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speff

713 karma · joined June 12, 2023

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speff··on Dwarf Fortress is getting the mother of all magic updates
I understand why they did it - medical emergencies and all. Have to pay the bill somehow. But yea, 0.47.05's still my go-to. Just can't vibe with the new UI/keybinds.

Old controls were on their roadmap for a long time, but the benefit from their perspective shrinks as time goes on. I doubt we'll see it at this point.

speff··on U of Michigan drops first-semester grades to ‘curb mental health crisis’
"It takes a ton of pressure to make a diamond". I read that in a game when I was a kid and took it as a guiding principle in my life.

Overcoming hard times absolutely made me a better person, but as I've grown I've seen many examples of the fallout you're referring to. Sometimes people just break.

speff··on Flux 3
You may like this old comment by dang who did this type of analysis: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24215601 (2020)
speff··on China sentences official to death for taking $325M in bribes
I'd imagine because of the talk from the then-incoming administration talking about how he'll go after their families unless his personal ongoing charges were dropped [0]. I would do the exact same thing if a vindictive POS was about to gain power.

[0]: "Trump threatens to prosecute Bidens if he’s re-elected unless he gets immunity" https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2024/apr/30/trump-second...

speff··on GLM 5.2 and the coming AI margin collapse
I'm trying to break anti-cheat protection in order to mod my own (single-player) game and Opus refuses to help. I don't really care if GLM's dumber at this point if Anthopic's going to be a non-option.

At work, layoffs cut too deep and I'm trying to find creative ways to re-discover lost knowledge. Wonder if I'll have to beg them to research our own systems at some point.

It's not limited to naughty queries.

speff··on Age verification is just a precursor to automated attribution of speech
I suspect a lot of people don't mind/care that the list is expanded to those groups. That's really a big part of the issue. It's better framing, regardless though.
speff··on What Is a Nomogram and Why Would It Interest Me?
That was a bit small on my screen. Found an interactive one here that's scalable - https://www.medcalc.org/en/calc/fagans-nomogram.php
speff··on NSA lost access to Mythos amid Anthropic dispute
Ghidra comes to mind
speff··on The Speed of Prototyping in the Age of AI
Similar experience here, however my feeling is that this isn't necessarily a bad thing. Garbage being made is indicative of a gap in the currently-available tools. User research should shift towards analyzing these prototypes and enhancing existing tools to fill this need.
speff··on MCP is dead?
This was one of the first ideas me and my team had for sharing skills and scripts. The problem is this is a very "why Dropbox and not FTP" answer.

The second you utter the word git, you may have lost 90% of your audience - depending on their background, of course. MCPs are a lot more non-tech friendly

speff··on MCP is dead?
My mental model for MCPs is that it's like a Swagger/OpenAPI spec for LLMs. Point 2 doesn't make much sense in that context as it's describing MCP as a Swagger endpoint that's unstable.

Chrome/Ghidra MCP does have a tendency of crashing, but I'm not sure why this is. Is my way of thinking of MCP incorrect? If it really is a descriptor of how to talk to another tool, then why do they seem fragile at times? I feel like there's a gap in my knowledge somewhere.

speff··on I am retiring from tech to live offline
Of course they do. Generally the end result from this is bad - reduced in scope, buggy, and/or unstable. But that's an issue with communication/expectations/management. It'll keep happening either because of politics or the fact that a sub-par deliverable still meets the needs of the overall organization. Until it doesn't.
speff··on I am retiring from tech to live offline
It depends on the management. Mine asks that, but others within my company get "this is going to be done by [DATE]".
speff··on Claude Opus 4.8
From what I understand, that's a problem with the way it receives data. The model doesn't see the letters g,o,o,g,l,e to count it. Just like how I can't sense radio waves. If I wanted to find that out, I'd get a tool to detect waves. If the LLM wants to find that out, it can write a script to find it.
speff··on Using AI to write better code more slowly
I suppose it depends how hands-off the tasks are - I max out at 2 parallel sessions working on different parts and it's fairly exhausting once done. I can see the number of parallel work increasing if there's a good dev/test loop. But at $WORK, that's not usually an option.
speff··on Why is Vivado 2026.1 dropping Linux support for free tier?
AMD and any other corpo is made of people, who do have emotions. Abuse towards these people impacts corp operations. This is an entity protecting itself from damage that it feels is not worth the benefit the offering would bring.

And I question your assertion of real harm to individuals, by not offering free support, being worse than receiving verbal abuse.

speff··on Oura says it gets government demands for user data
From what I understand, they can get call records and subscription info w/ administrative subpoenas, but this is the first I've heard of them being able to get location data without a warrant.

Assuming you meant directly from the telcos and not from the data broker loopholes - in which case pretty much anyone should be able to do that. Emails and texts they still need a warrant for.

speff··on Bitcoin trader recovers wallet with help of Claude
I'm not well versed at reverse engineering binaries or interpreting C/assembly so ghidra MCP has been an absolute gamechanger for helping me write tools. Once my project is complete, I plan to learn how to do the analysis myself manually and have cc guide me along the way.
speff··on The US is winning the AI race where it matters most: commercialization
Putting some numbers into the discussion census.gov [0] is tracking a sharp decline in net immigration due to both, a decrease in immigration and an increase in emmigration, from the start of 2025 to the present. Trending towards a net negative.

Pew [1] suggests that the changes around the start of 2025 were due increased restrictions on asylum applications under the previous admin and EOs by the current one to restrict new immigration. Given the rough numbers [2] of about 40k asylum grants per year in the early 2020s, I doubt the previous admin's actions are playing much of a role here.

Stating that none of it (immigration acceptance) changed under this administration might technically be true - with respect to the number of countries applying, but misses this point.

[0]: https://www.census.gov/newsroom/blogs/random-samplings/2026/...

[1]: https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2025/08/21/key-findi...

[2]: https://usafacts.org/articles/how-many-people-seek-asylum-in...

speff··on EEVblog: The 555 Timer is 55 years old [video]
Once you get above a couple meg, the oils on your fingers start affecting the resistance. Better hope no-one touches with your 55 year counter
speff··on Drunk post: Things I've learned as a senior engineer (2021)
You have abstractions and models for those things. I was formally trained as an EE, so I'm just guessing at how structural engineers do it.

I would expect someone building a bridge to keep the average/peak winds into consideration - and then feed it to CAD or whatever modeling software they use to design the structure. They don't need to know the exact force a screw was tightened with - they do need to give the specs of what range they should be tightened to. Again - considered in CAD. They don't need to know that theory is right - they just need to know it's not wrong to an unacceptable degree.

I'm sure there's some guessing, but a lot of these things are actually factored in.

speff··on Apple has removed most of the towns and villages in Lebanon from Apple maps?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Self-hating_Jew
speff··on AI Will Be Met with Violence, and Nothing Good Will Come of It
I suggest you keep going with that math. I'll use the numbers from here [0]. 924 billionaires with an overall wealth of 7.5 trillion. Split among 300 million people, that's about $25k for everyone.

Here are some points of consideration:

1. They don't have $7.5T in liquid. The average american won't be able to use that $25k to pay a hospital bill or eat. Also note that one-time wealth transfer won't even pay in full for one major surgery.

2. You've wiped away the incentive for getting-big mentality which drove some of the billionaires to innovate which advances society to this point. Think - discouraging a future Jobs from making another iPhone-like device.

3. After the one-time transfer, it turns out we need more money for the common folks. "Why is the line at $1B? Isn't $900m enough? The line should be $100m." And so on and so forth.

[0]: https://fortune.com/2025/12/08/how-many-billionaires-does-am...

speff··on Bored of eating your own dogfood? Try smelling your own farts
From my understanding, it's generally for health purposes (though the convenience doesn't hurt). An example my vet provided is that the level of sodium consumption needed by humans is way too high for dogs.
speff··on macOS 26 breaks custom DNS settings including .internal
Haaa. Confirmed. Went from 200-400ms (worse than I remembered) down to sub 30ms of jitter after putting on a stream. Thanks for the pointer
speff··on macOS 26 breaks custom DNS settings including .internal
Very interesting. I play RS3 and made a helper tool[0] for tracking ticks. I noticed increased jitter on my MBair (~50-150ms) compared to Windows, but I chalked it up to the air being on a wifi connection. I wonder if your explanation's the real reason.

[0]: https://files.catbox.moe/5n09lg.webm

speff··on Where I'm at with AI
This hasn't been the case in my experience, but I don't doubt it can happen.
speff··on Where I'm at with AI
Framed this way, it's useful for saving time creating or finding those snippets at least.
speff··on We X-Rayed a Suspicious FTDI USB Cable
I'd think the usual trusted sources for an authentic one - digikey, mouser, sparkfun.

Amazon, ebay, and similar others for the (cheaper) counterfeits.

speff··on U.S. Formally Withdraws from World Health Organization
Traditional Chinese Medicine and International Classification of Diseases - for people who didn't click the link
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