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sowbug

7,477 karma · joined March 9, 2009

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sowbug··on Vermont replacing power plants with home batteries
It would be nice to change the headline to "Vermont is replacing power plants with home batteries." Shorter and potentially saves a click.
sowbug··on Self-Hosting on the Dark Web
In a guide like this, it might be helpful to emphasize backing up the generated private key, loss of which would cause you to have to change your onion address.
sowbug··on OpenAI GPT–6 Astra breaks Enigma message that has resisted solution since 2005
Would you give much credit to someone who ignored a nearby hammer and pounded in a nail with his fist?
sowbug··on People who can't picture anything are rewriting the science of imagination
I'm aphantasic. I dream normally, seeing all sorts of imagery. I have accidentally had a couple lucid dreams in my lifetime, which got me interested in the methods to trigger them intentionally, all of which have failed.

The Wake Back to Bed (WBTB) method has been especially frustrating, because I'll see my usual nothing when my eyes are closed, but then for the very briefest instant I see a dream image that immediately disappears the moment I notice it.

I wonder whether whatever makes my brain aphantasic is also responsible for switching off those almost-lucid images.

sowbug··on iPhone Duo
When you're old enough to need reading glasses, larger is better.

I'd love a tiny phone. I just can't see it anymore.

sowbug··on How to build a printer
I've wanted something like this for a long time to print recipes that I'm about to cook. I don't want my phone in the kitchen getting gunk on it, so I'll usually print on paper, get the gunk on the paper, and then throw it out.

I'm not going to create a recipe PDF and load it on an e-reader. That's too much work. But I will happily press control-P on a recipe web page and select the eink display as the target.

sowbug··on I Connected My Withings Body+ to Home Assistant with an ESP32
I'm planning on doing something similar with a $150 treadmill that uses an app called "Gymax." I don't want the app or its adorably embryonic social network. I just want three buttons: slow, fast, and really fast for 60 seconds.
sowbug··on Cheap GPS jammers are filling the world with navigation dead zones
https://stfu.pankajtanwar.in/
sowbug··on Amazon now hides all customer reviews on products
For a long time, it was actually even worse: they obfuscated the product name, and added other products they wanted you to buy. So when you searched your email for practically anything, all sorts of Amazon garbage would come back.
sowbug··on Suica, Japan's First IC Transit Card
When you pay with Suica, the merchant pays a transaction fee of between 2 to 3.2%, similar to a credit card.

That's surprising. IC cards are so universally and cheerfully accepted that I assumed they had no per-transaction costs. Compare the US, where merchants can be surly about card payments.

sowbug··on We must not grant AI agents legal personhood
I agree with the article's conclusion (though I don't think much of the reasoning that got it there). But I do think we should consider granting additional privileges to real humans as they interact with LLMs.

Suppose I have a local LLM running on my PC. I have close and personal conversations with it. It keeps a chat history. I'm later accused, falsely,* of a crime. During the process of defending myself, should the prosecutor be entitled to a copy of my LLM's conversation history that was seized pursuant to a warrant? Or allowed to interrogate my LLM, again seized while executing a search warrant?

Under current US law, the answers are probably yes. Just as an accused's diary or notebook can be seized and introduced into evidence, an LLM's internal state seems like a paper/effect/document that would be subject to search and seizure. But a conversation with a local LLM also seems more like a conversation with a spouse, therapist, or attorney. There are good public-policy reasons to treat those conversations as privileged; we want people to be able to get good advice without fear of disclosure. Shouldn't those reasons apply to LLM conversations as well?

I'm not saying LLMs should have personal rights. But I can see a case for privileges for real humans arising from conversations between real humans and LLMs. LLMs might not be human, but humans do interact with them as if they were.

*It doesn't matter, of course, whether the accusation is false. Due process means people have certain rights regardless of culpability. But I don't want readers to fixate on culpability, so in this scenario the accusation is unfounded -- let's say someone did break into a house and steal the family jewels, but a security camera identified the wrong person.

sowbug··on Semaglutide linked to lower predicted dementia risk
One small thing to try is so-called Asian squats while you're playing with your kid.

Hip and groin neuralgia started suspiciously soon after my tirzepatide weight loss. I seem to have gotten it under control after mobility exercises centered around squatting. It took almost six months to get from falling backwards to being able to squat flat-footed. Now it's a comfortable and useful stance.

My theory is the weight loss shifted my center of gravity, calling on muscles and joints that weren't ready for the load. Learning to squat helped the new version of my body relearn how to support itself.

sowbug··on Hamburg's Stadtpark: A Park Built to Be Used
And for putting the inevitable subscribe-for-more form inline at the end of the article, rather than in a popup.
sowbug··on The whole premise of checking for human writing is daft
That's true. I don't know how to solve it, other than booking a long vacation until https://xkcd.com/810/.
sowbug··on The whole premise of checking for human writing is daft
Those issues existed well before LLMs. Everyone who reads needs a BS detector. It's unfortunate, though, that many such detectors have been replaced with AI detectors.
sowbug··on "We have information that Moonshot distilled Fable for the development of K3"
If you build a device that can help build devices, you shouldn't be too surprised when people use it to build devices.
sowbug··on Kimi K3, Qwen 3.8, and Anthropic's (Potential) Unravelling
This is a popular misreading of the state of the law.

Someone tried, as a bit of a stunt, to register a work for copyright with generative AI as the sole creator/author. That registration was rejected. This is quite different from a person using generative AI as a tool to create a work.

People have copyright in photos and videos they create, even if they used a camera. Same with images and code, even if they used an LLM.

I'm not your lawyer, but to the extent you have copyright in works you create, the fact that you used a tool doesn't diminish the copyright.

sowbug··on I Learned to Read Again
Ten thousand books in an 80-year lifetime would mean finishing one book every three days. That's aggressive, but entirely achievable.
sowbug··on The shingles vaccine may reduce the risk of dementia
Shingles vaccine, if you don't feel like clicking through.
sowbug··on Mistral's Robostral Navigate: a state of the art robotics navigation model
Then today's your lucky day! https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48829312
sowbug··on How to Build a Minimal ZFS NAS Without Synology, QNAP, TrueNAS (2024)
It's a paraphrasing of the popular 2024 Joanna Maciejewska quote: "I want AI to do my laundry and dishes so that I can do art and writing, not for AI to do my art and writing so that I can do my laundry and dishes."
sowbug··on Fixing analog audio on the $2.58 HDMI-to-VGA adapter
Sometimes it's fun to mod something that other people can also easily buy and follow your mod recipe. It's more of a network effect than publishing Gerbers and a BOM.

For example, there are (or maybe were) lots of cheap LED controllers that use proprietary phone apps, but if you crack them open, you find that they're ESP-8266-based, and if you can find the right locations on the PCB, you can reflash them with WLED.

sowbug··on Microsoft fire idTech team at Id software
Probably a good way to become a millionaire, in the Branson sense of the word.
sowbug··on The family keeping watch over a 52-year-old pot of soup
By the way, if you haven't tried 滷肉飯 (lǔròu fàn, or braised pork with rice), you should. You can't walk more than a block in Taipei without finding it, but I've seen it only once in the US.
sowbug··on Google limits Meta's use of its Gemini AI models
Or even more banal, perhaps Meta wasn't willing to pay a higher price for more capacity.
sowbug··on Turning music into a chore is how I became a musician (2022)
You can follow the "correct horse battery staple" method the author referred to in the article. Another handy tool is a BIP39 seed generator (https://iancoleman.io/bip39/), but use the generated seed as a small pool of candidates that might catch your fancy. "hockey rival" or "pepper garment" or "frozen artwork" could be project names.
sowbug··on Zuckerberg's war on whistleblowers
Please don't comment on whether someone read an article. "Did you even read the article? It mentions that" can be shortened to "The article mentions that".

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

sowbug··on Ask HN: Is "no source code was copied" still a sufficient copyright defense?
I assume this is the Bill Gates reference:https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Bill_Gates_Letter_to_Hobb...
sowbug··on Previewing GPT‑5.6 Sol: a next-generation model
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48690510
sowbug··on Previewing GPT‑5.6 Sol: a next-generation model
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48690510
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