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skirmish

578 karma · joined October 21, 2019

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skirmish··on What's Earth's dominant species by mass?
Most of the effort goes into eliminating the 5-year cycle and hanging on as long as possible.
skirmish··on Gravity seems holographic. What does that mean for reality?
Because deceit and lies exist.
skirmish··on HarnessTax: How Much Does the Harness Matter for Coding Agents?
I tried putting my agent in an LXC / Incus container but then I also needed it to process videos stored on a NAS, and that was not easy at all. I tried a FUSE-based NFS client [1] but it was very flaky and would randomly report files having zero length and fail processing.

[1] https://github.com/facebookarchive/nfusr

skirmish··on A wandering black hole caught feeding on the run
Quantum entanglement does not enable FTL communication: [1].

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/No-communication_theorem

skirmish··on Benchmarking Qwen3.8 27B quantizations: 4-bit holds up, 1-bit collapses

  --no-mmproj-offload
See the documentation: https://github.com/ggml-org/llama.cpp/blob/master/docs/multi...
skirmish··on Why your boss doesn't seem to care about your tech career anymore
So you are saying: backstab your manager and get them fired so you can take their place?
skirmish··on GrapheneOS project: pixel 11 no longer supports hardware memory tagging (MTE)
The supposed "security team" is busy fighting Google engineers connecting to internal systems to do their work. E.g. somebody figured how to control the coding AI agent from their phone -- red alert, ban all access from phones to AI for everybody (even with corporate accounts).
skirmish··on GrapheneOS project: pixel 11 no longer supports hardware memory tagging (MTE)
They do know, I experienced it myself.

I had a testing phone and my regular phone, I kept swapping the same Verizon SIM between them. It worked for maybe 3 swaps, then Verizon blocked my account and sent me an email: suspicious activity detected, the SIM is blocked and cannot be restored, the contract has been terminated, you will receive the refund in mail.

Good riddance, US Mobile is so much cheaper and pleasant to use. I am scared to swap SIMs with them now though.

skirmish··on Humanity has the debate about AI consciousness backwards
> Whether AI is conscious or not is independent of the social acceptance of the idea, unless you believe in thoroughly discredited and quite radical forms of social constructionism.

Yet all science is social, until you convince other people to take your ideas seriously, you are just another crank/loony.

How is social constructionism thoroughly discredited? Wikipedia shows some people poking with nits that don't look serious to me at all.

skirmish··on Black hole singularity is a surface not a point
Why would that happen? In a different coordinate system (Kruskal–Szekeres coordinates) nothing special happens at the event horizon at all.
skirmish··on Semaglutide linked to lower predicted dementia risk
A pair of adjustable dumbbells in the corner of the living room is still very doable. Lots of bodyweight exercises too you could look into.
skirmish··on Why does Opus 5 feel worse to work with?
Do you read (and enjoy reading) novels? I think it is just a modern addiction to soundbites. I know I do it myself, if the text is long and unstructured, I just skim through a few sentences, done!
skirmish··on Monitors for Work
Google recently to SWEs: replacing a mouse requires director's approval.

Also Google: why cannot we ship anything fast and why does Gemini suck so badly.

Because good people leave when you treat them like that, stupid Google!

skirmish··on The Absurdity of Albert Camus
You will find them in the Existential Comics, e.g. [1], [2], [3] etc.

[1] At the Existentialist Cafe, https://existentialcomics.com/comic/660

[2] The Asteroid and the Meaning of Life, https://existentialcomics.com/comic/654

[3] Camus on a Date, https://existentialcomics.com/comic/509

skirmish··on LG monitors silently install software through Windows Update without consent
Just found another mouse shape comparison site that may help:

https://www.rtings.com/mouse/tools/3d-model-shape-compare/

skirmish··on LG monitors silently install software through Windows Update without consent
Mousereview reddit always recommends looking at Chinese gaming mice, they have reasonable prices, often clone popular mouse shapes from large brands (see [1]) and have the latest sensors.

[1] EloShapes find similar: https://www.eloshapes.com/mouse/find-similar

skirmish··on Demis Hassabis has a plan to harness AI safely
Quite right, there is nothing to discuss since qualia don't exist. See Daniel Dennett.
skirmish··on The revenge of the philosophy majors
Marxist-Leninist Philosophy was a required course for all undergrads in my time studying in USSR. Strangely enough, the professors made it into an overview course on history of philosophy, which was quite enjoyable, with just some mention of Marxism-Leninism in the last lecture.
skirmish··on Factorio 2.1 Experimental Release
Ditto, I never could get into Factorio, it was just too depressing for me to be a tiny human running around in an all-brown landscape (that was years ago, no Space Age), then getting attacked for pollution. Tried Dyson Sphere, and immediately got hooked: a flying robot as the avatar, and you very soon need interplanetary and interstellar exploration and resource exchange. Just felt more techno-optimistic in its mood.

BTW in one playthrough (in DSP) I tried to avoid destroying any native vegetation at all, so obviously no blueprints, just lots of fun figuring out factory placement and routing belts around all the bushes.

skirmish··on DSpark: Speculative decoding accelerates LLM inference [pdf]
But then it's not a problem of speculative decoding, fix your dam main model.

BTW, in case there is confusion, we are not talking about CPU speculative execution affecting model inference at all, just about this specific technique: predict tokens via a smaller drafter model, then validate them against the main model in batch.

skirmish··on More evidence is consistent with possible ancient life on Mars (2025)
Coprolites.
skirmish··on DSpark: Speculative decoding accelerates LLM inference [pdf]
Don't think so because all tokens predicted speculatively are still validated against the main model (which is faster than predicting them from scratch) and only accepted if they match exactly.
skirmish··on How Many Elementary Particles Are There, Really?
See "Schild's Ladder" by Greg Egan: a science experiment creates a bubble of new physics expanding at 0.5 c, and humanity is forced to flee the expansion while some stay right next to the expanding boundary to investigate the inside.
skirmish··on Oracle shed about 20k roles globally in the last year
Ask AI to test and deploy them. /s
skirmish··on Job application asked for my SAT scores
Have to make sure all coworker's coffee cups are full.
skirmish··on I Hate (Most) Keyboard 'Fn' Keys
What works well for me is a taskbar icon with mouse scrolling (Waybar pulseaudio module on Sway). You see 50% and a speaker icon, hover and scroll up or down to instantly change.
skirmish··on Making peace with your unlived dreams (2023)
BTW, a very common name in Poland, a diminutive form of Jadwiga. If you ever read any Polish history, it almost seems like most of noblewomen were named Jadwiga.
skirmish··on Ask HN: Why is the HN crowd so anti-AI?
Is it this: GitLab Duo Agent Platform with Claude accelerates development [1]? Well, Gitlab itself promotes hooking them up!

[1] https://about.gitlab.com/blog/gitlab-duo-agent-platform-with...

skirmish··on Ask HN: Why is the HN crowd so anti-AI?
In other words, engineers are becoming (bad) middle management: happy to take credit on wins and quick to blame underlings (LLMs in this case) for any mishaps. As long as managers are allowed to play politics in workplace, of course engineers will try to do the same!
skirmish··on The real cost of owning a home
> a real estate agent just walked into my home without any notice

Just open the door stark naked, you are in your private home.

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