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guhcampos

1,669 karma · joined July 12, 2014

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guhcampos··on An algorithmic failure beneath the secret ballot
The machines used in Brazil, while based originally on a Diebold design, are widely different from the ones used in US. There are genuine complaints: for instance some of us belive the software and hardware should be open source, but it has passed the test of time in the last 30 years.
guhcampos··on An algorithmic failure beneath the secret ballot
This is a BIG discussion in Brazil, where the election is basically 100% electronic, no paper involved. There's a large portion of the population that distrusts the electronic voting machines, partly due to rightwing propaganda, but partly due to a genuine distrust of a system they can't understand.

In person paper voting, however, only works on a relatively healthy democractic community. What used to happen around here was that whoever was the local hegemonic power, mostly oligarcs, sometimes gangs, would just plant a grunt in the voting halls and coerce people to reveal their votes. That or they would simply have a bag of pre-cast votes and drop them all in the ballot box. Lots of absentees and dead people used to happily cast votes at the time.

So ultimately the full electronic system has been working quite well over here for the past 30-something years. It has only really started to be aggressively questioned since 2016 with the rise of social-media as an election driving powerhouse.

guhcampos··on Microsoft exec called AI scraping 'the largest theft of labor in human history'
Partially true.

If StackOverflow dies because nobody uses it anymore, the entirety of its knowledge is now only available through LLMs that trained on it.

If a blog dies out because the author gave up writing, the entirety of its knowledge is now only available through LLMs that trained on it.

If people stop writing books because they cant outcompete generated content, that knowledge is also lost to LLMs.

If people stop making art because they can't outcompete generated art, that is also lost to LLMs.

So yeah, they haven't directly taken anything away, but the consequences of what they are doing may still have that outcomes - and it does look like that's the version of reality we're about to get.

guhcampos··on Creativity is the new moat
Humanity is A/B testing itself into mediocrity.
guhcampos··on Agent memory as a file format
What the author suggests is remarkably close to the proposition of OpenViking. I've been testing a few memory solutions and OpenViking is one of my favorites so far.
guhcampos··on Disruption with Some GitHub Services
My point is: they blame it on scale. If that's the story they want us to believe, then they have to explain WHY such a simple fix isn't possible.

There may be non technical reasons for it, even: legal, or PR, but if they want me to believe the "scalability excuse" they need to convince me they're trying.

guhcampos··on Disruption with Some GitHub Services
Honestly?

If the problem is scalability, just rate limit git commands on free accounts already. Nobody realistically need to push multiple times per minute, and that alone is bound to trickle down to anything that triggers on commits and pushes.

guhcampos··on OpenAI Jalapeño: Better than Nvidia Blackwell
There are other options. I worked for a startup called NVXL and we were programming DNNs into FPGAs using OpenCL, on custom boards we built to plug into NVME. It worked great, but it wasn't fast enough at the time to compete with Nvidia, or even Intel AVX512. Ultimately the company failed, but maybe some hybrid like that could work for LLMs? I haven't been up to date on how DNNs and LLMs look like under the hood these days, but there's got to be someone doing something similar.
guhcampos··on Cursor launches Origin, GitHub alternative
It's been 5 hours and instead of "any" questions, you have only been happy to answer the 1 question that hasn't put you in a tight spot.

Honestly, that does not look too good for you or the offering - and this is coming from someone that just chose Cursor over Claude Code a week ago.

guhcampos··on Quake Shareware, a CD-ROM just a little too full
"For video game developers, the CD-ROM was an odd beast. The capacity far exceeded the quantity of assets they were able to produce. A few titles, like 7th Guest (1993) or Phantasmagoria (1995) introduced Full Motion Video (in a world where only part of the screen could be animated). "

To me the Saturn made the absolute best choice. The whole game's OST would be burned as audio tracks. I used to - and still can - just drop a game CD into an audio player and enjoy emblematic OST's like Daytona USA, Sonic R and many others in full 44100Hz 16bit audio.

I recall a few PC games did that too: Total Annihilation comes to mind: I also still own the physical media and still can listen to the OST that way.

guhcampos··on The TEMU-Fication of Software, Digital Goods and Services
I have another weak correlation to TEMU to add.

I have never, ever, bought anything on TEMU, because anytime I open the website it gives me a gambling roulette for some supposed discount thing. I hate gambling, so everytime I see the roulette I just close the webpage and go do something else.

Well, the whole cheap-generated content craze feels basically like gambling to me to this point, too. Folks are just randomly generating content: books, videos, articles, even applications, and gambling that something will pay for itself.

So now we have Enshitification, Eemufication and Gamblification of the Human Society. Damn I might write something on Substack about that.

guhcampos··on uBlock Origin is giving up the fight to keep ads off Facebook
I draw a line on advertising for myself: if it's just letting me know a service or product exists, it's fine. It's a business necessity. If I ever start a business, I need a way to communicate to potential customers that my business exists, that's fair use.

When the ads start being misleading, manipulative, emotional, irrational - then we're out of the fair use field and into the "this should be a crime" field.

guhcampos··on uBlock Origin is giving up the fight to keep ads off Facebook
I'm with the developer here. At some point the effort is just not worth it anymore.

Facebook, as a platform, has long since lost the relevance as a social network, it is basically just an ad platform these days. So why keep wasting resources on trying to block ads from an ad platform? A user who does not want to see ads on Facebook probably should just stop using Facebook altogether.

I get the appeal for staying on Instagram, Youtube, Reddit and other platforms despite the ads: these provide some sort of - maybe controversial - value for the user, even if it's just cat videos or whatever. Facebook has lost its value proposition so long ago it's hard for me to understand why would anyone tolerate using it to this day.

uBlock's resources are much better allocated into other initiatives: like Chrome .

guhcampos··on Understanding the AI Economy
>How ATLAS has been developed

"We picked some results we wanted to show and told gemini to cherry pick data that would fit in. As you can see, it was not a lot."

guhcampos··on Coding agents think ahead of time
Isn't that what "Attention is all you need" was about anyway? Does not sound like news to me.
guhcampos··on Why I'm Forced to Say Farewell: Google Management Has Lost Its Moral Compass
The blog post is from June 19th. Google Doc from June 17th.

My guess? He shared the Google Doc link with his peers, but forgot that Google Docs links are public for anyone who knows the link, so someone just forwarded it to oblivion, and he was forced to publish that as blog post. The addendums kind of reflect that.

That's a great reminded that any Google Doc with a shareable link is basically a public document for all intents and purposes.

guhcampos··on A native graphical shell for SSH
It's a very, very thin web layer on top of native code:

https://cockpit-project.org/guide/latest/features.html

To the author's defense: Cockpit is Linux only, and they seem to intend on making this also available on Windows and Mac.

Still, I don't see the appeal they seem to do, especially since it relies so much on SSH. The biggest use case I can think for something like this in the real world is something like first-time setup or MDM, and on both situations setting up SSH to begin with has the same level of friction they're trying to remove.

guhcampos··on A native graphical shell for SSH
I get it, but if the author of the article uses a biased and loaded language, I think it's fair game to do the same in the comments.
guhcampos··on A native graphical shell for SSH
Author apparently has never heard about Cockpit.

Everything they mention as "missing", or "novel" has been part of Cockpit for over a decade, from socket-based web server connection, backend-frontend separation for server apps and the whole idea of a server console with shell access itself.

To answer them: "Isn’t it weird that this doesn’t already exist?" - No, it's not, because it has existed for ages.

guhcampos··on HackerRank open sourced its ATS. My resume scored 90/100. Oh wait 74. No – 88
This is it. People mistake deterministic for precise/exact/correct. It's not.
guhcampos··on Did my old job only exist because of fraud?
I think I have a simpler answer: quarterly results.

Management just really needs to make the next earnings look like what it should look. Next quarter is next quarter's problem.

guhcampos··on Migrating from GNU Stow to Chezmoi
I used stow for a long time, then tried Ansible, but eventually settled into good old Make.

`make dotfiles` just creates a bunch of symlinks, takes 5 minutes, all good and happy. Everything is modular, declarative, simple. Never looked back.

guhcampos··on I found 10k GitHub repositories distributing Trojan malware
> Why do they only clone new repositories, rather than popular ones? > Why do they delete a commit and push a new one every few hours?

Because this is not targetted to humans. It's targetted to agents. They just need to appear on a fraction of the searches agents do to add dependencies and get lucky a couple times to start a new infection cluster.

Then to the more interesting question: why now?

1. Agents, agents everywhere.

2. MAJOR elections happening this year in the World, including US midterms and Brazilian mains. This appears to be an account-stealer worm - and my guess is it's looking to all those sweet sweet Facebook/Instagram/Tiktok/Whatsapp accounts ready to bot their way into oblivion.

guhcampos··on Let's Encrypt bans certificate usage in any US sanctioned territory [pdf]
The title was a bit misleading.

When I read it, I interpreted it as "let's encrypt bans certificate usage in - any territories endorsed by the US". Took me reading a couple comments to understand it actually meant "territories under US sanctions".

guhcampos··on Dropbox CEO Drew Houston to step down
Is that bad though?

Think about it. If you're paying all your bills, all your wages, and you have a strong product that people enjoy, and you're able to compete in the market - maybe not gaining any ground, but at least not losing any either - why change?

Of course I moderately understand the market pressures at work, but at some point in the human civilization journey we'll have to be content with something instead of chasing clouds all the time.

guhcampos··on Constraint Decay: The Fragility of LLM Agents in Back End Code Generation
I'm a convert. I was 100% skeptical about LLM code generation, now over 80% of the professional code I write is generated.

That said, the limitations are kind of obvious and are starting to show in some of my projects, and this article seems to confirm my suspicions. If it's just confirmation bias or not, I can't say yet.

In my experience, for anything complex enough, I have to start adding more and more constraints, style guides, corner cases, error handling, optimization guidelines and all this good stuff to my Markdown specifications, rules and skills. At some point this starts to look like we're all just moving complexity from the more formal and deterministic world of programming languages to the informal and non-deterministic world of natural language. The writing speed gains are enormous, yeah, and business sees this as productivity gains, of course - and we do it because the pressure for increased productivity is there, as it's always been; yet the trade off seems to be clear and a lot of people are just ignoring it.

guhcampos··on Launch HN: Superset (YC P26) – IDE for the agents era
We live in this era when folks can vibecode entire startups without ever making a simple Google Search.

https://github.com/apache/superset

guhcampos··on Ask HN: Who is hiring? (May 2026)
Being a fan of A24 I half wish I lived nearby!
guhcampos··on Avoid UUID Version 4 Primary Keys in Postgres
It's not that bad. Brazilian CPF are 11 numbers and everyone remembers them. You just get use to it =)
guhcampos··on Performance hacks for faster Python code
Or fab your own chip.
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