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khamidou

143 karma · joined September 13, 2022

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khamidou··on VLC's Jean-Baptiste Kempf Receives the European SFS Award 2025
Seems like Kyber is dual-licensed AGPL and proprietary, seems like a pretty standard way to fund an open source project.
khamidou··on NoLongerEvil-Thermostat – Nest Generation 1 and 2 Firmware
In that case wouldn't the blame lie in the smarty-pants person? When the web site says everywhere that it's beta quality?
khamidou··on NoLongerEvil-Thermostat – Nest Generation 1 and 2 Firmware
The user is going to win after going out of their way to install an aftermarket binary blob on their deprecated thermostat? Seems like a stretch no?
khamidou··on NoLongerEvil-Thermostat – Nest Generation 1 and 2 Firmware
This is for people who have already bought a nest and got burnt by the deprecation of their online services. Of course they could get another thermostat but then that'd just be more stuff for the landfills.
khamidou··on NoLongerEvil-Thermostat – Nest Generation 1 and 2 Firmware
I don't get the hate, it looks like they reverse-engineered the nest thermostat and wrote a firmware for it? That's super cool and the fact that an open source project doesn't have a privacy policy yet doesn't really matter at this point
khamidou··on PlanetScale Offering $5 Databases
btw I've used neon for that and it worked well. Disclaimer: I have no relationship with them, I just have a shoestring budget.
khamidou··on Crunchyroll is destroying its subtitles
Obviously you probably thought about it but what about rendering the subtitles on top of the video stream? Was there a reason it was not possible (e.g DRMs?)
khamidou··on Fil-C: A memory-safe C implementation
Hey Filip – while we're talking about memory architecture, have you started looking at ARM's EMTE extension (e.g https://security.apple.com/blog/memory-integrity-enforcement...)? Could it eventually replace invisicaps?
khamidou··on Asahi Linux Still Working on Apple M3 Support, M1n1 Bootloader Going Rust
Very strange logic. If we follow your example, going to the dealership and taking a car for a test drive is a rug pull because eventually the car dealer will ask you to pay for the car?
khamidou··on Asahi Linux Still Working on Apple M3 Support, M1n1 Bootloader Going Rust
How is wanting to build software sustainably a rug pull? Like seriously, if you get value from orbstack, it's fair to pay them.

Otherwise you can still stick to free alternatives like colima which would be CLI only

khamidou··on French ex-president Sarkozy begins jail sentence
If you read up on this story, you'd find out it's not run off the mill corruption. Sarkozy actually conspired with a foreign state – in particular with someone who directed a terror attack that killed 50 french citizens (!) – to fund his campaign.
khamidou··on Wikipedia says traffic is falling due to AI search summaries and social video
I mean, it's not like you can get away with running with zero SREs if you're running in the cloud. The personnel costs for on-prem hosting are vastly exaggerated, especially if you contract out the actual annoying work to a colo.
khamidou··on Wikipedia says traffic is falling due to AI search summaries and social video
If you look up their latest annual report (https://wikimediafoundation.org/wp-content/uploads/2025/04/W...) you can see that they're allocating ~1.7% of their expenses towards hosting.

I doubt that they're getting "hugged to death" by AI scrapers.

khamidou··on Leaving serverless led to performance improvement and a simplified architecture
A lot of it is because platforms need a wedge against AWS/Azure.

Take edge computing for example – most apps are CRUD apps that talk to a single database, but vendors keep pushing for running things on edge servers talking to databases with eventual consistency because hey, at least AWS doesn't offer that! (or it would cost you 10k/month to run that on AWS)

khamidou··on Ask HN: Build Your Own LLM?
Sorry to self-promote but I did exactly that a few months back: https://khamidou.com/gpt2/

Generally, I think the Karpathy tutorials are a good starting point but they're very mathy (despite people telling you you only need high school math to understand llms, a lot of the abstractions and concepts he uses are a bit foreign to programmers).

I found out rebuilding inference of a known model taught me a lot more than passively sitting through the videos and maybe retyping his code. You should try it with something simple, like a model from a few years back!

khamidou··on Zig builds are getting faster
> What's the use case for Zig? You're in that 1% of projects in which you need something beyond what a garbage collector can deliver and, what, you're in the 1% of the 1% in which Rust's language design hurts the vibe or something?

You want a modern language that has package management, bounds checks and pointer checks out of the box. Zig is a language you can pick up quickly whereas rust takes years to master. It's a good replacement to C++ if you're building a game engine for example.

> Either a language lets you prove the absence of certain classes of bug or it doesn't. It's not like C, Zig, and Rust form a continuum of safety. Two of these are different from the third in a qualitative sense.

Again repeating my critique from the previous comment – yes Zig brings in additional safety compared to C. Dismissing all of that out of hand does not convince anyone to use rust.

khamidou··on Zig builds are getting faster
Please — rust advocates need to realize that you're not winning anyone to rust with this kind of outlandish comments.

Zig is not an extreme sports experience. It has much better memory guarantees than C. It's clearly not as good as rust if that's your main concern but rust people need to also think long and hard about why rust has trouble competing with languages like Go, Zig and C++ nowadays.

khamidou··on Software CEO to Catholic panel: AI is more mass stupidity than mass unemployment
Just because they send them to a school without cell phones doesn't mean they're not hopelessly addicted to them
khamidou··on Software CEO to Catholic panel: AI is more mass stupidity than mass unemployment
> The privileged few among us (I am not one of them) don't struggle with avoiding these addictions.

Counterpoint, the richest man in the world is clearly addicted to being on twitter and posts at all hours of the day. More generally I don't see why the richest wouldn't be addicted to social media like the rest of us – after all they have a lot more free time and disposable income

khamidou··on Libghostty is coming
That's very helpful – thanks for taking the time.
khamidou··on Libghostty is coming
I'd be curious to hear more about how tmux helps you — I tried it and besides keeping a permanent session open on a remote server to me I didn't find much use for it compared to regular terminal tabs
khamidou··on The allure of new languages vs. the necessity of problem-solving
> If memory safety was the only relevant metric, we would've rewritten everything in Java decades ago.

well for a good 15-20 years the jvm had awful startup times which probably was why it was not attractive as a systems language. Does being garbage collected matter for a tool like cat? I would say no

khamidou··on The allure of new languages vs. the necessity of problem-solving
If I understand correctly, in your analogy, golang is floppies and rust is a sophisticated version control system? lol
khamidou··on The allure of new languages vs. the necessity of problem-solving
> If all the kids love Rust and hate C, then perhaps a switch to Rust might be a necessary evil to ensure we'll have well-maintained coreutils for another generation. You still need to be careful to avoid the fad of the day, but I think it's pretty clear by now that Rust is here to stay.

It's very unclear – to me it seems more like there's a vocal minority on people on here commenting on every C post "someone should rewrite this in a memory-safe language".

People tend to forget that C got so popular because it had very simple semantics (with much UBI ofc). Golang is arguably more popular than rust, has much simpler semantics and is much easier to pick up.

In all my years in tech I've rarely seen a more complex tool beat a simpler one (otherwise we'd all be using VMS), I'm not holding my breath for rust's longevity.

khamidou··on The allure of new languages vs. the necessity of problem-solving
I mean the one bug with the 9.8 CVSS was a denial of service when calling sort(1). That sounds like CVE grade inflation tbh – if you have attackers running sort on your machine they can probably run worse exploits.
khamidou··on A board member's perspective of the RubyGems controversy
For sure – but maybe it doesn't have to be the side project of a non-profit whose main thing is RailsConf.
khamidou··on A board member's perspective of the RubyGems controversy
Again this is mixed causality. Rails did not take off because of commercial interests – besides dhh who was working on it on the side, all the initial committers were doing that for fun.

Eventually they brought rails in many commercial companies and these companies succeeded to the point they could pay people to maintain rails.

khamidou··on A board member's perspective of the RubyGems controversy
I think you got things mixed up, open source projects survive because volunteers believe in them and want to contribute to them. Large companies rarely get involved, occasionally with some funding.

It sounds like they sold something to their donors they couldn't really guarantee – supply chain safety – and they decided to alienate their contributors to try to appease them.

Only time will tell if this was really damaging to the ruby community or just a temporary hurdle

khamidou··on Why, as a responsible adult, SimCity 2000 hits differently
There's some sunk cost fallacy at play here. If you've spent hundreds of thousands of dollars to buy a house in a remote suburb where your social activities are mostly playdates scheduled 3 months in advance, you don't want to be reminded that there was another path you could have taken.
khamidou··on Why, as a responsible adult, SimCity 2000 hits differently
I mean 200 million people in the US live in the top 50 metro areas. Sure there's a lot of small cities out there but they don't account for much population.
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