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rudolph9

731 karma · joined July 28, 2013

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rudolph9··on Google says criminal hackers used AI to find a major software flaw
Do they have high confidence the actor used a keyboard? Used the bathroom at some point during the attack? Has a mother?

Idk, this doesn’t strike me as news. Google just missed a vulnerability.

rudolph9··on $500 GPU outperforms Claude Sonnet on coding benchmarks
When Apple gets their shit together.
rudolph9··on White House plan to break up iconic U.S. climate lab moves forward
A lot of people were sick of the status quo. For better or worse, Trump represented change. Obviously, there are many more factors that contributed, but in my opinion, this is where the momentum was.
rudolph9··on The Cost of Indirection in Rust
The idea is that performance isn’t a reason not to do it. Other considerations may cause you to choose inline, but performance shouldn’t be one of them.
rudolph9··on Gemini 3.1 Pro
If I was building an application using massive amounts of calls to the api, I’d probably go with Gemini. For a Copilot, definitely Opus.
rudolph9··on Don't rent the cloud, own instead
> Having your own data center is cool

This company sounds more like a hobby interest than a business focused on solving genuine problems.

rudolph9··on America's $3T Nuclear Bet (HALEU) [video]
This was a well-made video. I haven’t validated any of their claims, but as someone not particularly familiar with nuclear technology, this was pretty helpful.
rudolph9··on Package managers keep using Git as a database, it never works out
It’s worth considering if these package managers would have taken off if they didn’t use git. You get a bunch for free, why not use it while you’re small?
rudolph9··on Learning music with Strudel
Is this real library/editor/programming-language ?? I don’t see anything on how it’s made?
rudolph9··on Mercury is the closest planet – to every other planet
I would think Venus, since it has the second smallest orbit. If that’s the case, I’m wondering if there’s some mathematical theorem that proves the “closest” planet is always the one with the next smallest orbit, regardless of speed or how closely the two objects’ orbits align in size.
rudolph9··on Mercury is the closest planet – to every other planet
What is the mostest closest neighbor relative to mercury?
rudolph9··on America's future could hinge on whether AI slightly disappoints
I’m not sure if it’s going to be a better world for humans, but roads so crowded with wheels that I don’t want to leave my house sounds like an economy where a lot of wheels are being sold.
rudolph9··on America's future could hinge on whether AI slightly disappoints
Best I can tell, it’s resulting in less churn, which isn’t the same as work getting done faster. Maybe it’s a phenomenon unique to engineering, but what I’m observing isn’t necessarily work getting done faster — it’s that a smaller number of people are able to manage a much larger footprint because AI tools have gotten really good at relaying existing knowledge.

Little things that historically would get me stuck as I switch between database work, front-end, and infrastructure are no longer impeding me, because the AI tools are so good at conveying the existing knowledge of each discipline. So now, with a flat org, things just get done — there’s no need for sprint masters, knowledge-sharing sessions, or waiting on PR reviews. More people means more coordination, which ultimately takes time. In some situations that’s unavoidable, but in software engineering, most of the patterns, tools, and practices are well established; it’s just a matter of using them effectively without making your head explode.

I think this relay of knowledge is especially evident when I can’t tell an AI comment from a human one in a technical discussion — a kind of modern Turing Test, or Imitation Game.

rudolph9··on America's future could hinge on whether AI slightly disappoints
What is the economic value of a wheel? If we flood the market with wheels, we’re going to need far fewer sleds and horses. Pretty soon, no one might need horses at all — can you imagine that?
rudolph9··on America's future could hinge on whether AI slightly disappoints
I can’t help but think a lot of these comments are actually written by AI — and that, in itself, showcases the value of AI. The fact that all of these comments could realistically have been written by AI with what’s available today is mind-blowing.

I use AI on a day-to-day basis, and by my best estimates, I’m doing the work of three to four people as a result of AI — not because I necessarily write code faster, but because I cover more breadth (front end, back end, DevOps, security) and make better engineering decisions with a smaller team. I think the true value of AI, at least in the immediate future, lies in helping us solve common problems faster. Though it’s not yet independently doing much, the most relevant expression I can think of is: “Those who cannot do, teach.” And AI is definitely good at relaying existing knowledge.

rudolph9··on U.S. bombs Iranian nuclear sites
The enriched uranium was reportedly moved before the bombing. As far as I know, the objective was to destroy the enrichment facilities.
rudolph9··on A conversation about AI for science with Jason Pruet
There are notable similarities between a wartime economy and one continually adapting to global warming. While perhaps not sustainable long-term, we may observe short-term economic growth driven by government spending, followed by extended inflationary periods. We might currently be experiencing the first cycle of this kind, with more likely to follow.
rudolph9··on MongoDB acquires Voyage AI
This
rudolph9··on MongoDB acquires Voyage AI
Don’t choose Mongo. It does everything and nothing well. It’s a weird bastard of a database—easily adopted, yet hard to get rid of. One day, you look in the mirror and ask yourself: why am I forking over hundreds of thousands of dollars for tens of thousands' worth of compute and storage to a company with a great business operation but a terrible engineering operation, continually weighed down by the unachievable business requirement of being everything to everyone?
rudolph9··on Ingesting PDFs and why Gemini 2.0 changes everything
Under the hood tika uses tesseract for ocr parsing. For clarity this all works surprisingly well generally speaking and it’s pretty easy to run your self and order of magnitude cheaper than most services out there.

https://tesseract-ocr.github.io/tessdoc/

rudolph9··on Ingesting PDFs and why Gemini 2.0 changes everything
We parse millions of PDFs using Apache Tika and process about 30,000 per dollar of compute cost. However, the structured output leaves something to be desired, and there are a significant number of pages that Tika is unable to parse.

https://tika.apache.org/

rudolph9··on Hacker in Snowflake extortions may be a U.S. soldier
Or it’s part of the troll.
rudolph9··on Julian Assange has reached a plea deal with the U.S., allowing him to go free
> he should have had a fair trial with fair charges and faced a fair jury and he never got any of that

Could he have had that if he turned him self when he was originally charged?

rudolph9··on The efficacy of duct tape vs. cryotherapy in the treatment of the common wart (2002)
I have one that wouldn’t go away for the longest time tried duct tape and cryotherapy and the thing that did it in was coming both.
rudolph9··on House passes bill to force TikTok sale from Chinese owner or ban the app
The weird thing to me is how little concern there is for sale of data by any social media company. Very intimate details about many Americans lives can easily be purchased by US adversaries. That’s reportedly the motivation for the bill but effectively it really only change who is profiting from the data by forcing a bargain price for a foreign company and directing the ongoing revenue to us company vs a Chinese company.

I suppose it would be easier to regulate a us based company should the rules around user data sale change but this bill alone effectively does nothing to advance the security principles the bill is sold on beside make it slightly more expensive for the Chinese government to use the data.

rudolph9··on Solar and battery to make up 81% of new US electric-generating capacity in 2024
It seems like this thread has sparked a lot nuclear vs solar debate, but both have the potential to be net zero energy sources and most fault tolerant grids are powered by a multitude of sources. We should be aggressively building solar, wind, battery, and nuclear along with anything else that can reasonably be part of a net zero supply chain that produces electricity in the not too distant. They all have different tradeoffs and we shouldn’t be debating which is better than the other. Rather we should focus on what percent of each fit best balancing safety/resiliency/cost of adoption/long term operating costs. And this varies widely from region and changing over time. What’s need are formulas and frameworks for helping make these wildly complex decisions more straightforward.
rudolph9··on Framework Laptop 16 Review
Have you installed the firmware updates to the AMD board? I had similar issues but the latest set of firmware updates seems to have fixed them.
rudolph9··on Willow Protocol
Why would anyone use this over libp2p?
rudolph9··on Filecoin Foundation Successfully Deploys IPFS in Space
The beauty of ipfs is the transport protocols are completely modular. They do a pretty good job supporting a lot of variety a separating concerns via https://github.com/libp2p/specs
rudolph9··on Pizza Hut to lay off California workers after minimum wage increase
> less idle time
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