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pinum

728 karma · joined June 11, 2015

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pinum··on RuneScape's Position on Gen AI
I'm against the use of AI for creative work, but

>[X] is not something an LLM will ever be very competent at

I'm no longer convinced that this is a particularly safe bet for any value of X. LLMs have absolutely been demonstrated as capable of doing things that they're theoretically the wrong type of model for, like generating images by writing SVGs or simulating brush strokes.

pinum··on Nobody likes spoilers, especially agents
Interesting. Do you have any evaluations to support the claims that this improves performance?
pinum··on Inverse Kinematics and Foot Locking
Are you using Firefox on ios? It’s a long-running bug with that browser that affects most pages with multiple videos and drives me mad.
pinum··on The original URL for this prediction will no longer be available in 11 years (2011)
>https://longbets.org/6/

Anyone know why this (and many other bets) have been removed?

https://web.archive.org/web/20080803213625/https://longbets....

>By 2010, more than 50 percent of books sold worldwide will be printed on demand at the point of sale in the form of library-quality paperbacks.

Not exactly a hot-button issue.

pinum··on Microsoft BitLocker – YellowKey zero-day exploit
Thanks, I was familiar with encryption but not with bitlocker.

So this only affects a particular mode of bitlocker in which the drive is automatically decrypted on boot without the user providing any secret. Meaning the key is basically stored in plaintext on-device, albeit in a convoluted way.

To me it seems intuitive that such a mode isn't secure. It's a bit like protecting your door with an unpickable unbreakable lock, but then putting the key in a lockbox on the wall with a flimsy padlock that can be raked or cut off in seconds.

It seems roughly equivalent to not encrypting the drive at all so it doesn't seem surprising that there's a way to bypass it.

pinum··on Framework Laptop 13 Pro
If I was releasing a laptop with Linux support as a key selling point, and the battery life was bad on Ubuntu 24.04 but good on the pre-release 26.04, then I'd advertise the good figures and write "tested on Ubuntu 26.04 beta, requires Linux 7.0 or later" in the footnotes.

I definitely /wouldn't/ rely on just Windows figures for a machine that's otherwise advertised as "Linux first". If the battery life was the same on both, I'd prominently mention that.

pinum··on Artemis computer running two instances of MS outlook; they can't figure out why
At its current distance, best case RTT would be about 420ms
pinum··on Please Do Not A/B Test My Workflow
Here’s the original article which was much more informative and interesting:

https://web.archive.org/web/20260314105751/https://backnotpr...

Can’t believe HN has become so afraid of generic probably-unenforceable “plz don’t reverse engineer” EULAs. We deserve to know what these tools are doing.

I’ve seen poor results from plan mode recently too and this explains a lot.

pinum··on LLM Writing Tropes.md
Similarly, "X that actually works"
pinum··on Qwen3.5 122B and 35B models offer Sonnet 4.5 performance on local computers
Looks much closer to Haiku than Sonnet.

Maybe "Qwen3.5 122B offers Haiku 4.5 performance on local computers" would be a more realistic and defensible claim.

pinum··on Doing gigabit Ethernet over my British phone wires
The other advantage of fibre is subtlety if you can't (or don't want to) run it through walls. 0.9mm diameter and light enough to attach it with occasional dots of glue instead of needing cable clips.
pinum··on Doing gigabit Ethernet over my British phone wires
I can second this 0.9mm transparent stuff, I've run it successfully and it's very subtle.

Depending on the media converter pair you're using, you probably want UPC instead of APC. I also found that the cheapest generic bidi media converters tend to be SC, so I want with a 30m pre-terminated SC/UPC cable. Total cost (cable plus media converters) was about £30.

Alternatively, you can order a custom 30+m white 0.9mm cable from FS: https://www.fs.com/uk/products/12285.html Lead time is fairly long.

pinum··on Can I start using Wayland in 2026?
Anecdotally, everything works flawlessly on my work machine: Optiplex Micro, Intel iGPU, Fedora KDE 43, 4K 32" primary monitor at 125% scale, 1440p 27" secondary monitor at 100%. No issues with Wayland or with anything else.

Everything actually feels significantly more solid/stable/reliable than modern Windows does. I can install updates at my own pace and without worrying that they'll add an advert for Candy Crush to my start menu.

I also run Bazzite-deck on an old AMD APU minipc as a light gaming HTPC. Again, it's a much better experience than my past attempts to run Windows on an HTPC.

As with everything, the people having issues will naturally be heard louder than the people who just use it daily without issues.

pinum··on Claude Sonnet 4.5
I use LiteLLM as a proxy.
pinum··on Enlisting in the Fight Against Link Rot
Instead of shutting down completely, why not this:

For goo.gl links that were created by google, continue redirecting them as normal. For others, show a warning page explaining to the user that the link wasn't created (or vouched for) by google. If they press an "agree" button, still don't show a clickable link, but instead show it as plain text to be copied.

pinum··on Adblockers stop publishers serving ads to (or even seeing) 1B web users
>The greatest proportion of users who self-activated a hard ad-blocker found out about it through advertising (34%)
pinum··on Garmin watches reveal your personal data, and what you can do
This seems to just be a description of the normal, desired, advertised functionality of the watch.
pinum··on I spent a year building an Android course for the elderly
This looks like it could be very valuable for quite a lot of people- thank you for making it!

Just a couple first impressions from your site... loading it on a phone, the first thing I see is this: https://imgur.com/4maP1vV

(1) The entire contents of the site is completely covered by a cookie warning. This is honestly quite annoying even for an SWE like me, never mind your target audience.

I know at least one older person who doesn't understand these cookie modals at all and refuses to touch them. They either continue using the site in the background without accepting/rejecting(!), or if that's not possible they just leave the site.

I'd suggest you carefully check whether you actually need this modal at all. If the only cookies you use are technically necessary, then (based on my layman understanding of the law) you don't need to show it. If you absolutely must use tracking cookies, then maybe consider a more subtle approach that allows the user to continue reading the page without deciding.

(2) "Join Now" makes it sound like I'm signing up to a subscription, rather than making a one-off payment.

pinum··on Ask HN: What Are You Working On? (October 2024)
Thank you! Just used this to clear away a load of tabs.

Some gripes:

I wish I could just use it standalone without it replacing the "new tab" page.

I wish I could view the full title of a tab, maybe on hover.

I only want to use it to manage tabs, not history or bookmarks, so I wish I didn't have to grant those permissions.

pinum··on Show HN: A Ghidra extension for exporting parts of a program as object files
This looks fantastic and is relevant to some game modding ideas I've had. I love your blog series about decompiling Tenchu too. Thank you for releasing this stuff!
pinum··on The Paradox of x86
@dang Hard paywall
pinum··on List of Animals That Have Passed the Mirror Test
This youtube video seems to show a cat recognising its reflection:

https://youtu.be/kQBHB682xsQ?t=20

pinum··on Why does unsafe multithreaded std:unordered_map crash more than std:map?
"The customer understood that their code was broken either way. They just were curious why unordered_map seems to demonstrate the problem more clearly."

Seems reasonable to me. It's an interesting question even if any given answer is only valid under narrow conditions.

pinum··on Alan Wake 2 is an unexpected visual marvel even on older GPUs
Your GPU is 6 years, 7 months old. As an analogy, consider someone in 2007 objecting that their 2001 GeForce3 Ti500 can't run Crysis/Mass Effect/etc. The PS4 generation really messed with the usual conventions and expectations of PC upgrade cycles.

(I appreciate that GPU prices have creeped up and up over time, though.)

pinum··on SectorC: A C Compiler in 512 bytes
Yes! There's a public git repo here: https://repo.or.cz/tinycc.git "Public" in the sense that anyone can just push to the "mob" branch. You don't even need an account.

Such anarchy has obvious security implications but has worked remarkably well in practice. There's a mailing list too.

pinum··on This layoff does not exist
>It appears that, during our transition to the digital age, the internet completely disappeared. We scoured the globe for it, but it seems to have been completely erased from existence. This has caused immense disruptions to our business, leading to the unfortunate layoffs that are necessary for continued success.
pinum··on Show HN: Filmbox, physically accurate film emulation, now on Linux and Windows
Those results look excellent. I'm trying to gauge whether something like this could potentially work in realtime, i.e. in games. I know it inevitably depends on hardware, resolution, settings, etc but do you have a ballpark figure for how long it takes to apply this to a frame? (And does it have a temporal aspect which requires access to frame N+k to render frame N?)
pinum··on Ask HN: How does a hobby programmer get hired?
>This can be said for any 100% online college.

I'm curious about this part. Do such students tend to underperform at interview?

pinum··on Bugpilot: Fix bugs without asking questions
Pressing "See it in action" shows an empty black overlay.

Opening that link in a new tab works, but the demo/story isn't as helpful as it could be. For example it talks about screen recordings, so I was expecting to be able to play one back. If a live demo isn't practical, I think I'd prefer a short video showing typical usage.

pinum··on Goodbye, data science
>in the US people very often use DS very differently from how the title is used in the UK

I haven't heard about this before and now I'm curious- can you elaborate on the differences?

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