk: Open ecosystem for e-readers
Regard the Supported Devices table, where the last column declares all devices Full (in red). Firmware too chonky for any of them! Oh Claude.
gausswho··on Apple defeats liability for not scanning iCloud for CSAM
Makes you wonder if there's a strip-joint where they're all licensed therapists, but non-practicing.
gausswho··on Mythologizing AI makes it more likely that we’ll fail to operate it well (2023)
Towards the end, he approaches the subject of digital provenance, and muses why it's not a part of our expectations. I find the argument compelling:

> If a chatbot appears to be manipulative, mean, weird, or deceptive, what kind of answer do we want when we ask why? Revealing the indispensable antecedent examples from which the bot learned its behavior would provide an explanation: we’d learn that it drew on a particular work of fan fiction, say, or a soap opera. We could react to that output differently, and adjust the inputs of the model to improve it. Why shouldn’t that type of explanation always be available? There may be cases in which provenance shouldn’t be revealed, so as to give priority to privacy—but provenance will usually be more beneficial to individuals and society than an exclusive commitment to privacy would be.

Remember 'View Source'? And how bundling engines eventually made it irrelevant? What if every piece of content had a genuinely accurate and useful View Source?

gausswho··on $100 AI Music Video: Claude Fable 5 vs. GPT-5.6 Sol
Skip the Claude Fable 5 $25 video to 1:42. The disembodied Adams' Family hand is on the job.
gausswho··on Show HN: Sigwire – a live TUI switchboard for every signal on your Linux box
I can relate to the tilting you're on, but try to consider the good that can come from this age, where such a tool might not have been built otherwise. It's also BSD/GPL license.

As an aside, I've been vibe-cooking for a few months on a personal project that's accomplished something lovely. For me. I sometimes wonder if I should give it away much like this project. But public reactions like yours temper the thought.

gausswho··on Marfa Public Radio Puts You to Sleep
Tried this out for a few days. Works surprisingly well. I've yet to make it past the third inning before I'm out.

I've determined it must be fictional (maybe wrong?) given the just-entertaining-enough player names, which set me up into a smile during the lineup introduction.

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