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sethaurus

407 karma · joined January 14, 2010

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sethaurus··on 1D Conway's Life glider found, 3.7B cells long
Oh my god, it's a Quine!

This is a linear sequence of bits, which when interpreted as a Game of Life board, "prints" an exact copy of itself 2 pixels to the right (leaving no trace of the original).

I suppose its job would be easier if it only had to construct a copy of itself rather than "moving" itself, but I enjoy the interpretation that it's a linear "tape" of bits which prints its own code transposed by 2 pixels, and takes an unfathomable amount of time and space to do so. Beautiful.

sethaurus··on A programmer-friendly I/O abstraction over io_uring and kqueue (2022)
> I’m curious, how do you know it was inspired by tiger beetles impl?

Describing its design, the readme for libxev says "credit to this awesome blog post" and links to the same Tigerbeetle post in this submission.

sethaurus··on Show HN: KiDoom – Running DOOM on PCB Traces
This is a little different from most "Doom on X" projects, because the accomplishment is less about the hardware (it's just a normal computer) and more about turning a circuit-board designer into a real-time game display.
sethaurus··on The realities of being a pop star
> Actually, as I'm writing this, I realized that probably the music being produced by this person is actually done by a computer. So, maybe she's in the first wave of totally artificial pop stars.

Her main collaborator, co-creator and producer of many years is the artist AG Cook, who founded the label PC Music. He appears often in her music videos and gets mentioned in her lyrics. His own solo work plays a lot with pairing the artificial and the organic, taking the "slick" aesthetics of electronic pop to abrasive extremes and placing it next to vulnerability and gentleness.

This is my favourite piece of his work (both the song and the video): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kH2wQ5speuU

Charli's work or his might not suit your taste! But these are real people doing interesting stuff and playing with the form. It's not fake.

sethaurus··on `satisfies` is my favorite TypeScript keyword (2024)
That's a little ungenerous. Richer types are not intrinsically about metaprogramming, they just let you model your domain more accurately so you can turn runtime errors into build-time errors. If your system already has natural constraints, you get to document them in a machine-checkable way.
sethaurus··on AGI fantasy is a blocker to actual engineering
Attempt generosity. Can you think of another way to interpret the comment above yours? Is it more likely they are calling their own argument a red herring, or the one they are responding to?

If something looks like a "weird stance", consider trying harder to understand it. It's better for everyone else in the conversation.

sethaurus··on XSLT RIP
I invite you to view the source of the very page we're on right now.
sethaurus··on Affinity Studio now free
The alternative is that they monetize it the same way Canva monetizes its other products: most features free, "pro" subscription for online collaboration/server-driven stuff and a library of stock content. Plus an enterprise tier.

All of that could get added to affinity without changing its core offering, which would be consistent with both their past strategy and their current messaging.

sethaurus··on Affinity Studio now free
I suspect Canva is willing to offer Affinity for free because it holds Adobe's feet to the fire and forces them to compete on Canva's home turf: the nonprofessional design market.

There's clearly a funnel for Canva Pro upgrades, but (to my knowledge) they've never paywalled formerly-free features, and it seems to be a profitable strategy so far.

sethaurus··on Affinity Studio now free
I think it's simpler than that. Canva's primary competitor is Adobe, and Adobe's remaining advantage is with creative professionals. That's Adobe's core market and their core revenue stream.

It's a classic "commoditize your complements" play. Canva remains profitable without charging for Affinity, but Adobe can't stay profitable if they stop charging for Photoshop/Illustrator.

The business justification works without imputing any more sinister motives than that.

sethaurus··on State-based vs Signal-based rendering
It's not merely calling React traditional, it's calling React hooks traditional. They didn't exist for the first 6 years of the framework.
sethaurus··on State-based vs Signal-based rendering
Relatedly, there is a stage-1 proposal to add first-class signals to Javascript: https://github.com/tc39/proposal-signals

It's a collaboration between multiple library maintainers, attempting to standardize and unify their shared change-tracking approach.

sethaurus··on What makes 5% of AI agents work in production?
You've said plainly elsewhere in these comments that you did use AI to write it:

> thanks, I used AI but aren't we all? I thought the point of AI is to get us to be more productive.

You've also repeatedly dismissed any criticism of the writing as "hate."

If you want readers to do you the favor of reading your work, please do them the favor of writing it.

sethaurus··on Obsidian Note Codes
(From the article, talking about the number of available codes)

> 32^4 = 1,048,576, which is hopefully enough.

Unfortunately, it really isn't enough. Since these 4-character codes are based only on a hash of the note's filename, and there's no other collision-resistance built in, the likelihood of two notes getting the same code rises very quickly. With 500 notes in the vault, the chance of two notes having the same code is about 1-in-10. At 900 notes, the odds are 1-in-3, and at 1200 notes, the chances of a collision rise above 50%: it's more likely that there will be a collision than not. These are realistic numbers of notes for an Obsidian vault.

This is all solvable by having something allocating IDs (and attaching them to the notes), but when using a hash, 32 bits just isn't enough to give uniqueness at even small scales.

sethaurus··on iFixit iPhone Air teardown
The hinge of the case (not the buds themselves).
sethaurus··on We all dodged a bullet
Furries tend to be high in curiosity, high in trait-openness, and lower in social conformance. It's a good recipe for learning, thinking and questioning.
sethaurus··on I ran Claude in a loop for 3 months, and it created a genz programming language
According to the author[0], the total spend was $14k USD.

[0]: https://x.com/GeoffreyHuntley/status/1965295152962097550

sethaurus··on Ripple – A TypeScript UI framework that takes the best of React, Solid, Svelte
This isn't proposing a standard, it's a new framework which takes inspiration from the other mentioned projects, while choosing a different set of trade-offs. This is just what it looks like when people try new stuff, and I don't think the snark of the comic is appropriate.
sethaurus··on Gemini 2.5 Flash Image
In this context, it's Paul Graham, the head Y Combinator guy whose cartoon likeness appears in the generated video: https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=pg
sethaurus··on Why are anime catgirls blocking my access to the Linux kernel?
Well that tells me the rough cultural area alt187 might be pointing to, but I could use some more clarity. Are you saying that pronouns/transgender/queerness are the ideology? Or are you showing them as shibboleths of a broader ideological tendency that's prevailing in FOSS?
sethaurus··on Universal Tool Calling Protocol (UTCP)
One really nice thing about using LLMs as components is that they just generate text. We've taught them to sometimes issue JSON messages representing a structured query or command, but it still comes out of the thing as text; the model doesn't have any IO or state of its own. Then the actual program can then decide what, if anything, to do with that structured request.

I don't like the gradual reframing of the model itself as being in charge of the tools, aided by a framework that executes whatever the model pumps out. It's not good to abstract away the connection between the text-generator and the actual volatile IO of your program.

sethaurus··on Why are anime catgirls blocking my access to the Linux kernel?
Could you expand on what ideology this tool is broadcasting and what virtue is being signalled?
sethaurus··on Web apps in a single, portable, self-updating, vanilla HTML file
You're describing built-in developer tools for editing local files during development. The comment you're replying to is describing the vision of a browser which can edit remote files as part of the normal user workflow, not as a developer-only activity.
sethaurus··on Google admits anti-competitive conduct involving Google Search in Australia
> Singling out Google is a strange choice given that all parties profited.

Profiting isn't the misdeed, artificially suppressing competition is. Only Google experienced the benefit of suppressed competition, and that's why they were the ones paying the kickback, not receiving it.

sethaurus··on OpenAI Progress
It seems more likely that they cherry-picked favorable examples showing a clear progression, rather than just falsifying the content.

Even in these comments, there's a fair bit of disagreement about whether they show do show monotonic improvement.

sethaurus··on Living with Williams Syndrome, the 'opposite of autism' (2014)
> Can you give a definition of what autism means then?

Wikipedia's definition is fine; it's describing the real diagnostic criteria, not a stereotype. The crucial thing is that to a third party, those traits won't always be obvious.

One of the axes upon which autistic people vary is their ability to mask those traits. The stereotype is a person with obvious symptoms who cannot (or at least does not) mask them socially. Presentations of autism frequently include some aspect of masking and some ability to "pass" as non-autistic, but with substantial cost and effort to the individual.

> It's my impression that people now use the term autism is for pretty much any sort of neurodiversity (and even for traits within neuronormal, e.g. likes math).

That may be so, but there are also plenty of people with actual diagnoses (and many others who meet the criteria) who don't fit the traditional image of an autistic person.

That's why I object to the claim that the term "autistic" has "lost all meaning." What's been lost is the ability to tell at a glance who is autistic, because the diagnostic manual now applies the criteria consistently regardless of whether their impact is immediately obvious to a stranger.

My personal experience, after getting diagnosed in my late 30s, has been observing the significant effort I spent masking — trying to pass as non-autistic — and choosing to use that energy differently. In that sense, I've probably become a little bit more obviously-autistic than before, but in a way which makes my life easier and more comfortable.

sethaurus··on Living with Williams Syndrome, the 'opposite of autism' (2014)
It didn't lose all meaning, it just became more difficult to stereotype. The diagnostic criteria for ASD are about its impact on the individual, not how it superficially presents to other people.

The DSM-V combined together a bunch of old disorders with largely overlapping symptoms and no consistent differentiation at the diagnostic level.

sethaurus··on Modern Node.js Patterns
The first `await` is waiting for the response-headers to arrive, so you know the status code and can decide what to do next. The second `await` is waiting for the full body to arrive (and get parsed as JSON).

It's designed that way to support doing things other than buffering the whole body; you might choose to stream it, close the connection early etc. But it comes at the cost of awkward double-awaiting for the common case (always load the whole body and then decide what happens next).

sethaurus··on Swift-erlang-actor-system
That was once the case, but no longer. Third-party WatchOS apps can work without a phone present, up to being installed directly from the watch's app store. They can definitely do independent networking, but there are still some restrictions, eg they can't do it when backgrounded, and websockets are pretty locked down (only for audio-streaming as per Apple policy).

I reckon the lack of general-purpose websockets is probably the issue for a system based on Phoenix LiveView.

sethaurus··on We built an air-gapped Jira alternative for regulated industries
Dependencies and code are both liabilities with maintenance costs. Devs chronically underestimate the cost of both, myself included.
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