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meltedcapacitor

528 karma · joined March 29, 2021

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meltedcapacitor··on The risk of RISC-V: What's going on at SiFive?
SiFive is a fabless prop chip designer, they build no fabs. Yes building fabs is heavy industrial investment, and thus less amenable to open models. Drawing the masks is not.

Lot of VC work is regulatory arbitrage: how to steal the flowers from the public park without going to prison. That's why they are so proud of all these local sectoral monopolies they established while the lawmakers were asleep at the wheel, or bought, so the normal limits on profit in a market economy, through competition, are suspended.

Bulk of VC compensation is management fees, wisely based on the "head I win tail you lose" model and losses are often outsourced to ordinary folks via institutions like the Ontario Teachers' Pension Fund.

Money is just the scoring system of the economic game. If the rich play zero sum games with the points with each other it's harmless, and much better than malinvestment in Yachts or Web3 platforms where actual steel and engineering capacity is taken away from better use cases.

meltedcapacitor··on The risk of RISC-V: What's going on at SiFive?
Awesome news. The world is healing.

Having a big player as the "ARM of Risc-V" funded by VC was so toxic. It takes the oxygen out of the ecosystem.

The next step in open hardware is not having more proprietary silicon shops, it's streamlining the manufacturing process to make it look more like pooled PCB manufacturing, so that open collaborative groups can cheaply iterate their designs.

meltedcapacitor··on The fake browser update scam gets a makeover
If it becomes a problem consensus can evolve to trim inactive data (say expiring unspent outputs after N blocks in UTXO chains, "move it or lose it" model) or explicit charging for storage per unit of size and time (decay some associated balance accordingly).
meltedcapacitor··on Upcoming .com and .xyz domain price increase
They use the occasion to get more commission, by encouraging renewals further in the future to "lock" the current price. Presumably they get the full 10 years worth of commission today when a .com is renewed for that long.
meltedcapacitor··on Blocked by Cloudflare
Sounds inferior to the "no cookies no banner" solution.

The GDPR does not mandate gratuitous and pointless personalised spying, which is the only case that requires consent. Normal operations (say a shop collecting payment details and shipping address to fulfil an order) do not require a consent banner.

meltedcapacitor··on BeagleV-Ahead RISC-V board
Are these vendor kernels good enough to run some sort of hypervisor and pass through devices at the lowest possible level to (updatable) guest kernel(s)?

The idea here would be to run things like the TCP stack, USB from the lowest proxy-able level the in USB stack, etc in the guest kernel(s), as well as the entire application level, so as to reduce exposure to vendor kernel bugs and feature freeze leaving it only with minimal SOC-specific nitty gritty. For GPIO the vendor kernel could be used as a PRU of sort, passing messages to the guest kernel for actual processing.

Then the vendor kernel is just treated as a BIOS/blob getting in the way as little as practicable, it's very ugly but would allow using all these boards, also same method could possibly be used to recycle obsolete android phones.

meltedcapacitor··on Nim Succession Plan
nim with a bureaucracy would quickly turn into rust, so corporate heads can just adopt rust and let the world of niche opinionated tools be themselves.
meltedcapacitor··on A response to the git.centos.org changes
the argument seems to be that redhat is/was playing fairly and then Oracle/AWS/Google/etc (which for legal reasons obviously cannot be named explicitly) came and started freeloading on redhat's work instead of "working together". bit of a tragedy of the commons/adverse selection issue within "capitalism" than a "capitalism vs community" thing.

maybe they should just grandfather RHEL (only support current releases for the 10 year period, no new LTS) and if clients want a security patched newer version of Linux, offer consultancy to help them switch to Oracle Linux. and then Larry will have to actually do the work lol.

maybe at a later point they can offer support for a bug-for-bug compatible rebuild of Oracle Linux :-)

meltedcapacitor··on Goodbye, Twilio
maybe a "click here to continue receiving these updates" link at the end of the first message would have solved this. :o)
meltedcapacitor··on Show HN: Non.io, a Reddit-like platform Ive been working on for the last 4 years
Has the cost of lawyers and moderation been modelled? At $2/month spammers break even if they get like 5 clicks from all their posting on the platform, huge magnet for them, and content copypasters, if the platform gets some traction.
meltedcapacitor··on MusicGen: Simple and controllable music generation
Sounds like the "is DJing an art form" debate. :o)

Unlike classic "hiring a musician", here it's practical to "hire" the (robot) musician 10000 times with a feedback loop between the model and the prompt writer, iterating and picking the best output(s)... which looks like a similar process to other exercises considered art forms.

meltedcapacitor··on Ask HN: Is it time to resurrect a Usenet clone?
A "usenet 2.0" that only does (short) text and links/embeddings for media (to youtube etc) would already be a very useful thing, notwithstanding the risk of take-down of controversial media (freeloading on Big Tech infra for the 99.9% that isn't).
meltedcapacitor··on Russia’s population nightmare is going to get even worse
Same as people who also "can no longer work" under that age? There is no need to give blanket age-based pension rights to fit people to coincidentally help the disabled, who can be supported directly based on actual impairments.
meltedcapacitor··on Russia’s population nightmare is going to get even worse
Quality-adjusted maybe?
meltedcapacitor··on Russia’s population nightmare is going to get even worse
Nothing a tweak to the parameters (retirement age, pension value net of taxes on pensions) can't fix. Pension "rights" are not immutable physical constants.

Counter-intuitively, in democratic systems, lot of young people means pensioners become a smaller proportion of the electorate: so the cake is notionally bigger but the slice pensioners can claim might end up proportionally smaller due to weakened bargaining power.

meltedcapacitor··on Twitter's Algorithm: Amplifying Anger, Animosity, and Affective Polarization
That feed anecdotally looks similar to the accountless (not logged in) feed. Makes sense, "no follows" is pretty similiar to "no account".

BTW accountless twitter got better under Elon: it's now possible to just bookmark one's follows offsite, and poll their page every so often, without as aggressive login walls as under Jack. Also nitter.net seems to have survived the API armageddon quite nicely and is good for accountless twitter with even fewer distractions.

meltedcapacitor··on Don Knuth plays with ChatGPT
In true Knuth fashion, this page is better formatted than 99% of the web.

TXT = CSS^^2b

meltedcapacitor··on Argentina raises interest rate to 97% as it struggles to tackle inflation
Are the rumours that "crypto" in Argentina is just everybody being on the Binance app true? (Let's hope not!)
meltedcapacitor··on Show HN: Boring Report, a news app that uses AI to desensationalize the news
Can this tech be used to make a concise version of Money Stuff by Matt Levine?

He does not need de-sensationalizing but he badly needs summarising, which seems adjacent. That Matt Levine refuses to use the services of an editor is one of the greatest tragedies of our era.

meltedcapacitor··on IRS files $44B claims against bankrupt FTX
It is sure an upper estimate but the order of magnitude is maybe not off:

That revenue is probably mostly fees from the exchanges. Alameda as a partnership started with peanuts and was at some point (say 2021 fiscal year) was worth like 80b or whatever out of trading and made up coins whose cost is petty expenses on a web page and a few dev days, so an aggressive interpretation is that 80B minus 10 million whatever is capital gains, that passes through Alameda partners as personal income.

Of course they burnt it all the next year so there might be an equally big tax credit for fiscal year 2022, to be used against future profit/income lol.

Also, FTX had no concept or accounting of client assets, so for tax purposes it might be considered that all the money clients "deposited" was revenue, which is how SBF functionally treated it.

meltedcapacitor··on CheerpJ 3.0: a JVM replacement in HTML5 and WASM to run Java on modern browsers
That web is no more, sadly.

It's just a question of time before the containerized crowd discover that the exact version of Chrome they test their website with can be compiled to the WASM+canvas platform, bundled with the website, and solve all browser issues forever...

meltedcapacitor··on One line of code that did cost $8k
they did not own to being antisocial dicks in the first place, with all the bad decisions that also apply when the thing works as intended...
meltedcapacitor··on Is Gmail killing independent email?
LLMs make it much easier to make harder to detect spam...
meltedcapacitor··on Show HN: Neat – Minimalist CSS Framework
Fascinating review.

It begs the question: is CSS beyond repair? So many footguns, so little time.

I recall browsing one of the websites collecting such CSS "frameworks" in a previous episode and was stunned by the mediocrity of it all. It is breathtaking. Basically, most of these things fail in various ways, like:

- gross display errors: it could not possibly be what the author intended, on plain current Firefox

- gross design errors: really ugly, like text outside the viewport or impossibly bad use of whitespace or colors

- responsiveness fails: becomes unusable or very ugly on a simple window resize.

That's without trying to actively find less obvious problems like things that will fall over in future, or past, browsers, in other browsers, or facing different user settings.

And this is the output of people who went out of their way to write and publish a CSS toolkit, thus presumably consider themselves competent, and maybe sell their malpractice for money to be deployed against users on the real web.

meltedcapacitor··on De-Stressing Booking.com (2019)
It's sort of toxic socially though as devs write dark patterns during working hours and dark pattern blockers in hobby time, for other nerds to use. So dev caste gets usable web and profits from antisocial behaviour, while low non-dev castes are left to drown in the swamp.
meltedcapacitor··on WeVPN Is Shutting Down
Sounds like a hard business for small VPN providers, getting squeezed between the cat and mouse game with content providers blocking them on one side, and users abusing the service on the other side. Same work whatever size, so better be big, or white label a big name.
meltedcapacitor··on Hetzner Introduces ARM64 Cloud Servers
For a "small server/NAS"?
meltedcapacitor··on PDF ChatBot – Upload, chat and interact with any PDF document
bad actors are not gonna be stopped by their own "legal jargon"... the terms look like copy pasta or AI generated themselves. can't imagine the operators spent much time reading them.

though maybe true bad actors would try harder to pretend being a company with some humans involved, rather than this openly anonymous site.

meltedcapacitor··on AI porn will never be sexy
Thanks for doing the research, this is much appreciated.
meltedcapacitor··on Awk Technical Notes
Awk is an improvement on most of its successors.

(h/t Tony Hoare)

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