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okwhateverdudeon Giving a Shit as a Service (2022)

> Giving a shit makes for a more happy customer, but cutting a board oval shaped is what they do in a workshop for breakfast.

Maybe. It could also be that the majority of their customers only want boring non-oval shit most of the time. So the chance to flex a bit on a "non-standard" order and getting to actually demonstrate those skills leads to a much better outcome for everyone including the craftspeople.

okwhateverdudeon Giving a Shit as a Service (2022)

The furniture people probably also had the same question and were excited to figure it out.

okwhateverdudeon Ketamine's effect on depression may hinge on hope

> In particular, I am of the (somewhat provocative) opinion that things like radical Islamic terrorism, fringe climate activism, and the more virulent brands of third-wave feminism are all, at their core, performative quests for such transcendence.

Interesting thought. If you have a blog, I'd like to read more.

okwhateverdudeon Sessionic: A cross-browser extension to save, manage, restore tabs and sessions

TreeStyleTabs in Firefox has a feature to bookmark the whole tree you've built. I find that very useful for a similar workflow as you. And keeping the tree structure is important because it lets me back up a level or two in case there were more resources to explore that I've not.

okwhateverdudeon Decline in independent activity as a cause of decline in child mental health

https://archive.org/details/1996-the-millionaire-next-door

Here you go.

okwhateverdudeon Unix Structured Concurrency

Two. And what's funny, I saw some of the fallout from the transition from v1 to v2 only last year at my last gig. Company upgraded Debian and Debian maintainers opted to go v2 only in the kernel build. However, the version of JVM the company was using did not fully support v2. Without the cgroup support, each JVM in a container thought they had the resources of the whole system. It was a cluster (heh) fuck, as in that all of the affected services OOM'd thinking they had more heap potential and the k8s cluster was churning pods like no tomorrow.

okwhateverdudeon Linux ate my RAM (2009)

Assuming Linux, oddly enough I came across this exact behavior[0] while researching resource management for an on-prem k8s cluster. Take a look at that thread for more info, but TL;DR, you need to actually finesse page cache constraints if you want avoid the behavior. You actually can have really fine grained control over page cache via cgroups v2[1][2] and systemd[3].

[0]: https://github.com/kubernetes/kubernetes/issues/43916

[1]: https://docs.kernel.org/admin-guide/cgroup-v2.html#memory-in...

[2]: https://biriukov.dev/docs/page-cache/6-cgroup-v2-and-page-ca...

[3]: https://www.freedesktop.org/software/systemd/man/systemd.res...

okwhateverdudeon Discovery Steering Committee re Google Antitrust Litigation [pdf]

You're assuming the goal posts on evil haven't been moved. Easy to justify all of your nonsense if you lower bar of evil to "not committing genocide."

okwhateverdudeon Mistral 7B

Yeah, gotta setup miniconda to keep things manageable. Basically a generic virtual env manager that is trivial to use. This way you can ensure each one of these LLM projects that want different versions of different libs will get them without stepping on each other or polluting your system.

okwhateverdudeon Food companies ‘sweetened the world’ and increased the risk of disease

> It's an addiction with no escape

There is hope through sheer willpower and lifestyle changes. Similar to stopping smoking. And it isn't easy. It is simple to do (CICO), however. I used to be 130kg. Now I'm sitting around 85kg (and would be better around 80kg), but the addiction never really goes away. I am forever aware of my calorie intake and expenditure. It's so easy to eat out of boredom and to eat more than I should. I have to police my behavior and preempt it. Can't eat junk food if you never buy any. But even then each one of those choices takes mental effort and will power to the point where to help ensure I continue fighting my addiction I've had to completely rethink my view point on food and purposefully try not to enjoy it. Food is not a reward. It is not a treat. It is fuel that I need to be active. And once I've had enough fuel for my current activity level, I don't need any more.

Not everyone can do this kind of introspection, lifestyle modification. It is a continual struggle where I've had to optimize my life around knowing just how much mental effort I'm capable of to manage my addiction. And western society doesn't make it any easier where you are shamed and called grotesque blobs for making poor choices in a system geared toward exploiting your weaknesses for profit. The most insidious aspect is that unlike smoking tobacco, you can't simply quit food. You need it to survive. Food should be regulated much like gambling is regulated or smoking for that matter. Otherwise, the sociopaths in our society will prey on people that literally can't help themselves.

okwhateverdudeon Darwin: A framework for evolving decentralized web apps

Let me know when I can buy groceries with your fake money, in person, and have the transaction completed immediately.

Cryptocurrencies are just three ponzi schemes in a trench coat.

okwhateverdudeon Windows NT on 600MHz machine opens apps instantly. What happened?

I already struggle with waiting for the rube goldberg-esque build-deploy-to-dev loop at my current gig. Thanks for the additional disgust.

okwhateverdudeon Reforming the free software message

IANAL, etc.

The Copyleft (both the short blurb and the longer detailed) explanation needs to make more explicit about the "distribution" aspect. GPL-v2/v3's copyleft requirement in particular only apply if you distribute the software. If you make changes/incorporate GPL-v2/v3 code but then never distribute that software, you are under no obligation to make those changes or the total incorporated project available. This is exactly why the Affero GPL came about, to close this "loophole", especially for network services (famous case is Amazon building a managed elasticsearch service).

okwhateverdudeon John Carmack on shorter work weeks (2016)

>Now that I'm back in Silicon Valley working for the FANGMAN on a tiny piece of His next attempt at world domination, I get exhausted and burned out pretty quick. I've got maybe 4 good hours of concentrated effort in me per day, it's a struggle to drag myself into the office, the week just crawls by and the weekend is gone in a flash..

It helps to disconnect from whatever it is the company is doing and value your time and expertise more. The success of whatever you're working on is not a reflection of you or your skills. Oh that experiment didn't work? That new product feature flopped? Meh, I'm paid by the hour to execute my expertise at my comfortable pace toward their goal regardless of how realistic or achievable it is. Embrace the jira ticket monkey mindset. Don't try to work around the org inefficiencies, embrace and amplify them. Oh I need to wait for some indeterminate time for access/permission? Blocked by another team? Scheduled for stupid meetings sprinkled through the day such that you can't get a proper maker's schedule[1]? The work isn't structured well? The priorities change frequently enough for whiplash? I get paid regardless. So what if my productivity or output is low due to their nonsense? Disconnecting mentally really helps prevent the exhaustion and burnout. Don't try to do the PO's/PM's/Boss' job. It's their money to waste, their dumb decisions to make, and none of it is your concern.

At least for me, a healthy dose of perspective makes it much easier to go into the office; enjoy the amenities, free feed, and getting some social time in. The weather has been fantastic the last few weeks and I've been cycling into work. I save my quality mental focus for other things, including keeping an eye out for gigs and opportunities where it makes sense to mentally connect.

[1]: http://paulgraham.com/makersschedule.html

okwhateverdudeon Comcast complains to FCC that listing all of its monthly fees is too hard

> I can't blame Comcast in the least for pushing back on having standardized labeling for this kind of thing, which varies from township to township.

To be fair, for a billion dollar company with literal billions in profit from a subsidized mono/duopoly and considering there are only so many towns in so many states where they operate, this is super weak. It can totally be done even if tedious, expensive, and time consuming. Thing is, most of the work has already been done accounting wise because they need to comply with the laws in those areas. Now they just need to report it accurately at point of sale.

okwhateverdudeon What happened with ASUS routers this morning?

A wild strawman appears! But seriously, it isn't 3rd party ads that GP was complaining about.

That said, if the OS is aggressively pushing recommendations for their first party news, videos, and search engine, and every one of those things shows 3rd party ads, I don't think that single step removed absolves win 11.

okwhateverdudeon Gamers 50-plus are a growing force in the tech market

Low gravity CTF in Urban Terror was the best. So many good maps where the right jump, curve, and slide could be done from flag to flag. So satisfying.

okwhateverdudeon OpenAI’s CEO says the age of giant AI models is already over

Yeah, SponsorBlock (https://sponsor.ajay.app/) is crowdsourced data for the in-video ads. Weirdly enough, I've never contributed timestamps, but the vast majority of the content I watch has submitted timestamps. I support a bunch of creators on patreon, but very much disagree with their double dipping.

okwhateverdudeon OpenAI’s CEO says the age of giant AI models is already over

NewPipe/Freetube/Invidious instances + SponsorBlock API support is really great at filtering all of these useless advertising memes. Somehow ($$$) the behavior of TV adverts culture seeped into YouTube. I've not watched broadcast/cable TV in years, but when I interact with people that do, inevitably, they make similar references. It's super weird.

okwhateverdudeon Make the future bright again: On building a new philosophy of progress

Well, who knows what genetic advances we'll make in 40 years. We squashed a pandemic in two years based on research that had been percolating for ten years. People don't die of old age, they die of ailments that accumulate through age. The more of those we fix, the longer people live. I'm not confident of the 150 number, but larger generational cohorts above 100? You bet.

okwhateverdudeon De-Stressing Booking.com (2019)

They aren't totally made up, but they are deliberately obtuse. Hotels are ultimately the ones that control the availability of rooms sold on the platform. It is a common tactic to only list a handful of room nights until those are sold, then add more. This means that all of their rooms always have the urgency messaging. The larger chains do this at scale and across multiple third party sites. So Booking isn't really lying, those numbers are "true", in that there are "only 2 rooms left" but they don't mention the hoteliers' smarmy behavior in abusing the urgency messaging about the availability or their own complicit participation in the lie-by-omission.

okwhateverdudeon How the relentless drive for optimization made baseball impossible to watch

Seems like it is a little of both according to this article on mlb.com: https://www.mlb.com/news/savannah-bananas-the-dancing-globet...

okwhateverdudeon How the relentless drive for optimization made baseball impossible to watch

That's a fair point. The changes they did make are definitely steering the large container ship with very slight course heading adjustments. But the cynic in me says that the audience is not the actual customer, the advertisers are. If they were to fundamentally change the sport in a way that would drive viewership up significantly, those extra advertising monies would easily paper over the loss from disgruntled audience.

The article makes a good point about misalignment here. Teams want to win (winning helps sell merch), but the league wants to sell ads (ads need worthwhile content). If these incentives were better aligned, maybe we'd end up with a less boring game that doesn't end up as background noise.

okwhateverdudeon How the relentless drive for optimization made baseball impossible to watch

Pretty sure anything but the last two innings of a baseball game (if it is close in score) was already boring. Pacing is already generally slow. So slow that it is super common to have all sorts of audience distractions (kiss cams, celebrity look-a-like cams, etc). If they wanted to make is more exciting to watch, they need to take a page from the american football clones (shortened field, reduced players, easier scoring).

Imagine if the game was shortened to 4 innings, no more home runs (hang a driving range golf net), no more foul balls (every hit counts, plus that big golf net goes all around the field). It would be a much more fast paced game, and rotund powerhouse smasher types replaced with more athletic, speedy types. Still need hits to get on base, but running the bases becomes much more important with the always force that happens with every-hit-is-a-hit.

okwhateverdudeon Show HN: Live coaching app for remote SWE interviews, uses Whisper and GPT-4

Well, without specifying what CPU, how else? There are tons of specific answers to this question if you wanna pick up a random datasheet

okwhateverdudeon An IP attorney’s reading of the Stable Diffusion class action lawsuit

Now hold on a second. You seem very certain of "individual", what it is, and what it is not. I am not so sure that we're not actually creating an individual here or at least parts of an individual as snapshots of qualia and being able to recall or "hallucinate" them. Does no amount of mimicry bring a program closer to an individual? What if we made a really clever model that learns on the fly via constant streams of qualia and adapts as best as it can and it could do all of the things you could do, maybe not very well, or only to the same level as a service animal; is that any closer to an individual? I believe it is way more of a spectrum than the binary "will never be an individual".

Regardless of the details of how a brain is a conscious, it can be reduced to its constituent pieces or nuts and bolts, so to speak. Everything from the electrochemical potentials within neurons to the encoded chemical information in the form of DNA and RNA that spontaneously replicates and orchestrates a maddening array of complexities, we can partially explain. Even if our explanation is basically parts in a bucket, that's enough to paint a future where humanity understands enough of those processes to replicate consciousness without actually understanding why it works. Perhaps we don't need to understand the emergent properties, but merely discover them like the standard model in physics. We equally can't explain /why/ the fundamental physics constants are the way they are, but we can use them to do extraordinary things.