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soganess

968 karma · joined July 26, 2013

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soganess··on Don't Be Nice
Yes. The virtue of not being nice to Nazis. I want people signaling that. I don't care why they are signaling it, I support it.

You know that insufferable friend who won't stop talking about the starving kids in XYZ? And you know how they donated five dollars that one time and just won't let you forget it? Yeah, well, at least that a*hat gave five dollars.

I'd rather have the Bonos of the world making mountains out of the molehills of aid they provide than hang out with people so cool and disaffected that they only see the virtue signaling and discount the virtue.

Just like you, I see the virtue signaling as gauche, but I think calling it out without any substance is just as gauche.

soganess··on Domain-Driven Agents
Agreed! I hate the start of a project with an LLM. The code it writes is always expletive, and wrangling it with rules, hooks, plans, and what have you is just a series of half measures. I'm basically in a fistfight with a cheerful drunk keyboard.

Once there's enough code, tests, and docs to appease the prefill gods and give it an understanding of what I expect in terms of code quality, style, and TDD etiquette, I can expect more consistent performance.

That said, I've never been comfortable enough with it to let it write more than a few of functions at a time without a diff/checking-in.

I've seen folks with 500K LOC branches written by an LLM and my heart just sinks...

soganess··on Asahi Linux Progress Report: Linux 7.2
Yeah, but there was a time when running Linux on a laptop was one of the most complex ways of running Linux. Now I just expect everything to work, especially if I buy from Lenovo, Dell, or HP.

There was a time when Wi-Fi, or Wayland, or XComposite, or Linux gaming, or just accelerated graphics at all or, or, or... People get excited, they work on it, other people get excited and mess about, and eventually it just works.

I would love to one day pick up a decommissioned M1 Ultra and use my OS of choice on it, and I'm grateful for the people who are doing the hard thing now.

soganess··on A Farmer Donated Land to Turn into a Park. The City Is Building a Data Center
Was anyone else bracing to read about a local ordnance that reclassified a data centers as a type of park (...for the AI to play in, duh)?

My brain officially only understands "up" as "down"...

soganess··on Anthropic's model naming, extrapolated
Is "release the Mythos" the new "Snyder cut" chant?

And also, chant is a lovely name that was skipped over. Especially for the models that won't stop sounding like a broken record.

soganess··on Firefox Merges Support for Vulkan Video Decoding
Yup, the name is a bit of a misnomer at this point: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/android/addon/enhanced-h264...

What you really do is disallow everything save vp9...

soganess··on Firefox Merges Support for Vulkan Video Decoding
I figured, but all I knew for certain was that it did not advertise it.

Maybe it was silently presented in silco but lacked the software bits. It's a pretty big omission considering the Pi5's release date.

soganess··on Firefox Merges Support for Vulkan Video Decoding
I believe h264-ify still does. And many of the fancy "remake YouTube to not suck" extensions do as well.
soganess··on Firefox Merges Support for Vulkan Video Decoding
You are 100% right! My mistake. It is too late for me to edit my previous comment. But I appreciate the correction.
soganess··on Firefox Merges Support for Vulkan Video Decoding
There are fairly mainstream devices with decent Vulkan support but poor hardware decode coverage for the codecs people actually get on the web. Polaris era Radeons have H.264 and HEVC decode, but VP9 support is absent (or not exposed in many common Linux paths) so YouTube is sloppy. The Raspberry Pi 5 is another example: it has hardware HEVC decode, but YouTube 4K is generally VP9 or AV1 rather than HEVC, and Pi 5 does not advertise VP9 hardware decode.
soganess··on We need to add 6k seats to Congress
1.5 Billion? Less than that 1.776B slush fund.
soganess··on AI-assisted engineers are burning out, is this fine?
Since we out here doing ad hominems: if you don't think the code you wrote a few months ago is shit, you're already cooked, and judging by that comment, I'm betting you're crispy.

Even the best code I've ever written rots, not because it changes but because I get better. Now... I know thinking out of the box is hard... but one can get better a lot of different ways, and call me an optimist, but I'm betting folks can get better at producing tool-assisted code, too. Assuming how we do it now is how it will be forever is silly.

We're in the middle of figuring out the next level of mediated engineering. You-know-what or get off the pot, but stop pretending being a dinosaur is still in vogue. It's gauche, and trust me, we've seen it all before...

... back in my day we didn't have that fancy IDE autocomplete; we memorized every function in a library. IDEs?! ... Back in my day we didn't even have debuggers; we just knew how the code worked. Pish posh, back in my day the compiler didn't even produce error messages that made sense. Compilers? The faux luxury of it all! Back in my day, if you actually cared about your code, you wrote the assembly by hand.

soganess··on Green Card Holders Targeted for Deportation by New 'Removal Apparatus'
I do believe we call that a pilot program. If it is legal for 50, why not 5 million?
soganess··on Googlebook, Designed for Gemini Intelligence
If this works out then 2027 might actually be the year of desktop Linux... but like in the saddest way possible.
soganess··on Fuck You, Bambu Lab. Go Ahead, Sue Us
The GamersNexus arc is such a YouTube success story: from a dude uploading videos, to superbly rigorous methodology in top tier hardware reviews, to occasional news summaries, to journalistic longforms, to straight up advocacy, and somehow back to a humble written tech site.

It’s like a tech Benjamin Button story. Thanks, Steve!

...oh heck, I can't handle it anymore, take my money already.

soganess··on Running local models on an M4 with 24GB memory
Getting so close to good!

I consider Gemma 4 31B (dense / no MoE), the new baseline for local models. It's obviously worse than the frontier models, but it feels less like a science experiment than any previous local model I’ve run, including GPT OSS 120B and Nemotron Super 120B.

On my M5 Max with 128 GB of RAM and the full 256K context window, I see RAM use spike to about 70 GB, with something like 14 GB of system overhead. A 64 GB Panther Lake machine with the full Arc B390, or a 48 GB Snapdragon X2 Elite machine, could probably run it with a 128K to 256K context window. Maybe you can squeeze it into 32GB (27.5GB usable) with a 32K context window?

Even last year, seeing this kinda performance on a mainstream-ish/plus configuration would have seemed like a pipe dream.

soganess··on Draw Marc Andreessen on an Egg
I'm sure Andreessen thinks about your well-being just as often as you think about his!

I agree poking fun at someone's appearance is low (and this is particularly savage), but it is hard to have sympathy for Andreessen, and I'm not going to strain myself trying.

soganess··on Today I've made the difficult decision to reduce the size of Coinbase by ~14%
That is your problem right there. Instead of PCI compliance you needed that sweet, sweet IBM MCA compliance.

Rookie mistake by your AI; otherwise it did a flawless job, and the glaze it's been giving you is 100% accurate. You are the bestest.

If one more AI calls me "insightful" or says that my question "really cuts through the noise" or "gets to the heart of the matter"...

soganess··on Sergey Brin Confronted Gavin Newsom
Everyone seems to be objecting to the arithmetic error, but what’s more interesting is the underlying assumption: that “Sergey Brin owes $50B” is so morally dispositive that it would end the argument.

Brin is not a sympathetic marginal case. He is the standard: founder equity, $1 salary, unrealized appreciation, deferral, and access to liquidity without needing wage income.

It is a little strange to look at a very large tax bill landing at his feet and decide that is where the scandal starts. Is the number supposed to make the idea disqualifying because it is drastically more than most people make in many lifetimes?

Said another way, the revealing part is not that someone on the internet multiplied wrong. The revealing part is how quickly the error resolves into a fairness argument on behalf of Sergey Brin, a man whose fortune is almost a laboratory specimen of the thing the regular income tax keeps failing, decade after decade, to reach.

soganess··on Google broke its promise to me – now ICE has my data
A country is not a house. Conflating the legal framework of a nation-state with the etiquette of a private living room is a category error. As John Locke demonstrated when refuting the patriarchal theory of government, political power is fundamentally distinct from household authority. A private home is governed by the unilateral property rights of an owner; a republic operates via constitutional law and public rights.

Pretending the rules of a private domicile apply to a jurisdiction by analogy is a sleight of hand. It operates like arguing that because memory safety is a strict requirement in system architecture, we must ensure human memories remain uncorrupted. The domains function under entirely different mechanics. A non-citizen in a public space is constrained by statutory law (and our statutory law is based on our understanding of inherent freedoms), not the etiquette of a houseguest.

soganess··on Google broke its promise to me – now ICE has my data
Yeah, because the American ideal of our forefathers was FAFO?

This is embarrassing to admit, but I miss the halcyon days when folks were still nominally pretending to be free speech warriors.

soganess··on Android developer verification: Balancing openness and choice with safety
And I'm 100% sure they will stop there... Yup! No evidence to believe the contrary.
soganess··on US Court of Appeals: TOS may be updated by email, use can imply consent [pdf]
Is this panel (Gould/Clinton, Nguyen/Obama, and Bennett/Trump) a standard pull for the ninth? Considering how many judges are in the ninth:

> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Court_of_Appeals...

It seems less likely to (randomly) have the same panel on two higher profile cases so close to each other:

> https://courthousenews.com/ninth-circuit-keeps-block-on-dhs-...

So I'm wondering if it is some procedural thing I am not privy to?

soganess··on Intel's make-or-break 18A process node debuts for data center with 288-core Xeon
During the 8th gen they made an i7-8086... Hopefully Intel hasn't fired that person.
soganess··on xAI joins SpaceX
Are launch costs really 10x!? Could I get a source for that?

In the back on my head this all seemed astronomically far-fetched, but 5.5 million to get 8 GPUs in space... wild. That isn't even a single TB of VRAM.

Are you maybe factoring in the cost to powering them in space in that 5 million?

soganess··on Ubuntu is the reason Windows users don't want to switch to Linux
1. It's a moral good (free as in freedom). Wider Linux adoption makes software more free for everyone and creates a feedback loop: more users means more engineering effort, which improves the many many projects we colloquially call Linux, which (i++) attracts more users. As a corollary to #1: do you really want Billy G spying on your mom?

2. It's often better for the environment to keep old hardware running (manufacturing emissions usually dwarf operational ones for consumer devices).

And a more personal corollary to #2: I love old hardware and don't want to see it die (and I'm not talking about vintage tech). A 16+ core Haswell Xeon (that riiiing) and Polaris RX 480 (HWS, why yes) remain perfectly useful in the modern world. I like knowing both are out there, somewhere, just chugging away long after they were retired from some server or mining operation.

soganess··on P vs. NP and the Difficulty of Computation: A ruliological approach
Can someone tell me what I am missing here?

This seems to suffer from a finite-size effect. Wolfram's machines have a tiny state space (s ≤ 4, k ≤ 3). For some class of NP problems, this will be insufficient to encode complex algorithms and is low dimensional enough that it is unlikely to be able to encode hard instances ("worst case") of the problem class. The solution space simply cannot support them.

In this regime, hard problem classes only have easy solutions, think random k-SAT below the satisfiability threshold, where algorithms like FIX (Coja-Oghlan) approximate the decision problem in polynomial time. In random k-SAT, the "hardness" cannot emerge away from the phase transition and by analogy (watch my hand wave in the wind so free) I can imagine that they would not exist at small scales. Almost like the opposite of the overlap gap property.

Wolfram's implicit counter-claim seems to be that the density of irreducibility among small machines approximates the density in the infinite limit (...or something? Via his "Principle of Computational Equivalence"), but I'm not following that argument. I am sure someone has brought this up to him! I just don't understand his response. Is there some way of characterizing / capturing the complexity floor of a given problem (For an NP-hard Problem P the reduced space needs to be at least as big as S to, WHP, describe a few hard instances)?

soganess··on Former CNN journalist Don Lemon arrested after church protest in Minnesota
I am so confused wrt what you are attempting to do.

I literally do not care what the policy says. Must I say it that way? The policy

  (1) is logically incoherent

  (2) is not policed in an equitable way

  (3) is used to launder a worldview to young tech workers just coming to hn

  (4) ... do I need to keep going? because I can keep saying stuff

  (5) is just random bits on a server
I don't like it, many people don't like it, it has a negative chilling effect on the hn community. I am regularly voicing my concern in an effort to create my desired outcome. FWIW, the folks that want the rules changed are generally the most aware of them.
soganess··on Former CNN journalist Don Lemon arrested after church protest in Minnesota
Do you honestly think I have not read that before?

I don't even know where that is posted, I just see folks quote it all the time. I obviously don't abide, those were written at a different time on a different internet with a different HN.

NOTE: I slightly restructured this without noticing the reply. The poster below is not misquoting me in anyway.

soganess··on Former CNN journalist Don Lemon arrested after church protest in Minnesota
I consider myself extremely confrontational on here (especially compared to myself in meatworld), but in my 13 years on HN I have had only one direct disagreement with dang, and it was about the definition of the hazelnut spread Nutella.

I am sure he and I disagree on most things, but I don't fault the primary moderator. In general, dang seems pretty laissez-faire. I am venting at the flag brigade: what news gets flagged, and more importantly what doesn't.

I come here to stick my thumb in the wind and see what the prevailing tech view is. As for the tech itself, I am more "if I learn something cool along the way, neat," so I guess I am here for the vibe as well. I just wish folks were more honest about what HN is (like you are being here). Things change; it's okay for them to change.

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