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mfuzzey

317 karma · joined January 11, 2022

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mfuzzey··on CEO fired developers to make room for AI. Developers create open source AI CEO
In most of Europe we don't really have problems with the #2 and #3. Cost of housing can still be tricky in major cities though.
mfuzzey··on Apple sues OpenAI, accuses ex-employees of stealing trade secrets
Yes of course someone pays for it, in this case your deductions as you say. But I think there is a fundemental difference to employers paying for health insurance in that it doesn't depend on your job. So if you lose your job you don't lose your healthcare so companies can't use that as a way to retain you.

And the actual cost of healthcare to the organisations paying for it is actually far lower than the US system, probably partly because it's more regulated and also because there is far less litigation so insuranace for doctors is cheaper.

So I don't think the US system is "more efficient", unless by "efficient" you mean in extracting money from patients / their insurances. In the US hospitals exist to make money, in the EU it's more about providing treatment.

mfuzzey··on From PGP to Mythos: a brief history of export controls that didn't stop anyone
If they had said only governemnt and a few other approved institutions can use it then yes that could work.

But they didn't say that. They said "only US citizens". Once something is available to hundreds of millions of people there will be leaks like it or not. Some accidental and some voluntary.

And even if it could be done it wouldn't solve the purported security issue anyway. Does anyone believe there are no criminals or terrorists with US nationality?

mfuzzey··on From PGP to Mythos: a brief history of export controls that didn't stop anyone
If a model is really capable of that type of stuff (creating biological weapons etc) the problem isn't solved by export controls - I'm sure there are plenty of home grown US terrorist organisations that would like that capablility and wouldn't be subject to such controls.

Yes governments can, and probably should, restrict some things completely to all those outside of official government institutions but once something is public in one country it is effectively, even if not legally, public in all countries.

But for "physical" things like biological, chemical or nuclear weapons the know how / information part, that AI can "help" with is far from the complete picture. Articles have already been published on how to make a nuclear bomb. The knowledge isn't really the blocker that's more access to the required materiels and equipment. However in the cyber space then yes AI could indeed give the "bad guys" much more capability.

mfuzzey··on From PGP to Mythos: a brief history of export controls that didn't stop anyone
There's no effective way of enforcing export controls on local software like PGP etc. Whatever they say someone will leak it.

It is possible to shutdown access to hosted services, as happened with Fable, but it can't really be done selectively. The US government wanted to allow it for US nationals only but Anthropic couldn't do that and so shut it down for everyone. Even if they did tie Claude accounts to nationality some people would set up "proxy servers" to allow access (either for montetary gain or because they don't agree with the restrictions)

mfuzzey··on Hetzner Price Adjustment
There are large (x2, x3) price rises for US based servers but the German / Sweedish ones show much more reasonable increases ~30%
mfuzzey··on Swiss voters reject proposal to cap population at ten million
Interesting that those supporting the motion claimed it was because there was no space left for new arrivals and that it put too much pressure on infrastructure like trains and yet the largest support came from the countryside which proably has less overcrowding and the cities were greatly against it.

Makes me think that "overcrowding" wasn't thre real reason...

mfuzzey··on Let's Encrypt bans certificate usage in any US sanctioned territory [pdf]
Just close down completely in the US and move to the EU
mfuzzey··on Where is the AI jobs crisis?
>I mean, if we want to not talk about economics that’s fine, but can the AI actually do junior work at the same price?

Even if we assume it can then not hiring Juniors still doesn't make sense - where will seniors come from in the future?

mfuzzey··on I think Anthropic and OpenAI have found product-market fit
It's actually worse than that. It's not just financial depreciation or that the existing hardware becomes obsolete due to being less powerful than new hardware but also that hardware being run all the time at high load actually has a limited lifetime of a few years so it will physically break...
mfuzzey··on I think Anthropic and OpenAI have found product-market fit
Seems to be a thing in the US to need specialised software, an accountant or AI to file taxes.

In most of Europe individuals at least don't need any of that. I'm in France and it's just a connection to a government run website to enter a few figures, takes less than an hour most of it is already pre-entered (salary etc), the main thing to add manually is charitable donations.

If you're running a business then yes an accountant can be good (or be required depending on the legal form of the business) but not for individuals.

mfuzzey··on Hyperscalers have already outspent most famous US megaprojects
actually the physical lifetime (not financial depreciation) for AI data center GPUs is even lower (3 to 4 years)
mfuzzey··on Von der Leyen uses Orbán defeat to push for end of veto in EU foreign policy
Political structures exist to influence the world around them.

A thousand or even a few hundred years ago most people travelled very little and often were born, lived and died in the same village. At that time the village was the natural unit of organisation. As communications improved, with horses, trains, planes, internet the unit of political organisation had to scale up to cities, regions, nations and now supra national organisations like the EU

The nation state is an outdated concept that has lived its time. In a world where those we need to talk to are the US, China, Russia even big EU countries like France and Germany are too small so we need to scale up.

mfuzzey··on Von der Leyen uses Orbán defeat to push for end of veto in EU foreign policy
There are a lot of upsides to being in the EU.

It's so much easier to move aroud, both for short term travel and longer term too. The common currency (at least in most countries) really helps as do things like no roaming charges. If you decide you want to go and look for a job in another country you just do it, no visa hassle or asking permissions.

I was born in the UK and moved to France (long before Brexit thank goodness) it would have been much harder without the EU.

I certainly consider myself a EU citizen, more than British or French (I now have both nationalities).

Of course it's not perfect but getting rid of individual coutry vetoes would help with a lot of things in the wider geopolicital sphere - and has already been done in many domains)

mfuzzey··on Von der Leyen uses Orbán defeat to push for end of veto in EU foreign policy
Would you let one or two cities have veto power over the policy of an entire country? If not then what's the difference here? If yes do you think that would work?

Of course the important thing is to decide what should be handled at the city, region, nation and EU level. There's a tradeoff. Decisions made at lower levels are generally better for accountability and give better adaptability to local circumstances but on the other hand they often lose leverage.

A city wouldn't be able to talk as an equal to large companies like Apple and Google for example, even many countries can't. But the EU can. Replace Apple / Google by Russia / China / US and it's even worse.

mfuzzey··on Log messages are mostly for the people operating your software
Depends a lot on the context and type of software.

For server side software where there is a sysadmin in charge of keeping it running I generally agree.

But for end user software (desktop, mobile, embedded) no one wil read the logs and there the logs can, and probably should, be aimed at the developers. Of course you can and should still provide usable and informative end user oriented error messages but they're not the same thing as logs

mfuzzey··on Working and Communicating with Japanese Engineers
"we really need to focus on user-facing touchpoints, because there’s too much sign-up friction. Like, we need to 10x the stickiness of the landing page but also keep it lean,"

Even as a native English speaker I find this type of language hard to understand, fluffy and ambiguous. We would all benefit from using plain language not just non native English speakers

mfuzzey··on Platforms bend over backward to help DHS censor ICE critics, advocates say
I disagree.

Sure corporations have to respect the LAW in their juradiction, even if said law is unpopular or unethical. But they don't have to, and shouldn't where ethics and human rights are involved, go beyond what is required by the law. Since Trump has come to power a lot of big organsations seem to be reversing their previous positions to gain political favour, which is wrong.

The solution is probably for them to appeal to the public. "We stand up to ICE abuse" would probably help them in the markets.

Something interesting happened recently in France where it turned out that the American subsiduary of CapGemini was selling serives to ICE. They were forced to sell that subsiduary after public outcry.

mfuzzey··on Canada slashes 100% tariffs on Chinese EVs to 6%
"stolen" should not be used in conjunction with IP, "infringed" if you like.

To steal is to deny the original owner access to their property. That is true for physical objects, if I steal your wallet or your car you no longer have it.

But if I illegally copy some of your IP you still have access to it. Sure you may experience some financial prejudice from that but you still have it.

mfuzzey··on Log level 'error' should mean that something needs to be fixed
I think it's difficult to say without knowing how the system is deployed and administered. "If a SMTP mailer trying to send email to somewhere logs 'cannot contact port 25 on <remote host>', that is not an error in the local system"

Maybe or maybe not. If the connection problem is really due to the remote host then that's not the problem of the sender. But maybe the local network interface is down, maybe there's a local firewall rule blocking it,...

If you know the deployment scenario then you can make reasonable decisions on logging levels but quite often code is generic and can be deployed in multiple configurations so that's hard to do

mfuzzey··on 'The French people want to save us': help pours in for glassmaker Duralex
Well the initial financial problems were under a traditional profit driven scheme. Almost certainy they wouldn't have got the donations they are getting today if they had remained in that model so the employee-owned scheme is at least somewhat better. It is also likely that, in addiiton to donations, they are getting extra sales by being employee-owened, at least in France.

Ultimately though it's probably the whole market theey are in (relatively cheap household goods) that is difficult for a company based in a rich country, whatever their ownership model.

mfuzzey··on How a French judge was digitally cut off by the USA
It's more the US that has corrupt politicians and myopic policies. Trump changes his mind every few days He takes bribes from the Swiss.

The sooner the EU rids itself of the US the better

mfuzzey··on AI isn't replacing jobs. AI spending is
If upper management think that they don't deserve to be upper management.
mfuzzey··on State of Embedded: Q4 2025 Overview
NXP i.MX, TI, STM32MP
mfuzzey··on Schleswig-Holstein completes migration to open source email
I think we're going to be seeing more and more of this type of thing in Europe. Of course some administrations have already done it before, sometimes sucessfully, like the French gendarmerie and sometimes unsuccesfully like Munich that ended up reverting to Windows (mostly for political rather than technical reasons).

But previously the motivations were difficult to understand for many, either being about saving money on licenses with dubious returns once retraining was considered or about software freedom arguments that are difficult to explain to non geeks.

These days the US is increasingly seen as an untrustworthy partner / supplier in Europe and the digital digital sovereignty arguments are well understood, both by politicians and the general public.

mfuzzey··on I write type-safe generic data structures in C
The way I remember it is:

INIT_LIST_HEAD is of form VERB_NOUN so is called from within a function to programatically initialise the list.

LIST_HEAD_INIT is NOUN_VERB and is used within a structure initialiser not from a function.

But my main point was to show the "embed the list in the data" approach rather than "embed the data in the list" or "point to the data from the list" and not to discuss the naming details in the kernel implementation of the concept.

mfuzzey··on I write type-safe generic data structures in C
There's also the method used in the Linux kernel to embed the list information (struct list_head) within the type specific struct. https://kernelnewbies.org/FAQ/LinkedLists
mfuzzey··on Google restricts Android sideloading
Will this affect alternative app stores like F-droid or is it only about downloading and installing an APK with a web browser?

An example of "normal" users that side load (through F-droid or direct APK) is most Ingress players. While Ingress itself is in the playstore most people use the "companion" intel app called IITC which isn't in the playstore as it's technically against the ToS.

mfuzzey··on Microsoft’s original source code
I started Z80 assemnbler (on a ZX80 computer) that way. But I soon get fed up looking up opcodes and especially calculating relative jumps (especially backwards ones) by hand as I often seemed to make off by one errors causing my program to crash.

So I wrote my on assembler in BASIC :)

mfuzzey··on Marine Le Pen banned from running in 2027 and given four-year sentence
No, not in this type of case.

Actually I wouldn't have an issue with that had she been convicted of, say, assault. In that case it would be reasonable for the electorate to decide if her being convicted of assault makes her illegible in their eyes.

But here she has been convicted of fraudulent use of EU money to fund here own party. That money could be used to buy her votes.

France, and most EU countries I think, have strict laws about funding of political parties and campaigns in order to have a level playing field and prevent rich candidates / parties having an undue advantage. If politicians could illegally fund their campaigns beyond what is authorized that could be used to unfairly influence the vote.

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