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mianos

2,310 karma · joined March 22, 2014

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mianos··on Former SR-71 engineer talks NASA's Blackbird revival program
I think Ken Shirriff, CuriousMarc and friends need a new project to step it up now they have their Apollo systems all running like new. :)
mianos··on OpenAI breaches Medicare, Albanese reveals
As an Australian, I'd rather them spend the time and money fixing their insecure web sites than establishing a 'task force'. Because I can't see much useful stuff coming from herding a bunch of monkeys into a room and letting them just screech at each other, as monkeys do.
mianos··on OpenAI breaches Medicare, Albanese reveals
The writes where to get past cloudflare.
mianos··on What Sun got wrong
It's full RRP for everything less than 1000 units. If you want a 100 unit refresh you are better off going to your local corner shop for price and service.
mianos··on Australia says it could follow Canada in forging deeper ties with EU
But you can bend the pins of the power cables and make them fit. :)
mianos··on Australia says it could follow Canada in forging deeper ties with EU
Having spent a lot of time in the UK, EU and US, I feel Sydney is way more like California than say London or European cities, in terms of living, shopping and culture. Even things from the US are coming here, like the growth of Halloween.

If you walk into a shop, the US is much more like Australia in terms of service and attitude (even though retail staff are paid vastly differently).

I always thought this was due to TV and Australia having remote branches of many US retail chains.

Outside of California, it's similar but diverges a lot in areas like socialism. In the recent 20 years Australia has pretty much become more like the EU in terms of socialism.

mianos··on Gemini 3.8 Live and 3.8 Live Extended Thinking
I agree. Lot's of people really like it. For me it often just forgets all context and starts showing random slop. It's super clear as, when I ask it what happened to some element earlier in the conversation it tells me it does not have that. It might be good if it told me, but randomly lose the plot is quite frustrating.

Claude does it occasionally but it's a more a soft landing earlier context seems to be compacted, not completely lose the plot.

I just cancelled my pro subscription. I really wanted it to be good but not yet.

mianos··on A Tesla ran a stop sign and killed a man, Full Self-Driving/Autopilot was on
It's not 'whataboutism'. It's an identical situation, and the statistics relate to the same events.
mianos··on A Tesla ran a stop sign and killed a man, Full Self-Driving/Autopilot was on
But they don't. Thousands of people are being killed at intersections, yet unless there is some proven intent, it's extremely rare to go to jail.

Maybe this might be valid if this was a realistic thing and every bad driver who pulls out of a side street and kills someone suffers serious consequences, but they don't and it's not.

mianos··on Ask HN: Resources to get good at soldering?
I have a microscope, but once you get used to using hot air, you don't need it for soldering, just inspection.
mianos··on Gemini Omni 1.1 Flash
I have a pro subscription, I think they have just given up. Likely because when they test their new models against the other frontier models they are so bad, they just pull it back. This leads them to try and innovate in other areas where there is currently less competition so they can compete. Not a bad play.
mianos··on Felony charges for citizen deleting phone data at US Border
There is no right to refusal at border control. It's outside the 4th amendment so it's not even relevant.
mianos··on Stripe will reportedly acquire OpenRouter for $7B+
They do reach out pretty quick when your usage takes a huge dive after you move to one of the single provider plans that offer hard to believe possibly unsustainable value.
mianos··on The UK's war on anonymity has come to America
The flaw in 'calling attention to their methods' is that you rarely have a meaningful opportunity to argue against a bureaucratic system that operates this way.

Whether individuals inside the system are true believers or cynical operators, the response to calling out their methods will be identical:

If they genuinely believe the rhetoric: They will simply double down and say, 'Yes, and protecting the children makes this absolutely necessary.'

If they know it is a manipulation tactic: They will still reply with, 'It is for the children,' because they know it is an impenetrable PR shield that gets them their way.

In either scenario, the bureaucracy is entirely immune to the criticism.

Exposing the game might help persuade third-party observers, but it does absolutely nothing to stop the bureaucratic machine from using that exact same line to steamroll the agenda forward.

mianos··on The UK's war on anonymity has come to America
> Anyone who brings up kids is trying to manipulate you into giving up your freedom for security.

The immediate reply is the accusational: "why are you trying to trying to prevent safety for kids".

It's a simple next step to accuse you of hiding your own child abuse ring.

This sounds like hype, but it's the normal path here in Australian.

mianos··on Atlassian Rovo Exfiltrates Data, Bypassing Controls
I just asked it to do a summary or a status page for my staff so I can share the high level details. Somehow it retrieved a version of the page from two weeks ago and summarised that. When I said, this is old, it happily said, yep, I'll do a summary of the current page. I kinda feel there may be people in between the box and some lame LLM.
mianos··on Hubble: Open-source notetaking app for you and your agents
With the explosion in token usage, why not write it in z80 assembly and run it in a z80 emulator written in webasm?
mianos··on Hubble: Open-source notetaking app for you and your agents
There is still a place for 'but rust’, in between too much and too little LLM usage.
mianos··on Hubble: Open-source notetaking app for you and your agents
There are also a lot of mcp agents for Joplin: https://discourse.joplinapp.org/t/ai-agents-and-joplin/46168 Dare I say, another, more popular, note taking app for you and your agents.

I really like it as I run a webdav service and can read/write and sync notes between multiple Mac desktops and Android. Encrypted while I am at it.

Markdown native.

mianos··on Clinical failure rates over the decades: yikes
Also, highly related, in the previous paragraph, they say: "We know a lot more about the biology of disease - although God knows, not nearly enough".

Anyone smarter than a 10 year old would not we actually know almost everything about car design. How it works is not at all hidden. We have iterated on pretty much the same thing for 100 years. The current state is about efficiency, materials and manufacturing.

When you have deep knowledge and experience in a field you will get near 100%.

mianos··on Show HN: I replaced a $120k bowling center system with $1,600 in ESP32s
Once I had more than a few esp32 sensors about the place, with my own firmware, I got serious about getting the OTA updates working and a good c++ wrapper around the nvram management. I don't like the vibe of multiple sensors not having the fixed firmware, just OCD. Github mianos.
mianos··on Why do AI company logos look like buttholes?
Same, I often wondered why the openai logo looks like an interpretation of goatse.
mianos··on Job queues are deceptively tricky
There are lots of good books and some great vids on youtube, but I'd start with this statement and work backward, because this is the non-obvious thing most bootcamp trained, promoted to CTO don't know:

The single most important lesson from queuing theory for software systems is the non-linear relationship between utilisation and latency.

As system utilisation approaches 1.0 (100% capacity), the average waiting time does not scale linearly, it scales hyperbolically. A system running at 95% utilisation is vastly more fragile and slow than one running at 80%, even though the load difference is minor.

mianos··on How to Build a Minimal ZFS NAS Without Synology, QNAP, TrueNAS (2024)
I run zfs as the storage pool for my incus (next lxd) services. It is the ideal fit. Here is a list:

- Instant, zero-copy container cloning from images via Copy-on-Write. If you boot a new image like the existing ones it's seconds.

- Atomic, millisecond-level instance snapshots regardless of storage size

- Block-level container migration using native 'zfs send' and 'zfs receive', very short command lines and seems to work perfectly.

- Granular dataset nesting (every instance, image, and custom volume gets its own ZFS dataset). You can see every filesystem even on the host.

- Transparent, inline data compression (LZ4/ZSTD) enabled automatically per dataset. For services that don't change much, you might as well use a compressed image to make them even smaller.

- Mirroring / Raid

- Sub-volume sharing and direct management via native ZFS administration tools. If my home directory has a build area and a million files, I can just save time and put my home, pre cooked into a new machine and not copy or even rebuild on my new machine.

- Dedup keeps blocks with the same data as a reference. This costs a lot of memory and has not saved much for me as a lot of my images are similar and already shared I think, but it's cool.

mianos··on CarPlay Is Additive
I have a 15 year old Mercedes. I got the old integrated CD player and radio pulled out and Alpine makes a nice dash surround and canbus support module for the steering wheel controls. It has a 7" display where the old stuff was and wireless Android Auto.

It's pretty much like any new car as far as entertainment and maps. Plus, it's got physical buttons for everything else. I think recent cars may well be coming back to what I have on my old car.

ps. not mentioned, Anrdoid auto and Carplay are H264, later H265, video players with touch control and buttons in a return channel. The phones render the display internally and project it as video to the display. That's all. This is why much older generation displays with at least reasonable SOCs can run them near perfectly. They are not running Anrdoid themselves. In fact some of them are operating system-less SOCs that have nearly no firmware but a video player and the support for the touchscreen and buttons. Much like that crappy video player built into old TVs ten years ago.

I have them on my motorcycles too. It's way better than a phone, in that the user interface is designed to be less interactive and more focusses with larger buttons.

mianos··on Is sunscreen the new margarine? (2019)
Which grows out. So if it was substantial, you can just stay inside a while and eventually your hair will grow out and replace the faded hair.
mianos··on Investors get real-time view of UK bond market activity for the first time
ps, this is not how I 'think' it happens. In some countries this is literally my code.
mianos··on Investors get real-time view of UK bond market activity for the first time
40 years building exchanges..

> Only extremely wealthy people participate in stock markets, in general. Other people use one of those wealthy people as an intermediary.

This confuses a retail investor with a Clearing Member. Anyone with a phone and a $10 brokerage account has direct, sub-millisecond execution access to US equity markets. Brokers are not wealthy patrons acting as gatekeepers, they are licensed utility providers providing the technical pipeline to the exchange, just like the power distributors who cable and sell you power. They are providing a managed service, being a direct link to the exchange. There are some platforms that are not DMA, direct market access, but there are numerous brokers who offer DMA. I personally don't trust non DMA access, but maybe for larger orders, it might be good to have a man in the middle as a service.

The graph on Google is a trade feed, the last traded price, not buys and sells. If you sign up to one of those discount brokers you have a feed of those buy and sell orders, the order book, live, not delayed like the google trades. No one gets the names of the people buying and selling until settlement. (How I know, I write that code that builds the order book and matches the orders for a living). Not even the brokers.

True large firms trade large orders amongst themselves so they can get a more stable price, but US regulators explicitly mandate real-time reporting for off-exchange and private trades. Once they trade a listed instrument they must report the trade within 10 minutes. Yes they do, this part is highly regulated, if they don't they will be penalised. It's also in their interest as the more pricing, the better the prices. (No conspiracies here, some people have broken the rules but the code is pretty easy to write to make sure this happens, I've worked on that too)

mianos··on Investors get real-time view of UK bond market activity for the first time
This is all false in modern days. What you are saying was pretty true 100 years ago, except the google bit. I'm pretty sure you didn't take your meds today.
mianos··on What job interviews taught me about Kubernetes
This is exactly why I call it 'resume++'. You have to use it to attract talent. People want to use it to expand their employment pool. This is not justification to using it.

To use it is a whole different question, and not in any way related to job interviews. I have worked in places that are crazy for not using it and others where using it was even crazier.

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