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landonxjames

428 karma · joined October 4, 2017

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landonxjames··on Claude Code is unusable for complex engineering tasks with the Feb updates
I have noticed this as well. I frequently have to tell it that we need to do the correct fix (and then describe it in detail) rather than the simple fix. And even then it continues trying to revert to the simple (and often incorrect) fix.
landonxjames··on Apple Photos app corrupts images
This is infuriating to me. I manually manage my music library and have for years. I buy the iPhone with the most storage so I can keep my entire library with me locally. This used to work great, but has degraded over the last decade. Now when I drag new music to my phone in iTunes nothing happens for minutes, and then if I get lucky it finally starts transferring, but some times nothing happens at all and I have to retry.

Recently when I load new music onto my phone I find that random unrelated album art has been mangled or switched with other albums from other artists. And some music, which exists on my phone's hard drive, is now greyed out and when clicked says "This item is not currently available in your country or region." I am considering switching back to a iPod with an upgraded drive and giving up on keeping music on my phone completely.

landonxjames··on William Gibson Reads Neuromancer (2004)
There was a fantastic soundtrack created for this audiobook in the 90s by the industrial group Black Rain. https://room40.bandcamp.com/album/neuromancer
landonxjames··on When Is WebAssembly Going to Get DOM Support?
I have used Jco quite a bit (and contributed a few times) to build out simple utilities binding Rust code to JS [1][2]. I think it is great and the Component Model is the most exciting step towards real useful polyglot libraries I have seen in years. I wish it were better publicized, but I understand keeping things lowkey until it is more fleshed out (the async and stream support coming in Preview 3 are the real missing pieces for my usecases).

[1] https://github.com/awslabs/aws-wasm-checksums [2] https://github.com/landonxjames/aws-sdk-wasi-example

landonxjames··on How we’re responding to The NYT’s data demands in order to protect user privacy
Repeatedly calling the lawsuit baseless feels like it makes Open AI’s point a lot weaker. They obviously don’t like the suit, but I don’t think you can credibly argue that there aren’t tricky questions around the use of copyrighted materials in training data. Pretending otherwise is disingenuous.
landonxjames··on Let's Write a Reverb (2021)
Not sure about Neural DSP or reverbs in general, but real-time neural network based DSP seems very possible. The open source Neural amp modeler[1] would be a good place to start diving in.

[1] https://www.neuralampmodeler.com/the-code

landonxjames··on JetBrains releases RustRover IDE for Rust development
I like rust-analyzer in VSCode, but I've found that it does seem to struggle with large projects that have multiple nested Cargo workspaces. IntelliJ with the Rust plugin has handled that (admittedly niche) case better so far. I still prefer VSCode though so I just open each workspace in an individual window and it works more or less as expected.
landonxjames··on Tesla's 2M car Autopilot recall is now under federal scrutiny
I believe 2014 is the model year of that Tesla, it seems like that particular crash was in 2018. https://incidentdatabase.ai/cite/320/
landonxjames··on Bach’s Accidental Masterpiece
https://archive.ph/Vyy7X
landonxjames··on I decided to stop working on Mighty
According to the final tweet in that thread [0] it seems like they are pivoting to a sort of AI generated art based social media platform. I’m curious why they think this has the potential to be a “mass market changing” business since the social media world seems pretty over saturated already

[0] https://twitter.com/suhail/status/1591831193598963713

landonxjames··on Stable Diffusion: Is Video Coming Soon?
I recently saw a Twitter thread from last year where someone made a comic book with AI generated backgrounds. The characters were added in later, but it stuck with me as a very cool future use case

https://twitter.com/ursulav/status/1467652391059214337

landonxjames··on Ask HN: Boring but important tech no one is working on?
I saw a talk by an engineer from Parallel Systems [0] and they seem to be doing some very cool stuff for the future of rail. Autonomous Electric rail cars and some other interesting things

[0] https://moveparallel.com/

landonxjames··on Tao: A statically-typed functional language
Came across this post [0] by Graydon Hoare (original author of Rust and member of the Swift team) in an HN comment the other day. Lots of interesting discussion about future paths for language design work, including some discussion of Effects Systems.

Curious how Tao is pushing the limits on that front?

[0] https://graydon2.dreamwidth.org/253769.html

landonxjames··on About the security content of macOS Monterey 12.2
This issue was killing my battery, but I don't use bluetooth on this laptop at all, so going to Settings > Bluetooth and turning it off completely fixed the issue for me. Haven't seen a bluetoothd process in ~2 weeks now.
landonxjames··on PRQL – A proposal for a better SQL
PartiQL[0] is an open source library that is a superset of SQL that I really like. It supports querying nested structures inside columns, so if a column contains some JSON data you can use the standard dot notation to query nested JSON data directly

[0] https://partiql.org/

landonxjames··on The redacted lawsuit: Solarwinds board of directors sued by shareholders
This is a helpful reminder because upon reading the headline I immediately confused this company with the solar roof company Tesla acquired a few years ago.
landonxjames··on The CIA and the Media (1977)
I’m generally less worried about explicit interference like this (which mostly seems to eventually be found out) than I am about the more insidious and ingrained Propaganda Model [0] proposed by Chomsky and Herman in Manufacturing Consent. In their own words:

> Structural factors are those such as ownership and control, dependence on other major funding sources (notably, advertisers), and mutual interests and relationships between the media and those who make the news and have the power to define it and explain what it means. The propaganda model also incorporates other closely related factors such as the ability to complain about the media’s treatment of news (that is, produce “flak”), to provide “experts” to confirm the official slant on the news, and to fix the basic principles and ideologies that are taken for granted by media personnel and the elite, but are often resisted by the general population.1 In our view, the same underlying power sources that own the media and fund them as advertisers, that serve as primary definers of the news, and that produce flak and proper-thinking experts, also play a key role in fixing basic principles and the dominant ideologies. We believe that what journalists do, what they see as newsworthy, and what they take for granted as premises of their work are frequently well explained by the incentives, pressures, and constraints incorporated into such a structural analysis. These structural factors that dominate media operations are not allcontrolling and do not always produce simple and homogeneous results.

The media, despite all of its supposed diversity, is really just a dialogue between powerful entities, but it strictly avoids criticizing or even acknowledging the foundational principles of the structures that give it power.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Propaganda_model

landonxjames··on U.S. indicts two men for running a $20M YouTube content ID scam
Benn Jordan (perhaps better know by his musical moniker The Flashbulb) put out a video today[0] about another scam in a somewhat similar vein, but this one perpetrated by a NYTimes reporter and specifically targeting musicians

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zk872ERRVxA

landonxjames··on How a NYTimes reporter collects royalties from hundreds of musicians [video]
Just finished the video and its pretty shocking how effective his scheme was. Music is already a confusing place when it comes to licensing and many musicians can't afford lawyers to look over every single thing. I feel bad for everyone who was scammed here
landonxjames··on Impossible Foods brings total funding to $2B with new $500M raise
The term I have seen used in some more vitriolic corners of the internet is "carnist"
landonxjames··on Amazon Ion – A richly-typed, self-describing, hierarchical serialization format
I believe that is provided by the Ion Schema Language https://amzn.github.io/ion-schema/docs/spec.html
landonxjames··on Amazon lobbyists who kill U.S. consumer privacy protections
There was a long article in Wired yesterday about Amazon's retail side privacy failures https://www.wired.com/story/amazon-failed-to-protect-your-da...
landonxjames··on Blacksmith – Rowhammer bit flips on all DRAM devices today despite mitigations
"We have never shared two threads on a core between EC2 instances" - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kQ4H6XO-iao&t=2485s

Interesting that AWS has been mitigating for side channel attacks since before they became a big news item. Curious about Azure and GCP's stance on this

landonxjames··on CT Scan of a Pumpkin
Is “They did a CT scan on a pumpkin” the next evolution of “They did surgery on a grape”[0]?

[0] https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/they-did-surgery-on-a-grape

landonxjames··on Neal Stephenson reacts to Facebook name change
Peter F. Hamilton’s Commonwealth series[0] and Vernor Vinge’s Zones of Thought[1] both scratch a similar itch to Stephenson novels for me

[0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Commonwealth_Saga

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Fire_Upon_the_Deep

landonxjames··on Joe Rogan, confined to Spotify, is losing influence
I came across a very thorough analysis of the Paul Saladino episode [0] the other day when I was researching him after a friend recommended his book. Seemed like he was cherry picking evidence pretty hard and that the majority of the evidence doesn't agree with his stance at all

[0] https://www.biolayne.com/articles/research/paul-saladino-on-...

landonxjames··on Malicious PyPI packages stealing credit cards and injecting code
Deno (a Node-like runtime by the original author of Node) has a security model kind of like this [0]. Its unfortunately not as granular as I think it should be (only operates on the module level and not individual dependencies), but its a start.

[0] https://deno.land/manual/getting_started/permissions

landonxjames··on Amazon US customers given one week to opt out of mass wireless sharing
I was worried that my Eero routers were going to get roped into this, but thankfully the CEO confirmed on Reddit[0] that there are currently no plans to involve their products in Sidewalk.

[0]https://www.reddit.com/r/eero/comments/nnvs20/amazon_sidewal...

landonxjames··on Mathematics for the Adventurous Self-Learner
> had I known better I'd have gone into computer science because that's where I see the most progress being made.

Interestingly this is similar to what my two advisors (one from the math department and one from CS) suggested to me. It would be easier to do the math I like in a CS department than it would be to do the CS I like in a math department. Do you feel like math departments are more conservative when it comes to working outside the discipline?

landonxjames··on What were the creepiest declassified documents of the last decade?
The Afghanistan Papers[0] were published a few weeks ago and didn't get nearly as much traction as I hoped they would. A stunning documentation of the incompetence of America's strategy in the Middle East over the past two decades.

[0] https://www.washingtonpost.com/graphics/2019/investigations/...

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