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sly010

2,303 karma · joined April 8, 2012

slymsg (at) gmail (dot) com
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sly010··on Font where each token is equal-width
Here is an other one: https://fonts.google.com/noto/specimen/Noto+Sans+SC
sly010··on Japanese used bookstores see 5x sales surge as books are being bought by the ton
That would require effort (to sort, acquire copyright, etc) which they wouldn't put in. Because they don't care.

People obviously feel bad about companies doing this. People reading these stories don't care what's legal, they care what's ethical. Heck, re-publishing long lost material would make AI companies heroes instead of bad guys.

sly010··on Japanese used bookstores see 5x sales surge as books are being bought by the ton
Well, they could turn the bad faith story into a good faith story by making them available for everyone to download perhaps. (AI companies "saving" old books!) But that would require giving a s*t which they don't and that is the real problem imho.
sly010··on The CSS Zen Garden dream, finally shipped
Came here to say the same. I closed the window on the spot. I don't even care if I miss out on something.
sly010··on New type of dice guarantees no tie when deciding who goes first
I like how the article contains 0 useful information about the problem beyond the title.
sly010··on Muse Spark 1.3
I think the turing test is still very much load-bearing — if you know what I mean.
sly010··on WebMCP: Teaching Your Website to Talk to AI Agents
This whole thing reminds me of the "I am writing to inform you that a fire has broken out..." scene from IT crowd. It's ridiculously inefficient.
sly010··on Understanding is the new bottleneck
I hate to be pedantic, but if you are the _reviewer_ you do not control the authors claude skills. Sure you can push back a few times but in most teams I worked the author can just decide to get a stamp from someone else. Then as a reviewer you loose all remaining influence. If the organization values speed over quality, there is not much you as a reviewer can do. This seems like a leadership/culture issue not a technical issue.
sly010··on Stealing Reasoning Traces from Proprietary LLM APIs
"Recovery" would be a more apt (although less catchy name). The stealing is on the provider side for not giving you access to tokens you already paid for.
sly010··on Not everything should cost a token: the case for deterministic AI
> Deterministic AI.

Aka, a computer program.

sly010··on Zero-copy in Go: sendfile, splice, and the cost of io.Copy
Beware, there are versions of go where sendfile is broken and only sends the first 4k of a file on macos.
sly010··on Anthropic requires 30 day data retention for Fable and Mythos
> people over-rate how much software/IP is useful in running a successful business

Indeed, by a couple trillions...

sly010··on Googlebook
I don't think people doubt what AI _could_ do, they just have been through enough enshitification cycles to know this is not any different. Right now AI is better than Google but only because Google regressed so much. Market forces always prevail. The operating costs are just too high to offer AI for free for everyone but people will refuse to pay, so AI (at least for the masses) will become just an other marketing funnel companies can buy out. I also don't see how AI will change the fact that clothing companies target average users and don't serve the long tail.
sly010··on If AI writes your code, why use Python?
No batteries!? Go has a huge stable standard library no other language even comes close to. Built in tooling for unit testing, performance testing, debugging, code formatting, package management, etc. And most go binaries can be compiled statically so libc is not even a dependency. Golang is the definition of batteries included.
sly010··on More common mistakes to avoid when creating system architecture diagrams
Then of course there is the whole fractal nature of software. As you add more detail, the arrows can flip flop around. Polling in a lower level of a stack can very much be used as a push mechanism. (e.g. USB interrupts are in fact the host polling the device)

This is why communicating architecture is often as hard if not harder than implementing it.

sly010··on More common mistakes to avoid when creating system architecture diagrams
There is in fact a 3rd: build time dependencies.

Control: Object/module/function A calls object/module/function B.

Data: The call can either push or pull data.

Build dependency: The call can be direct (A depends on B) or indirect through an interface/callback/etc (both A and B depends on the interface).

Ideally every design document includes all 3 as separate diagrams.

sly010··on Separating the Wayland compositor and window manager
... or the WM loads the compositor, or the WM links to a compositor library (i.e. wlroots). The point is there are options...

Honestly, every time this topic comes up, I feel like the person complaining just doesn't want to put in the work and they are angry that they don't get an easy win. And maybe that's a good thing. Do we really need more half baked WMs?

sly010··on A Programmer's Loss of Identity
> chosen to use fear and intimidation to help sell the agenda of the big tech CEOs who, in turn, have somehow managed to use coal-fired GPUs to capture society’s output and sell it back to us, while converting a significant portion of the economy into an expanding envelope of hot gas

I work for a very big tech company and I have no one to share this with.

sly010··on Cognitive and mental health correlates of short-form video use
There is a 3rd party Android app that uses the accessibility APIs to (supposedly) track and limit my short video use. However, it's broken, so I can't watch short videos at all :)
sly010··on An engineer's perspective on hiring
We get it. You are a manager.
sly010··on Vibe Coding Gone Wrong: 5 Rules for Safely Using AI
I've seen this image generated by meta AI. The prompt was something like: think of a room, make it look like anything you like, but do not in any circumstance put a clown in it. Guess what...

I think Jason has a "do not think of an elephant" problem.

sly010··on Rethinking CLI interfaces for AI
Sorry for the snark, but we couldn't even do this for humans, but let's do it for poor poor LLMs? It's kind of ironic that NOW is the time we worry about usability. What happened to RTFM?
sly010··on Is Gemini 2.5 good at bounding boxes?
Genuine question: How does this work? How does an LLM do object detection? Or more generally, how does an LLM do anything that is not text? I always thought tasks like this are usually just handed to an other (i.e. vision) model, but the post talks about it as if it's the _same_ model doing both text generation and vision. It doesn't make sense to me why would Gemini 2 and 2.5 would have different vision capabilities, shouldn't they both have access to the same, purpose trained state of the art vision model?
sly010··on Bot or human? Creating an invisible Turing test for the internet
Nah. You misunderstood. "They" don't make money on human time wasted. They make money on ads served. They don't particularly care if the ads were served to humans or agents, they get paid either way. Bot-traffic is actually good for tech companies because it inflates numbers. Capthas are not there to waste our time, but are there to improve their credibility ("We are certain those ad-clicks were real humans because the captha said so").
sly010··on Bot or human? Creating an invisible Turing test for the internet
First off, I always thought the type of things described (tracking mouse movements, keypress jitter, etc) are already done by ReCacpha to decide when to present the user with a captcha. I am surprised they are not already doing this.

Second, I am surprised AI agents are this naive. I thought they would emulate human behavior better.

In fact, just based on this article, very little effort has been put into this race on either side.

So I wonder if is has to do with the fact that if companies like google reliably filtered out bot traffic, they would loose 90% of their AD revenue. This way they have plausible deniability.

sly010··on A new pyramid-like shape always lands the same side up
Math has a PR problem. The weight being non-uniform makes this a little unsurprising to a non-mathematician, it's a bit like a wire "sphere" with a weight attached on one side, but a low poly version. Giving it a "skin" would make this look more impressive.
sly010··on LLM-powered tools amplify developer capabilities rather than replacing them
And just like optimizing compilers LLMs also emit code that is difficult to verify and no-one really understands, so when the shit hits the fan you have no idea what's going on.
sly010··on A flowing WebGL gradient, deconstructed
Very cool, but by css-rotating (skewY(-6deg)) the canvas at the last moment, you introduced aliasing on the border between the canvas and the rest of the page which kills the vibe. The browser can't automatically blend the canvas with the rest of the page. It's noticeable even on a brand new retina display. Maybe you could keep your canvas square and introduce the skew in the shader.
sly010··on Apple Exclaves
Isn't that just true for vulnerabilities in general? Trust Zone is not a security mechanism, it's an isolation mechanism.
sly010··on Distributed systems programming has stalled
I don't disagree, but funny that I recently made a point to someone that modern consumer embedded systems (with multiple MCUs connected with buses and sometimes shared memory) are basically small distributed systems, because partial restarts are common and the start/restart order of the MCUs is not very well defined. At least in the space I am working in. (Needless to say we use C, not rust)
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