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sobani

341 karma · joined September 14, 2011

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sobani··on California lawmakers unanimously pass Linux exemption from age-verification law
As someone from a country where neither happens, I don't think this distinction matters a lot.
sobani··on Delta
Similarly with Overleaf (an online Latex editor), where I've done group projects with up to 4 people simultaneously.

It works well enough that we occasionally used it for short chat conversations inside the document we were working on.

sobani··on Danish high schoolers will have to verbally defend written assignments
There's a slight difference between a bog standard daily standup with mildly interested colleagues and a career defining examination where multiple experts will dissect every word you say.

It's easy to get used to the former, much harder for the latter.

sobani··on Elevators
FYI: all your comments are [flagged][dead]

I don't know why, because they all look fine to me...

sobani··on John Deere owners will get the right to repair equipment under FTC settlement
You might be a victim of the Goomba Fallacy[0] where you're seeing two opposing opinions from two distinct groups of people, but since those are expressed on the same site, it seems as if 'the site' is contradicting itself.

[0] https://knowyourmeme.com/editorials/guides/what-is-the-goomb...

sobani··on SpaceX, Other Mega IPOs Denied Fast Index Entry by S&P
They do have identical value.

500 shares of company A is worth 100% of the market cap of company A.

500 shares of company B is also worth 100% of the market cap of company B.

So if you have 5 shares of each, you'll have 1% of the market cap of each, even if one of those companies finds the cure for cancer or turns out to be a money furnace.

sobani··on Can we have the day off?
> it seems we actually work more than our ancestors.

Only if you count the hours worked for the local lord and forget about all other mandatory work like:

- growing your own food

- cooking/prepping said food (44 hours per week)

- maintenance

- spinning, weaving and sewing clothes

https://acoup.blog/2025/09/05/collections-life-work-death-an...

https://acoup.blog/2025/10/10/collections-life-work-death-an...

sobani··on Ladybird adopts Rust, with help from AI
That reminds me of the "Strangler Fig" pattern where you replace a service by first sending the requests to both the old and new implementation so you can compare their outputs. Then only when you're confident the new service functions as expected do you actually retire the old service.
sobani··on /dev/null is an ACID compliant database
Related: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phillips_Machine

"The Phillips Machine is an analogue computer which uses fluidic logic to model the workings of an economy."

sobani··on Cap'n Web: a new RPC system for browsers and web servers
How many of those languages can take an expression instead of a lambda?

Func<..> is lambda that can only be invoked.

Expression<Func..>> is an AST of a lambda that can be transformed by your code/library.

sobani··on Emailing a one-time code is worse than passwords
> 1-(1-1/1,000,000)^(4×1,000,000) ≈ 98%

> Pretty close to 1 account per day

No, this means there is a 98% chance you get _at least_ 1 account.

`1-1/1,000,000` is the probability you fail 1 attempt. That probability to the 4millionth is the probability you fail 4 million times in a row. 1 minus _that_ probability is that the probability that you _don't_ fail 4 million times in a row, aka that you succeed at least once.

The expected number of accounts is still number of attempts times the probability of success for 1 try, or: 4 accounts.

sobani··on Amazon workers to strike at multiple US warehouses during busy holiday season
Yeah @rlupi, America is far too poor to afford basic living conditions. /s

But seriously, no US state is as poor as Italy, in GDP per capita terms (Mississippi 50K vs Italy 40K).

sobani··on New LLM optimization technique slashes memory costs
Heat dissipation becomes a _huge_ problem when you deploy a data center inside a perfect insulator, the vacuum of space.

Currently about a third of the energy consumption of a data center spent on cooling (heat dissipation)? And that's with the use of a huge heat sink, the earth.

sobani··on Starship Flight 5: Launch and booster catch [video]
> SpaceX should create a simple 'catch' the rocket game. Play in browser style. Just for kicks and marketing.

They did: https://starshipthegame.spacex.com/

sobani··on TSMC execs allegedly dismissed OpenAI CEO Sam Altman as 'podcasting bro'
If someone comes up with a new port that had 10% more throughput than USB, do you think that will be enough to make it a viable competitor, or do you think it won't be worth the hassle of replacing your peripherals (cassettes) and computers (cassette players)?
sobani··on DOJ accuses Visa of monopoly that affects price of 'nearly everything’
I have trouble imagining how you'd get a credit card without a bank account.
sobani··on Move Fast and Abandon Things
Would you be willing to trust your child to the care of someone who is unwilling or incapable of finding work outside the jobs program?

For any useful job you can think of, ask yourself: What's stopping the unemployed from doing that job right now? They could already be making decent money driving or caring, so why aren't they?

sobani··on How to succeed in MrBeast production (Leaked PDF)
> Imagine that our bitter ememies invented a superior logistics tool, known as the wheel. They also invented airplanes and the concept of blitzkrieg. Should we attribute their success to the wheel, and study how it was designed, since they clearly had a mighty army?

If you replace "wheel" with "jerrycan", then that's exactly what happened.

Quoting from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jerrycan :

> Such was the appreciation of the cans in the war effort that President Franklin Roosevelt noted, "Without these cans it would have been impossible for our armies to cut their way across France at a lightning pace which exceeded the German Blitzkrieg of 1940."

sobani··on I used to not worry about climate change. Now I do [video]
Weighted average prices up to €2.40: https://brandstofdata.nl/brandstof/benzine/2022
sobani··on The phrase "no evidence" is a red flag for bad science communication (2021)
The difference is during a regular meeting, the skin is uncut. The skin is a major protection against diseases and the body has a bunch of mechanisms at its regular openings (nose, ears, etc) to protect you.

When you cut through someones skin, you bypass one of the major first lines of defense. Therefor surgeons reduce the risks, for a similar reason why clean their tools before use.

sobani··on America’s Covid job-saving programme gave most of its cash to the rich
> increased employment at small businesses by only 2%

> implying a cost of $377,000 per job saved

The second doesn't follow from the first at all?

The fact that employment increased doesn't tell you anything about how many jobs were not lost, right?

sobani··on I was part of a human subject research study without my consent
> a lawyer will be able to answer it a fraction of an hour

Except that they will probably won't know the answer immediately an need more time than that: https://twitter.com/DanielleVEsq/status/1472105731474137094

sobani··on Low interest rates in advanced countries have pushed money into real estate
There are other taxes than just income tax.

There's also capital gains tax or even wealth tax. Especially the last one will target the wealthy.

sobani··on .NET 6 vs .NET 5 speedup
If you're using LINQ on a list, it will not use Expressions, but a plain Func. So nothing will get parsed either way.

The difference, as @sbelskie already mentioned, is that Where has an optimization for List, while First only uses the naive enumerator.

sobani··on If Apple keeps letting its software slip, the next big thing won’t matter
When I put two fingers at the same time on a message, the checkboxes immediately appear. If I'm even slightly off, the checkboxes never appear and instead I get to see the contents of the message when I let go.
sobani··on The benefits of staying off social media
> Is complementing someone's hat really worth the potential anxiety?

I still remember the compliments one of my jackets got me 1, 4 and 6 years ago. That probably helped making it my favorite jacket, especially since those are the only non-family compliments I got in the past 10 years.

When you like something about someone, please make their year and compliment them on it.

sobani··on Suspected head of $21B crime syndicate may be world’s most innovative drug lord
https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/know-your-amphetamines

Start reading from "There's a lot of confusion around the difference between amphetamine and methamphetamine."

Most relevant quote: "Moreover, there are no known neurobiological differences in action between METH and AMPH that would account for the [supposedly] greater addictive, rewarding, or psychomotor properties of METH."

sobani··on MacBook Pro 14-inch and MacBook Pro 16-inch
It looks like the iPhone is about 2-3 times thicker than a MacBook lid. I'm not sure they actually have the space to put iPhone equivalent hardware above the MacBook screen.
sobani··on MacBook Pro 14-inch and MacBook Pro 16-inch
If you are considering the 13", also take a good look at the air. The difference is $300 and you basically only lose an hour of battery life and the touch bar.

https://www.apple.com/mac/compare/?modelList=MacBook-Pro-14,...

sobani··on Give me /events, not webhooks
I don't think mr throwaway was advocating to use email to send the events, only to use SMTP. Email is an entire ecosystem, SMTP is only a protocol.

If the distinction is too hard to make: think of it as using the 'Simple Event Transfer Protocol' that just happens to use exactly the same protocol as SMTP.

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