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seabass-labrax

2,641 karma · joined March 6, 2023

Sebastian Crane

Open source package ecosystem expert and functional programming enthusiast

seabass-labrax@gmx.com

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seabass-labrax··on I made my phone slow on purpose
Wikipedia blue-link surfing can be a good substitute for conversing with LLMs (and could be significantly cheaper too, the way things are going).
seabass-labrax··on A successful Japanese trial of a ramjet engine designed for Mach‑5 aircraft
That would be very cool to witness! SABRE sounds like it would be an ideal engine for that application.
seabass-labrax··on A successful Japanese trial of a ramjet engine designed for Mach‑5 aircraft
It would still be possible to fly a predominantly ballistic trajectory, yet use rocket propulsion to decelerate whilst still outside the atmosphere. It would require a huge amount of extra fuel compared to a purely ballistic trajectory, but perhaps still less than achieving a full orbit and de-orbiting again for some destinations.
seabass-labrax··on Ferrari Luce
Several Kia models produced around 2005 incorporated the questionable design of having the engine control electronics located below the oil sump - as I've seen first-hand what that does to the vehicle's maintenance costs, I'm inclined to agree with you!
seabass-labrax··on Why Japanese companies do so many different things
Your example is exactly the same problem as "admissible evidence" in a court of law. In the USA, it's very common for evidence to be rejected because the collection of that evidence was itself illegal - this is intended to protect the integrity of the system in general, no matter how heinous the alleged crime in a specific case.

So I'm sceptical: was the union really defending that specific employee, or were they trying to prevent a precedent from being set that could be used against other, more upright employees?

seabass-labrax··on Xs of Y – roguelike that names itself every run. Written in 4kLoC
I killed myself with a flaming spear and the game said this:

> FATAL ERROR: [program exited] "cannot subtract nil and let-go.lang.Int", :data {:trace ("game-loop (<unknown>)" "game-loop (<unknown>)" "update-world (<unknown>)" "run-until-player-turn (<unknown>)" "creature-turn (<unknown>)" "update-ai-state (<unknown>)" "distance (<unknown>)")}}

A fatal error indeed!

seabass-labrax··on The One Dollar Counterfeiter
> 10 years went by and the search for Mister 880 turned into the largest and most expensive counterfeit investigation in Secret Service history.

The article doesn't explain why the Secret Service made this their biggest case, and it doesn't make much sense to me. If the dollars were accepted by the general population, it would cause an infinitesimal increase in inflation of no consequence to others. And if shopkeepers wised up to the false dollars and rejected them, at worst he was defrauding the public by a few hundred dollars a year. In either eventuality, surely the Secret Service had more notorious counterfeiters to track down?

seabass-labrax··on StarFighter 16-Inch
Yes, the MNT Reform and Pocket Reform both have trackballs[1]. They're very different products from the StarFighter laptop though, in that they sacrifice a lot of potential processing power in exchange for a platform which is much more amenable to customization.

[1]: https://shop.mntre.com/

seabass-labrax··on I built my own hair electrolysis machine
How did you detect/measure the estrogen after the extraction process?
seabass-labrax··on European AI. A playbook to own it
I don't see the AI talent visa as a serious suggestion. There's already the Blue Card, which is pretty easy for software engineers to obtain; for an AI talent visa to be anything special, it would have to loosen the already fairly lax requirements. To manage to persuade the whole EU to create a special visa for an emerging field that doesn't even have commonly-agreed-upon qualifications would be a unrealistic feat when many EU member states are looking to close down immigration opportunities, not create them.
seabass-labrax··on Great at gaming? US air traffic control wants you to apply
Another useful tip: don't immediately register with the division local to you in the 'real world', but instead take a look at a variety to see how different divisions conduct themselves. Some divisions have very long waiting lists, and standards of service do differ between ARTCCs/FIRs. It's also worth just checking to see whether the software a given division uses is actually compatible with your computer, because they don't all use the same programs.

I've spent many hours in VATSIM and loved it, so don't be discouraged from diving in, but as a warning: I encountered a pervasive issue with pretentiousness across the VATSIM community, with some divisions setting largely arbitrary rules and procedures which don't exist in real world ATC.

seabass-labrax··on Introduction to Nintendo DS Programming
Luma3DS and the community around it is excellent; thank you TuxSH! Your community provides better software and better support than Nintendo does with all their trillion-Yen revenue available to them; you deserve to be proud of that achievement.
seabass-labrax··on Open source security at Astral
And here's the video for his talk about it at PackagingCon 2023: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Fa9cI2Rf2qc
seabass-labrax··on The Image Boards of Hayao Miyazaki
Not an aerospace engineer, but I think it looks borderline plausible and simultaneously very unsafe.

Having the propeller so high up relative to the center of mass is going to produce a massive pitch down moment: because there's only a small horizontal stabilizer, it would require very aggressive thrust vectoring or elevon usage. A fly-by-wire control system would be essential, I think.

The anhedral wing angle would make it even more unstable, and there is really no reason for it here except aesthetics. Seaplanes with wing-mounted propellers could benefit from the extra clearance, but the propeller is not even on the wing here.

See the 737 MAX for how this kind of pitch instability can go very wrong: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boeing_737_MAX_groundings

seabass-labrax··on SpaceX files to go public
The study you link to doesn't take into consideration the Overton window of opinions. Perhaps there's some dimension along which you could say that one ideology lies 'opposite' to another political persuasion, but that doesn't necessarily mean that the two ideologies are equally acceptable to support in a given society.

I don't think calling defining neutral a 'challenge' does the question justice - neutral will always be context-dependent, and what may be in the center of the Overton window of one society may be unpopular or even highly illegal in a different society.

seabass-labrax··on US Court of Appeals: TOS may be updated by email, use can imply consent [pdf]
This is my feeling exactly - there's a lot wrong with predatory contracts, but the problem is with the predatory part, not the mere fact they're contracts!
seabass-labrax··on US Court of Appeals: TOS may be updated by email, use can imply consent [pdf]
Isn't that a bit extreme? As a counterpoint, I find it useful to be able to pay for a train journey by tapping my card on an electronic reader - no representative of the company is there or otherwise witnesses me doing so - but I have entered into a contract whereby I am entitled to travel to a distant location. And I do want it to be a contract, because the transport company agrees to get me to my destination somehow even if the trains are cancelled. Perhaps the conditions of carriage may be somehow unsatisfactory to me, but the way in which I enter into the contract is almost entirely unrelated.
seabass-labrax··on Making Wolfram tech available as a foundation tool for LLM systems
Stephen Wolfram doesn't claim that Mathematica is a "new kind of science"; that's the slogan he uses instead to refer to the theoretical physics model (one based on state transitions) that underpins his 'Wolfram Physics Project'.
seabass-labrax··on What not to write on your security clearance form (1988)
Oh, that's really interesting. We have them in the UK too, but they're called placements rather than co-ops.
seabass-labrax··on 0 A.D. Release 28: Boiorix
I'm really looking forward to playing this! The new logic in Alpha 27, where units don't try to capture enemy structures by default, caught me out, but it was fun getting familiar with siege engines until I worked that out.

As for the new capture attack for citizens, I imagine this could lead to some really risky endgame strategies where a player moves citizens from their base to attack the enemy's supporting buildings while the enemy is distracted.

seabass-labrax··on What not to write on your security clearance form (1988)
There are co-operatives in manufacturing which would need their staff to be security-cleared in order to win government contacts (such as assembling weapons). Perhaps this is what parent is referring to. Co-ops aren't just for groceries :)
seabass-labrax··on Pocketblue – Fedora Atomic for mobile devices
I have a PinePhone (original KDE Community Edition, convergence variant). I'd be more than happy to test for you! Email address in my profile :)
seabass-labrax··on Show HN: Geo Racers – Race from London to Tokyo on a single bus pass
It's a really fun game! One frustration - and probably a realistic one - is that there aren't nearly enough jobs and they don't pay well enough to break even with the hotel costs.
seabass-labrax··on Show HN: Geo Racers – Race from London to Tokyo on a single bus pass
Indeed. It's an absolute pain in real life trying to go south to Gare Montparnasse when you've just arrived at Gare du Nord - your options are: to walk, which takes forever; to take a bus, which is still rather slow and awkward with luggage; or to take the Metro, which is only a bit faster and even more awkward with luggage - there aren't any lifts at the Montparnasse Metro station!
seabass-labrax··on Doom has been ported to an earbud
The other aspect to consider is changing requirements. Maybe a device capable of transmitting PSTN-level audio quality wirelessly would have been popular twenty years ago, but nowadays most people wouldn't settle for anything with less than 44.1kHz bandwidth. A faster processor means that there's some room for software upgrades later on, future-proofing the device and potentially reducing electronic waste. Unfortunately, that advantage is almost always squandered in practice by planned obsolescence and an industry obsession with locked-down, proprietary firmware.
seabass-labrax··on Show HN: Rocket Launch and Orbit Simulator
Nice work! Had a "blast" playing it ;)
seabass-labrax··on Why the trans flag emoji is the 5-codepoint sequence it is
I'm not aware of any single furry emoji, but I've noticed a lot of furry communities on the Fediverse using custom (non-Unicode) emoji packs; see [1] for how that might work. Also an example of the feature in use[2].

[1]: https://misskey-hub.net/en/docs/for-users/features/custom-em...

[2]: https://thegayagenda.fans/notes/ah5imm41r1ru05a7

seabass-labrax··on If AI replaces workers, should it also pay taxes?
Companies in western democracies usually pay tax in addition to their workers and owners, but don't have representation in parliaments separate to that of their workers and owners. Questions about whether robots have the right to vote has more to do with their humanity and less to do with their tax liability in such societies.
seabass-labrax··on FocusTube: A Chrome extension that hides YouTube Shorts
I have my browser set to clear cookies and site data automatically, so I'm not sure if my experience of YouTube shorts is typical, but I have a pet theory about why the feelings you describe are so common. It seems like a big part of the addictiveness is not that the content is eye-catching, although this clearly has an effect. The platform gives you a quick way to move onto something else by scrolling/swiping, which means I find myself caught in a cycle of:

1. seeing AI slop or a unoriginal 'comedy' sketch,

2. thinking "eww get this off my screen",

3. scrolling down to the next video; jump to step 1

On the rare occasions that the algorithm does show something genuinely interesting or creative, I watch to the end of the video and feel a lot more satisfied about spending time on it. That's not to say that long-form videos can't be distracting and addictive, but I would posit that 'shorts' engagement is actually driven by disgust rather than curiosity. I now avoid YouTube shorts like the plague, because life is too short to experience that volume of disgust in it.

seabass-labrax··on German government comes out against Chat Control
I'm not sure that's relevant to Chat Control. What's at stake here is not a definition of 'acceptable communication' in public, but the possibility of all private communication being scanned.

That's not to say that private communication can't already be illegal; mere 'conspiracy' is a crime in many places. Yet the level of surveillance that would be enabled by legislation like Chat Control is greater than any other in history. Even notorious agencies like the Stasi had to pick and choose their targets based on prior suspicion, simply because of the logistics involved in traditional surveillance.

We don't fully know what effects this kind of unceasing, universal monitoring would have on society, and what little historical precedent exists doesn't bode well. Restrictions on public speech however are pretty well understood; we've had censorship in various forms pretty much everywhere in the world at one point or another. We can look to history for lessons about what happens, and can properly discuss (even if not agree!) about when censorship is good or bad for society.

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