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olddustytrail

796 karma · joined April 22, 2022

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olddustytrail··on The “Wow!” signal was likely from extraterrestrial source, and more powerful
Creationism is effectively identical to the simulation hypothesis. It's odd that people here will accept the latter while immediately dismissing the former.
olddustytrail··on One universal antiviral to rule them all?
Not really. Races don't exist biologically. There are certainly traits within populations but that's a bit like my cousins tend to be fatter than my family. It's not something that can be accurately targeted.
olddustytrail··on Why do people keep writing about the imaginary compound Cr2Gr2Te6?
The second reference link had Ge rather than Gr in the abstract. These seem a tiny number of typos.

How many papers have the correct formula?

olddustytrail··on macOS dotfiles should not go in –/Library/Application Support
The spec says

"There is a single base directory relative to which user-specific data files should be written. This directory is defined by the environment variable $XDG_DATA_HOME"

Where are you seeing "read-only"?

And why would it not be safe? What kind of user specific documentation did you think should go there and even if you did, why would you think it could be randomly removed by something else?

olddustytrail··on Starship's Tenth Flight Test
I certainly hope the people at SpaceX don't do that because it's not cool to neglect your family and friends no matter how cool your job is.

I appreciate their work however and it's a shame that Musk has tainted their efforts. He could be a decent man if he tried but he's clearly chosen a different path.

olddustytrail··on US attack on renewables will lead to power crunch that spikes electricity prices
When I go outside on a cloudy day I can still see clearly because there's still electromagnetic radiation from the Sun reaching the Earth.
olddustytrail··on US attack on renewables will lead to power crunch that spikes electricity prices
If people really cared about coal miners then they could be offered a $1 million redundancy package. It would amount to a tiny fraction of government spending and I'm pretty sure it would be welcomed.
olddustytrail··on US attack on renewables will lead to power crunch that spikes electricity prices
As JumpCrisscross said, they really are. Look at solar deployments across the planet.

They do need planning permission of course and that's where they can be blocked.

olddustytrail··on US attack on renewables will lead to power crunch that spikes electricity prices
Exactly right. HN is generally right-wing but I think it aspires to be more intelligent right-wing than dumb.

Think more Bloomberg News than Fox News (or, for UK folk, more FT than DM).

olddustytrail··on US attack on renewables will lead to power crunch that spikes electricity prices
It doesn't. Solar is ridiculously cheap and requires no subsidy at all to be profitable.

If this is happening (which frankly I doubt) it's just corruption.

olddustytrail··on US attack on renewables will lead to power crunch that spikes electricity prices
If the Sun is 100% offline then we're all dead anyway.

Generally we can rely on there being a day though. Can even predict sunrise and sunset.

olddustytrail··on Florida lawmaker floats ban on HOAs amid growing backlash
Outrageous government overreach. Why can't you just choose the corporation to pay the weregild? It would be far more efficient!
olddustytrail··on Building AI products in the probabilistic era
I vibe like there is a real point trying to escape this article but it sounds like a long form LinkedIn post.

Ask ChatGPT to fix it.

ps. On a side note, I love that vibe has come back as a word. Feels like the 60s.

olddustytrail··on Go is still not good
> If you're saying someone can't credibly criticize a language without having designed a language themselves

Actually I think that's a reasonable argument. I've not designed a language myself (other than toy experiments) so I'm hesitant to denigrate other people's design choices because even with my limited experience I'm aware that there are always compromises.

Similarly, I'm not impressed by literary critics whose own writing is unimpressive.

olddustytrail··on Florida lawmaker floats ban on HOAs amid growing backlash
Why not kill the guy with the motorbike and cut out the middleman?
olddustytrail··on "Email is Easy" email address quiz
Exactly. Not valid because it can't be routed.
olddustytrail··on Simulator of the life of a 30-year-old in the UK
Schools are not strictly run by the government either. Learn how schools work before commenting.

A fair number of my family are teachers so check your facts before trying your lazy assertions.

olddustytrail··on Gitea 1.24.0 Is Released
Is Gitea still a thing now Forgejo is around? I'm not sure what advantages Gitea has.
olddustytrail··on Simulator of the life of a 30-year-old in the UK
I don't believe you because I live in the UK and the idea that people don't celebrate Christmas is beyond moronic. The shops start doing Christmas stuff the day after Halloween. It's unending Christmas songs for two months.

Tell me you seriously didn't notice this.

olddustytrail··on The future of large files in Git is Git
Yes, the problem really stems from the fact that git "understands" text files but not really anything other than that, so it can't really make a good diff between say a jpeg and its updated version, so it simply relies on compression for those other formats.

It would be nice to have a VCS that could manage these more effectively but most binary formats don't lend themselves to that, even when it might be an additional layer to an image.

I reckon there's still room for better image and video formats that would work better with VCS.

olddustytrail··on Great Myths #16: The Conflict Thesis
> It is reported in the Supplement of the Council of Nicaea that the Fathers, when they had no idea how to determine which were the questionable or apocryphal books of the Old and New Testament, piled all of them disorderly on an altar; and the books to be rejected fell to the ground. It’s a pity this nice method has fallen into disuse nowadays.

Nice to see this ancient practice reinstated in recruitment with resumés.

olddustytrail··on We caught companies making it harder to delete your personal data online
I don't think there is a mechanism to do that. I think that puts all AI models in breach of the GDPR by default.

I might be wrong but if I'm not that's a serious problem for AI companies.

olddustytrail··on What if A.I. doesn't get better than this?
LLMs aren't monolingual so you might want to expand that beyond English. Consider how multilingual people think.

Also, apparently it's pretty common for people to think in words and have an internal monologue. I hadn't realized this was a thing until recently but it seems many people don't think abstractly as you've described.

olddustytrail··on What if A.I. doesn't get better than this?
> Because every s-curve looks like an exponent for those in the start.

No, it looks like an exponential all the way to the top of the curve. And the natural reaction when you consider it an s-curve is to think you're near the top. Unfortunately near the top looks exactly the same as near the bottom, so you might consider that you're nowhere near the top and that there's no reason you should be.

Then you go on to speculate about tech that didn't exist 3 years ago and extrapolate 75 years in the future.

No one has any idea what we'll have in 10 years time never mind 75. Even linearly, it's like someone from 1950 trying to guess about 2025.

olddustytrail··on Claude Sonnet 4 now supports 1M tokens of context
That's a difficult case where you might want to collect your good context and shift it to a different session.

It would be nice if the UI made that easy to do.

olddustytrail··on Claude Sonnet 4 now supports 1M tokens of context
I think it's key to not give it contradictory instructions, which is an easy mistake to make if you forget where you started.

As an example, I know of an instance where the LLM claimed it had tried a test on its laptop. This obviously isn't true so the user argued with it. But they'd originally told it that it was a Senior Software Engineer so playing that role, saying you tested locally is fine.

As soon as you start arguing with those minor points you break the context; now it's both a Software Engineer and an LLM. Of course you get confused responses if you do that.

olddustytrail··on Google's Genie is more impressive than GPT5
If you know the Earth is round you can guess at it.
olddustytrail··on Google's Genie is more impressive than GPT5
> Sounds like someone needs to come up with VibesBench

Possibly. Have you grabbed that domain? Might be worth doing.

olddustytrail··on Astronomy Photographer of the Year 2025 shortlist
I'm not aware of any photograph of this sort that would fool an astronomer. The times and dates wouldn't work if it was faked.
olddustytrail··on GPT-5 vs. Sonnet: Complex Agentic Coding
From reactions I've seen it appears that GPT-5 hallucinates less than previous models but the flip side is that it's worse for creative tasks.

This makes logical sense: you don't want a model to get creative if you need functioning code, but if you want a story idea it should basically be all hallucination.

I think it makes sense to have different models for these tasks.

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