lll-o-lll

That seems incredibly naive. There are many examples of extremely intelligent people with psychopathy or narcissism. Also empathy does not lead to kindness by default; it is used as a tool by the most sadistic.

This is a really interesting new side channel attack. One I had never considered before; it’s like rowhammer but for the screen. Clever. Also evil.

Clever and evil.

Interesting. The visuals, presumably somewhat hand crafted, look infinitely better in this rendition. The sound is much less compelling, however.

Is this an intentionally offensive post?

> Collaboration is the reason why we are here, along with altruism and empathy. Autism drastically limits all three.

Autism does not reduce altruism. What are you trying to suggest by this? Autistic people are often the most altruistic people I know; going well above and beyond to help out (sometimes to a fault).

Autism does not reduce empathy. This is a common misconception due to difficulties with reading faces and theory of mind. Empathy is often felt extremely strongly.

Autism does not mean unable to collaborate. Here on HN of all places! The software world is full of asd people happily collaborating to do great things.

> at the cost of losing core human characteristics like altruism, empathy, and the potential for collaboration.

Ahh I get it now. The neurodivergent are not even properly human to you. Perhaps a little eugenics is needed to correct things?

It doesn’t make seniors shine. It makes some of them fucking delusional. Sure, once in a while a LLM does something impressive and you are left thinking “holy shit, the future is now!”. However, this does not make up for the mass of time that you spend going “what is this shit?”, and saying “that’s not what I intended, gentlemen robot, please correct x, y and z.” And then gentlemen robot will go ahead and FUCK IT UP WORSE THAN BEFORE. Never work with kids, animals or AI. This shit is the worst, who came up with this? I can code! I’m bloody good at it! If I wanted to deal with some useless no-hoper having a crack and constantly needing to have their head kicked to do anything useful, I would have gotten you to do it.

That’s your assumption, and if it were true there wouldn’t have been top level quake players who used inverted. Yet there are. I don’t think one follows the other.

Faster at mental shape rotation? Seems you play some unique fps games…

This is specifically mentioned in the article as the common reason given, but that it is wrong. People think this is why, but then they study them and it’s an innate difference.

> What they discovered through the cognitive testing was that a lot of assumptions being made around controller preferences were wrong. “None of the reasons people gave us [for inverting controls] had anything to do with whether they actually inverted,” says Corbett. “It turns out the most predictive out of all the factors we measured was how quickly gamers could mentally rotate things and overcome the Simon effect. The faster they were, the less likely they were to invert. People who said they sometimes inverted were by far the slowest on these tasks.” So does this mean non-inverters are better gamers? No, says Corbett. “Though they tended to be faster, they didn’t get the correct answer more than inverters who were actually slightly more accurate.”

“Simon Effect” is where you are slower to react with the right hand button when the object is displayed on the left and vice versa.

So, slow to rotate or react is more accurate? I feel like I need to understand more here, as this seems like an important brain difference. I’m an inverted player, assumed it was because of MS Flight Sim (1st game), can rotate really well, but am probably very slow at it! Would love to know more!

Edit: I know that I am very slow to overcome the “Simon Effect”, having done this sort of testing in the past. I’d be curious if others experience the same. Perhaps there is more going on than just inverted vs not being something “innate”, whereby the inverted player simply struggles to adapt to a new scheme more and hence has stuck with it.

I’m not familiar with pthread_cancel, but I am with TerminateThread. It’s not something that can be used safely: ever. Raymond Chen has written a few times about it, including the history.

> Originally, there was no Terminate­Thread function. The original designers felt strongly that no such function should exist because there was no safe way to terminate a thread, and there’s no point having a function that cannot be called safely. But people screamed that they needed the Terminate­Thread function, even though it wasn’t safe, so the operating system designers caved and added the function because people demanded it. Of course, those people who insisted that they needed Terminate­Thread now regret having been given it.

It’s not AGPL though, and AGPL would have solved the underlying problem. GPL existed to force companies to release changes so “I can have it also”; and that’s a political view, the whole “free as in freedom”. Cloud wasn’t accounted for in this pre-centralised internet. 2001 (B2), is long before AGPLv3, but if you have the same ideology, that’s what you want. You built a thing using GPL based code, I want it also.

Freedom is never a given, it must be continually fought for or lost.

> 5 years ago you'd have a project like that, talk to someone at a company for like 30m-1hr about it, and then get an offer.

Based on my own experiences, that was true 25 years ago. 20 years ago, coding puzzles were now a standard part of interviewing, but it was pretty lightweight. 5 years ago (covid!) everything was leet-code to get to the interview stage.

PID is standard in the industry, but the reality is it is infinitely easier to model in the discrete domain. The z-plane if math, but you don’t really need much math. Just model like a games developer. Simulate with a bit of JS or python. Add the motor saturation! Play with feedback and disturbances.

I just think this gives much better results. The model can be as simple or complex as you need, and we aren’t trapped in the linear response range. PID is good enough for many tasks, but it’s never good.

Absolutely the worst control systems of all time have been written by software engineers that don’t understand control theory. The second worst control systems are designed by those who only know the PID heuristic, and can’t be bothered to model a little non-linearity from motor drives saturating.

Nitpick: No one is a visual learner, or more correctly everyone is. Multimodal is the way, so good teachers will express the same concepts in several ‘modes’ and that helps develop the intuition.

dtrace is more comparable to ETW in windows land. Procmon is more for quick and dirty analysis. Maybe there are other *nix tools that are more appropriate, but I look forward to trying this one out.

Humans have a very limited amount of working memory. 3-5 items on average. A savant might be at something like 12. It is trivially easy to blow that with code. OO with code inheritance is a prime example of combinatorial explosion that can lead to more possibilities than atoms in the universe, let alone one persons ability to reason.

Watch ‘Simple made Easy’ by Rich Hickey; a classic from our industry. The battle against complexity is ever ongoing. https://youtu.be/SxdOUGdseq4?feature=shared

One of the big troubles is that if you join a big org you won’t get to do any architecture until you are at least “senior” or “lead”. Maybe that’s not true everywhere, but I have seen a fair bit of it. You need several iterations of “I built a thing” “oh, the thing evolved in horrible ways”, before the instincts for good architecture are developed.

I think Big Orgs need to develop younger promising talent by letting them build small green fields projects. Essentially fostering startups inside the organisation proper. Let them build and learn from mistakes (while providing the necessary knowledge; you can actually learn most of this from books, but experience is the ultimate teacher). Otherwise you end up with 5 year experienced people who cannot design themselves out of a paper bag.

> Unfortunately people have ideas, projects, and solutions that they care deeply about.

This is true of course, but this is also true for the “search for truth” in science. Do we fail to point out the flaw in the reasoning of someone’s life's work for fear of offence? The truth is the higher ideal that must be strived for!

In the same way, an idea is only good once it has been challenged. It may fail and dissolve, it may survive, it may morph into something that can no longer be assailed. This is the forgers fire, and it is necessary.

I know this isn’t as black and white as I’m painting it, but the ideal is still something worth striving for.

Hard disagree. Being tactful is only relevant when dealing with people, criticise an idea, a project, a solution as much as you like. Intellectual debate is the fire from which genuinely good ideas are forged.

> Carmack absolutely 100% percent did not say "these people are incompetent".

Sorry if I wasn’t clear; this was the point I was actually trying to make. Direct and to the point should not a HR incident make. I was trying to contrast with something that would.

> Perhaps it really did work at first, in the complete sense, when the number of users was quite small. That's where the actual content of the article kicks in: it suggests you really do use that simple solution, because maybe you'll never need to scale after all, or you'll need to rewrite everything by then anyway, or you'll have access to more engineering talent by then, etc.

This is where I am arguing nuance. These decisions are contextual; and the superficially more complicated solution may be solving inherent complexity in the problem space that only provides benefit over a time period.

As an example, some team might decide to forgo a database and read/write directly to the file system. This may enable a release in less time and that might be the right decision in certain contexts. Or it could be a terrible decision as the externalised costs begin to manifest and the business fails because of loss of customer trust.

My point is that you cannot only look at what is right in front of you, you also need to tactically plan ahead. In the big org context, you also need to strategically plan ahead.

> We can even just look at the title here: Do the simplest thing POSSIBLE.

I think the nuance here is that “the simplest thing possible” is not always the “best solution”. As an example, it is possible to solve very many business or operational problems with a simple service sitting in front of a database. At scale, you can continue to operate, but the amount of man-hours going into keeping the lights on can grow exponentially. Is the simplest thing possible still the DB?

Complexity is more than just the code or the infrastructure; it needs to run the entire gamut of the solution. That includes looking at the incidental complexity that goes into scaling, operating, maintaining, and migrating (if a temporary ‘too simple but fast to get going’ stack was chosen).

Measure twice, cut once. Understand what you are trying to build, and work out a way to get there in stages that provide business value at each step. Easier said than done.

Edit: Replies seem to be getting hung up over the “DB” reference. This is meant to be a hypothetical where the reader infers a scenario of a technology that “can solve all problems, but is not necessarily the best solution”. Substitute for “writing files to the file system” if you prefer.

And stupid. Like it or hate it, a non-nonsense, direct speaking, but fair and objective boss is the one you want. No one is served by failure; not the people at the top, nor the people at the bottom.

There is a difference between “this project is not going to work” vs “these people are incompetent and the project should be cancelled as a result”. The former needs to be said, the latter is a HR violation.

I love arrays! How can you array hate? Uiua is my favourite language for fun.

Ozone is bad for you though. How do you manage that?

Edit: Sorry, you did address that.

> no sparks means ozone in too small concentrations to worry about.

Have you actually measured?

I absolutely love this! What a great tool.

It’s not really “what is the brain doing”; that path leads to “quantum mysticism”. What we lack is a good theoretical framework about complex emergence. More maths in this space please.

Intelligence is an emergent phenomenon; all the interesting stuff happens at the boundary of order and disorder but we don’t have good tools in this space.

Yuck. I thought some of the signatures you end up with when building “Modern C++” in the Andrei Alexandrescu style were hairy, but this looks sick. Not in a good way.

Probably does something cool for all that crazy though?

Smartphones are banned at school in Aus, for a strong net positive. Kids still sneak them into toilets and so on (and vapes), but the overwhelming impact has been positive.