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kjksf

6,931 karma · joined September 5, 2009

My website is https://blog.kowalczyk.info

Working on https://filerion.com/, a web based file manager (s3, Dropbox and more).

I created https://www.sumatrapdfreader.org

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kjksf··on US plans online portal to bypass content bans in Europe and elsewhere
I principled stance would be against government censoring nipples AND speech of any kind, including what you call "hate speech".

My educated guess is that your definition of "hate speech" doesn't include people openly calling for assassinating federal employees (i.e. ICE).

BTW: properly applied 1st amendment is what led to un-banning censorship of nipples (see. Flynt v. United States, Miller v. California) as well as unbanning "obscene" books by Henry Miller and others (Grove Press, Inc. v. Gerstein)

I'm against censorship of nipples and speech including what you likely consider "hate speech". To me the line is calling to kill or physically harm someone. Which leftists are currently doing in spades and yet BlueSky doesn't ban them for that.

kjksf··on US plans online portal to bypass content bans in Europe and elsewhere
I'm confused about your principles.

Do you want censorship (of porn, of "hate speech") or not?

Because it seems you don't want censorship of porn but do want censorship of speech.

"hate speech" is a made up thing that politicians use to jail people who complain about government.

If you're an American you should cherish 1st amendment. You should cherish the fact that founding fathers recognized that the greatest thread to your freedom is not another person with a gun but a thousand people with a gun i.e. government.

And giving government the power to censor speech they don't like is the fastest way to tyranny.

That's why freedom of speech is 1st amendment. Not second, not fifth. It's 1st because it's that important.

kjksf··on US plans online portal to bypass content bans in Europe and elsewhere
Which US newspapers and which governments websites?

I happen to write this from Poland and I don't recall a single newspaper being geo blocked here. Not nyt, not washington post not anything I've ever accessed.

And didn't see US gov website geo blocked either.

So I ask again: which newspapers and which gov websites?

kjksf··on DOGE Bro's Grant Review Process Was Literally Just Asking ChatGPT 'Is This DEI?'
I mean a business registered to an address taking millions from government to provide child care. The address is boarded up, no children. All on video and public records for evidence.

What more do you want?

But that's not all, of course.

There were already successful prosecutions of fraudsters before the video made by the person you try so hard to discredit with 5-th grade tactic of throwing insults. What is ad hominem?

Lots more people were already arrested and lots of investigation have started as a result.

I lived in San Francisco, watching homeless problem becoming bigger and bigger. California spent billions supposedly fixing homelessness. Where did that money go?

California speed rail was supposed to be done in 2020 for $33 billion.

It's 2026. Newsom spent $15 billion and NOT A SINGLE TRACK is operational. Where did the money go? Who did the work and what were they doing for 18 years (it got approved in 2008). Fraud or gross incompetence? Either way, how is Newsom still in charge (and worse, running for President)?

I could go on but I'll wait for your "rebuttal" how convicting someone of fraud isn't really an indication that fraud happened or spending $15 billion achieving nothing is totally how non-fraudulent construction project work.

kjksf··on Mark Zuckerberg grilled on usage goals and underage users at California trial
Since we're being condescending here: what you're missing is absence of laws making a given activity illegal.

As far as I know there's no law that you could use to claim that Facebook did something illegal based on some notion of making addictive products.

Just like there are no laws you could use to claim a winemaker did something illegal based on some notion of making addictive products.

And I think it would be absurd to make what Facebook does illegal before we make what winemaker does illegal.

And we tried with winemakers. Educate yourself on dark times of Prohibition. (you opened the condescension doors).

> Those companies are required to publicise the addictive nature of their products, and required to advertise services to aid those addicted

I've never seen such advertising so I suspect you pulled that factoid out of your ass. Easy for you to correct me: laws have numbers, cite one.

If there is such law for say, alcohol, I wouldn't be opposed to such requirements for Facebook.

I mean, it obviously would end up as ineffective annoyance that doesn't deter or fix anything, like cookie banners, but have at it.

So yeah, it's still patently absurd to sue Facebook claiming addiction.

kjksf··on Mark Zuckerberg grilled on usage goals and underage users at California trial
As far as I can tell, even in US, the most litigious nation in the world, you can't SUCCESSFULLY sue e.g. a cigarette maker or alcohol maker for making you addicted.

(I emphasize successfully because of course you can sue anyone for anything. The question is what lawsuits are winnable based on empirical data of what lawsuits were won).

If you could, that would be the end of those businesses. The addiction is beyond dispute and if every alcoholic could win a lawsuits against a winemaker, there would be no winemakers left.

In that context it seems patently absurd that you could sue Facebook for making you addicted.

It would be absurd to create a law that makes it possible without first making such laws for alcohol and cigarettes.

It's also patently absurd that we (where "we" here is leftist politicians) are allowing open drug dealing in populated areas of San Francisco and yet this is what we discuss today and not politician's systemic failure to fix easily fixable problems for which we already have laws making them illegal.

kjksf··on Intermittent fasting may make little difference to weight loss, review finds
> spreading that one meal out throughout the day

Probably yes. But you're minimizing the difficulty of staying in caloric deficit.

IF you can stick to one meal per day AND eat mostly protein (vs. mostly sugar / carbs) THEN it's very hard to overeat i.e. be in caloric surplus.

If you snack many times a day, mostly sugar / carbs, and slosh it down with coke or red bull (non-diet, sugary version) it's very hard to keep eating under calorie limit. Sugar / carbs stimulate your hunger, leading to more eating. It's the opposite of Ozempic.

And your glucose levels are chronically elevated which is bad for our bodies. It's basically chronic inflammation.

Now, if you eat a steak once a day, you'll find it very hard to overeat. Like physically, you won't be able to eat too much.

It's still not easy to stick to that but it's simpler and easier than calorie count everything you eat throughout the day.

kjksf··on Beginning fully autonomous operations with the 6th-generation Waymo driver
Tesla never had lidar so they didn't abandon it.

Also, Tesla started FSD in 2016. The very core of their strategy was (and is) to sell $40k car with hardware capable of running FSD.

Cameras are super cheap, FSD chip is reasonably inexpensive. Lidar is not. Maybe today the cost isn't completely prohibitive (I think it still is, because you need multiple lidars) but it certainly was for the first 8 years of FSD program.

Tesla just didn't have the luxury of adding $50k to the cost of the car for the hardware, the way Waymo did. And they didn't have sugar daddy (Google) willing to burn several billions a year for many years.

So the Waymo approach was not an option for Tesla.

And given that in Austin they just reached parity with Waymo (i.e. completely unsupervised robotaxi service), they are not doing badly.

kjksf··on Beginning fully autonomous operations with the 6th-generation Waymo driver
1. in US you can get a driver's license if you're deaf so as a society we think you can drive without hearing

2. since this is in context of Tesla: tesla cars do have microphones and FSD does use it for responding to sirens etc.

kjksf··on Eight more months of agents
That's a silly bar to ask for.

Chrome took at least a thousand man years i.e. 100 people working for 10 years.

I'm lowballing here: it's likely way, way more.

If ai gives 10x speedup, to reproduce Chrome as it is today would require 1 person working for 100 years, 10 people working for 10 years or 100 people working for 1 year.

Clearly, unrealistic bar to meet.

If you want a concrete example: https://github.com/antirez/flux2.c

Creator of Redis started this project 3 weeks ago and use Claude Code to vibe code this.

It works, it's fast and the code quality is as high as I've ever seen a C code base. Easily 1% percentile of quality.

Look at this one-shotted working implementation of jpeg decoder: https://github.com/antirez/flux2.c/commit/a14b0ff5c3b74c7660...

Now, it takes a skilled person to guide Claude Code to generate this but I have zero doubts that this was done at least 5x-10x faster than Antirez writing the same code by hand.

kjksf··on Eight more months of agents
Not to take away from your experience but to offer a counterpoint.

I used claude code to port rust pdb parsing library to typescript.

My SumatraPDF is a large C++ app and I wanted visibility into where does the size of functions / data go, layout of classes. So I wanted to build a tool to dump info out of a PDB. But I have been diagnosed with extreme case of Rustophobiatis so I just can't touch rust code. Hence, the port to typescript.

With my assistance it did the work in an afternoon and did it well. The code worked. I ran it against large PDB from SumatraPDF and it matched the output of other tools.

In a way porting from one language to another is extreme case of refactoring and Claude did it very well.

I think that in general (your experience notwithstanding) Claude Caude is excellent at refactorings.

Here are 3 refactorings from SumatraPDF where I asked claude code to simplify code written by a human:

https://github.com/sumatrapdfreader/sumatrapdf/commit/a472d3... https://github.com/sumatrapdfreader/sumatrapdf/commit/5624aa... https://github.com/sumatrapdfreader/sumatrapdf/commit/a40bc9...

I hope you agree the code written by Claude is better than the code written by a human.

Granted, those are small changes but I think it generalizes into bigger changes. I have few refactorings in mind I wanted to do for a long time and maybe with Claude they will finally be feasible (they were not feasible before only because I don't have infinite amount of time to do everything I want to do).

kjksf··on Eight more months of agents
Because there's nothing to learn. "learning" to use claude code is less effort than learning how to use the basics of git.

They provide value today so I'm using them today.

kjksf··on Child prodigies rarely become elite performers
At the same time, I can refuse to be a loser in chess and I'll still have 0% chance of beating Magnus Carlsen.

I'm very much a proponent of hard work to the best of your ability but I'm also a realist.

I'm pretty good at programming. I doubt Usain Bolt would ever be as good as I am at programming, even if he tried, and I certainly wouldn't be even close to be as good as Usain Bolt in running no matter how hard I tried.

I know how fast I was running in high school compared to 30 of my peers (my class) and there was never a path from there to a world class athlete.

kjksf··on Child prodigies rarely become elite performers
I think there are 0 people in NBA that don't have natural ability placing them in 1% of general pop.

Your statement might be applicable to jobs that can be performed more than adequately by 20% percentile talent but not to most sports or music, which have brutal odds due to "winner takes most" dynamics.

There are 540 NBA players. There are ~40 million men aged 18-35 in US.

To beat those odds you have to supremely talented and supremely hard working.

Contrast this with estimated 1.6-4.4 million software engineers.

You can be mid but hard working programmer and beat brilliant but otherwise flawed programmer (not as hard working, oblivious to politics etc.), for some definition of "beat" (like better pay or higher position in company).

As to people in leadership position: consider that to succeed as a manager / leader is more about being good at politics than at solving complex equations.

Then again, the outsized successes were created by competent leaders: Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, Jeff Bezos.

kjksf··on Child prodigies rarely become elite performers
Are you looking for facts that will contradict your opinion?

Justin Bieber clearly was that. His youtube videos got him discovered at age 13-14.

Vanessa Paradis made her first public appearance as a singer at age 7.

There are several children prodigies I've seen on YouTube (singers, drummers, guitarists). They clearly have such talent that even at young age they do music better than most people would do with infinite amount of practice.

As to your question, the prodigy is, by definition, extremely rare. They clearly exist (Bieber, Paradis) but, by definition, you can't expect to have a lot of them.

And "why aren't 7 year olds headlining for Taylor Swift" is not a fair bar.

There are reasons 7 year olds don't do world wide tours that have to do with things other than musical talent. Like being in school or not being allowed to take a bus by themselves.

kjksf··on AI is killing B2B SaaS
I think it's safe to say that ORM in Django is, in fact, better in all possible ways than an ORM someone at some company just wrote. Including speed and handling edge cases.

We only know what OP wrote and he doesn't sell himself as a genius but as someone who was competing with really, really bad ideas.

kjksf··on Self Driving Car Insurance
They literally just (in the last few days) started unsupervised robotaxis in Austin.

They are as self-driving as a car can be.

This is different than the one where they had a human supervisor in passenger seat (which they still do elsewhere).

And different than the one where they didn't have human supervisor but did have a follow car.

Now they have a few robotaxis that are self driving.

kjksf··on Self Driving Car Insurance
Tesla is cooperating with Lemonade on this by providing them necessary user driving data.

If Tesla didn't want Lemonade to provide this, they could block them.

Strategically, Tesla doesn't want to be an insurer. They started the insurance product years ago, before Lemonade also offered this, to make FSD more attractive to buyers.

But the expansion stalled, maybe because the state bureaucracy or maybe because Tesla shifted priority to other things.

In conclusion: Tesla is happy that Lemonade offers this. It makes Tesla cars more attractive to buyers without Tesla doing the work of starting an insurance company in every state.

kjksf··on Self Driving Car Insurance
Because that's the law of the land currently.

The product you buy is called "FSD Supervised". It clearly states you're liable and must supervise the system.

I don't think there's law that would allow Tesla (or anyone else) to sell a passenger car with unsupervised system.

If you take Waymo or Tesla Robotaxi in Austin, you are not liable for accidents, Google or Tesla is.

That's because they operate on limited state laws that allow them to provide such service but the law doesn't allow selling such cars to people.

That's changing. Quite likely this year we will have federal law that will allow selling cars with fully unsupervised self-driving, in which case the insurance/liability will obviously land on the maker of the system, not person present in the car.

kjksf··on Was it a billion dollar mistake?
Here's an example. Imagine you're writing a parser that creates AST tree in C++.

What 99% of people do is the "individual" style where every node is allocate with new and the memory comes from generic OS allocator.

Then when you free the AST tree, you have traverse the tree and call delete on every node.

There can be thousands of nodes.

The crucial observation is: the lifetime of all nodes is the same. It's the lifetime of AST tree.

The "grouped" thing is: you have an allocator dedicated to nodes of the AST tree. All nodes are allocated from this allocator.

This has numerous speed and simplicity benefits.

You need one free() call to free allocator vs. thousands of free() for each node.

You can optimize your allocator for that use case compared to general OS allocator. By definition it's a bump pointer allocator (i.e. allocation is mostly addr += sizeof(obj)) which is much faster than what even fastest general allocators can do.

You don't need to track per-allocation metadata that general allocator needs to be able to individually free each allocation. So you use less memory.

There's no fragmentation because your allocator is contiguous space.

The use of cache lines is most likely better because memory is not spread around. The nodes are used together so it's better if they are close in memory.

Those are very significant benefits and yet, as the article notices, very few people are aware of this.

Plus until very recently (before Rust became popular) the only serious low-level language was C/C++ and they don't help you programming in this style.

Odin, zig, jai do. They make an allocator an exposed thing and provide language and standard library support for using different allocators.

kjksf··on Late night pizzeria nearby The Pentagon has suddenly surged in traffic
A bigger difference is that Ukrainians want to defend Ukraine from Russia.

Maduro is a dictator. His first presidency was legitimate but he had to steal the last election and is now ruling by force, because he is so unpopular.

Majority of Venezuelan don't want to fight US. They want Maduro out and the person who actually won last election to rule.

US doesn't want to occupy Venezuela. They want a government that is aligned with US and not with Russia/China/Iran.

The goals of US and majority of Venezuelans align.

kjksf··on Archiving Git branches as tags
Because in git tooling (be it github.com or a tui/gui client like lazygit), git branches are shown more prominently because the expectation is that a branch is something you actively work on (if you're finished with a branch, you delete it).

If you don't anticipate working on a branch but you want to preserve the code you leave it but it starts to clutter that prominent "active" space in most git tools.

This allows you to preserve the code (if you ever want to look at it again) while also de-cluttering the prominent "branches" view.

kjksf··on Jonathan Blow has spent the past decade designing 1,400 puzzles
He didn't have to. He wanted to.

Which is the same motivation as creator of rust, zig, nim, ruby, perl, python had. They all wanted to make a programming language better at something.

So I don't see anything "hilarious" about it.

kjksf··on FCC chair suggests agency isn't independent, word cut from mission statement
To everyone asking: why is it crazy?

Because the constitution explicitly grants the president absolute executive power over executive branch (government) of which FCC is part of. If government is a company then president is CEO and can do anything he wants to do.

Of course people can argue about the meaning so ultimately the arbiter of what constitution mean is Supreme Court.

And recently there were several lawsuits in the vain "the president can't do THAT" and while federal judges said "indeed, he can't" and issued injunctions, they were pretty much overturned by higher court or Supreme Court, re-affirming that president does in fact has control of executive branch.

And if you want to game this: if this wasn't true, congress could completely defang the powers of the president by making every government agency (IRS, FBI, FTC etc.) "independent" and de facto giving the power to unelected beaurocrats away from elected president.

And why should you care about this?

Because every 4 years you can vote for a different president.

You can't vote for the head of FCC.

kjksf··on Demand for UK Food Bank Up 15% Year on Year
Per AI, comparative food production subsidies are the same in US and China. China spends a 2x total but they have more people so per farmer support is more or less the same.

So if that's your metric, US is at par with China.

US food is affordable. To the extent that food in China is cheaper, I'm pretty sure the main reason is dramatically lower cost of labor.

But the premise of your comment is just wrong.

Money doesn't grow on trees. It's taken by the government from people.

Subsidies don't make things cheaper. They just obscure the real cost and can be used by politicians to buy votes from pickFrom([farmers,students,renters,teachers,...])

If US government didn't spend $35 billion/year subsidizing food production, food would be more expensive but an average worker would have $214 more per year to spend on food.

kjksf··on Students fight back over course taught by AI
Per internet charter schools get 20-36% less funding per child than traditional public (district) schools.

Also, charter schools are also public, not private.

The data seems to contradict everything you claim about charter schools.

"we" (taxpayers) send more money to traditional public schools than to (also public) charter schools.

kjksf··on The International Criminal Court wants to become independent of USA technology
Microsoft, being a U.S. company, had no choice in the matter. U.S. imposed sanctions on the guy. One component of sanctions is "Prohibition on U.S. persons (individuals or entities) conducting business or transactions with Khan."

If Microsoft didn't cancel his account it would be breaking the law by "conducting business or transactions with Khan."

So yeah, it makes sense for ICC to switch to a non-US provider, e.g. one in Germany, but it's not 100% solution because U.S. can impose secondary sanctions i.e. sanction the German company. I don't know if ICC sanctions include secondary sanctions but U.S. did that for Russian oil i.e. they said if e.g. Indian company buys Russian oil, they'll sanction Indian company too.

kjksf··on The International Criminal Court wants to become independent of USA technology
Strange framing.

Currency manipulation is meant to benefit the country doing manipulation (in this case Switzerland) at the expense of another country (in this case U.S.)

It's very much the role of U.S. government to protect U.S. from other countries trying to do harm to U.S., be it by bombing U.S. territory, tariffs on U.S. goods or currency manipulation that economically hurts U.S.

You could present an argument that Switzerland wasn't trying to harm U.S. economically via currency manipulation but instead you're trying to delegitimize the very idea that U.S. can defend itself from other countries trying to harm it economically by pretending that it's purely internal affair that has no effect on U.S.

Currency manipulation does hurt U.S. and that's the reason U.S. has the right to push back on it.

kjksf··on Toyota aims to launch the ' first' all-solid-state EV batteries
Even if true, I don't see this as significant.

The current battle for electric batteries is cost, not energy density.

LFP and sodium batteries are less dense that non-solid state lithium ion batteries but they are good enough to be used in standard version of Model 3 or Model Y and those are best selling ev cars.

Energy density is good enough, durability is good enough, what matters is lowering the price.

A battery with higher energy density but without lower price is not competitive.

Toyota still doesn't have a high volume electric car. Lack of batteries is not the cause of that but Toyota's own decisions.

Even if they get a slightly better battery, they still need to design a good ev car and that's way more to that than replacing gas tank and engine with a battery and motors.

Furthermore, you don't just mass produce ev batteries. Panasonic was struggling and loosing money for several years making batteries for Tesla. When Tesla decided to make batteries themselves, it also took them years to go from 0 to a significant number of batteries.

Idemitsu doesn't seem to make ev car batteries so I don't see how the could possibly have meaningful production in 2 years.

Furthermore, going solid state is only an incremental improvement of a component of the battery. It has the most economic value when applied at scale. So it would make most sense to license this technology to existing high volume manufacturer like LG Chem or CATL.

The realities of volume production vs. cost make it very unlikely you can just compete with CATL and LG Chem making 1/100 of their volume even if your battery is slightly better.

kjksf··on Regarding the Compact
Your "I don't know what words mean" is very selective.

So you don't know what "hostile to US" means.

Do you know what "Unwelcome verbal, nonverbal, or physical conduct based on protected characteristics" means? This is one of the many vague prescriptions in MIT code of conduct.

If I make a sour face at a gay person, is it "unwelcome nonverbal conduct"? Should I be punished for that? But not punished for shouting "from the river to the sea" i.e. demanding annihilation of Israel?

Is your argument that we should just scrap all code of conducts because it is by nature open to interpretation?

Or you just object to those that tickle your politics?

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