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moribvndvs

1,069 karma · joined July 6, 2023

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moribvndvs··on macOS 27: Workaround to avoid downloading AI models and save storage
Even though I do use it, a choice would be nice.
moribvndvs··on Show HN: Jev vs. GPT-5.6 and Claude Haiku at Pong
lol, playing against jev the ball routinely disappears dozens of pixels away from my paddle and it just awards itself the point anyways. Big Obama awarding Obama energy.
moribvndvs··on ER visits for gambling disorders doubled after expanded online gambling market
Back when legalized gambling was on the ballot for my state, I was enthusiastic supportive, even though I don’t enjoy gambling personally. I conflated these bans with a sort of religious and social nannying, an affront to individual liberties and denying a legal livelihood for something people will do anyways. Legalizing gambling was a step in liberating society from churches and the state. Considering I had no skin in the game, I ignorantly downplayed mental health claims. Years later, I not only regret my support but am deeply embarrassed by it.

Since then, I’ve watched an alarming number of friends and coworkers slip into erratic and reckless patterns of anti-social behavior and self harm. People I never would have expected. No economic or social renaissance has followed as proponents might have claimed back in the day. The casinos around me are large, costly, seedy, hopelessly depressing dumps littered with equally depressing people that stink of desperation and delusion.

The expansion, normalization, and corporatization of traditional gambling and prediction markets is accelerating degeneracy and letting low rent hucksters strip mine countries where they are legal and leave the rest of us paying the bill. I think they are a genuine risk to the health and safety of society.

moribvndvs··on Firefox 156 shows ads in the address bar (dubbed "Firefox Suggest")
The consent dialog is one of the most unhinged examples I’ve seen. No “reject all”, I clicked reject on each of the visible sections which kept the save selected button grayed out. To fix that you have to click all providers and reject each one, and there are nearly 200.
moribvndvs··on Ex-FTC boss Khan: break out the handcuffs for AI CEOs, citing 1934 precedent
So is the solution to only nominate corporate bagmen who have a perverse incentive?
moribvndvs··on Things That Annoy Me About Cars
On my car, yes it activates the brake light.
moribvndvs··on Things That Annoy Me About Cars
As you suggest, it smooths out your driving habits. You’re just focusing on balancing the accelerator with your desired velocity, that’s it. Need to go slower? Back off the pedal until you hit the mark. The regenerative braking kicks in so it slows down quickly, sort of like light-to-medium braking. It’s more responsive than you might think. Need to go faster? Press the accelerator as usual. No more going back and forth between gas and brake, which makes it less exhausting in stop-and-go traffic. You’re also maximizing regenerative breaking, so that’s increased efficiency and less brake wear. That’s particularly good when you’re doing down hill.
moribvndvs··on Things That Annoy Me About Cars
I got a used 2023 Chevy Bolt and initially disregarded one pedal driving was an absurd and unnecessary feature, but now I think I would skip a car that doesn’t have it.
moribvndvs··on Cops Search Flock Cameras for Reasons of 'LMAO,' 'IDK,' and 'Asdfg'
I’d like to see these comments copied over to the “reason for termination” field in their personnel file.
moribvndvs··on Gonc – Netcat with P2P Nat Traversal
Here’s a regularly updated list of them [0].

0 - https://github.com/pradt2/always-online-stun/tree/master

moribvndvs··on LLMs are real, AI is fake
Python is proselytized as an easy-to-master programming language, though.
moribvndvs··on Details.so
A who’s who of usability war crimes.
moribvndvs··on Four Weeks of a Vegan Diet Alter Signs of Inflammation and Aging
I’ve been vegan for 14 years. Protein is not very very hard, unless you have multiple dietary restrictions on top of plant based. Which, if I can be frank, tend to be self imposed when people complain about this to me after dabbling in plant based.
moribvndvs··on Reading Maps – Journeys from fiction drawn on the real world
I find naval battles fascinating, but they can be hard to visualize over time. Not only location of key events like this, but where each ship is located, where/what they were shooting, etc. There are a handful of YouTube channels that do reasonable jobs animating this, but I’d love something interactive I could scrub through at my leisure and provide lots more detail and context. I had been tinkering with an educational game where you could load in a battle and watch from almost any perspective (especially on deck), but as you might imagine that is a wildly large scope. Maybe something like this is a better first step :)
moribvndvs··on SpacetimeDB: a short technical review
Very cool watching late stage software shops undiscover n tier architecture. Of course, breaking from hard learned wisdom for niche use cases is fine… until you bury the reality in a misleading and edge lord-ish PR sweep.
moribvndvs··on Raiders of the Lost Array: vibe-coding a macOS driver for my orphaned Drobo
You’re referencing an argument I never made. I have no problem with the author’s post, I was very specifically complaining about Opus’ barely coherent style of prose.
moribvndvs··on Columbia House, Mail-Order Media Company, Is Shuttering
I accidentally found a magical entrance to the underground hardcore, punk, and metal scene because of CH. That, and subsequently looking through my first Very catalog, was like that scene from The Mummy when they discover the pharaoh’s treasure room. Thanks for the intro, CH
moribvndvs··on Quake Shareware, a CD-ROM just a little too full
I worked the parts counter in 98-99. It was a coveted position, as the juice was the retail channel programs where qualified employees got pretty significant discounts from Intel, AMD, and the likes. Reps would also shower you with free or discounted stuff, I recall having a good friendship with a Creative Labs who rigged contests and gave away shit constantly. Lots of free software to be had as well. It was effective though because I happily and aggressively shilled for the companies hooking me up. CompUSA was actually a pretty miserable place to work but it fed MY insatiable hunger for new hardware.
moribvndvs··on Private prisons announce $1.4B in revenue as immigration detentions climb
Nice false dilemma you have here.
moribvndvs··on Hello, me. It's been a while
I’m over the hill, and I’ve found I just can’t handle the distractions of music or podcasts most of the time. I need silence when working, cooking, reading, etc. There are few situations where I feel I can listen to things i.e. driving so long as I don’t need to focus on them. I’m not sure what changed or if it’s a good thing. Music used to be a huge part of my life, played at all times. Now I have to deliberately do nothing but listen, which gives me a weird sensation of boredom or fidgety anxiety, so I don’t do it very much anymore. I suspect an attention disorder worsened by years of overstimulation.
moribvndvs··on I requested a copy of my data from McDonald’s loyalty program
It does sound nice for a local shop. And I don’t discredit the worker for being nice in my case. I was however disturbed by the fact I was shamefully slamming that much fast food at 1 AM every day.
moribvndvs··on I requested a copy of my data from McDonald’s loyalty program
At my first start up, I unfortunately relied on fast food daily. One night I pulled into a Wendy’s and the drive thru operator opened with “Hey Mike. Working late again, eh? The usual [my usual order]”. I don't recall having a friendly relationship with the operator or really talking to any one in particular, so this freaked me out and also made me feel a bit of shame. I stopped going after that. Granted, this was just a friendly worker but your question reminded me of it.

Definitely prompted me to remove the Taco Bell app. I don’t need the occasional free bean burrito that badly.

moribvndvs··on My Agent Setup
Not pointed at the author, but at the current state of affairs: this is fucking exhausting. We went and made a trillions-dollar market out of the bikeshedding maximization machine.
moribvndvs··on Don't be a meat proxy
Claude’s tone and style has gotten worse with the recent models, not that it was ever very good. It’s both too concise (stringing together a bunch of jargon/acronyms together in weird ways that aren’t familiar even in areas where you have expertise – with no ramp up, context, or clarity) and too verbose (printing out reams of the word salad mentioned above, often just restating things repeatedly). It feels like writing from someone who really doesn’t know where to start or where to end on a topic so they try to cover their ass by saturation. I suppose that’s not far from reality. Asking it a dozen different ways to speak plainly, use STE, ELI5, whatever has little appreciable effect.

I recently started a new consulting gig and got a 36 page architectural white paper that was authored by Claude. It took me an entire business day and a monstrous headache to decipher and distill it down to a 1 pager. This shit is unsustainable.

moribvndvs··on Physical Media vs. Digital Media
I don’t care about media – whether it’s on a disc, thumb drive, hard disk, cassette, in the cloud, sitting on a nas, it doesn’t matter - I simply want the rights to use the thing I bought, irrevocably and irrespective of the media it’s conveyed on. I get that physical media is an easy target because traditional physical media requires someone to come into your house and remove or destroy it, but this is one of those issues where treating a symptom rather than the cause will not solve the greater problem.
moribvndvs··on CO2 overload, detected in human blood, suggests toxic atmosphere within 50 years
They do make HRV and ERV, but not exactly a simple retrofit for existing houses.
moribvndvs··on Why I Left Google DeepMind
It’s true that humans are unreliable, even if we could guarantee a consistent set of moral and ethical standards as well as the appropriate tools and authority to enforce them at all times. We do, however, have to deal with 100% of the implications, one way or another. Machines don’t. Vasily Arkhipov and Stanislav Petrov had to consider the world they would condemn their children to if they pushed the button, the missiles didn’t. These are imperfect devices made by imperfect beings, whose rules and goals can be changed more or less at will by whomever wields them. Offloading the responsibility of pulling a trigger or trampling someone’s legal or human rights to such a machine while insulating those in command from consequences threatens to make things worse at a speed and scale I don’t think we’ve seen before in all of our dark history. Meanwhile, it further concentrates immense and unchecked power in the hands of a relative scant handful of elites, all of whom exhibit the lack of ethical and moral fiber we were talking about to begin with.

Teaching something or someone to pull a trigger is trivial compared to teaching them not to. I have no reason to believe that automated weapons and surveillance will be more reliable than our world leaders or that the world will be safer with them in it.

moribvndvs··on What happened after 2k people tried to hack my AI assistant
What happened to the common sense adage: your opponent only has to be lucky once, you have to be lucky every time.
moribvndvs··on Ask HN: Where is the programming profession going?
Anecdotal experience amongst my small team:

- spending exorbitant amounts of time up front planning, surfacing every milestone, subtask, and individual change, burning tons of tokens in addition to man hours fixing minute but important mistakes or derivations despite explicit instructions, CLAUDE.md, memory subsystems, agent and skill instructions, etc.

- executing and reviewing results compared to the plan and finding even more mistakes and derivations from the plan often takes a lot of time - the relative rapidity produces a lot of output for the team which stresses our lifecycle and introduces feelings the whole process is on the verge of flying off the rails

- individual developers have different expectations, definitions of acceptable, skills/experience to detect and deal with problems, and patience. I might spend hours to days meticulously planning and executing a ticket and another guy might yolo it in 30 minutes. Other than bug escape rate and tracking review failures I’m struggling with how to track people who are “doing it wrong” let alone telling them the “right” way to do it.

- growing exhaustion, lack of ownership and confidence, frustration, and a generalized feeling of endlessly fighting your tools but in a weird way they never seem to really improve despite all your efforts to do so

- taking humans out of the loop and letting the agents be more autonomous in hopes that we’ll reduce the bottleneck and produce better results has not helped.

- I find even myself fighting (and sometimes failing) the urge to give in even though the proposed or implemented solution doesn’t feel right. Scale that across your team

- experience has not really changed despite changes in models and harnesses

- there’s a deep feeling that I’m doing something wrong and fomo since so many people in the industry boast of incredible results. I probably am, but everything I’ve read about and tried has not really moved the needle much and it’s introducing another dimension of exhaustion and frustration

overall, I don’t feel like we’re being much more productive when you factor in quality and accountability (which should be a given, but this industry increasingly overtaken by a reckless philosophy of speed over everything else). I do think it has helped parallelize tasks, produce higher quality PoCs to explore more options and do it faster, offload joyless but necessary tasks that are narrow in scope and measurable, do exploratory work and act as a generalized interactive knowledge base, and make shallow techniques, technologies, etc. that you don’t yet have experience with. Maybe I’m just missing a critical component or two in the process (formal specification, etc). Maybe it’s growing pains, or maybe there’s a looming rot. Either way job satisfaction and confidence in my work is much lower than I would have expected.

moribvndvs··on DuckDB Internals Part 1
I recently got a task to sift through a daily drop of parquet files that need to be processed and given a UI for arbitrary queries by a non-technical team. Naively I started by looking at redshift, Athena/glue, etc. I spun my wheels for a week and barely made progress, resulting in a miserably fragile, slow, overly complicated, and/or expensive set of underwhelming PoCs. So I decided to give DuckDB a shot and I got the whole project done in under a day. It was so intuitive and runs so fast I was sure I was missing something. I wasn’t. What an absolute joy to use, and the supporting documentation is outstanding. My problem now is it’s my favorite hammer and I want everything to be a nail.
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