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hajile

7,529 karma · joined October 4, 2013

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hajile··on Does anybody like React?
JSX is basically just a subset of E4X.
hajile··on Does anybody like React?
There are four culprits here and neither is due to JS.

First is the pursuit of polish. Each extra 1% in polish adds tons and tons of lines of code. If you want that level of polish on a non-SPA, you'll still have to add all that code then reload it one page at a time. I see a lot of these "bare HTML pages" and they are lacking important stuff like i18n/a11y/WCAG compliance. Try adding all that back in and you'll see your website bloat right up.

Second is bloated do-everything libraries. Ant, MUI, Mantine, or whatever else is aimed to be a superset of all possible website needs which means that the components you adopt have tons of features and bloat you don't need that slow down loading, parsing, and execution. Simply replacing that <Paper> component with a <div> and a few lines of CSS will get you the same thing you want, but will save you layers of unnecessary React components and sometimes a layer or two of unneeded DOM nodes as well that were added because the <Paper> component had weird interactions with some other component.

Third is manpower/experience. Many/most JS devs today (sad to say) don't actually know how to make that simple <Paper> component on their own. Those that do often skip it because they've got too much to do already. I've lost count of the number of teams I've seen where a bog-standard backend has 25 people working on stuff while the frontend team has 3x as many total lines of code (which are often times handling human-computer interaction issues the backend couldn't even imagin), but only 3-4 people to maintain it all.

Fourth is of course management. Designs on the backend change at a trickle while changes to the frontend arrive in a torrent. Understaffed frontend teams can't keep up with all the things shoved on their plate, so they usually can't optimize things even if they know how (eg, only a small percentage of SPA actually know/take the time to lazy load various parts of their apps to improve load time).

Fix these things and the SPA performance will improve drastically and almost certainly exceed BE templates with some jQuery spaghetti.

hajile··on Does anybody like React?
Vue doesn't solve problems better than React (and solves them worse if you have to learn all their proprietary files and DSLs instead of JSX), so there's not much of a reason to switch.

The real discussion would be between React's vdom and something like Solid's signals.

hajile··on Steve Wozniak cheered after telling students they have AI – actual intelligence
Money and monetary systems aren't compassionate -- people are.

Historically (in the USA), capitalism was paired with charity and supporting those around you (primarily for religious reasons).

One of the greatest downsides of the welfare system is that people don't give the money to others themselves (it's instead stripped from them and doled out without their input). They don't get to experience the good feelings that come from helping another person (only negative feelings about the government taking their money).

This removes the habits of practicing selflessness and it's positive feedback loop. As a result, we get all the downsides of capitalism with a trained selfish cohort who have no charitable feelings to counterbalance things.

hajile··on Steve Wozniak cheered after telling students they have AI – actual intelligence
> There is value in affording all beings dignity, respect, and the opportunity to thrive.

> there should be no question about their worth as a person

Dignity, respect, thriving, and even human worth don't exist without joy and at least a concept of suffering.

hajile··on AI is just unauthorised plagiarism at a bigger scale
Contracts are legally binding even if they weren't written by a lawyer. Copyright is legally binding even if no copyright claim is explicitly stated.

I looked into this a bit (not a lawyer) and it seems that robots.txt isn't legally binding to either party, but this seems to have two major implications for AI agents (and crawlers/scrapers in general).

First, even if the robots.txt says you can crawl the site, that isn't a copyright grant of any kind or permission to copy/use that data outside of the permissions granted by the TOS.

Second, ignoring the robots.txt while also pirating the site contents could point to bad-faith and makes a much stronger case for double-damage penalties due to willful infringement.

If the site TOS doesn't explicitly grant an AI agent rights to copy out the site content AND the AI agent is ignoring the robots.txt at the same time, it seems a lot more likely that there's a strong copyright infringement case against the agent owner.

hajile··on AI is just unauthorised plagiarism at a bigger scale
robots.txt seems like it should be a legally-binding terms of service which would make them outright copyright infringing.

Sue for $180,000 per infringement which should be calculated for each illegal API call.

hajile··on An OpenAI model has disproved a central conjecture in discrete geometry
It proves the limit doesn't exist, but doesn't seem to show how to find one of these more optimized limits. Given that nobody has ever brute-forced a counter-example, it may be that calculating these solutions is P=NP hard which would mean sticking with the status quo unless we find a good algorithm to calculate it on quantum computers and can actually get quantum computers large enough to work on the problem.

It's interesting as a math problem and test of AI, but not much else IMO.

hajile··on Nintendo announces price increases for Nintendo Switch 2
> Given that the impact of various changes in market conditions is expected to extend over the medium to long term, price revisions are also planned outside Japan as described below.

                     Current Price   Revised Price
    United States      $449.99         $499.99
    Canada             $629.99         $679.99
    Europe             €469.99         €499.99
These price changes reflect more than just Yen value dropping.
hajile··on The woes of sanitizing SVGs
We need a secondary official SSVG (Secure SVG) spec so the changes can be guaranteed by browsers and other implementors.

This would allow an update to the xmlns to

    <svg xmlns="http://www.w3.org/2000/ssvg">
Which would allow the image to force SSVG mode and disable all non-approved features, but you could also update the image tag so the client could force security on potentially insecure SVGs

    <img type="ssvg" src="/insecure.svg">
hajile··on DeepSeek v4
All these things are from the private sector and may be left behind if you like (do younger generations even listen to corporate news?)

The real issues are government surveillance and it increasingly getting involved in my personal matters, but it’s still more free than any other country I could go to. Look at countries in Europe like the UK without true freedom of press arresting people for mean tweets and giving them years in prison.

hajile··on DeepSeek v4
Kent state saw 4 people unjustly killed. Tiananmen killed 100 to 1000x as many people and that’s just in the area with the reporters. The crackdowns in the other 300 cities without cameras were almost certainly much more brutal.

Going further, discussion about Kent state won’t get you in any trouble in the US, but discussing Tiananmen in China will get a far different response from the government.

Comparing the two only highlights just how much more extreme and repressive the Chinese system is despite all the US moves toward authoritarianism.

hajile··on An update on recent Claude Code quality reports
My takeaway is that they knew they were changing a bunch of stuff while their reps were gaslighting us in the comments here.

Why should we ever trust what they say again out trust that they won’t be rug-pulling again once this blows over?

hajile··on PHP 8.6 Closure Optimizations
We could do something like `#function() {}` or `#() => {}` which makes a function static.
hajile··on What is RISC-V and why it matters to Canonical
What evidence do you have that RISC-V is being held back by fragmentation?

Every upcoming general purpose RISC-V core I'm aware of is targeting RVA23. That's even less fragmentation than x86 has.

Meanwhile, I don't know of ANY third-party chip designs using LoongArch, so asserting no fragmentation seems to be misrepresenting the situation a bit.

hajile··on What is RISC-V and why it matters to Canonical
There has been concerted effort to start working on these kinds of standards, but it takes time to develop and reach a consensus.

Some stuff like BRS (Boot and Runtime Services Specification)and SBI (Supervisor Binary Interface) already exist.

hajile··on What is RISC-V and why it matters to Canonical
You can choose to develop proprietary extensions, but who’s going to use them?

A great case study is the companies that implemented the pre-release vector standard in their chips.

The final version is different in a few key ways. Despite substantial similarities to the ratified version, very few people are coding SIMD for those chips.

If a proprietary extension does something actually useful to everyone, it’ll either be turned into an open standard or a new open standard will be created to replace it. In either case, it isn’t an issue.

The only place I see proprietary extensions surviving is in the embedded space where they already do this kind of stuff, but even that seems to be the exception with the RISCV chips I’ve seen. Using standard compilers and tooling instead of a crappy custom toolchain (probably built on an old version of Eclipse) is just nicer (And cheaper for chip makers).

hajile··on What is RISC-V and why it matters to Canonical
ARM is British (America’s closest ally) and proprietary. If you’re swapping, just eliminate the risk and cost entirely.

LoongArch is 32-bit instructions only. This means no MCUs due to poor code density. That forces them into RISCV anyway at which point, you might as well pour all your money and dev time into one ISA instead of two. RISCV has way more worldwide investment meaning LoongArch looks like a losing horse in the long term when it comes to software.

hajile··on What is RISC-V and why it matters to Canonical
RVA23 is the standard target for compilers now. If you support newer stuff, it’ll take a while before software catches up (just like SVE in ARM or AVX in x86).

If you try to make your own extensions, the standard compiler flags won’t be supporting it and it’ll probably be limited to your own software. If it’s actually good, you’ll have to get everyone on board with a shared, open design, then get it added to a future RVA standard.

hajile··on Many African families spend fortunes burying their dead
Lab corundum is where it's at. Almost as hard as diamond (Mohs 9), but much less prone to cracking than diamond. It's available in tons of colors (most famous are blue and red -- sapphires and rubies). Lab-grown is so much better than natural that the way they identify natural is by looking for imperfections that lab versions don't have.

Oh, and diamonds burn while aluminum oxide does not.

There's no need to go broke when you can buy a superior product for less money.

hajile··on JSIR: A High-Level IR for JavaScript
I want them to finish the official TC39 binary AST proposal. Nearly twice as fast to parse and a bit smaller than minified code makes it a pretty much universally useful proposal.

https://github.com/tc39/proposal-binary-ast

hajile··on F-15E jet shot down over Iran
Maybe they've been taking down jets the entire time and you've simply been lied to and the situation on the ground is different than what you believe.

CENTCOM tweeted that no shootdown occurred only for Iran to show the wreckage and one of the ejection seats. CENTCOM said Iran didn't shoot down the F-35, but it apparently crashed in Saudi Arabia and we sent out a Chinook to run search patterns to find it.

CENTCOM claimed a single Kuwait (ghost of Kuwait?) shot down three different F-15s by accident, but those planes were close enough to Iran that they could have been targeted by Iran (which seems more likely than the massive chain of mistakes required for the Kuwaiti shootdown to happen).

CENTCOM also only talks about US planes shot down and excludes Israeli F-15 that have been hit. CENTCOM also doesn't count all the very expensive drones that have been shot down, but their total value is at least a half-billion dollars.

Finally, CENTCOM is straight-up lying about air superiority. They claimed they'd switched to gravity bombs, but people instantly noticed that all the planes going up were using long-range JASSM stand-off missiles so they don't have to actually go very far inside Iran and can keep their planes in a safer section of the country. CENTCOM loaded up a B-52 with JDAMs and took a couple pictures, but all the pictures after that photo-op still show super-expensive JASSM (costing as much as $1.6M each).

If our planes never enter their airspace, there's nothing for them to shoot down. I'd note they've also shot down a couple of JASSM missiles which is interesting itself as the radar cross-section of a JASSM is believed to be pretty close to an F-35.

Iran is currently using bongo trucks with an IRST and a couple missiles that can even loiter in the air if there's no target. Being electro-optically guided means they are passive and the human element makes them a lot less likely to miss due to chaff.

These little trucks can hide ANYWHERE and because they aren't a massive multi-vehicle setup like a Patriot or S-300, they should be able to relocate often and quickly (they might even be able to stay mobile while in operation). This mobility combined, ability to hide as a normal truck, and completely passive sensors make them almost impossible to find and destroy.

hajile··on F-15E jet shot down over Iran
All CAS can cause friendly fire, but that doesn't remove the need for CAS.

The A-10 flies slower and closer than our fighter jets which means they have more time to assess the situation before taking action.

hajile··on F-15E jet shot down over Iran
List the number of attacks on America by Iran. Now list the number of attacks from our "allies" like the Saudis or Israel.

Words don't matter as much as actions and the biggest attacks on the US by countries in the ME were done by Israel and Saudi Arabia.

hajile··on F-15E jet shot down over Iran
When they struck desalination plants in Bahrain would be an easy example. You can say that they are retaliatory strikes, but they are certainly against the Geneva Conventions.

Iran's use of cluster munitions to attack swaths of Israeli cities is also against the Geneva Convention (though I'd again point out that we started hitting civilian targets in Iran first).

Both sides have violated the conventions, but the US and Israel have violated them to a much greater degree (especially Israel and all their attacks on Lebanese civilians not to mention razing Gaza).

hajile··on F-15E jet shot down over Iran
CENTCOM claimed the F-35 made it made it back to base, but right after the hit happened, they sent out a Chinook to run search patterns in the area. Additionally, the pilot was treated for shrapnel wounds. As he's at the front of the plane, it wasn't some "near miss" like that really cool F-18 evasion (where it timed the break exactly and the shrapnel all blew past it).

CENTCOM has turned out to be about as honest as the Russian or Ukrainian MoD. They flat-out lied about this shootdown all while sending out search teams. There is some circumstantial evidence that two Blackhawks were damaged trying to run search and rescue operations. There are also stories coming out that they are using bureaucracy to hide massive numbers of casualties.

hajile··on F-15E jet shot down over Iran
Look at the super-precise strike on the E-3 sentry that we have pictures of. We know at least one other was hit.

If Iran can do this with AWACS, they can do even more with the hundreds of fighter jets in Israeli and US bases (it's much easier to cover up the destruction of an F-15 or F-35). Once this war ends, I think we'll see that most of the aircraft kills are going to be on the ground.

hajile··on F-15E jet shot down over Iran
MANPADS have a range of around 4 miles. Most soldiers aren't carrying around armed MANPADS. They have to fetch the MANPADS, arm it, aim, and fire all before the jet dumps its load and flares before bailing out. Because of this, MANPADS are a much greater threat to helicopters or CAS like the Warthog than they are to jets dumping ordinance. This has been proven pretty decisively in Ukraine.

Radar is line-of-sight. A non-stealth fighter flying just above the treetops can only be detected if it gets within a few miles of a SAM radar. This is true to the point that the radar lock range for something like an F-35 is about the same as a non-stealth jet flying super-low (though the hit probability is lower for the F-35 if it's flying at high altitude as it has more room to detect the launch and maneuver).

The problem is that CENTCOM is actively lying to us. After this shootdown, they denied it happened while launching search and rescue operations only admitting to the facts after Iran released the evidence. The same thing happened with the F-35. CENTCOM said it landed safely, but were simultaneously sending an Chinook to run search patterns in the area. This could also mean that the alleged Kuwaiti pilot that supposedly took out 3 of our F-15 was also a lie.

Finally, with so many non-stealth planes getting shot down and stealth allegedly working great, why are we using so many stand-off munitions still and why aren't we using F-35 more?

All the shootdowns have been shown with a custom software showing an IR view and the successful missiles seem to be using electro-optical tracking. The IRST is passive and doesn't trigger sensors plus isn't stopped by our radar stealth. At the same time, a human operator means stuff like flares don't work anywhere near as well. Even more scary, these human-guided runs are premium training material for China to train AI-guided missiles.

My conclusion is that stealth is no longer the game-changer it was once though to be (if it ever was).

hajile··on F-15E jet shot down over Iran
The videos we've seen match up with what we've seen on the ground. They are all running a custom software we haven't seen elsewhere and don't seem to be traditional MANPADS in any way.

We know Iran is driving around bongo trucks with small SAM systems on the back that use passive IRST rather than radar. The missiles themselves have the capability to cruise in the air for some period of time searching for a target before kicking in the engine for a last, fast sprint to the target. Because they are electro-optical (and piloted by a human), even early-warning and flare deployments won't do very much against a skilled operator.

hajile··on ESP32-S31: Dual-Core RISC-V SoC with Wi-Fi 6, Bluetooth 5.4, and Advanced HMI
Adding 2 frequency ranges is more expensive. If you're going to choose just one, you should choose the one with the greatest backward compatibility.
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