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kilna

109 karma · joined October 27, 2021

Meat-based sentient lifeform.
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kilna··on I don't want the details
You can build everything in the world with organizations at that size cooperating, but a society that values profit extraction will never organize itself in this manner. The problem isn't org size, it's profit motive.
kilna··on What archaeology reveals about the rise of autocracy
So, societies where increasingly-centralized private control (which always results in monopolization) of trade, resources, expansion profits, plantations, and enslaved labor, are the ones that become autocratic. So, basically, all the things libertarians want (commodification of everything with no collectively-demanded limits) while pretending they don't result in this.
kilna··on Good Culture Is the Biggest Productivity Hack, Not AI
I think this IS good for a focus when forming an organization. I don't think it'll reform bad companies per se, but reading something like this might help better companies to form.
kilna··on My life was changed by four sentences in four books
Withdrawal rate. They were talking about per year.
kilna··on Sticky wage norms and the real wage cost of unexpected inflation
Inflation is not just an increase in prices, it's basically a money pump. Under weakened labor it is redistribution from workers to the parasite class.
kilna··on Googlebook
It's called Gemini because there's two of them responding to you. One that tells the lie, and the other to apologize for telling the lie (which, of course, is just a different lie).
kilna··on They Live (1988) inspired Adblocker
The heavier weights of League Spartan would be a good match.
kilna··on The woes of sanitizing SVGs
> SVG was seen as a potential flash replacement?

Yes, that was a large part of the thrust back in the day. Even if it wasn't officially a goal of the SVG working group, there was a lack of an open standards-based alternative to what Flash was able to do, and the developers of the SVG standard saw that adding animation/tweening wouldn't take much given what browsers were already becoming capable of.

kilna··on The woes of sanitizing SVGs
The rust resvg [1] project uses micro SVG (usvg) [2] as an interim normalization format that simplifies SVG into solely:

* Simplified paths (no shapes, only one kind of object)

* DTDs, Attributes, CSS and references are pre-resolved

* Invisible elements and comments are removed

Resolving shared items may cause sizes to increase drastically however. This is the sort of explosion that compression is perfect at compressing.

1: https://docs.rs/resvg/latest/resvg/ 2: https://docs.rs/usvg/latest/usvg/

kilna··on No Terms. No Conditions
#5 "Access is not conditioned on approval" would seem to be permission to DDOS.
kilna··on Unsealed court documents show teen addiction was big tech's "top priority"
All capitalism is crony capitalism.
kilna··on Show HN: I've been using AI to analyze every supplement on the market
Monetize it with Amazon or other affiliate links, and provide dollar per effective dose for a given set of desired supplements.
kilna··on Ask HN: Share your personal website
https://kilna.net - I knocked up a linktree type site for myself and all of my projects a while back, but the offerings out there were so obnoxiously branded even when paid... and none of them felt polished in the way I like. I did the HTML + CSS myself, and was pleased I could make it work so well on both mobile and desktop.
kilna··on Tesla’s 4680 battery supply chain collapses as partner writes down deal by 99%
Framing it as unwarranted to not think "Tesla is uniquely unable to achieve it"...? Seriously?

The real question is if Tesla is uniquely ABLE to achieve it, above others in the market... including new startups or tech/auto-maker partnerships which may yet form.

Tesla has some supply chain innovation, but none of what they do can't be replicated... and Musk's slavish commitment to video as opposed to LIDAR is hobbling them.

kilna··on Go Gray, Not Cray: Why You Should Grayscale Your Phone
Black and white is 1-bit, where one value (say, 1) means white and the other (say, 0) means black.
kilna··on Valve reveals it’s the architect behind a push to bring Windows games to Arm
Sure, but very modestly due to scale, not core institutional morals. Go to your average small business with 10 or so people and ask the staff how they are treated and paid, and you'll get an answer not much different than the level of employee satisfaction for Fortune 500 companies. Look a their customer reviews... are small restaurants for instance an order of magnitude different that megacorp chains? In an economy with regulatory capture and highly unequal distribution of wealth, the wealthy set the tone across the board.
kilna··on A Fast 64-Bit Date Algorithm (30–40% faster by counting dates backwards)
Leap seconds are not deterministic.
kilna··on Things I've learned in my 7 years implementing AI
It takes good self control to not go down rabbit holes writing the wrong prompts, or prompts that produce interesting or pleasing results without necessarily solving the problem you intended to solve. Sycophantic LLMs are an addiction engine, in addition to being a guess-based autocomplete for thoughts.
kilna··on Disk Prices
This makes me miss pricewatch.com
kilna··on The history of the Schwartzian Transform (2016)
If the production code has to be maximally performant, you'd want the transform. It doesn't copy data around with a bunch of needless assignments. Pipelining the extract/sort/reconstitute in this manner is absolutely the right thing to do in production if production requirements are to keep it fast and with a small footprint. There's no excuse for not commenting it, but strictly-code-speaking there's no reason not to use this for production if the requisite needs are there.
kilna··on The history of the Schwartzian Transform (2016)
Perl was ahead of its time, and likely because of it's Borg-like capacity to absorb a little bit of everything... it was unfortunately nigh on impossible to refactor. This is why Perl6 (nee Raku) took nearly 2 decades to be "done". It's a crying shame that it lost momentum, because many of the techniques that the features of Raku enable are as clever/succinct/revolutionary as the Schwartzian Transform was back in its day... but because the developer community is so very small now, Raku will have a very hard time catching up to the performance of competing languages.
kilna··on OpenAI claims gold-medal performance at IMO 2025
AI is kerosene. A useful resource when applied with reason and compassion. Late stage capitalism is a dumpster full of garbage. AI in combination with late stage capitalism is a dumpster fire. Many, perhaps most people conflate the dumpster fire with "kerosine evil!"
kilna··on Authors Are Accidentally Leaving AI Prompts in Their Novels
I'm interested in a source for the 10% statistic. There are only 42m sex workers worldwide... and that number is not entirely women, and not entirely people involved in content creation.
kilna··on FBI arrests judge accused of helping man evade immigration authorities
In fact, If you have 20 assault rifles in your safe you are a target for 20 or so revolutionaries. Oligarchs aside, most people of the hoarding political persuasion mistrust others and couldn't social engineer their way out of a paper bag.
kilna··on DOGE worker’s code supports NLRB whistleblower
Um, as best I can tell from similar articles, they're all script kiddies.
kilna··on Apple says it will add 20k jobs, spend $500B, produce AI servers in US
I made this. It makes it easy to use all of the most common gnu tools via brew, without having to do gsed for sed, etc... all with working man pages. It also lets you switch back easily in a shell session if you need the mac native ones for some godforsaken reason:

https://github.com/kilna/gnu-on

kilna··on Why does target="_blank" have an underscore in front? (2024)
Underscore prefix in a label has conferred a meaning of private or reserved in the C programming language since at least Unix Version 6 in 1975, which had underscores to denote system level functions and variables. MUMPS in 1966 reserved a % prefix to indicate system variables and routines, so a convention of using a non-alphanumeric character to distinguish scope has been around about as long as ASCII has been the dominant standard for text.
kilna··on DoppelBot: Replace Your CEO with an LLM
Since 1980 the top 1%’s share of national income nearly doubled, while the bottom 50%’s share fell from 20% to 13%. Real wages for most workers stagnated despite productivity rising 62% (1979-2019), ALL of that went to investors.

People who claim funding co-ops is a "wealth transfer" ignore existing policies which already funnel taxpayer money upward. Redirecting a fraction of subsidies like bailouts and fossil fuel breaks and the endless war machine... instead to worker owned models that reinvest profits locally and tie wealth to labor... that isn’t a new transfer but a correction. Co-ops reduce reliance on exploitative private equity (e.g., hedge funds buying 40% of U.S. rental homes) and ensure economic gains stay with the people generating value.

I have the controversial opinion that people who work should get money, not the people who don't work.

kilna··on DoppelBot: Replace Your CEO with an LLM
"slaves had no choice"... Um, do you think most people can choose not to work?

Gig work is "popular" because wealth-driven systemic pressure is replacing FTE with gig jobs in order to fatten the bottom line.

kilna··on Parents of OpenAI Whistleblower Don't Believe He Died by Suicide, Order Autopsy
Not an opinion, it's a verifiable fact that all gains have gone to the wealthy. Search "productivity hourly compensation graph" in your favorite image search. Effectively all gains for decades have gone to the already rich, not the working class. "Hellscape" is a reasonable assessment for a world in which most families' kids have worse prospects than their parents, they get to live under the thumb of an oligarchy with even more power. The only way out of this is a massive readjustment, so get used to hearing a lot of stuff you don't want to, because the wealth gap is making anti-corporate, anti-wealth sentiment inevitable.
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