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gumby

63,701 karma · joined June 19, 2010

Currently working on removing excess methane from the atmosphere.

Previous lives:

gnu hacker (e.g. co-founder of Cygnus back in '89) Pharma developer (Talima) Distributed solar thermal systems (Terrajoule) MIT AI Lab/PARC/MCC/Rodin consumer tabletop AR (CastAR) Etc...

remove-everything-up-through-last-dash-gumby@brachiate.org

submissionscomments
gumby··on Example.com just launched the biggest redesign in decades
Static test is still, IMHO best, but if they want that fancy transition they could at least have used a gif. All that js is terrible overkill.
gumby··on Systematic review+meta-analysis: cannabis use associated with risk of violence
Actual title was too long: “Cannabis use is associated with increased risk of violence: A systematic review and meta-analysis”
gumby··on Turn off Apple Intelligence on macOS 27 and get its disk space back
It’s hard to strip it down these days as the OS image and its core, immutable filesystem cannot be edited. Admittedly this helps keep idiots from destroying their filesystem and also blocks many malware attacks on the system, but, for example. I don’t believe you can delete the chess program.
gumby··on Barcodes are about to go extinct
Don’t let them wear hats or have pockets!!
gumby··on Barcodes are about to go extinct
Maybe use a hologram
gumby··on Barcodes are about to go extinct
Sheesh, does nobody speak English any more? “Meteorites” are the members of that revolutionary faction who support more meteors.
gumby··on Hair Loss Was Just the Start. Ozempic Users Are Also Reporting Nail Trouble
FDA trials follow this approach. If something bad happens it’s logged as an adverse event; if they croak it’s a serious adverse event (SAE).

So if you have a treatment for moles, and a patient (trial participant) has a mole on their back treated and then falls down the stairs or is run over by a trolley the agency wants you to do an analysis to see if the treatment might have had something to do with getting run over or not taking the lift.

Note: this is not an exaggeration. I have written phase I and phase II clinical trial protocols earlier in my career.

gumby··on Everyone's Packing Up
Reddit is leaving me, by killing RSS. Oh well.
gumby··on Apple Pass Designer
Whats’s the monopoly in this case?

In general, whatever else one can say about Apple, it’s hard to see them having a monopoly in anything. Apple phones are about 1/3 of all phones in use; Apple laptops are well less than 20% of all laptops (bigger than I would have guessed), their VR headsets in use might crack three digits (OK, an exaggeration, but could there be more than 100K actually in image? I doubt it), etc.

Same is true in software and services (does anyone use iMessage outside the US?), and every place that takes Apple Pay takes Google too, nd most also take Samsung; many countries just use QR codes.

gumby··on Scientists untangle the biology of an 'undruggable' cancer gene
to get around paywall: https://archive.ph/4uZAg
gumby··on US tells France and Germany to release diesel stocks or face US export ban
I think people would just pack them into their checked luggage, where a fire could be much more dangerous.
gumby··on US tells France and Germany to release diesel stocks or face US export ban
Even 20 years ago batteries were advancing at a plodding pace. Things were just changing enough that you could build a smart phone, but battery life was by today’s standards low and charger anxiety was a real issue.

Nowadays I rarely carry a charger. On the either hand I am carrying several devices that are right on the knife edge of catching fire at any time

gumby··on US tells France and Germany to release diesel stocks or face US export ban
I love this one. I usually say “dinosaur-burner” (though really oil and natgas were overwhelmingly made from algae).

And every time you want to get angry at the petroleum companies remember that they saved the whales.

gumby··on Singapore govt dating app uses Gale-Shapley stable marriage algorithm
In some ways it’s easier. In my 40s I was meeting ppl online and one mentioned that she knew my name, where I had gone to university, and from those starting points learned a lot about me. Not enough to sustain more than a few dates but at least she knew I was not a convicted mass killer. And nowadays reverse image search and such means you can scope out your prospective date’s background.

Around the same time I met my now wife online and it turns out I knew several of her neighbours (she knew them all), had visited some of them, yet she and I had never met. So community cred isn’t automatic.

And I have friends who met in a bar 30-odd years ago, both who were there alone. So…?

gumby··on AI needs $6T in annual revenue to justify data centre boom
A half a year! I was an arpanet(->Internet) user starting in the 70s and yes it was a massive research accelerator (for a tiny set of domains) but the real use (human contact, mainly mailing lists back then), while already strong, took decades to reach mass adoption.
gumby··on Virus Stole a Human Gene and Won't Let Go of It
I speculated in a different reply that it’s to reduce dups. Two people could post the same article, but if they used different paywall-bypassers they would appear as separate submissions.
gumby··on Virus Stole a Human Gene and Won't Let Go of It
My understanding is you’re not supposed to post paywall-cutting links but it’s ok to post them as comments. Perhaps to prevent dupes? Or perhaps there is no such rule.
gumby··on The End of a Fair Price: Dynamic Pricing and the Normalization of Gouging
Of course in enterprise sales this has been the norm since forever, referred to as “value pricing”.

Back in the early days of laptops, I went to Oracle to give them a quote; while cooling my heels in the lobby I looked round, realized I was being an idiot, and so opened my laptop and increased the prices across the board.

gumby··on What makes software development engineering
SCADA (Supervisory control and data acquisition) goes back to the 50s with, yes, remote access. Security has never been a design factor (after all, how many people had mainframes in the 50s?).

So yes, from very early in the design process.

gumby··on Scientists solve 1840s space weather mystery
Yeah, there will be a flourishing of “butterfly collecting” in cross-domain correlation and then it will settle down and just be an unremarkable part of scientific research: occasionally enlightening but often a fruitless task.
gumby··on Kids turned low-traffic NPR Spotify comments into a secret group chat
French kids started doing this in the 1930s with the talking clock (a French invention BTW). The clock was basically a busbar: callers were all connected to the clock. When it was not speaking the time (at the minute) callers could speak and be heard by others. And it was a free call!

The phone system had switched to digital by the time I started using it so I never got to experience this, but in exchange I could use Minitel!

gumby··on The Mars Delusion
I am extremely excited and supportive of the exploration of our solar system and beyond.

But what’s with the obsession of sending humans?? Robots already do the important space science (at least the data collection parts) and are well adapted to working in space, unlike humans who have to drag a chunk of Earth around with them everywhere. Robots are leaving the solar system, while no human would be interested in such a journey, no matter how interested they are in the data.

Frankly, the people who act as if it’s important to have humans in space, as rather embarrassing.

On the other hand, I’m perfectly supportive of human spaceflight for tourism and recreation. But let’s not pretend that humans should be involved in the important work out there, except from Earth.

Never send a human to do a machine’s job.

gumby··on The Normalization of Inexplicable Failures
As far a I can tell, most didn’t bother to see if it worked for the system,p. They just needed to have it compile in their system and then they’d call it done.
gumby··on Don't couple your Go code to GitHub
Seems like an error to use a URL. This is perfect for a URN or some other form of URI.

It could be a URN that used the DNS as a back end (though that’s a lot like a URL) so better would be something more abstract with multiple possible resolvers and a signature.

gumby··on What even is an OS now?
The exploratory or malleable environment had its day, and as described in the post could come back. The most successful (and they ultimately failed) were the Xerox PARC D-machines (dependents of the Alto) and the MIT Lisp machines (later sold by Symbolics, LMI, and others). I was at both institutions and used both kinds of machines for years.

All of these machines booted into an environment that had OS, networking, windowing etc in a single address space (where your software ran too). The D-machines booted into Smalltalk, Interlisp, or Cedar/Mesa environments. All were deeply networked: they didn’t have local file systems, for example.

The downside of these environments was the complete lack of security: not just the old password situation but a bug could bring the whole system down (OTOH whem so,etching went wrong you immediately entered the debugger with all state in place, sort of like ITS. No core dumps). Then you could just reboot of course. Commonly, people would just save their entire memory image and restart it later; I worked with one person who had been using the same memory image (saving it each day) for years.

Nowadays we can do more sophisticated things than we could 40 years ago. Maybe a machine that boots into a polyglot interpreter for Python, JS, C++, that also took compiled code.

I’ve never been as productive as the years I worked on then lispm. LLMS would have supercharged it…but they didn’t exist: we were working on AI back then!

gumby··on How to keep enjoying programming in a world of LLMs
> "the rockstar engineer spent a week bouncing their favorite nerf ball off the wall all week and then the solution came to them"

I wouldn’t call myself a rockstar but I did get a job after a summer internship which I mostly spent touring with the Grateful Dead. At the end of the summer I was in the office and the head of the research division said he hadn’t seen me much(!). I said I’d been thinking and had some ideas on how the group’s research plan was flawed and how to do it better. I then filled his whiteboard with off the cuff ideas.

I spent the next several years with a team implementing the whiteboard.

I like to think things work better these days, AI or no AI

gumby··on The Copilot+ PC brand is dead
I long believed a not-insignificant factor was that they had bought the trademark to alexa when they bought the company.
gumby··on Banks and Credit Unions to Team Up Against Apple Pay Fees
The problem is if merchants stop accepting Apple Pay or any other privacy-supporting payment system.
gumby··on Banks and Credit Unions to Team Up Against Apple Pay Fees
Initially I was casually (didn’t dig into the issue) fine with Apple allowing only a single access to payment via NFC due to the opportunity for fraud, which was Apple’s justification.

But I haven’t heard of it happening with the wild-west Android NFC payments, much less widespread problems with the essentially unconstrained use of QR code payments on SE Asia (e.g. Alipay).

So as an iPhone user I’m happy for Apple’s lockdown going away. I just hope it doesn’t mean that in future I’ll need to install a dozen payment apps and have to figure out which when I buy things.

gumby··on The Mafia may be keeping fentanyl out of Italy
He was part of the management team and they know each others’ views. Schiller’s stepping back was a clear signal to me.
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