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kgen

194 karma · joined May 12, 2008

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kgen··on Scaling Memory Safety: AI-Assisted Rewrites of C/C++ Dependencies to Rust
Yes, from the article they basically did all those things
kgen··on Silicon Valley Is Transforming the Military-Industrial Complex
Real sv tech workers don't ride the VTA :P
kgen··on The entire city of San Francisco as a video game
This is excellent! Wish it had more of the surrounding area, and the announcements are all queued/delayed, but still lots of fun. Love the style as well
kgen··on If you care about security you might want to move the iPhone Camera app
Because it's on the homescreen in the default layout and a large number of people don't change their defaults?
kgen··on Abstraction, not syntax
Code as configuration loses one primary benefit which is being able to read the actual config and know exactly what will apply. In the example in the article you would get the same benefit by disallowing users to edit the config directly and instead require the config to be generated via a cmdline app/service that encodes the same policy?
kgen··on QuakeNotch: Quake Terminal on your MacBook's notch
Totally agree, I even grew up in the quake/dn3d era and wasn't familiar with the term either!
kgen··on SMS 2FA is not just insecure, it's also hostile to mountain people
What's the theater with sms 2fa? That is more secure than not having it enabled no?
kgen··on Cozy video games can quell stress and anxiety
When I started stardew I didn't know how to play so I would spend days waking up walking around and then go back to sleep repeating until my parsnips grew, but when I introduced my SO to the game, we ended up trying to learn how to actually play and then ended up with spreadsheets to track all the seasons, grow cycles, relationships and whatever else lol
kgen··on Brazil's government-run payments system has become dominant
Only in theory right? The moment you use it with a service that requires credentials or an email or a physical address to mail to, it's not, unless you somehow wash it through an anonymous pool somehow
kgen··on Arsenal FC AI Research Engineer job posting
I think he means in Moneyball
kgen··on TikTok goes dark in the US
I don't know why you think it's randomly (or recently) decided -- it started in 2020 (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Restrictions_on_TikTok_in_the_...), culminating in this act (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Protecting_Americans_from_Fore...) banning the app, which passed 360-58.

Have you ever gotten 36 people to agree to something, let alone 360? There's obviously more to this that we aren't aware of.

kgen··on TikTok goes dark in the US
Or maybe occam's razor suggests that there's indeed something more concerning about usage of the app that we aren't privy to?
kgen··on ByteDance’s Bytespider is scraping at much higher rates than other platforms
To be honest, it's probably not enough to just block these scrapers if they are acting maliciously, people should just start serving generated content back to it and see how long it takes for them to catch on and fix the problem
kgen··on Can Large Language Models Understand Symbolic Graphics Programs?
I was just about to post the same thing -- quite a fascinating test of gpt's capabilities
kgen··on Airlines are running out of 4-digit flight numbers
But lots of airlines have come and gone or merged over the years and these systems would have already had to deal with new airlines codes?
kgen··on Blender 16yo winner of UK young animator of the year
I was thinking about that very thing as well, but I came to the conclusion that robotic movement doesn't really need to match human movements. If you want to have consistent fine motor control, you wouldn't really expect things like acceleration when hitting with a hammer, or pulling down the top of the griddle.
kgen··on NPR cancels 4 podcasts amid major layoffs
There's PBS, but yeah if it had the popularity of BBC it would probably look a lot different.
kgen··on OpenAI tech gives Microsoft's Bing a boost in search battle with Google
Right, and what the person above is saying is that spyware/bad extensions can be making random searches which muddy your profile's search data
kgen··on Alder Lake Core i9 processor is faster than the M1 Max
I imagine the GPU also draws lower power during idle, so they would both scale at undefined rates when benchmarking
kgen··on Ask HN: Selling framed physical art online
I've definitely bought my fair share of non-framed art on Etsy, so that is one option.
kgen··on iPhone camera app replaces person’s head with a leaf in photo
This is so interesting, I how you debug something like this (assuming there is no copy of the original pre-processed image as well)?
kgen··on Ask HN: Why do so many developers seem hostile to their users these days?
This is a good question, and one that I've been thinking a lot about as well. I think the problem is that

A) there's a LOT more people using computers now than ever before, and

B) the entry point into "computing" has lowered, which means that users come to a piece of software with a wide range of expectations of both what it should do, and how it should do it, and

C) the complexity matrix of the form factors that people expect to use software has also grown in size, and

D) software grows in complexity in response to the needs of the users (B) and the devices it runs on (C)

E) tack onto the above is that you really have to handle N+10 things nowadays to have a proper piece of software (ie. i10n, security, UX, performance, etc.)

It's a bit of a cop out to just blame complexity, but it's almost impossible to have a small team write a (sufficiently complicated) program that does all the above, but companies want single-software solutions (runs on everything for everyone from new users to veterans) and users also expect it. So as a result, developers are overworked, users complain the software doesn't do what they expect (often for good reasons), and devs often end up resenting users because despite their best intentions, it's simply not possible (a lot of the time) to make something that satisfies everyone.

kgen··on Lego Sets Are Better Investments Than Stocks, Bonds or Even Gold
As if Lego sets weren't already expensive enough...
kgen··on Chrome OS overtakes Macs for second place OS market share for the first time
Huh, I've never used a Chromebook (even a cheap one from 2014) that had more than a second wait to open a tab. Sounds like there's something wrong with whatever ones your school particular issued.
kgen··on Uber Will Rent Scooters Through Its App in Partnership with Lime
The only reason it works on a beach is that there aren't drive ways and intersecting streets. Are you proposing that we make the side walks level with the street? If so, then it's no different than what we have now, and if not, then you'll have ramps every block that go from street level and back up to sidewalk level?
kgen··on Dumb Things Camera Companies are Still Doing
Yeah, I found the same with my GoPro, but you don't have to go to the trouble of setting up an AP, just get a UHS sdcard and pop it out and into a compatible reader.
kgen··on Ask HN: What feature would you want the web to “force” next, after HTTPS?
I like this idea, but because websites have the content, they can simply throw up a button that requests showing your identity to view the content and most people would blindly click it leading to the same situation we have now. The HTTPS push is important and works because the search engines can leverage their importance and the browsers can (effectively) scare people without any user input.
kgen··on Buying Lotion on Amazon.com
Sure, if you only bought a single item once, but when you have a shopping cart full and a repeated purchases over the year, $10 here and $10 there can easily add up over the year. The article is clearly just highlighting the wider problem using a single product as an example.
kgen··on TCP/IP headers leak info about what you're watching on Netflix
I tried spinning up a VM on google gcp this weekend since my laptop was low on memory, and easily scaled it to 24gb with a literal click of a button. At a few bucks per hour, it doesn't really seem that far out of reach for most people these days?
kgen··on Unplanned Freefall? Some Survival Tips
I remember hearing about that as well, likely from a Radiolab or This American Life podcast (can't find it right now), but http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=1291121... talks about it a bit more.

LT;DR, people didn't actually experience time slowing, they just happened to remember more of what was happening.

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