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knome

2,179 karma · joined April 12, 2007

http://michaelspeer.knome.net/

(2) the subculture of the compulsive programmer, whose ethics prescribe that one silly idea and a month of frantic coding should suffice to make him a life-long millionaire. --ewd1036

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knome··on Over fifty new hallucinations in ICLR 2026 submissions
I assumed they meant using the LLM to extract the citations and then use external tooling to lookup and grab the original paper, at least verifying that it exists, has relevant title, summary and that the authors are correctly cited.
knome··on How did the Win 95 user interface code get brought to the Windows NT code base?
I appreciate linux for the inverse reason. Because everything is either a nice text based config file or a command line tool, scripting changes to settings and automating things is a breeze.
knome··on OOP is shifting between domains, not disappearing
a pure function doesn't have side effects. it doesn't read from nonlocal state or trigger distant changes nor perform any manner of io.

a pure function doesn't change its inputs, it simply uses them to craft it's outputs.

bringing in an object or function via parameter to perform these side effects still leaves the function impure.

knome··on OOP is shifting between domains, not disappearing
closures and objects with a single invoke() method have been considered equivalent in many views for some time.
knome··on Nearly all UK drivers say headlights are too bright
It would be fantastic if it were possible to dictate a headlight height for standard lights. just because your SUV is twelve feet off the ground doesn't mean the lights need to be positioned there.
knome··on Steam Machine
you can already do whatever you want to the steam deck. it's just linux with a readonly base that gets atomically updated. but you can rip it out and do whatever. it's your hardware.
knome··on How I fell in love with Erlang
when I program, I am visualizing the machine I am building in my head. some language semantics are cleaner than others, allowing the bits and pieces to flow together more naturally, composing in elegant ways that do not require pointless effort be spent manually wrangling footguns and minutia.
knome··on How I fell in love with Erlang
It can be quite useful to have nondestructive sorting in imperative languages as well. Hence python introducing 'sorted' even though '.sort()' preceded it.
knome··on How to get the GOT address from a PLT stub using GDB
you may consider defining your acronyms on first use for the sake of programmers who are unfamiliar with them.
knome··on Counter-Strike's player economy is in a freefall
having a high profit-per-employee is not the definition of rent seeking.

valve is certainly not rent-seeking. it offers service that is valuable to users, and take care of online infrastructure for games published through it, indefinitely, at no running cost to the developer.

knome··on Codebase is 250% AI generated
title is nonsense and unsupported by the justification the author attempts to create.
knome··on Orcas are bringing humans gifts
This is not correct in the least.

As one of many, many examples, a galapagos turtle reaches sexual maturity at 20 to 25 years of age, and lives 100 to 200 years.

knome··on Toybox: All-in-one Linux command line
I've generally seen symlinks, but it wouldn't really matter. It's just checking argument 0, the program name, and branching off that.
knome··on Binary Formats Gallery
You should check out erlangs binary literals.
knome··on We reverse-engineered Flash Attention 4
What time period and area did you come across this usage? As I ever saw it used, 'reverse engineering' generally referred to creating docs from executables or watching network protocols rather than from source.
knome··on Python developers are embracing type hints
>why not a protocol type

it was a sin that python's type system was initially released as a nominal type system. they should have been the target from day one.

being unable to just say "this takes anything that you can call .hello() and .world() on" was ridiculous, as that was part of the ethos of the dynamically typed python ecosystem. typechecking was generally frowned upon, with the idea that you should accept anything that fit the shape the receiving code required. it allowed you to trivially create resource wrappers and change behaviors by providing alternate objects to existing mechanisms. if you wanted to provide a fake file that read from memory instead of an actual file, it was simple and correct.

the lack of protocols made hell of these patterns for years.

knome··on Yt-dlp: Upcoming new requirements for YouTube downloads
the control changes sound like you might have gotten caught in some kind of a-b testing
knome··on YouTube says it'll bring back creators banned for Covid and election content
A determined instigator could easily continue pushing modern yellow journalism with little problem under the system you propose.

They simply need choose which negative stories they print, which opinions they run. How do you frame misrepresentation vs a differing point of view? How do you call out mere emphasis on which true stories are run. Truths are still truths, right?

It's not infrequent today to see political opinions washed through language to provide reasonable deniability by those using it.

Hell, it's not infrequent to see racism, bigotry and hate wrapped up to avoid the key phrases of yesteryear, instead smuggling their foulness through carefully considered phrases, used specifically to shield those repeating them from being called out.

'No no no. Of course it doesn't mean _that_, you're imagining things and making false accusations.'

knome··on Configuration files are user interfaces
Azure and GitHub build pipelines are written in yaml and have conditionals, variables, template expansions, etc
knome··on U.S. investors, Trump close in on TikTok deal with China
>That wouldn't be a bad thing

The government should be the government, and corporations should be corporations. Nothing good will come of having them bleed together.

Like church and state, you keep them separate for the good of both.

knome··on UUIDv47: Store UUIDv7 in DB, emit UUIDv4 outside (SipHash-masked timestamp)
creating your uuids client side has a risk of clients toying with the uuids.

creating them server-side risks having a network error cause a client to have requested a resource be created without receiving its id due to a network error before receiving the response, risking double submissions and generally bad recovery options from the UI.

if you need users to provide uuids for consistent network operations, you can have an endpoint responsible for generating signed uuids that expire after a short interval, thereby controlling uuid-time drift (must be used within 1-5 minutes, perhaps), ensuring the client can't forge them to mess with your backend, and still provide a nice and stable client-side-uuid system.

for the uuidv47 thing, you would apply their XOR trick prior to sending the UUID to the user. you presumably just reverse the XOR trick to get the UUIDv7 back from the UUIDv4 you passed them.

knome··on Anthropic agrees to pay $1.5B to settle lawsuit with book authors
I remember them having a 3D page unwarping tech they built as well so they could photograph rare and antique books without hacking them apart.
knome··on The forgotten meaning of "jerk"
Yes, it's one of the contenders for the etymology of the insult.

To be crude but accurate, we're looking at semantic drift from a jerk being a jerk off to a jerk ass.

knome··on The forgotten meaning of "jerk"
It is hardly surprising that people don't bother differentiating between those that think they are inherently superior by dint of their race versus those that think others are innately inferior by dint of their race. The one implies the other. And those who would impose such views when met with counterexamples, with condescension, mockery, shunning, exclusion, and violence, are never so far behind.
knome··on Prime Number Grid
>There are more prime numbers than there are squares of integers.

all integers have a square, while not all integers are prime.

in any given span, you'll see more primes than squares, however.

more dense?

knome··on Robots.txt is a suicide note (2011)
given this is from a group determined to copy and archive your data with or without your permission, their opinions on the usefulness of ROBOTS.TXT seem kind of irrelevant. of course they aren't going to respect it. they see themselves as 'rogue digital archivists', and being edgy and legally rather grey is part of their self-image. they're going to back it up, regardless of who says they can't.

for the rest of the net, ROBOTS.TXT is still often used for limiting the blast radius of search engines and bot crawl-delays and other "we know you're going to download this, please respect these provisions" type situations, as a sort of gentlemen's agreement. the site operator won't blackhole your net-ranges if you abide their terms. that's a reasonably useful thing to have.

knome··on Don't “let it crash”, let it heal
erlang doesn't crash the program, it crashes the thread. erlang has a layered management system built in as part of OTP (open telecom platform, erlang was built for running highly concurrent telephony hardware). when a thread crashes, it dies and signals its parent. the parent then decides what to do. usually, that's just restarting the worker. maybe if ten workers have crashed in a minute, the manager itself will die and restart. issues bubble up, and managers restart subsystems automatically. for some things, like parsing user data, you might never cause the manager to die, and just always restart the worker.

the article, if you should choose to read it, is explaining that people have the misconception you appear to be having due to the 'let it fail' catchphrase. it goes into detail about this system, when failing is appropriate, and when trying to work around errors is appropriate.

as erlang uses greenthreads, restarting a thread for a user API is effectively instant and free.

knome··on I prefer human-readable file formats
json makes for a great flat file format these days, with jq around to munge the data in it. csv is pretty bad for errors. mostly use it to dump data when I need to pass it to someone that will want to shove it in excel.
knome··on Leonardo Chiariglione – Co-founder of MPEG
This has nothing to do with copyright. It is an issue of patents.
knome··on The Real Origin of Cisco Systems (1999)
https://www.computerhistory.org/revolution/networking/19/375...

this, too, mentions Yeager as the initial developer, and that CISCO licensed and enhanced his work from Stanford.

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