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nwatson

2,479 karma · joined June 1, 2009

To reach me put an 'f' between first/second letters of my HN username and append with the goog's standard e-mail service address suffix.

Living in North Carolina, remote-working for San Mateo, CA software company.

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nwatson··on Why the US Navy won't blast the Iranians and 'open' Strait of Hormuz
The USA military is subject to civilian control and whim and that's their contract. Gauging approaches to have best effect would involve coordination among the political, intelligence, and military glamorati, and that's something that could never happen in the environment of the past year.
nwatson··on Quantization from the Ground Up
I got an Olares One system with a 24GB (consumer not 32GB) NVIDIA RTX 5090 for less than $3k at the Kickstarter price. It comes with Olares OS which for my purposes is not all that useful, I settled finally on a good Ubuntu 24.04 LTS configuration, but it was a good deal. I actually bought two.
nwatson··on 'The Secret Agent': Exploring a Vibrant, yet Violent Brazil (2025)
I spent the early 70s and early 80s in Brazil. I left at around the time of the abertura in 1984 when we lost a semester at UnB due to the student and faculty strikes. It was convenient that my family was coming to the USA. There's a lot I missed while living in Brazil but I've enjoyed watching Peninha (Eduardo Bueno) explain Brazilian history on his "Buenas [sic] Ideias" YouTube channel.

He spends a lot of time on the 1960s and the "milicos escrotos" (f'in military folks) who took over at the time, but he's written a number of books on Brazilian history and has an entertaining style.

nwatson··on Malus – Clean Room as a Service
Enforcement stops completely at around US$1-billion.
nwatson··on Cognitive Debt: When Velocity Exceeds Comprehension
Sounds like "Nate B Jones" from the "AI News & Strategy Daily | Nate B Jones". He's very enthusiastic about the notion that there are "dark software houses" or something like that where no human writes code, reviews code, or writes unit / integration tests. The human's job is to write specs so complete that the AI can't help but write the correctly behaving software, and that the software developer role combines somehow with the product manager role, and that the skills required for this are fundamentally different from traditional software, and that most people are at tier zero, one, or two of the AI-aided software paradigm, whereas they need to be at level five to not be left behind. His videos are thought-provoking at least.

EDIT: fixed a few mistakes

nwatson··on I was banned from Claude for scaffolding a Claude.md file?
Self-hosted might be the way to go soon. I'm getting 2x Olares One boxes, each with an RTX 5090 GPU (NVIDIA 24GB VRAM), and a built-in ecosystem of AI apps, many of which should be useful, and Kubernetes + Docker will let me deploy whatever else I want. Presumably I will manage to host a good coding model and use Claude Code as the framework (or some other). There will be many good options out there soon.
nwatson··on Michelangelo's first painting, created when he was 12 or 13
His painting is based on a prior work, an engraving by Martin Schongauer ... "The Temptation of St Anthony" ... see here https://www.wikiart.org/en/martin-schongauer/the-temptation-... ...

So he was re-rendering a religious folk story.

nwatson··on The origin of the names of the days of the week in Portuguese
Graças à Deus, amanhã chega sexta-feira.
nwatson··on Trump says Venezuela’s Maduro captured after strikes
Capture might not be the aim. The coming decades will see anonymous effective asymmetric warfare with USA infrastructure and the USA political establishment as prime targets. That's the big concern.
nwatson··on The closer we look at time, the stranger it gets
The past that we have yet to subject to our subjection also is effectively future.

Supplication for unknown outcomes surely already determined in the objective past wrt the present time still makes sense. The Divine Successive Relaxation with physical laws as the substrate, and the choices of human free will, human petition and desire, and Divine Will And Intention as boundary conditions, will solidify objective reality into a coherent whole in Open Theism.

nwatson··on Adversarial poetry as a universal single-turn jailbreak mechanism in LLMs
Poetry jailbreaks peoples' own defenses too. Roses, wine, a guitar, a poem.
nwatson··on I may have found a way to spot U.S. at-sea strikes before they're announced
The goal is kinetics and beautiful fireworks for the folks back home. "Acting now" is much easier than methodical interdiction, investigation, and potential justice. The home audience won't tolerate anything smacking of evidence and proof, that's too bookish and takes time.
nwatson··on Replacement.ai
Enter the Dominionists, gaining steam now. Not a regime I want to live under. Here's a forty year old article describing the inception of those religious figures close to the current USA administration ... https://banner.org.uk/res/kt1.html
nwatson··on Restrictions on house sharing by unrelated roommates
Just wait for the City Office of Roommate-By-Another-Name Licensure.
nwatson··on Will AI Replace Human Thinking? The Case for Writing and Coding Manually
Yeah, I'm trying to branch out to build things outside my comfort zone. AI already is helpful in my normal day-to-day (backend engineer, mostly Python w/ PyCharm/Datagrip working in monorepo style), but Claude Code helped me graft on a Typescript/Javascript UI ecosystem with an independent Webstorm IDE setup that will integrate well, along with all the presumably latest build tools and package management. The research and self-education I would have needed to do this without Claude would have been extensive, and would have been nowhere as complete. I don't see any point in going back to pre-AI. And I don't generally use AI results blindly, I go back and review and set some breakpoints in an IDE and watch it do its thing.
nwatson··on A visual introduction to big O notation
It can get a lot more complicated though. At times there are more parameters to an algorithm's complexity than just `n`. E.g., the parameters for big-O might be `n`, `K`, and `ρ`, and some expressions in the big-O might involve combinations of those parameters.

In such cases as well, one might know for a specific application of the algorithm that, for example, `ρ` is bounded, and so the big-O becomes more influenced by the `n` and `K`.

nwatson··on With waters at 32C, Mediterranean tropicalization shifts into high gear
Yeah ... animal (and plant, etc.) populations in a stable environment have a lot of random variations that confer no outright distinct advantages over their peers, they are distributed along the normal plane to the current evolutionary gradient. When environments suddenly change, it's not like animal populations rapidly create new random mutations that confer advantages in subsequent generations. Rather, the new conditions make previously existing traits that some animals within the population had and others didn't have more significant to survival, and so those advantageous traits are emphasized in subsequent generations.

After this "evolutionary bottleneck", other new random mutations / variations will occur generations later that might have no seeming immediate advantage / disadvantage to the "new normal", but at some subsequent change in the environment, the cycle of weeding out "bad" traits will happen again.

nwatson··on With waters at 32C, Mediterranean tropicalization shifts into high gear
The ones that survived will have had more efficient metabolisms, or harder hooves that could break through the ice to get to the food, or could have learned a technique to cope. Hopefully their next generation will retain those traits or that culture to adapt.
nwatson··on Claude Sonnet 4 now supports 1M tokens of context
One can also integrate with, say, a running PyCharm with the Jetbrains IDE MCP server. Claude Desktop can then interact directly with PyCharm.
nwatson··on GitHub pull requests were down
Set up a second remote on Bitbucket or other and synchronize through that. Pipelined, etc might be missing but at least development can proceed.
nwatson··on The Dollar Is Dead
It creates rich-people dollars and poor-people dollars. The poor people can still afford a buy a few necessities because rich-people money is tied up in useless vain endeavors, at least to some extent. If rich were to direct all their purchasing power toward real goods they could drive up the prices and make it unaffordable for regular people. As happens with the housing market to some extent.

Edit: unautocorrect

nwatson··on VPN use surges in UK as new online safety rules kick in
As for WW2, Roosevelt worked hard to make sure Britain couldn't reconstitute its empire, and to work toward global self-determination.
nwatson··on Proposed NOAA Budget Kills Program Designed to Prevent Satellite Collisions
Someone will propose privatization of said program with insurance fees covering the reformulated collision-prevention service. Of course, privatization will leave out crucial aspects, lead to failures, increasing untraceable space debris from which nobody will be safe, and eventually bankruptcy of said privatized program, with no way back. As is happening in other parts of government.
nwatson··on Why English doesn't use accents
I spent time in the "Rio de la Plata" area in the late 1970s, mainly Montevideo, and learned rioplatense Spanish, and would use the ZH sound as in "meaSure" for Y/LL letters in "playa" and "calle".

In the last 40 years I've spent mostly in the USA I rarely have heard Uruguayan/Argentinian Spanish in person or in media, but was surprised to hear Messi and others in recent interviews use SH as in "puSH" for the Y/LL, this apparent has been a generational shift in that area, first in Argentina and then Uruguay. I'd sound old-fashioned if I were to go back to Montevideo these days.

nwatson··on U.S. has bombed Fordo nuclear plant in attack on Iran
Along the same lines ... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RJiwovX3mNA ... powerful lyrics
nwatson··on Show HN: An open-source rhythm dungeon crawler in 16 x 9 pixels
For low "pixel count" games try electronic football, 3x9 pixels. From Mattel, 1977.

https://youtube.com/shorts/MNm4e5MxqFk?si=-UR3HayZOuDuhGJm

nwatson··on Show HN: Racketmeter – Measure Badminton String Tension Using Sound Frequency
The Gates company make the Gates Carbon Belt to replace bike chains with a carbon fiber belt (encased in some polymer). My Priority Bicycle 600x has this belt drive, along with matching sprockets and a Pinion C1.12 "transmission", where all gearing/shifting takes place.

To check proper tension, Gates supplies an app [0] that also has you pluck the belt to measure the frequency. For my bike the appropriate tension is at 60Hz. Tension is adjusted by moving the rear axle backward or forward.

[0] https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.gates.carb...

EDIT: the advantages are ... no fragile derailleur; no chain lube; long belt lifespan; low maintenance

nwatson··on CLion Is Now Free for Non-Commercial Use
Jetbrains has "AI Assistant" and "Junie" (the latter is much like "Claude Code"). Junie is a great AI coding assistant, seems to be on par with Claude Code (and can use Anthropic models e.g. Claude Sonnet, or other models).

Also, Claude Desktop can be configured to serve Jetbrains MCP Server, which will let Claude Desktop (or any other coding AI/LLM) connect and control Jetbrains IDEs, including changing project configuration, listing / finding files, editing files, looking at VCS diffs.

So I believe Jetbrains is addressing the AI coding assistant market, they're not making as much noise and perhaps they should be ... feature-wise I think Jetbrains IDEs + AI integrations will be as good, in the long term, as other systems. At least I hope so, because I can't let go of PyCharm, Webstorm, IntelliJ IDEA, Goland, et al

nwatson··on I analyzed chord progressions in 680k songs
Thanks for the Rick Beato video. Yes, complex.
nwatson··on CVE program faces swift end after DHS fails to renew contract [updated]
Maybe "they" want to do the pwning with less coordinated resistance. Doing away with CVEs would help with that objective.
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