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ponco

194 karma · joined August 5, 2016

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ponco··on Ben Bernanke Joins Anthropic Oversight Trust
I was being a bit cheeky, but I’m not really arguing that individual inventions can be determined as good or bad. My point is it comes from the same underlying mode of production. "Claude is useful" and "the way we have organised society that led to its creation may be ecologically catastrophic” can both be true.
ponco··on Ben Bernanke Joins Anthropic Oversight Trust
Darn, I tried this and the lithium battery kicked in.
ponco··on Ben Bernanke Joins Anthropic Oversight Trust
The benefits of modernity (electricity, cars, iPhone, Claude) are good, but they come bundled with potentially terminal ecological costs which is bad.
ponco··on Cocktail Optimization, an Integer Programming Problem
Writing a custom solver seems kind of absurd to me. There are 10s(/100s?) of open source ones out there. HiGHS in particular seems to be challenging the paid solvers with its LP improvements of late. But now I want to write my own.
ponco··on I run multiple $10K MRR companies on a $20/month tech stack
Always good to challenge the narrative - but I don't pay for RDS Postgres because of the WAL, replication, all the beauty of pg etc. I pay RDS because it's largely set and forget. I am gladly paying AWS to think about it for me. I think at a certain scale, this is a really good tradeoff. At the very beginning it could be overkill, and at the top end obviously its unsuitable - but for most of us those tradeoffs are why it's successful.
ponco··on Can AI Think?
(disclosure: I wrote this)
ponco··on AWS engineer reports PostgreSQL perf halved by Linux 7.0, fix may not be easy
more throughput WITHOUT huge tail latency is my understanding. A user above posted this link https://lwn.net/Articles/994322/ which goes into the background. My mental model is "give the kernel more explicit information" and it will be able to make better decisions
ponco··on I want to wash my car. The car wash is 50 meters away. Should I walk or drive?
I've speculated about this myself, but haven't heard anyone actually discuss it or reveal/leak this is the case. Do you have a source for this?
ponco··on Warcraft III Peon Voice Notifications for Claude Code
`peon --pack peasant`

This was my first thought too, thankfully they thought of it!

ponco··on Claude Code is being dumbed down?
This was a very bitter pill to swallow! It took me more than one mistake to learn this - "you are not the user".
ponco··on The creator of Claude Code's Claude setup
Not OP, but I think that without some creative impetus like 'agency', how useful is an AGI going to be?
ponco··on The creator of Claude Code's Claude setup
I agree. I'm imagining a large software team with hundreds of tickets "ready to be worked on" might support this workflow - but even then, surely you're going to start running into unnecessary conflicts.

The max Claude instances I've run is 2 because beyond that, I'm - as you say - unable to actually determine the next best course during the processing time. I could spend the entire day planning / designing prompts - and perhaps that will be the most efficient software development practise in the future. And/or perhaps there it is a sign I'm doing insufficient design up front.

ponco··on Britain's railway privatization was an abject failure
The privatisation of the commons will endure as our generations' greatest folly. I look at the Australian NBN as a great example of a project that is not economical for a private business to entertain - it requires "The Government" to build. How do we reason with this in the capitalist system?
ponco··on Summary of the Amazon DynamoDB Service Disruption in US-East-1 Region
Respectfully, I don't think that piece adds anything of material substance. It's a list of hollow platitudes (vapid writing listing inactionable truisms).
ponco··on Computer science courses that don't exist, but should (2015)
I reflect on university, and one of the most interesting projects I did was an 'essay on the history of <operating system of your choice>' as part of an OS course. I chose OS X (Snow Leopard) and digging into the history gave me fantastic insights into software development, Unix, and software commercialisation. Echo your Mr Kay's sentiments entirely.
ponco··on Germany outfitted half a million balconies with solar panels
A simple Google tells me (as I was curious) it's between 6 months to 20 years, with the average being 2 years. https://www.google.com/search?q=carbon+payback+time+solar+pa...

Hard to imagine a large scale rollout like this would have been on the low quality side (plus hey its Germany after all).

ponco··on Rock, paper, scissors showdown
I had an old colleague who had a favourite lunch room trick - if challenged to Scissors, Paper, Rock then he would win every single time. I presumed it was some kind of behavioural psychology trick, but it didn't occur to me it's just a pattern recognition. Or maybe it was both. I should get in touch again...
ponco··on Australian Parliament bans social media for under-16s
For a time, we did not have an “R” rating for video games and this sort of content called for this rating, which legislation said could not be given. Fortunately saner heads prevailed and they created an “R” rating for video games and this oddity went away.
ponco··on Blockbuster Video VHS insert template
Our family VCR had the "EZ Rewind" setting which would automatically rewind it to the beginning once the movie ended. Saved a lot of hassle.
ponco··on Show HN: Allocate poker chips optimally with mixed-integer nonlinear programming
Can anyone explain why this isn’t a discrete optimisation problem? I don’t understand what aspects of problem would require a non convex approach
ponco··on How short can Git abbreviate? (2013)
oh my goodness, TIL nonce has a technical meaning. It has a very different meaning in Australia.
ponco··on Why Do Python Lists Multiply Oddly? Exploring the CPython Source Code
I feel like far too much attention is given to `[[]] * n`. In the grand scheme of things, no serious python programmer is using multiply on a sequence outside of the string construction convenience.

It's also remarkebly easy to diagnose once you see the unexpected behaviour, so anyone asking for help is going to be instantly told not to do it and use a comprehension instead.

I'm sure there are plenty of other pitfalls in other languages, though I concede this one is especially unintuitive to a new person.

ponco··on Oi (Interjection)
In my experience, 'oi' has a few usages:

- Drawn out "oiiiiiii" and a pointed finger when someone makes a witty remark or has some kind of success. As in, "oiiii, nice one".

- "OI!" as a generic "hey!" shouted at someone to get their attention in the street.

- "oi?" with an upwards inflection to express disbelief

- Getting your friend's attention, usually followed by an insulting term like 'dickhead'. As in, "oi dickhead, watch out" when someone is trying to pass them on the street.

ponco··on Xbox's new policy – say goodbye to unofficial accessories from November
The security/cheating arguments are good cover for MS simply enforcing their IP rights.
ponco··on The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom Release
For those of us who have never played a Zelda game...how does this compare to Pokemon, Fallout or Knights of the Old Republic?
ponco··on Spotifyd
Is there an existential threat looming? Could Spotify make an API change that would completely break libespot and Spotifyd? Any insights as to why/why not that might be likely?

Also, any plans to add the ability to save the tracks that are streamed? (for e.g. offline playback or for exporting to mp3 etc.)

ponco··on Ask HN: Why does the media say inflation is up every month?
As an Australian, with an economy always experiencing very high inflation (8%) I just immediately question what is the composition of the US CPI. Perhaps it’s not reflective or is disproportionately weighted
ponco··on High Court of Australia rules hyperlinking is not publishing [pdf]
It's a defamation case and you will note the main question was whether or not publication occurred. The rules governing dissemination of copyrighted material are completely different.
ponco··on High Court of Australia rules hyperlinking is not publishing [pdf]
Given how the HCA has taken so many traditional (archaic) views on media publication recently (see Voller 2020) I wonder to what degree this a political decision. The respondent is a very unsavoury figure in the legal world. Any lawyers able to interpret how narrow or broad the ruling is?
ponco··on High Court of Australia rules hyperlinking is not publishing [pdf]
I wouldn't be so quick to dismiss this as Murdoch machinations (old media tax extraction - besides, that's settled law here). During oral arguments one of the justices rightly pointed out that Google has a financial incentive in hyperlinking. Consider that Google may summarise a news article and display it in the search results - effectively stealing the ad traffic from the news publisher.
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