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luma

6,391 karma · joined October 17, 2012

[ my public key: https://keybase.io/allen; my proof: https://keybase.io/allen/sigs/WIJeJPWvG0304yf88eOslSXWK0AqaVCkMCpK8QFtnEA ]
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luma··on Netflix Animation Studios Joins the Blender Development Fund as Corporate Patron
The Blender project is the model I hope FreeCAD can eventually follow. Like digital animation, the 3D digital design field has a pretty rough selection of tools and the UI on all of them leaves a lot to be desired. FreeCAD has been on an upward trajectory in the past couple years as more people lean into the project out of frustration over increasingly hostile pricing from the commercial solutions. KiCAD has seen incredible advances since CERN started pouring resources into it, I'm sure Netflix money is going to help Blender. Now to get some large engineering shop to consider FreeCAD as their exit path to Siemens/et al...
luma··on White House defends sharing AI image showing arrested woman crying
Every Republican you know, including a substantial percentage of the users here, is directly responsible for what we have in front of us today.

This is precisely the thing they voted for.

luma··on We might have been slower to abandon StackOverflow if it wasn't a toxic hellhole
This echoes my own experience. The very few times I attempted to post a question it was later flagged as duplicate, pointing to some other question which matched the keywords but didn't at all match the actual use case or problem. I don't know if this was the result of an automated process or zealous users, but it certainly put me off ever trying to engage with the community there.
luma··on A 30B Qwen model walks into a Raspberry Pi and runs in real time
I had the same experience, eBay suggests that I'll have a Jabra speakerphone in my mailbox tomorrow to try moving everything to a better audio setup. The software seems good but the audio performance is miserable on the preview device, you essentially have to be talking directly at the microphone from not more than a few feet away for anything to recognize.

Sadly, the Jabra (or any USB) audio device means I'll need to shift over to an rPi which comes with it's own lifecycle challenges.

luma··on Jensen: 'We've done our country a great disservice' by offshoring
Service jobs are hard to export, it's just moving money around inside your country. Riveting is a job that produces goods that can be exported for incoming cash, elderly care isn't.
luma··on I migrated to an almost all-EU stack and saved 500€ per year
Absolutely screwed! Every single product they have - OS (dominant desktop and laptop OS by a wide margin), Azure - (gaining in second place, now 25% vs AWS 31%), M365 (also dominant, particularly in terms of revenue). None of these show any sign of going anywhere, and if anything, the numbers for cloud and M365 are trending up.

I could only wish my own business were this screwed.

luma··on Alzheimer’s disease can be reversed in animal models? Study
I think it means one should read the very next sentence:

> Pieper emphasized that current over-the-counter NAD+-precursors have been shown in animal models to raise cellular NAD+ to dangerously high levels that promote cancer. The pharmacological approach in this study, however, uses a pharmacologic agent (P7C3-A20) that enables cells to maintain their proper balance of NAD+ under conditions of otherwise overwhelming stress, without elevating NAD+ to supraphysiologic levels.

luma··on A train-sized tunnel is now carrying electricity under South London
Anyone have any idea why the cables are arranged like this? https://8400e186.delivery.rocketcdn.me/articles/wp-content/u...

What's the zig-zag pattern for, seems like a fair bit of extra conductor.

luma··on Pricing Changes for GitHub Actions
The first stages always do, that's why corporations keep pulling the enshittification lever.
luma··on “Captain Gains” on Capitol Hill
Billionaires benefit from it, they are the ones buying off our government. All the other "wedge issues" are designed to deflect attention away from our oligarchs and both parties are on the take. Look at how the DNC reacted to Mamdani for a recent example.

To be clear, because I know it will come up - not saying both parties are the same, but I am saying they are both doing the oligarch's bidding. The US government is now fully captured by billionaires and is currently being used for personal enrichment of those in power.

luma··on The Thinking Game Film – Google DeepMind documentary
I’m certainly no authority but i tend to write the same way for casual communication, came from the 90s era BBS days. It was (and still is) common on irc nets too. Autocorrect fixes up some of it, but sometimes i just have ideas i’m trying to dump out of my head and the shift key isn’t helping that go faster. Emails at work get more attention, but bullshittin with friends on the PC? No need.

I’ll code switch depending on the venue, on HN i mostly Serious Post so my post history might demonstrate more care for the language than somewhere i consider more causal.

luma··on Orion 1.0
Single word answer: trust.

Y’all seem like nice people but trust isn’t automatic these days.

luma··on Bluetooth Channel Sounding: The Next Leap in Bluetooth Innovation
Sorry, "cost of entry" meaning that the software and the supporting hardware platforms makes it cost prohibitive for a small org that isn't moving a lot of volume from their shelves. Grocer margins are razor thin already.
luma··on Bluetooth Channel Sounding: The Next Leap in Bluetooth Innovation
I have no first hand experience outside of North America so I won’t speculate. There is a cost of entry so you need to be moving enough volume in a market already working on razor thin margins. I’d expect that this means it’s only for the regional/national players here.
luma··on Proxmox virtual environment 9.1 available
KVM is awesome enough that there isn’t a lot of room left to differentiate at the hypervisor level. Now the problem is dealing with thousands of the things, so it’s the management layer where the product space is competing.
luma··on Proxmox virtual environment 9.1 available
VMware has been so good and reasonably priced for so long that there hasn't been a competitive market in the enterprise virtualization space for the past two decades. In a way, I think Broadcom's moves here might be healthy for the enterprise datacenter longer term, it has created the opportunity for others to step in and broadened the ecosystem significantly.
luma··on Proxmox virtual environment 9.1 available
Talking to midmarket and enterprise customers and nobody is taking Proxmox seriously quite yet, I think due to concerns around support availability and long term viability. Hyper-V and Azure Local come up a lot in these conversations if you run a lot of Windows (Healthcare in the US is nearly entirely Windows based). Have some folks kicking tires on OpenShift, which is a HEAVY lift and not much less expensive than modern Broadcom licenses.

My personal dark horse favorite right now is HPE VM Essentials. HPE has a terrible track record of being awesome at enterprise software, but their support org is solid and the solution checks a heck of a lot of boxes, including broad support for non-HPE servers, storage, and networking. Solution is priced to move and I expect HPE smells blood in these waters, they're clearly dumping a lot of development resources into the product in this past year.

luma··on Bluetooth Channel Sounding: The Next Leap in Bluetooth Innovation
The industry tends to use the even harder-to-understand term "shrink". Not always theft, just any loss of product versus what the books say they should have.
luma··on Geothermal's Time Has Come
What percentage of the world's power grid do you figure is being used by all datacenters right now?

Go ahead and look it up, you might be overstating the problem by a bit.

luma··on Bluetooth Channel Sounding: The Next Leap in Bluetooth Innovation
I've worked with a major retailer on similar backend systems and can echo the post above - all of them are running these systems and they almost never discuss the specifics (until someone like Walmart sues Everseen and we get a glimpse behind the curtain from the court documents).

If you go to an org's website offering these tools (eg, Everseen mentioned above, RetailNext, etc), they don't directly advertise the full breadth of their capabilities until you have them in a room for a sales pitch. They can combine multiple data streams such that an individual can be traced throughout the store via cameras, wifi, and bluetooth, which gives the retailer an opportunity to sell that information. Did a customer pause in front of the corn chips but then decide not to buy? Print them out a Frito-Lay coupon at checkout and see if you can't get them next time, and Frito-Lay will pay you to do that.

luma··on New attacks are diluting secure enclave defenses from Nvidia, AMD, and Intel
More recently, TPM and the systems surrounding it are being effectively used for attestation of the entire OS and driver stack at boot time, from UEFI up to a running OS. DRM sucks, but I do appreciate having some degree of hardware-level defense against rootkits or other advanced malware.
luma··on YouTube is taking down videos on performing nonstandard Windows 11 installs
I'd rather suspect it has a lot more to do with 40+ years of application backward compatibility and the ludicrous stack of software available for the platform.
luma··on MCP-Scanner – Scan MCP Servers for vulnerabilities
Was trying to remember where I had heard this org's name: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42690473

This org has gone to some dubious lengths to make a name for themselves, including submitting backdoored packages to public npm repos which would exfiltrate your data and send to a Synk-controlled C&C. This included the environment, which would be sending them your username along with any envvars like git/aws/etc auth tokens.

This might give them some credibility in this space, maybe they stand a decent chance of scanning MCPs for backdoors based on their own experience in placing malicious code on other people's systems.

luma··on OpenAI acquires Sky.app
I'm not an IOS guy so I'm trying to track this - from the thread I'm to gather this allows robotic process automation on IOS which I guess isn't easy to do? I could see the use case if you're trying to build an agent that can navigate and use apps on IOS.

Here's the question - why is this difficult on IOS? What "magic" does Sky bring to the table to make this happen?

luma··on MinIO stops distributing free Docker images
How about S3? I haven’t personally seen them price that so aggressively but I have a limited sample set.
luma··on Benjie's Humanoid Olympic Games
Agreed - force sensitivity can be had for the princely cost of a cheap motor current sensor on each axis, everything else is a software issue.
luma··on Blender 4.5 LTS
Looks like a dev build of the 1.1 release
luma··on FCC Accidentally Leaked iPhone Schematics
It's still very useful for repair techs (and I don't mean parts-swappers, I mean actual techs). This data is pretty quickly reverse engineered and shared in China, and then made available to shops through services like ZXW, WuXinJi, JCID, etc. There's an entire shadow industry around creating and then sharing schematics and PCBs for common products which might need repair.
luma··on Ed Zitron is mad as hell
> this is being driven entirely by spite not insight

Zitron is a PR dude who runs a PR company and has never had any experience, training, or meaningful contributions to technology. He found twitter success posting shittakes about AI, ran that into a podcast, and now he's in the FT. Zitron is a professional contrarian and PR man, saying "AI sucks" has found him fame and success.

luma··on Demand for human radiologists is at an all-time high
Agreed, I'm not sure where the OP from TFA is working but around here, radiologists have all been bought out and rolled into Radiology As A Service organizations. They work from home or at an office, never at a clinic, and have zero interactions with the patient. They perform diagnosis on whatever modality is presented and electronically file their work into their EMR. I work with a couple such orgs on remote access and am familiar with others, it might just be a selection bias on my side but TFA does not reflect my first-hand experience in this area.
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