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jffry

3,553 karma · joined June 26, 2013

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jffry··on U.S. postal inspectors shut down website selling counterfeit postage labels
USPS still sells denominated stamps from $0.01 to $10.00, in addition to "First Class Forever" stamps - see near the bottom of the filters sidebar on https://store.usps.com/store/stamps
jffry··on Keychron announces first open-source firmware for gaming mice
Fn+Tab is the backlight toggle on my V5 Max (and it's specifically called out in the user manual https://www.keychron.com/pages/keychron-v5-max-user-manual)
jffry··on Upcoming breaking changes for NPM v12
The default behavior for the automated "add everything existing to the allowlist" is to include the specific version: https://docs.npmjs.com/cli/v11/using-npm/config#allow-script...

Together with a lockfile that does achieve "package xyz postinstall allowed with hash <1234>"

jffry··on Evolving Webflow for the Agentic Web
> "...we made the difficult decision to restructure Webflow’s team and operating model. As a result, many of our Webflow teammates are leaving the company today."

Leaving implies agency. You've fired these people. Using a euphemism that implies they had a choice in this matter is disingenuous and not "owning this decision"

jffry··on Dogme 25 – Vow of Chastity (2025)
"dogme" is the Danish, Norwegian, and French spelling of the word "dogma"

https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/dogme

jffry··on NASA Artemis Posters
These appear to be the highlights. There's also other galleries in https://www.nasa.gov/gallery/ with a bunch more photos:

https://www.nasa.gov/gallery/artemis-ii-launch/

https://www.nasa.gov/gallery/journey-to-the-moon/

https://www.nasa.gov/gallery/artemis-ii-flight-day-highlight...

https://www.nasa.gov/gallery/lunar-flyby/

https://www.nasa.gov/gallery/return-to-earth/

https://www.nasa.gov/gallery/artemis-ii-splashdown-and-recov...

jffry··on PostgreSQL production incident caused by transaction ID wraparound
tl;dr: autovacuum was seen to be active during an earlier incident, assumed to be at fault, and was disabled. It was never re-enabled. The long-term implications of disabling autovacuum were not actively considered.
jffry··on The Cathedral, the Bazaar, and the Winchester Mystery House
I think the graph is getting cut off for you - for me it reads "Agent Teams"
jffry··on A Founder Tried to Pitch – and Got a Restraining Order
"Workplace violence restraining orders" in California appear to be a type of restraining order that can be filed by an employer on behalf of an employee, to protect said employee from a third party

https://selfhelp.courts.ca.gov/WV-restraining-order

jffry··on Copilot edited an ad into my PR
> We've been including product tips in PRs created by Copilot coding agent

If the PR is wholly authored by Copilot I get the spirit of this, although maybe not the best implementation. And "tips" like this that look like an ad for a product _definitely_ feel like an enshittification betrayal of the user, even if it was a genuine recommendation and not a paid advertisement.

In the OP's situation, where where Copilot was summoned to fix some thing within a human-authored PR, irrelevant modification of the PR description to insert unrelated content is specifically egregious. Copilot can easily include the tip in its own comment, so I'm curious why it was decided to edit the description of a PR instead.

jffry··on If you don't opt out by Apr 24 GitHub will train on your private repos
It's unnecessarily splitting hairs.

> interaction data—specifically inputs, outputs, code snippets, and associated context [...] will be used to train and improve our AI models

So using Copilot in a private repo, where lots of that repo will be used as context for Copilot, means GitHub will be using your private repo as training data when they were not before.

jffry··on Antimatter has been transported for the first time
Nope, it's pretty compact. The first image in CERN's photo gallery shows it being loaded into that truck: https://cds.cern.ch/record/2957407?ln=en

Of course, it's compact because it only has to last so long. CERN's press release discusses needing a generator and a cryocooler in the truck for longer trips: https://home.cern/news/press-release/experiments/base-experi...

This older article about the test they did with ordinary protons, indicates the outer frame measures "2.00 meters in length, 0.87 meters in width, and 1.85 meters in height" and comes in under 1000kg https://ep-news.web.cern.ch/content/cerns-base-step-leap-for...

jffry··on Nvidia Launches Vera CPU, Purpose-Built for Agentic AI
An ASIC is custom silicon, no?

Anyways, I found this article discussing it a bit more: https://www.eetimes.com/taalas-specializes-to-extremes-for-e...

"Taalas is borrowing some ideas from the structured ASICs of the early 2000s to make its hardwired model-specific chips. Structured ASICs used gate arrays and hardened IP blocks, changing only the interconnect layers to adapt the chip to a specific workload. At the time, this was seen as a more cost-effective alternative to a full-custom ASIC that was more performant than an FPGA."

"Taalas changes only two masks to customize a chip for a specific model, but the two masks can change both model weights and dataflow through the chip. On the HC1, the model and its weights are stored on the chip using a mask-ROM-based recall fabric paired with a (programmable) SRAM, which can be used to hold fine-tuned weights and/or the KV cache. Future generations of chips may split the SRAM onto a separate chip, meaning they could be denser than the HC1."

jffry··on Nvidia Launches Vera CPU, Purpose-Built for Agentic AI
It's a tech demonstrator for a company that turns models into custom silicon for fast inference. In this case llama3.1-8b https://taalas.com/products/
jffry··on Physics Girl: Super-Kamiokande – Imaging the sun by detecting neutrinos [video]
For a sense of how crazy 30 detections per day is: Super-K is a cylinder 41.4m tall and 39.3m in diameter [1] and neutrino flux on Earth is 65 billion per square centimeter per second [2]

The tank's cross sectional area relative to the sun depends on its relative orientation to the sun. We'll ballpark it at somewhere between its circular endcaps (Pi x ((39.3/2)^2) = 1213 square meters) and its curved cylindrical face (which, pointed right at the sun, has a rectangular cross section of 41.4 x 39.3 = 1627 square meters).

So, conservatively, the neutrino flux through Super-K's tank is 1400 m^2 x (100cm/m)^2 x 6.5e10 neutrino/second/(cm^2) x 86400 seconds/day = 7.86e22 neutrinos/day passing through the tank. Of which 30 are detected.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Super-Kamiokande

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neutrino (end of intro section, just before History). Wikipedia says only that the "majority" of the 65 billion flux is from the sun, so we might be off by a factor of two-ish in the worst case.

jffry··on Officials Claim Drone Incursion Led to Shutdown of El Paso Airport
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_military_nuclear_accid...
jffry··on Raspberry Pi Drag Race: Pi 1 to Pi 5 – Performance Comparison
I've done the same thing - making a USB-only printer available on my LAN - following this guide: https://pimylifeup.com/raspberry-pi-print-server/

One nice thing is I can print to the CUPS server even if the printer is off

jffry··on I wasted years of my life in crypto
BTC cannot be split beyond 10^-8
jffry··on DIY NAS: 2026 Edition
Every time I've looked into doing a DIY NAS in the last few years Topton seems to come up - as far as I can tell it's because they make MiniITX boards with a boatload of SATA ports.
jffry··on End of Japanese community
"I'm sorry for how you feel about it" isn't exactly an empathetic opening stance
jffry··on FCC Accidentally Leaked iPhone Schematics
> I doubt Apple could demonstrably prove damages before the civil statute of limitations expires.

Statute of Limitations is about how long you have to file the case, by no means is it a deadline by which you must fully prove damages and have no opportunity to continue your case after it passes.

jffry··on SimpleFold: Folding proteins is simpler than you think
Apparently from a F@H blog post [1] they say it's still useful to know the dynamics of how it folded, in addition to the final folded shape. And that having ML-folded proteins is a rich target for simulation to validate and to understand how the protein works

[1] https://foldingathome.org/2024/05/02/alphafold-opens-new-opp...

jffry··on You didn't see it coming
It's a $12 stock photo, making it even stranger to put any source label on it https://www.istockphoto.com/vector/gm2076276464-564919694
jffry··on Vapor chamber tech keeps iPhone 17 Pro cool
> Do you know if the vapor chambers operate at reduced internal atmospheric pressure?

Indeed they do. A random search found this company that manufactures vapor chambers and they have a short discussion: https://radianheatsinks.com/vapor-chamber-heatsink/

jffry··on I launched a Mac utility; now there are 5 clones on the App Store using my story
I appreciate you having a go and it does look very attractive. It's not a problem I have but $5 is a reasonable request for something that gets the info into an understandable format for somebody.

I do think that small, single-purpose apps are probably the easiest lunch to eat. Narrowly scoped greenfield projects are where the LLMs seem to excel right now so that game seems like a race to the bottom.

As far as the cloning goes: your only recourse is probably the DMCA angle for the exact duplicate text. It's a shame they're so lazy as to straight copy it, but I suspect the response (if any) will be them lightly laundering it through ChatGPT so it's no longer the same.

Good luck! And I hope you find more useful ideas people might pay for

jffry··on I launched a Mac utility; now there are 5 clones on the App Store using my story
> My app's value is its simplicity

With or without the advent LLMs, it's an uphill battle to build a moat around a small (but nice!) wrapper around the output of a command-line tool shipped with MacOS.

> what is the moat?

Increasingly, and sadly, it's online services with a monthly subscription and no data portability. Get users in with a generous free tier and pull up the drawbridge so they can't get out easily.

jffry··on What's New with Firefox 142
First: No need to be rude, "in situ" is a very commonly used phrase among English speakers, as should be evident from the Wikipedia article [1] you yourself cited

Second: The normal Firefox translate feature replaces the text in the page with the translated text - retaining its styling, position, context w/ images, etc. The right click menu, does not. I described the right click menu as "not in situ" which is correct.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/In_situ

jffry··on NPM debug and chalk packages compromised
> Anyway didn't this replace versions, so locking won't have helped either?

The lockfile includes a hash of the tarball, doesn't it?

jffry··on What's New with Firefox 142
If you select a chunk of text in the page and right click there should be a context-menu option to translate the text. It's a popup with a textarea and not in-situ, but it's the same local model as far as I can tell
jffry··on F-Droid site certificate expired
Certainly with yearlong or multi year certs nobody of note ever forgot to renew them, right? https://hn.algolia.com/?dateEnd=1416268800&dateRange=custom&...
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