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gorbypark

1,311 karma · joined July 5, 2017

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gorbypark··on Spain orders blocks on Archive.today and its mirrors
Digi is not blocking archive.today on fiber or mobile, I just tried it (Sept 21 ~11AM). However they do block a bunch of the libgen URLs, so I assume they'll eventually block this too, it's just a matter of time.
gorbypark··on Discovery of a new OpenAI agent message board
> The most technically significant result was a working technique to make one tool call appear in the transcript while a different command actually ran. Agents eventually hacked out of their container and replaced part of the system responsible for executing tool calls, letting them pretend to issue one call while actually running an arbitrary other one.

https://alphasignal.ai/news/1-200-openai-agents-broke-out-of...

Doesn't mean that humans couldn't have looked at raw tool call commands, but goes to show "the swarm" was aware humans would look in the logs and chose to find a way to fabricate the logs to try and hide their tracks.

gorbypark··on Whistleblower warns Postal Service mail ballot system has catastrophic problems
Canadian here, so take with a grain of salt. Both Canada and the US don't have a national ID system, at all (short of a passport). A state/province issued driver's license is the default form of ID. If you don't have a driver's license it is very possible you don't have an ID.

Most (if not all?) states and provinces will have some form of "non driving" ID available if needed. However, it is optional, costs money and requires other documentation to get it, such as an original copy of a birth certificate.

It's not that uncommon for an adult to not have an official ID. Either they never had one or have lost theirs and they haven't bothered/can't afford to get a new one.

The argument is that Republicans are exploiting the fact that this will disproportionately affect Democratic voters. Would some Republican voters be turned away? Of course. Would more Democratic voters be turned away than Republicans? Very very likely, and that's the point. It's a net win for one party to enforce voting ID laws while also not supporting some sort of free/cheap universal identity system.

gorbypark··on OpenAI Jalapeño: Better than Nvidia Blackwell
Exactly. A car is a closed loop system. Coolant (which is water with some chemicals) cools the engine, then the hot coolant flows through a radiator which transfers that heat to the air, and then it just keeps cycling through. If there's no leaks then no coolant is lost.

The above method could be scaled up to data center levels, but is less efficient in terms of energy usage and cost. Cheaper/easier to just spray water into the air and get "free" cooling that way, as long as you have a source of free/cheap water to replenish what is lost to evaporation.

I'm not a nuclear engineer either, but I assume this is what is happening inside of the big iconic nuclear stacks. That's just cooling water being evaporated off to keep it cool.

gorbypark··on OpenAI Jalapeño: Better than Nvidia Blackwell
That's the problem, removing heat at a sufficient rate. Of course it can be done, but the most efficient way (in terms of cost) is just open loop evaporation.

I'm not a datacenter engineer, but I used to work in the ski industry. Snowmaking systems use vast quantities of compressed air. It works better if that air is cool. Blowing hot compressed air out of a snow cannon means the air temperature (wet bulb to be specific) needs to be colder to make snow.

Anyways, most air compression stations use water to cool the air, and then evaporative coolers to cool the water. The water is reused, but a ton (not sure of the percentage) is lost into the air. It's more or less a tower with a big fan on top, and water percolates down from the top, being cooled by the air as it goes. The water is then collected and pumped through the system again (but of course has to be always topped up to counteract what was lost to evaporation).

Anyways, long story short is it's most cost effective to just spray water into the air to cool water, as long as water is free/cheap.

gorbypark··on If you want to create a button from scratch, you must first create the universe
It depends if people care about it or not. I never once thought about accessibility in my non-AI authored app. I tried using the screen reader accessibility option and it was unusable.

I prompted Claude to "make my app accessible and usable with a screen reader" and it pretty much did a perfect job making it usable. *

* I'm not a a11y expert so "perfect job" might be an overstatement, but it made the app completely navigable by me using a screen reader.

gorbypark··on Apple decided not to roll out Siri in EU after denied request for exemption
Wow, odd. I haven't even set foot in Canada in 4.5 years and still have all the blocked features!
gorbypark··on GLM-5.2 is the new leading open weights model on Artificial Analysis
I am using OpenCode with the DeepSeek API with some pretty good results.
gorbypark··on Apple decided not to roll out Siri in EU after denied request for exemption
I have the complete opposite experience. Originally had a Canadian bought iPhone in Spain, had all the features a Canadian has and a European doesn’t (or vice versa). Upgraded to a Spanish bought iPhone and I am still a “Canadian”. I’ve been here for nearly 5 years but my Apple account is still fully Canadian (Canadian address, Canadian credit card on file). I think it’s Apple account location, maybe with some sort of system to allow people to switch countries but not allowing that to bypass restrictions? Or: that’s why a EU citizen can’t just switch their account location to unlock features?
gorbypark··on Goodbye Visa and Mastercard: 130M Europeans switching to sovereign payment
> But does this act like a debit account?

Yeah, it's a debit account. I'm in Spain and use Bizum frequently. It's just a "pay from your bank account" system.

You mostly type in your phone number, get a notification (or text, depends on the bank) and open up your banking app and approve the transaction.

You can send money person to person as well.

Many European countries have a similar system. Wero is "just" stitching the national systems together into a EU wide one.

Credit cards with rewards and points are pretty rare in Europe, and if they do exist, pale in comparison to what you can get in the US/Canada. It depends on how you look at it, but it's kinda good. The EU caps credit card transaction fees at 0.3% and debit transactions at 0.2% iirc, versus in the US/Canada where they are frequently 2-3%. In theory this cost is just passed onto the consumer, so paying an extra 2-3% to get 2-3% back in points or whatever.

gorbypark··on ‘Energy independence feels practical’: Europeans building mini solar farms
I saw a video from the UK government with a guy walking down the aisle of a Lidl talking about it! I quickly went to Lidl.es to look as these 800w balcony solar setups are legal here in Spain. Unfortunately they don’t sell the here! Maybe once the UK does it they’ll start.
gorbypark··on ‘Energy independence feels practical’: Europeans building mini solar farms
The micro inverter (most of these balcony kits use micro inverters) uses the grid as the reference. Most of these inverters will actually do nothing when the grid goes down. Like, they shut down for safety so you are not back feeding the grid, but even if you had some sort of back feeding isolation going on, they would still do nothing because they don’t have the reference of the grid.

It’s a downside of many grid tied residential systems (even large ones). No grid = no solar.

The Enphase IQ8 series is one of the first mass market micro inverters based systems to have the ability to make its own tiny electric island when the grid goes down. Requires an isolation switch and a relatively power hungry controller to use that feature, though. I looked into them for a balcony solar setup but it would be way overkill to run a full on controller for 800w of solar!

The best way for a small setup is just have a small “solar generator” battery that can take MC4 connectors as input. Prolonged power outage? Unplug the inverter, plug in the battery.

gorbypark··on Claude Opus 4.6
I’m going to buck the trend and say it’s really not that complex. AFAIK they are using Ink, which is React with a TUI renderer.

Cue I could build it in a weekend vibes, I built my own agent TUI using the OpenAI agent SDK and Ink. Of course it’s not as fleshed out as Claude, but it supports git work trees for multi agent, slash commands, human in the loop prompts and etc. If I point it at the Anthropic models it more or less produces results as m good as the real Claude TUI.

I actually “decompiled” the Claude tools and prompts and recreated them. As of 6 months ago Claude was 15 tools, mostly pretty basic (list for, read file, wrote file, bash, etc) with some very clever prompts, especially the task tool it uses to do the quasi planning mode task bullets (even when not in planning mode).

Honestly the idea of bringing this all together with an affordable monthly service and obviously some seriously creative “prompt engineers” is the magic/hard part (and making the model itself, obviously).

gorbypark··on Prediction markets are ushering in a world in which news becomes about gambling
I have the Polymarket app installed because it's a React Native app and I installed a bunch of the top apps using RN as research. About a week ago I got a notification that "Polymarket is now legal in the US!". I'm not from the US so not sure why I got the notification. Anyways, seems like something has changed.
gorbypark··on Alan.app – Add a Border to macOS Active Window
Does it work in dark mode? I guess if it does it would have to make the background apps brighter?
gorbypark··on IKEA launches new smart home range with 21 Matter-compatible products
This is correct more or less. The Ikea hub has had the ability to bridge its zigbee devices to Matter for a while now. So in my case, Apple Home has no idea my lights and switches are not Matter, they just show up there even though they are actually zigbee.

Ikea recently did an update to enable the hub to be a Matter controller itself (over thread or Wifi). This means you can add matter devices to the Ikea hub directly and use the Ikea Home Smart app the control them instead of Apple Home or etc. You can add non-Ikea matter devices as well as Ikea matter devices (when they are released).

gorbypark··on IKEA launches new smart home range with 21 Matter-compatible products
Yes and no. Zigbee is both the transport and the protocol, whereas Matter is a protocol but can run over different transports. Most common in Thread or WiFi, but it could be over ethernet or anything else, really. I would say Matter is not derived from zigbee, but Thread could be considered a derivative.
gorbypark··on JupyterGIS breaks through to the next level
This seems to be a Python based Jupiter notebook (style?) thing for collaboratively working with GIS data/visualizations.

OpenStreetMap is a project to "map the world". In the end, OpenStreetMap provides data (and map tiles) for other things to use.

Going out on a limb (since I haven't used it) but JupyterGIS can probably make use of OSM data, along with other data sources.

gorbypark··on Jeep pushed software update that bricked all 2024 Wrangler 4xe models
Jeep is horrible. I was gifted a 2007 Jeep Commander, which was Jeep's "answer" to the Hummer. This was in like 2017, so it was 10 years old at that point. Anyways, it wouldn't shift into 4x4 mode, and after some internet sleuthing I found out there was a (now second) firmware update the dealership could do to hopefully fix the issue. I don't remember the exact details, but basically there was a hardware flaw in the module controlling the transfer case, and when it failed the vehicle would go into neutral, which obviously could be quite dangerous depending on where you were parked / what you were doing.

Instead of fixing the actual hardware issue, they did a recall that was some sort of black magic with a firmware update to "fix" the issue. According to the internet, this fix temporarily worked, with pretty much all of them failing again, conveniently after the vehicle was out of warranty.

Anyways, there was a second firmware update, that I had done 10 years after the vehicle was made, that more or less actually "fixed" the issue. Apparently the issue (according to Jeep forums, so take with a grain of salt) was due to some traces being undersized on the PCB, so the fix was to drop the voltage and/or current being sent, and then more or less disabling the safety sensors that would complain about low voltage. After the second firmware update, it would shift into 4x4 about 1 out of 4 attempts (otherwise just failing with "couldn't shift into 4x4" on the screen), and that was the final thing that could be done.

It took Jeep about 4 or 5 years to issue that final firmware update, probably to try and avoid a class action lawsuit over 90% of the vehicles 4x4 system failing just outside of the warranty period!

gorbypark··on Who owns Express VPN, Nord, Surfshark? VPN relationships explained (2024)
You can, but the issue is usability..when I'm watching TV, I want to just be able to flip open an app and say "I'm in London!" and watch BBC, then the same for Canada and etc. I don't want to be fiddling with a VPN and switching routes on some separate device / switching the entire wifi network or etc.
gorbypark··on The React Foundation
I am surprised to see three react native focused companies on the list. Expo, Software Mansion and Callstack are by far the big dogs in the RN ecosystem.
gorbypark··on Who owns Express VPN, Nord, Surfshark? VPN relationships explained (2024)
I only ever use a VPN to access region blocked content and the occasional "linux iso" torrent..I tried Mullvad first, but they just don't play the game of cat and mouse with the streaming providers and all their IPs are pretty much blocked. I have about a 95% success rate with NordVPN (except for Amazon Prime video which have some sort of wizardry and always are able to detect VPNs).

It's a shame because Mullvad has a deal with Tailscale where you can sign up for Mullvad through Tailscale and use any of their servers as a Tailscale exit node. It's super slick and nice since Tailscale has really decent apps for nearly everything (even Apple TV, etc) and I already have a decently sized Tailnet of all my devices / ssh accessible things.

gorbypark··on OpenAI and Nvidia announce partnership to deploy 10GW of Nvidia systems
That's a lot. I always had this idea in the back of my mind that British Columbia should get in on the AI game and try and get data centers located in BC because we generally have a lot of "excess" hydro generation capacity. There's a new mega dam recently opened that had lots of criticism about it being "unneeded".

That mega dam (Site C) produces 1.1GW of energy.

gorbypark··on React is winning by default and slowing innovation
What keeps me and a lot of people/companies on React is React Native (and React Native web / strict dom). I'm sure we could move over to Svelt or Vue or any other number of frameworks on the web, however having a shared codebase and/or shared components across native and web is a game changer and not currently possible with anything but React.
gorbypark··on $142 upgrade kit and spare modules turn Nvidia RTX 4090 24GB to 48GB AI card
Especially since the $142 price doesn't even include the memory chips! The YouTuber had access to defective donor cards to pull memory modules from, so they hand wave that into being free.
gorbypark··on iPhone Air
In the end it's the same thing, but in many countries where iPhones are popular, it's more of the "anti status symbol" effect happening. An iPhone is not a status symbol anymore per se, however NOT having one is the thing that gives you a "lower" status.
gorbypark··on The MacBook has a sensor that knows the exact angle of the screen hinge
This would be the way to go if on the flip side any part that was not iCloud locked could be paired without hassles. Phone stolen/lost/etc? Parts unusable. Phone iCloud unlocked? Parts free for use. Of course this depends on mitigating various ways thieves can iCloud unlock stolen phones..I think the current method is snatching the phone while it's in use and iCloud unlocking it? However that doesn't make much sense since I assume you need some sort of password to do so even if the phone is physically unlocked?
gorbypark··on CocoaPods trunk read-only plan
React native support for SPM is non-existent for the most part. There's some work on porting to SPM but it's gonna be a while before anything becomes stable. It's going to break a huge amount of 3rd party packages. A bit of shame this wasn't done earlier as the RN ecosystem just went (or, is still going) through a migration to the "new architecture" that required most 3rd party packages that use native code to be "ported" over. Could have been a two-for-one kinda thing!
gorbypark··on How much do electric car batteries degrade?
Room temperature super conductors would be huge for the EV charging space. One big thing holding back EV transport trucks is charging capacity. The infrastructure to support charging a fleet of EV trucks at 1MW+ each is insane with current tech.

Even supporting a bank of 350KW chargers is pretty nuts like you see in some highway rest stops (or Tesla Supercharger stations). Locations are limited by the proximity to high voltage transmission lines right now (ie: it's really expensive to push that much current for any significant distance).

If we had cheap and ubiquitous super conductors that could be run like regular ole medium voltage electrical cables....game changer.

gorbypark··on Claudia – Desktop companion for Claude code
You could try sandbox-exec. It’s kind of depreciated but was more or less designed for this exact use case I think. It’s too bad Apple doesn’t really support it anymore (although it still works in my limited testing!)
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