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jonstewart

3,718 karma · joined December 9, 2010

[ my public key: https://keybase.io/jonstewart; my proof: https://keybase.io/jonstewart/sigs/K9JLQMMOlAgjvlg-HZoZIle_xarkvo7BuvZBBcgvDT0 ]
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jonstewart··on What I did at Recurse Center
The Reagan years were a golden age but not the 90s?
jonstewart··on Pentium II at 600Mhz with Voodoo 3 Emulated on 86Box with M6 Mac Mini
Quake party!!!!
jonstewart··on How GLM built its own inference infrastructure
Necessity is the mother of invention. The shortsighted protections put on chips, etc., by the US has forced Chinese AI industry to adapt or die. Guess what their response to this fitness function has been? Kudos to Z.ai on their inventions and excellent write-up, which reads like humans wrote it.
jonstewart··on Nike exits the S&P 100 after 18 years and a $200B market-cap wipeout
I intellectually understand the retailpocalypse replaced by online shopping, but I will always want to try on clothes before buying them, and that goes double for shoes. After trying out New Balance for a year or two in adulthood I ended up going back to Nike running shoes (I still remember my pair of Air Icarus from high school, so light), just seemed to fit my feet better.

But now I wear Hokas. Nike’s loss.

jonstewart··on She Also Found It at the Movies
Because she was smart, and her reviews will make you think.
jonstewart··on South African diamond mines are closing due to weak sales and lab-grown stones
Too bad. I get mine from the small town butcher/locker when I’m in the Midwest in summer, and the neighborhood farmer’s market on the east coast the rest of the year. A couple of ribeyes a year and I’m good, so I see them as an affordable luxury where I can pay for good prime meat from a short supply chain.
jonstewart··on South African diamond mines are closing due to weak sales and lab-grown stones
Hopefully most people here getting ribeyes aren’t getting them from the same factory farms that supply McDonald’s and sell other cheap kinds of beef. A ribeye is an occasional luxury and best bought from the farmer.
jonstewart··on South African diamond mines are closing due to weak sales and lab-grown stones
So lab grown diamonds are good and cheap enough I can finally buy my wife of 21 years a diamond ring?
jonstewart··on The revolt of the reader
AI slop really needs to be auto-flagged. It’s been like 20% of front page links I click on lately.
jonstewart··on Product Backlog Problems: Why Your Hierarchy Is Broken
A strong whiff of AI writing.
jonstewart··on Show HN: FrontierHarness Eval – 9 harness, same model, cost per pass varies 17x
Forgive my stupidity but how do you run Claude Code with non-Anthropic models?
jonstewart··on Poisson Disk Sampling
Oh, that’s rather a different sort of disk sampling than I imagined.
jonstewart··on Hacking IKEA Furniture
I hadn’t been to IKEA in a decade or more but went this weekend to get new furniture for our kids. Today I put together a “vanity” for my daughter, and couldn’t help but think of the vanity I had in my room as a teenager that my mom had I inherited from some other family member, solid wood with beautiful birds-eye maple veneer. “Simulacrum” was the word I kept muttering to myself as I thought about what this next year in AI coding will bring.
jonstewart··on Why does Opus 5 feel worse to work with?
Pondering this one night last week, I realized that because LLMs can only reason with written language, what we might be seeing emerge with Opus’s load-bearing mumbo jumbo is its own creole for structural reasoning. Not only are our brains wide, our senses are, too. I slow down to a crawl when I have to read actual math in a CS paper, but show me diagrams and I can reason about whatever sort of data structure or algorithm, no problem. Opus by and large can’t and its adaptation has been to adopt metaphor for structural reasoning. So while it may be exceedingly annoying to chat with, I sort of wonder whether this metaphorical-reasoning behavior has been selected for precisely because it leads to better coding outcomes.
jonstewart··on The German Mittelstand
> Advancing the precedent set by Alfred, generations of Krupps would continue to develop the region through various private and public works, for almost a century into the 1920s. > > With their basic needs addressed and the workforce inculcated with the “Kruppianer spirit,” the firm crossed the fifth ring. They forged an empire that, by the late 1950s,

<insert Goose meme> “What did Krupp make in the 1930s?”

This was kind of an interesting article but could have been a great deal shorter and wasn’t particularly insightful.

jonstewart··on Protopia
Imagine writing several paragraphs defining “utopia” and not mentioning Thomas More.
jonstewart··on The Beam Engine
If you enjoyed this and haven’t been, you need to plan a trip to Paris to spend a day at Musée des Arts et Métiers.
jonstewart··on The kids with phones are alright
This essay extends one anecdote involving 16+ year old teenagers to the unsupported conclusion that kids should have phones and those who wish to restrict that are all wealthy 1% right wing authoritarians. Then with the personal note it seems clear that the core of the essay stems from the author's own personal trauma/experience.

I don't disagree that big adtech's reliance on dopamine-driven addictive behavior is real evil, but regulations that at least wall kids off from that makes sense and there's all kinds of research to suggest as much, in contrast to a personal essay about a video online.

jonstewart··on Regular expressions that work "everywhere"
Then there’s not just the issue of whether the engine supports a particular syntactical feature but the issue of matching semantics. Perl/PCRE’s semantics are far different from POSIX’s and some implementations different semantics altogether (and quite reasonably).
jonstewart··on Linux on Older Hardware: The Complete Revival Guide
I’ve got a 15 year old workstation that I’m breathing new life into, but fortunately starting from a higher baseline. 24GB of RAM is going to 96GB, and it turns out it should be able to use an NVMe drive, so have a card and an M2 drive on the way. The annoying thing is that the GTX 460 is no longer supported by the Nvidia driver so I’m back to nouveau. That might get replaced with something more modern. I had an old Mint installed and decided to blow it away with stock Debian, and Claude’s setting up nix VMs for itself to run in. It has been crazy how $4k in 2011 for an SR-2 system has yielded a long productive life for this box.
jonstewart··on Calvin and Hobbes and the price of integrity
Citation? I’m sure he’s fine but $100M?
jonstewart··on Firewood Splitting Simulator
There should be a "hickory" option where the axe just bounces back at you or gets stuck in the round.
jonstewart··on The better the autopilot the worse the pilot
Am I missing something? Is TFA only 2-3 paragraphs of a generic metaphor, with no actual data/research from aviation (or other fields) to back up the core thesis?
jonstewart··on Can we have the day off?
It’s from the Melian Dialogue (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Siege_of_Melos) and it’s perhaps the most succinct embodiment of the realist school of international relations/politics.

I quote it here because the best way to get a day off is not to continue being weak, but to find strength, just as miners and railroad workers found strength in the 1870s.

jonstewart··on Can we have the day off?
"The strong do what they can, the weak suffer what they must." — Thucydides
jonstewart··on All of human cooking compressed into 2 megabytes
Jacques Pepin's knuckles don't compress.
jonstewart··on Private equity bought America's essential services
Statutory antitrust regulation would be fantastic. Instead of litigation, the regulators, corporations, and shareholders know when a business must split or divest. The firm files a plan, it gets approved, everyone wins except monopolists.
jonstewart··on Greg Brockman interview [video]
Point of order: Anthropic is the most important AI company now.
jonstewart··on Eric Schmidt booed at University of Arizona after praising AI
Publishers (and authors) have long had a beef with Amazon. It was Barnes and Noble that put the bookstores out of business, and then Amazon put them out of business and no one really cared.

Most of the early internet unleashed pent-up demand for greater connectivity. The main industry that was negatively impacted was journalism. Most small towns had their own newspapers, there were many great newspapers across the country, and their business model was advertising, especially classifieds. That was all vaporized, more or less. I don’t think search ads were an improvement, though Craigslist is.

jonstewart··on Canvas online again as ShinyHunters threatens to leak schools’ data
I don't have an opinion on Instructure (except as a parent generally hating the overall app-ization of education; fortunately our district switched away from Canvas a couple years ago), their cybersecurity posture, or this particular event. My only point is that even if backups exist, working through a ransomware attack often takes time.

Also, ransomware gangs often exfil the data and threaten to release it if the ransom is not paid--blackmail, of a sort. It depends on the company and the data set whether this is effective as a tactic. But when it is, backups don't help.

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