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thaeli

980 karma · joined November 1, 2015

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thaeli··on We’re forgetting what darkness feels like
For most of my life, I never quite “got it” about the night sky. It was pretty, but not THAT different away from cities.

I only recently learned that visual snow syndrome is a thing, and that most people don’t have it. For me, there is a faint background of multicolor static (analog TV on a dead channel, for those who remember that) on everything, all the time. Light washes it out, so it’s only in the deep dark that I’m absolutely surrounded by it. (It’s basically visual tinnitus, which in turn lead me to discover that I’ve also had auditory tinnitus my whole life, it’s just a soft static not a “ringing” so I never realized it was the same phenomenon.)

thaeli··on Plan mode is dead
It’s bizarre to me that Claude Code doesn’t have more guardrails on plan mode. I mostly use Copilot and the plan mode there has teeth. In plan the agent does not have permission to write to the filesystem outside of a temp directory and the plan document itself, and tool calling is heavily restricted.

There’s also a “ask” mode which is read only. Both are enforced by the permissions model, not just a system prompt instruction. I’ve seen the model “forget” and try to start coding - it bounces off a hard permissions failure and that “reminds” it that it’s in plan mode.

thaeli··on Keys Not Included: recovering the signing keys for US driver's license barcodes
How it works in my state: For in person renewals/changes, they punch VOID into your old license, give it back to you, and give you a temporary license printout. Then your new license is mailed a couple weeks later.

For remote renewals/replacements, they just give you a temporary license to print out and then mail you a new one. The old license never gets physically cancelled.

thaeli··on Ask HN: Would a startup for young creatives who reject AI be feasible?
There absolutely is a market - anti-AI sentiment among creatives isn't going away. Like any other "purity" branding, it's a real commitment and severely limits your future ability to pivot.

I don't know of anyone in the VC or traditional incubator communities who has an appetite for this. And the groups who are an ideological fit don't have the funds to be worth pursuing.

It's a niche. Like most niches, there's the opportunity to prosper, but yeah - bootstrapping (or angel-bootstrapping if you're lucky and have a personal connection) is pretty much the only way to go here.

thaeli··on David Sacks: OpenAI and Anthropic Don't Need Regulations to Pace Frontier Models
I will take those concerns more seriously when we start hearing similar consensus from the Chinese side.
thaeli··on A Mysterious Kidney Disease Has Arrived in Texas
A routine urinalysis has always been part of my normal annual physicals.
thaeli··on Publishing Schematics Before “Open Source” Was a Word
It’s still the standard for “white goods” (larger home appliances) in general.
thaeli··on Who's afraid of Chinese models?
Same here, except we just defaulted everyone to Auto and expect the percentage of tokens spent via the auto router to be high.
thaeli··on Leaking YouTube creators' private videos
At an operational level for the railroads, we have PSR, which is even worse.
thaeli··on Can I disable all data collection from my vehicle?
Also, my phone follows me between vehicles and provides the exact same interface in all of them. Heck, I can switch vehicles and my podcast or music starts back up right where I left it. That alone is a major win for the phone-based approach - if I drive my spouse's vehicle for instance, or my old truck because I need to haul something, doesn't matter, they all have the same navigation and audio.
thaeli··on People Who Hunt Down Old TVs
I'm the same way. The scanlined, subpixeled versions just look terrible to me.
thaeli··on People Who Hunt Down Old TVs
FPGA based devices that can do this, and quite well, do exist, they're just expensive. The RetroTINK-4k Pro is the top of the line as of this writing but it's a $750 converter.
thaeli··on Ask HN: Do custom ROMs exist for electric cars, for example Teslas?
Emissions related components work very similarly, replace the software and it’s presumed to be a defeat device unless proved otherwise.
thaeli··on Ask HN: Do custom ROMs exist for electric cars, for example Teslas?
For emissions related components, EPA rules do kick in though. While the current administration appears to have paused enforcement, their position for many years has been that running anything except factory approved firmware on an ECU or other emissions related computer constitutes a “defeat device” and is illegal for an on road vehicle subject to emissions controls. (Granted, in practice 99% of the reason anyone installs new firmware on their ECU, or switches to an aftermarket ECU, is for a “tune” that does affect emissions. I’m sure there is some edge case exception, but it’s very rare in on road engines.)

The alternative, and there are a very few tunes that have done this, is to prove to regulators that the tune does not negatively affect emissions in any way. In practice this is done by getting a CARB exception since they’re the ones actually checking for tunes.

thaeli··on We should have the ability to run any code we want on hardware we own
Well, many areas have banned app-only payment requirements (along with card-only) so it’s possible we’ll get some mandated alternatives.
thaeli··on LLMs solving problems OCR+NLP couldn't
Ironically, this check would be a pretty good use for a LLM.
thaeli··on Ghrc.io appears to be malicious
Are there any additional mitigations folks are using for this? This issue is the only reason we can’t turn classic PATs off entirely.

Short lifetime mandatory reauth to enterprise SSO seems to be the best available, but it’s inconvenient for the single Classic PAT we actually need.

thaeli··on Show HN: WarpBuild – x86-64 and arm GitHub Action runners for 30% faster builds
Yeah, interested to compare this with optimized and properly cached GitHub Hosted Runner builds.
thaeli··on Inside The Decline of Stack Exchange
The biggest problem with SE for me, and this is related to the culture issues you're talking about, is that the site has no good way of deprecating "formerly correct" answers. Even if a better, more correct answer is posted later, the reputation system has a huge incumbency bias in favor of older answers that have accumulated upvotes by being the best available answer at the time.

Their knowledge repository is slowly rotting under the weight of having to ask every time "okay, is this correct-sounding, highly upvoted answer actually (still) correct, or is it 10 years out of date?"

thaeli··on B.C. woman buried in Amazon packages she did not ask for and does not want
There was a common scam back then of sending cheap goods to someone, then billing them a high price, when they didn't order anything to begin with.
thaeli··on American hard hat jobs have the highest level of open positions ever recorded
Compare this to EMS, where unless you're lucky enough to be fire or hospital based, worker protections are almost nonexistent.
thaeli··on S.F. says incidents by Cruise, Waymo driverless taxis are ‘skyrocketing.’
Unless we're ever ready to start treating bike thieves like horse thieves, that's unlikely to ever change. And I doubt we'll ever have the political will to do that, or even a kinder gentler version of it.
thaeli··on Ask HN: Glassdoor is unbelievably bad, why no one disrupting it?
The concentrated force for candidates to counteract this would be an industy-wide union. Which isn't happening.. but if you look at unionized industries this is one of the major benefits for candidates, or at least for candidates who make it into the union..
thaeli··on When an app asks for permissions, it should have a “feed fake data” option
It's not ideal, per app would be preferable, but at least global can be a toggle in the global quick settings UI.
thaeli··on When an app asks for permissions, it should have a “feed fake data” option
As a user, I don't care about your ML model. I care about not sending you personal info. Coarser info isn't good enough - you can convince me you actually deserve my real info, or you can get no info (preferable), or you can get fake info (alternative if you degrade or break my user experience because I wouldn't give you that info).

I understand there are some legit use cases for validated info. Unfortunately, targeted advertising and other types of profiling are also common use cases for the same info. It's a lot like MAC randomization on public wifi - it sucks, it breaks legit use cases, but it was needed because too many companies were using it to track people.

thaeli··on Cities turn to ‘extreme’ water recycling
We do that, but we're joking.
thaeli··on NHTSA tells automakers not to comply with Massachusetts right-to-repair law
Isn't that pretty much what immobilizer bypass modules have done for years?
thaeli··on 1970s campus librarians foresaw our world of distributed knowledge and research
It was correct when the book was written, but isn't anymore.
thaeli··on Jaron Lanier on the danger of AI
If you read Brave New World and think of the lower "classes" as instead being automation and AI (really, most of the jobs done by Epsilons and Deltas in the book were automated decades ago, and the Gamma / Beta jobs are rapidly moving towards AI replacement as well) it's not a bad system, nor is it a dystopia.
thaeli··on Why construction projects always go over budget
The local maximum of "fix it but don't improve it" is a problem, and the requirement for major reconstruction to be done to current codes is foundational to almost all building codes. Note that small repairs and routine maintenance don't activate this requirement - it's activated when major work is being done, and there is a percentage of total project cost cap to the requirements.

If the new local maximum is "well, we won't fix it at all then" - the usual building code solution is property maintenance codes that mandate repairs.

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