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vonmoltke

10,286 karma · joined December 28, 2011

From my blog: http://wmkrug.com/?page_id=2

hnchat:Jpx4bUmdBFA0Wx1DtALs

Just moved to NYC (blog hasn't been updated yet). Always interested in getting to know people.

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vonmoltke··on Everyone Is Cheating Their Way Through College
The GGP said, "LLMs have ended the need for white collar junior work". That claim is that LLMs are a "1:1 replacement at an individual level", and this is what the GP was responding to.
vonmoltke··on Why can't Ivies cope with losing a few hundred million?
Sure, but that's margin trading. These bonds have nothing to do with the endowment.
vonmoltke··on Why can't Ivies cope with losing a few hundred million?
Those are standard, unsecured bonds. They're not loans against anything in the endowment.
vonmoltke··on You Can Be a Great Designer and Be Completely Unknown
> It doesn't look like the other Teslas, which all look really nice, but are more expensive.

No, they're not. The price of a Cybertruck is in line with the price for a Model S or Model X, and significantly higher than a Model 3.

vonmoltke··on US Government threatens Harvard with foreign student ban
> The US hasn't declared a war since WWII since executive privilege allows the President to pursue war without Congress declaring war.

That's not correct. Congress no longer passes declarations of war, it passes authorizations of the use of military force (AUMF). The change was made starting in Vietnam because a declaration of war can only target a recognized sovereign nation, while an AUMF can target any state or non-state actor. The President is still heavily restricted from employing the US military without an AUMF.

I think the confusion about this stems from Congress having passed several, a couple of which are pretty broad, and never repealing them. This has allowed various Presidents to use one of the active AUMFs to justify actions, but for those who don't know or pay attention to the details it seems like the President is going around Congress.

vonmoltke··on Whistleblower details how DOGE may have taken sensitive NLRB data
It, indirectly, was, because it was the reason the country initially relied on decentralized citizen militias for defense in the first place. Many of the founders were worried that a standing federal army would be a tool of oppression, and wanted to keep most of the firepower distributed amongst the populace.

The system more or less worked until the Spanish American War, when the government realized that the militias need some sort of standard in order to integrate properly with the regular army when called up. This led to the creation of the National Guard in 1903. It was tightly integrated into the Army structure in 1933.

What arguably made the Amendment obsolete was the advance of technology. By the early 20th century conventional warfighting took too much firepower, support, and coordination for a loose citizen militia to conduct. At best they could form the core of an insurgent force, but the goal is always to not get to that point.

In theory, that insurgent force could work against a tyrannical federal government. In practice, even if most of the people with the civilian firepower weren't supporting the tyranny I'm not sure it would work out. Conducting an insurgency against a foreign occupier is a lot different than conducting one against a domestic oppressor.

vonmoltke··on Hunt for Red October 1990 (2016)
> Adhesion and cohesion always fuck up scenes that combine scale models and water. Splashes always look very wrong

Like the terrible model work in In Harm's Way.

vonmoltke··on Busy Bar
I remember that on a Thinkgeek (RIP) t-shirt.
vonmoltke··on Dow plunges 2,200 points, Nasdaq enters bear market
Only within the table of 20 largest point drops. Neither even makes the table of 20 largest percentage drops (which is above).
vonmoltke··on US officials object to European push to buy weapons locally
> I have also noticed that e.g. Lockheed Martin (maker of the F35) is not doing very well on the stock market.

There's no "e.g." here. It's only Lockmart, and it's because they recently lost the Next Generation Air Defense contract to Boeing. The rest of the US defense sector is fine (for now).

These statements from the US are more about keeping Europe dependent on the US (and thus the US keeping some geopolitical leverage) than about bolstering the US defense sector.

vonmoltke··on US Marines to get high-speed, radar-evading electric seagliders for rescue ops
Yes, AWACS has limited moving target indicator (MTI) capability. A full-featured maritime MTI radar would easily pick this up, provided the signal processing algorithms don't reject the track for moving too fast.
vonmoltke··on US Marines to get high-speed, radar-evading electric seagliders for rescue ops
> but I'm less sure about the search part of SAR

The article never mentioned the search part of SAR, only the rescue part. The range is still something of an issue with that, though, as you'd need to be fairly close the people needing rescuing. So I still agree that contested rescue is likely a side mission for this.

vonmoltke··on US Marines to get high-speed, radar-evading electric seagliders for rescue ops
> Also I assume radar-proof is just because it's a ground effect vehicle that will never fly high enough to show up on radar it certainly doesn't look all angular like a stealth bomber. In which case my bicycle is also radar-proof?

From the way the article is worded, it does seem the author is only considering air search radar with this claim. Without low observability features, this will show up on surface search and surveillance radars. There might be an initial period where some radars fail to register it because they reject it as a possible target due to its kinematics. If craft like this become common, though, the signal processing algorithms will be updated to handle them. Most can already deal with very low-flying helicopters anyway.

That said, just because it isn't angular doesn't mean it doesn't have low observability features. Radar absorbing material would still make it harder to detect. So would more subtle elements of the physical design. I don't think "radar-proof" in that section header is justified, though.

vonmoltke··on MLB says Yankees' new "torpedo bats" are legal and likely coming
The defense in that game was pretty bad. Five of the nine Brewers runs scored due to errors, and it was five separate errors. The game yesterday went much better, defensively.
vonmoltke··on How a Connecticut DMV Employee Made Thousands by Selling Towed Cars
> What? They're giving away cars just to cut in line? That seems a pointlessly costly deal. Maybe I'm not understanding the scam correctly.

You're not. As the article notes

> Under state law, the profits from sales of towed cars are supposed to belong to the vehicle owners. Towing companies have to hold onto the proceeds for a year and turn over any remaining money, after subtracting their fees, to the state.

This means D&L doesn't give a shit how much they sell the cars for as long as they get more than the towing and storage fees for them. Depending on how many cars they deal with, it might actually be more profitable to turn them over quickly for pennies on the dollar than let them sit in the yard and rack up higher fees.

vonmoltke··on DOGE puts $1 spending limit on government employee credit cards
You're right, and there were definitely situations where we could have done things better, but didn't, because the impetus wasn't there. It was really frustrating, and I wish I'd been able to get out sooner.

> -2000 lines

Not sure what this is a reference to, but one of the fun things I tripped over while there was that code changes were valued on dollars per LOC. Changesets with net negative LOC were... problematic. I think I once had a change that was near -2000 LOC net.

vonmoltke··on DOGE puts $1 spending limit on government employee credit cards
So, this particular contractor was big into efficiency and cost savings, to the point that we were all required to do a project where we made something more efficient and documented how much money we saved in doing so. The whole thing was mostly bullshit, but one of the interesting things I learned by doing it was that saving engineering time was essentially $0, because from the company's perspective we were all salaried, and as long as the time we were saving was charged to the same contract we would be charging our other work to, it didn't matter.

From that perspective, which I do not agree with, the cost of coffee breaks was also $0, while the cost of providing it was not, so no coffee. On one program I was on we at least managed to get facilities to install a commercial Bunn machine for us, but we were still responsible for buying all the supplies.

vonmoltke··on DOGE puts $1 spending limit on government employee credit cards
I spent the first 9.5 years of my career at a large defense contractor. We never had free coffee.
vonmoltke··on 1% Equity for Founding Engineers Is BS
> Theres at least two sporting good store is employee run and for some reason my brain can't remember the name (it insists its DEI)

It's REI, and it's actually a consumer co-op owned by its members, not employee-owned.

vonmoltke··on Boom XB-1 First Supersonic Flight [video]
The product line was effectively cancelled by the oil crisis of 1973 and severe economic issues in the mid 70s. It had nothing to do with a crash (of an airplane; there was a market crash involved).
vonmoltke··on Google Maps in the US Will Change to Gulf of America and Mount McKinley
> Czech Republic is now Czechia

The Czech Republic is still the Czech Republic; it is also now known as Czechia. "Czech Republic" is the full official name of the country, like "United States of America". "Czechia" is the official short or informal name for the country, like "United States".

vonmoltke··on Undergraduates with family income below $200k will be tuition-free at MIT
> UPenn is a land-grant institution

The University of Pennsylvania is one of the nine colonial colleges founded before the United States existed. It predates land grant institutions by over a century. I think you are confusing it with Pennsylvania State University, which is a land grant institution.

vonmoltke··on Why is it so hard to find a job now? Enter Ghost Jobs
> Those companies are breaking the law.

If the position requires a security clearance, they are not breaking the law. Language like this is standard on defense contractor postings that require clearances (this from Lockeed):

> Security Clearance Statement: This position requires a government security clearance, you must be a US Citizen for consideration.

> SpaceX was prosecuted for doing that.

SpaceX was prosecuted for excluding refugees and asylees from export-controlled positions, not cleared positions.

vonmoltke··on Global EV Charging Points with Open Charge Map
Here in northern New Jersey there are many chargers that are inside municipal parking garages. Since you have to pay to enter (technically, to leave) you have to pay for parking time to use those chargers. That's obviously not an issue if you would be parking there anyway, but if you lived in the area and just wanted or needed to use the charger you'd have to pay an additional $1 - $2 per hour on top of the charges from the charger.

I'm not sure what the state of the chargers being installed at local businesses is. My local grocery store has four chargers now, but I don't recall seeing any signage about them being for customers only. They share the parking lot with the church across the street, though, so that may complicate things.

vonmoltke··on We built the city of Colombo in Cities:Skylines
> Not sure if it’s still there but on twitter they had a system where you’d have to click through before you’re allowed to submit a comment.

The system did not prevent you from replying, it just added a warning message and a little friction to doing so.

vonmoltke··on American Singapore(s): Competent city governance hiding in plain sight
The article's math is right. Yours is wrong. 100,000 * 140,000 is 14,000,000,000. 100,000 * 14,000 is 1,400,000,000.
vonmoltke··on Silicon Valley's best kept secret: Founder liquidity
Most (all?) public tech companies have policies that prohibit employees from trading the company's stock outside designated windows following a quarterly earnings release.
vonmoltke··on Silicon Valley's best kept secret: Founder liquidity
We couldn't at Twitter, which is the only company I've worked at that had a blanket trading blackout policy. The closest we could do was elect to sell all RSUs as soon as they vested (even if outside an open window).
vonmoltke··on AI in software engineering at Google: Progress and the path ahead
> These kinds of similies make less and less sense nowadays because we've got nvme storage nowadays, and that can be as fast as 7GByte/s. That's a lot faster then the RAM in most devices today. And with less latency too.

7 GB/s is the low end of the DDR3 performance range; DDR3 is 17 years old. Meanwhile, DDR5 performance ranges from about 33.5 GB/s to about 69 GB/s. RAM latency, even on DDR3, is measured in nanoseconds; NVMe latency is measured in microseconds, making it about three orders of magnitude higher.

vonmoltke··on Elon Musk sues Sam Altman, Greg Brockman, and OpenAI [pdf]
I know this is a joke (like the Jets), but the NFL was a 501(c)(6) organization. You can't deduct donations to those.
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