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wmwragg

495 karma · joined October 6, 2013

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wmwragg··on Burning Man death rates – A short lesson in statistics
Yeah that would be a really interesting read, either as an article or full length book
wmwragg··on Fine, I'll build my own text editor
For the very basic of basic browser based text editors just use this as the URL:

  data:text/html, <html contenteditable>
wmwragg··on AI Built a Nuke and Still Lost
This and the fact that you often read a sentence, paragraph or the whole article, and think this said absolutely nothing in lots of words.
wmwragg··on Wages in America Are Too Low for the 30% Rule to Work for Renters Anymore
I think there is another element, private equity (PE) has got involved in the housing market, and like anything that PE gets involved with it burns it to the ground and then exits with it's profit leaving behind a wasteland. PE equity will do anything to get their profit no matter who it hurts
wmwragg··on The Pentagon is running an AI propaganda mill targeting Latin America
There is a significant difference between socialism and communism, Americans seem to purposely conflate the two, they are not the same.
wmwragg··on wolfSSL releases a new product; wolfCOSE a zero alloc C embbedded COSE stack
My understanding of zero alloc is that there are no heap allocations i.e. use of a form of malloc. At least that has always been my experience, use of the stack is perfectly fine
wmwragg··on The economics of software teams: Why most engineering orgs are flying blind
Yep, I think people who repeat this aphorism essentially equate programming with typing, or as you say just connecting existing bits together. Programming is the working out how to get a computer to perform some task, not just the typing, it's the algorithms, the performance balancing, the structuring, the integration etc.
wmwragg··on Show HN: Brutalist Concrete Laptop Stand (2024)
I believe it's this keyboard[1] from Posturite, but doing a web search for "Left-Side Numpad" of "Left handed keyboard" should show a few options.

[1] https://www.posturite.co.uk/left-handed-mechanical-keyboard

wmwragg··on The MacBook Neo
Cheers, opening System Settings and then Option clicking Displays, did the trick and showed the rotation option for the built in display. It's mostly PDFs I'd be reading so might try the PDF reader option, as yeah, navigation using the trackpad after the screen rotates is challenging.

Edit: Just tried rotation in the built in MacOS Preview app, (Command+R or Command+L) and works really well. You do have to set the View to Single Page, and rotate each page separately (it does remember which pages were rotated), but other than that it's great.

wmwragg··on The MacBook Neo
I believe that is only applicable for external displays, and I don't see the rotation option on my M1 MacBook Air, even if I Ctrl+Command click
wmwragg··on The MacBook Neo
That sounds interesting, I might give it a go, but how do you rotate the screen, I can't see an option for it for the built in MacBook screen?
wmwragg··on Traffic to top tech publications has plummeted since 2024, new analysis shows
Yep same. The reason I don't visit most of them anymore has nothing to do with AI and everything to do with ads and quality of content (which I suppose may have to do with AI) i.e. enshitification
wmwragg··on Six Math Essentials
The Pelican UK version[1] looks a lot nicer

[1] https://www.penguin.co.uk/books/482167/six-maths-essentials-...

wmwragg··on Make.ts
I generally use AWK as my scripting language, or often just write the whole thing directly in AWK. It doesn't change, is always installed on all POSIX platforms, easily interfaces with the command line, and is an easy to learn small language.
wmwragg··on JPEG XL Test Page
You probably want the JPEG XL Info[1] site then. A nice site outlining what JPEG XL actually is.

[1] https://jpegxl.info/

wmwragg··on Don't fall into the anti-AI hype
Yep, good point. If they don't make the hardware available for personal use, then we wouldn't be able to buy it even it could be used in a personal system.
wmwragg··on Don't fall into the anti-AI hype
There is that, but the way this usually works is that there is always a better closed service you have to pay for, and we see that with LLMs as well. Plus there is the fact that you currently need a very powerful machine to run these models at anywhere near the speed of the PaaS systems, and I'm not convinced we'll be able to do the Moore's law style jumps required to get that level of performance locally, not to mention the massive energy requirements, you can only go so small, and we are getting pretty close to the limit. Perhaps I'm wrong, but we don't see the jumps in processing power we used to see in the 80s and 90s, due to clock speed jumps, the clock speed of most CPUs has stayed pretty much the same for a long time. As LLMs are essentially probabilistic in nature, this does open up options not available to current deterministic CPU designs, so that might be an avenue which gets exploited to bring this to local development.
wmwragg··on Don't fall into the anti-AI hype
This is something I think a lot of people don't seem to notice, or worry about, the moving of programming as a local task, to one that is controlled by big corporations, essentially turning programming into a subscription model, just like everything else, if you don't pay the subscription you will no longer be able to code i.e. PaaS (Programming as a Service). Obviously at the moment most programmers can still code without LLMs, but when autocomplete IDEs became main stream, it didn't take long before a large proportion of programmers couldn't program without an autocomplete IDE, I expect most new programmers coming in won't be able to "program" without a remote LLM.
wmwragg··on Don't fall into the anti-AI hype
Yep, this is my take as well. It's not that open source is being stolen as such, as if you abide by an open source license you aren't stealing anything, it's that the licenses are being completely ignored for the profit of a few massive corporations.
wmwragg··on Apple will phase out Rosetta 2 in macOS 28
Yep, this is another reason I've needed the use of x86-64 images, as although they should be technically the same when rebuilt for ARM, they aren't always, so using the same architecture image which is run in production, will sometimes catch edge case bugs the ARM version doesn't. Admittedly it's not common, but I have had it happen. Obviously there is also the argument that the x86-64 image is being translated, so isn't the same as production anyway, but I've found that to have far less bugs than the different architecture
wmwragg··on Apple will phase out Rosetta 2 in macOS 28
I'm aware, I use ARM images all the time, I was trying to indicate that the usual refrain that the developers have had years to migrate their software to apple silicon, doesn't really apply to docker images. It's only the increase in use of ARM elsewhere (possibly driven by the great performance of macs running apple silicon) which has driven any migration of docker images to have ARM versions
wmwragg··on Apple will phase out Rosetta 2 in macOS 28
Yes that was my first thought as well, and as the images aren't designed to be run on a mac specifically, like a native app might be, there is no expectation for the developers to create a native apple silicon version. This is going to be a pretty major issue for a lot of developers
wmwragg··on This World of Ours (2014) [pdf]
Yeah, Science shouldn't be concerned with usefulness, just like Art. It's the application of those fields which should concern itself with usefulness i.e. applied science, engineering, design etc. I'm not saying that scientific research shouldn't be carried out by companies with specific goals in mind, just that it shouldn't be the expected default.
wmwragg··on Computers Have Killed Chess
I created a smaller version of chess called Mischia[1], mainly for casual games, but except for the opening phase it tries to play like normal chess. Games usually last 15 to 20 minutes.

[1] https://www.chessvariants.com/rules/mischia

wmwragg··on The Great SaaS Gaslight
My issue isn't specifically the subscription model, though it gets annoying and I prefer a one time fee, or the cost, I'm happy to pay, my issue is the lock-in accompanied with the SaaS subscription model. You stop paying you loose access to your work, esp. as most SaaS models aim for proprietary data formats and no, or deliberately really annoying and cumbersome, export abilities often only allowing exporting in their own proprietary formats "for backup", which are useless once you stop paying
wmwragg··on Show HN: I built a web framework in C
The book "Understanding and Using C Pointers: Core Techniques for Memory Management" by Richard M Reese, is a great way to learn pointers
wmwragg··on Java 25 officially released
Note that the previous Java LTS release license reverts to the OTN license one year after the new Java LTS version is published, making it no longer free, assuming you keep up with the security updates. See the license note on the Java 21 LTS version[1].

[1] https://www.oracle.com/uk/java/technologies/downloads/#java2...

wmwragg··on Gemini (2023)
Gemini has images, just by default the gemini protocol is designed to not download and inline them, though many gemini browsers allow auto inlining of images. There is no specific line format for them, they are just another link line pointing to an image.
wmwragg··on Old Timey Code and Old Timey Mono Fonts
Looking at the examples, they look good, though one thing stands out, the "w" seems to be bolder than the other letters. The "m" seems fine, as do the other letters and symbols, just the "w".
wmwragg··on Isolating complexity is the essence of successful abstractions
I've often thought this. It feels like there should be two languages, one for the implementation of the parts, and another to design/architect the software using the parts, allowing the design/architect language to focus on the high level architecture of the software and the implementation language to focus on the parts. We currently use the same language for both, and mix the two areas as we program
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