tlb

5 ms·

1.
by tlb 1mo ago
It's shocking that anyone can spoof the number of, say, my bank. At least large institutions should have authentication.
2.
by tlb 2mo ago
Please don't submit pages with multiple unrelated stories, as it's not suitable for discussion.
3.
by tlb 2mo ago
You can engage with an AI-written document! Simply paste the document into the AI (same or different as the AI that wrote it) and ask questions. You can get an answer in seconds compared to an hour (if it's a blog post by an HN reader)
4.
by tlb 2mo ago
Librarians have systems that can classify every published book. And scientific publishers can classify every paper. Those don't add up to a complete classification of all human knowledge, but it's a substantial fraction of it. If
5.
by tlb 3mo ago
Gmail is at least as large a target, and they don’t keep having breaches.
6.
by tlb 3mo ago
I just ask LLMs questions about things I'm curious about. I don't really want to follow someone else's predefined curriculum. A curriculum is necessary when the information has to be delivered in a lecture, but not in a 1-1 i
7.
by tlb 3mo ago
Some of mine do. They use WASM64 with threads to run robotics simulations.
8.
by tlb 3mo ago
This is out of date. There are now a number of fusion energy startups, including Helion which has raised $1B from investors, mostly Silicon Valley ones you've heard of. It's not yet proven that the tech will work, but it is proven
9.
by tlb 3mo ago
They do as soon as that company makes a profit, or anyone sells shares in that company.
10.
by tlb 3mo ago
Yes, if you run `git blame -C`.
11.
by tlb 3mo ago
15 years ago you could argue that venture capital wasn't funding enough advanced tech, so ideas were failing to cross the gap from pure research to commercial development. But lately there's capital available for quantum computers
12.
by tlb 3mo ago
git actually does this. `git diff --find-copies`
13.
by tlb 3mo ago
0 for 10 on some startups (large and small, YC and not) that came to mind. It's easy to scrape YC startups from https://www.ycombinator.com/companies . Scrape that and a dozen other investors' portfolio pages and y
14.
by tlb 3mo ago
In terms of political power, programmers are more like yeomen than peasants. Yeomen have power due to their essential skills because if a good fraction of them stopped working the system would collapse. (Whereas if peasants stop working, th
15.
by tlb 3mo ago
England also has a lot of disused airfields, often with huge hangers and stupendous concrete runways built during WWII. A few are open as museums. They can be worth a quick visit.
16.
by tlb 3mo ago
As a kid I found saltpeter at an old-fashioned pharmacy and made gunpowder, and it also barely fizzled. I think you have to grind the ingredients much finer than a kid has patience for.
17.
by tlb 3mo ago
Generator excitation is not the hard part of a black start. You have to run coal feeders, blowers, and water pumps for an hour before you can spin the generator. Then you get power instantly upon applying power to the field windings.
18.
by tlb 3mo ago
Yes, that is basically the plan. It's based on the belief that unfettered AI would let anyone be a supervillain and destroy the world. There are enough would-be supervillains out there, but they rarely get far because they can't g
19.
by tlb 3mo ago
It's ridiculous to consider MITM attacks out of scope for taking over your computer. Also, there are probably ways to exploit this without a true MITM like DNS cache poisoning. But it's best to just assume the whole internet is MI
20.
by tlb 3mo ago
They should compile it to WASM and host it.
21.
by tlb 4mo ago
Building a swap device at user level used to be one of those classic unsolvable problems, because what if your daemon needs to swap in a page in order to swap in a page? Or at least it was discussed at a reason why microkernels will never w
22.
by tlb 4mo ago
There's a package to do this in Julia: https://juliaarrays.github.io/StructArrays.jl/stable/
23.
by tlb 4mo ago
There are still things you can't do with an open-weight model without the training data, like modifying the architecture and training from scratch. That's different from true open-source code, where you can do anything the authors
24.
by tlb 4mo ago
Linux on Arm works great. I barely notice the difference except everything is a bit faster. Most SaaS companies can and should switch.
25.
by tlb 4mo ago
Yes, for example taking off or landing a rocket on the surface blasts particles of sand out sideways at 1000s of m/s. The particles can fly in the thin atmosphere for kilometers and sandblast everything. Our intuitions about how far an
26.
by tlb 4mo ago
But in fact no modern processor/OS executes this either. Pages are marked as executable or not, and static data is loaded as non-executable pages.
27.
by tlb 4mo ago
I like how the pictures got more and more sloporific through the essay. It doesn't mention an important group being harmed: the creators who make high-quality, sincere podcasts about knitting. Their genuine content gets buried under a
28.
by tlb 5mo ago
Yes, the entire field of software engineering ran aground on not being able to test how well people can write software. But I'm more optimistic about testing programming models. You can run repeated tests, and compare median performanc
29.
by tlb 5mo ago
Field termination is necessary when the connectors are too large to pull through a conduit. But if they were USB-C sized, you could just pull fully assembled cables.
30.
by tlb 5mo ago
You can rotate your voice with substantial effort. Just speak differently: higher or lower pitch, a different accent. Your friends may look at you funny for the first few years.

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