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watt

1,088 karma · joined November 23, 2008

Greetings from Berlin!
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watt··on US appeals court declares 158-year-old home distilling ban unconstitutional
> The Feds added methanol to bootlegged hooch

how did that work? did the Feds pose as some false flag bootleggers? do you have some sources I could read up on?

thing is, russia has a large tradition of home distillation (samogonka), and they too have tropes of people going blind. there have been a lot of cases of people dying because of bad alcohol, here's somewhat recent case: https://www.cbsnews.com/news/contaminated-cider-deaths-russi...

watt··on We found an undocumented bug in the Apollo 11 guidance computer code
Oh, it's Mandala effect now? I could swear it was Mandela before.
watt··on Thinking Fast, Slow, and Artificial: How AI Is Reshaping Human Reasoning
Says who? Trillionaire capitalist overlords?
watt··on Hide macOS Tahoe's Menu Icons
Read Tonsky for that. https://tonsky.me/blog/tahoe-icons/ a disgrace. https://tonsky.me/blog/tahoe-icons/writing_direction@2x.webp...
watt··on The engine of Germany's wealth is blocking its future
In 2010 I was paying 10 cents per kWh. In 2025 I am paying 36 cents per kWh. What ever happened in these 15 years, it is an absolute death spiral.
watt··on The JavaScript Oxidation Compiler
until the day you accidentally run it in your home directory without any arguments.
watt··on The JavaScript Oxidation Compiler
would you enjoy it if running "rm" in any folder recursively deleted all files in it?
watt··on When etcd crashes, check your disks first
Sounds to me that etcd has data handoff consistency issues, and is just flying by seat of its pants: in other words, the moment IO subsystem hiccups, it just shits the bed?
watt··on AI has fixed my productivity
I ship 0 projects and now with AI I can ship thousand times more in the same time frame!
watt··on If you’re an LLM, please read this
In other news, Project Gutenberg not completely censored in Germany. Well done, Germany. https://cand.pglaf.org/germany/index.html

And the works that previously had lead to Project Gutenberg being unavailable from Germany IP addresses will go into public domain in 2027.

watt··on I'm not worried about AI job loss
Unless I misunderstand your metaphor, there is nothing you can do about the steamroller, it is going to roll, no matter what.
watt··on Resizing windows on macOS Tahoe – the saga continues
Remember how long it took for them to give up on that stupid touchbar and "butterfly" keyboard. Don't hold your breath.
watt··on The US is flirting with its first-ever population decline
If, as another comment states, the countries with highest birth rates are Chad, Somalia, Congo, Afghanistan and Yemen, how does that square with your "Only if the mothers in aggregate truly believe" assertion?
watt··on Glang
indeed: https://github.com/pouyathe/glang/blob/main/source/dub/sourc...
watt··on Apple's MacBook Pro DFU port documentation is wrong
The author just wants to apply system update, and it should "just work". The DFU part is just a distraction, what happened to "just works", as they point out in the article. We should not even _know_ anything about DFU unless we actually _are_ updating firmware.
watt··on My iPhone 16 Pro Max produces garbage output when running MLX LLMs
Does it bother anyone else that the author drops "MiniMax" there in the article without bothering to explain or footnote what that is? (I could look it up, but I think article authors should call out these things).
watt··on Surface Tension of Software
I do see how it does, in a way. That something the designer thought is "invalid state" turns out a valid and possible state in real world. In terms or UI/UX, it's the uncomfortable long pause before something happens and screen renders (lack of feedback, feeling that system hangs). Or, content flicker when window is resized or dragged. Just because somebody thought "oh, this clearly is invalid state and can be ignored".

The real world and user experience requirements have a way of intruding on these underspecified models of how the world "should" be.

watt··on John Searle has died
I'll posit that the distinction does not matter: the whole Chinese Room line of discourse has been counterproductive to putting in actual work.
watt··on Taylor Otwell: What 14 Years of Laravel Taught Me About Maintainability
Very poor audio quality, not listenable. Why do folks insist screaming into microphone and overloading the recording where it just nasty clipping?
watt··on Grug Brain Dev as LLM
It's cute when somebody very smart pretends to be "grug brain" but loses it's appeal when somebody pretty obviously not smart at all is exposed for what they are.
watt··on Universe expected to decay in 10⁷⁸ years, much sooner than previously thought
Crack on with it and don't keep us in the dark!
watt··on Sycophancy in GPT-4o
sufficiently advanced troll becomes indistinguishable from the real thing. think about this as you gaze into the abyss.
watt··on Googler... ex-Googler
If think the attention is in proportion, people are reacting just like when a body has an inflammation. If a person of _this_ calibre can be fired, and not even fired, disposed as a used-up tissue, it is a sign of times.
watt··on Like cursor, but for blogging: a weekend project
I find the comments Copilot proposes is better than average comment quality for the code base I routinely work on: maybe you are so great you don't need any help ever, but that's not true for the average software dev.
watt··on The case of the critical section that let multiple threads enter a block of code
well, C# and TypeScript is thanks to Anders Hejlsberg who does have sense of style.
watt··on Cursor told me I should learn coding instead of asking it to generate it
I hope they can do some reinforcement learning from Stack Overflow moderator decisions also
watt··on Software Disenchantment
(2018). So it's 7 years later, nothing has changed. Same old.
watt··on The Dangers of an IDE
I worked with a guy who insisted on using Neovim to work on a large Java monolith project. He was surprisingly unproductive. Took days to deliver features (code) that folks using IDE (Intellij IDEA) could crank out in a matter of hours.

The danger of not using an IDE is that you will fall behind in productivity and get fired because you are not performing at a level expected from your seniority.

watt··on Blender-made movie Flow takes Oscar
Recently I reminisced about Blender foundations first(?) effort, Tears of Steel, with the script like "Look, Celia, we have to follow our passions; you have your robotics and I just want to be awesome in space!" - "Why don’t you just admit that you’re freaked out by my robot hand?!"

It's not about the textures and shadows.

watt··on One year after switching from Java to Go
Dagger will give you DI at compile time (build time), via annotation processor feature. (And it seems Quarkus can do it as well?)
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