Arch-TK (u/Arch-TK) - Readit News

Arch-TK commented on Nokia N900 Necromancy yaky.dev/2025-12-11-nokia... · Posted by u/yaky

pessimizer · 2 days ago

This seems like weird revisionist history or I missed something. I never got a dime back that I spent on the Neo900, which I assumed they spent on their personal lifestyles and travel while trying and failing to design and manufacture a board.

If there was actually a holdup of funds that killed the project, and eventually the funds were released, that's an even worse story. I didn't think there could be a worse story. It would mean that the project fell apart while they were waiting on cash, then when they got it they just treated it like a personal windfall. IIRC I ended up out $1.5K on the thing.

Arch-TK · a day ago

Paypal released the funds to the project, not to the people making the downpayments. Paypal never returns money immediately to anyone, they sit on it for months while they "investigate".

I don't know who you are or where you were but the paypal problems were pretty well announced and _I_ was there. The project was already facing delays because a key person who was needed to make the board layouts was held up with the also now dead DragonBox Pyra handheld.

I have no idea where you think the money went, how much you think there was, but it was a constant game of trying to drum up enough activity to gain attention of potential customers to bring in enough down-payments to pay the salaries of the small number of people working on the project while having enough money to buy parts. The money went into salaries, parts, nobody bought hookers or blow with it, and certainly nobody got anything but stress out of that project in the end. I believe Joerg Reisenweber paid a lawyer out of pocket to try to get PayPal to release the funds.

Arch-TK commented on Nokia N900 Necromancy yaky.dev/2025-12-11-nokia... · Posted by u/yaky

yaky · 2 days ago

There was Neo900, abandoned in 2018. The site is still up though: https://neo900.org/#main

Arch-TK · 2 days ago

It wasn't really abandoned so much as killed by PayPal.

The project used PayPal to gather downpayments, PayPal decided to lock the funds for months (almost a year or maybe longer IIRC) because they saw money coming in but no confirmation of goods coming out. And, you know, when it comes to big companies, no explanation is sufficient, you are guilty of something because some heuristic said so, so the funds were locked, legal threats didn't work (try threatening a company with the power of a small/medium country), and by the time they got their money back, key people who were going to work at a discount to cover key milestones had moved on.

Arch-TK commented on Checked-size array parameters in C lwn.net/SubscriberLink/10... · Posted by u/chmaynard

loeg · 9 days ago

People still routinely want to incorporate C libraries in C++ code, using C headers. It mostly works.

Arch-TK · 9 days ago

Sure, but it works mostly by intentional hobbling of headers. Meanwhile in other languages you just write/generate bindings and they survive it.

Arch-TK commented on Checked-size array parameters in C lwn.net/SubscriberLink/10... · Posted by u/chmaynard

Arch-TK · 10 days ago

That weird feeling when you realise that the people you hang out with form such a weird niche that something considered common knowledge among you is being described as "buried deep within the C standard".

What's noteworthy is that the compiler isn't required to generate a warning if the array is too small. That's just GCC being generous with its help. The official stance is that it's simply undefined behaviour to pass a pointer to an object which is too small (yes, only to pass, even if you don't access it).

Arch-TK commented on Self-hosting a NAT Gateway awsistoohard.com/blog/sel... · Posted by u/veryrealsid

Arch-TK · 22 days ago

The article seems to perpetuate one of those age old myths that NAT has something to do with protection.

Yes, in a very superficial sense, you can't literally route a packet over the internet backwards to a host behind NAT without matching a state entry or explicit port forwarding. But implementing NAT on it's own says nothing about the behavior of your router firewall with regards to receiving Martians, or with regards to whether the router firewall itself accepts connections and if the router firewall itself isn't running some service which causes exposure.

To actually protect things behind NAT you still need firewall rules and you can keep those rules even when you are not using NAT. Thus those rules, and by extension the protection, are separable from the concept of NAT.

This is the kind of weird argument that has caused a lot of people who hadn't ever used IPv6 to avoid trying it.

Arch-TK commented on 210 IQ Is Not Enough taylor.town/iq-not-enough... · Posted by u/surprisetalk

827a · 23 days ago

My point is to state that one of two things must be true: Either IQ does not really measure Intelligence, or Intelligence (being the thing IQ measures or correlates to) isn't much of a desirable quality for agentic systems to have. I suspect its a mix. The people on the upper end of the IQ spectrum tend to lead wholly uninspiring lives; the 276 guy isn't the only example, fraud or not, there's a couple university professors with relatively average publishing history, a couple suicides, a couple wacko cult leaders, a couple self-help gurus... and the goat, Terrance Tao, he's up there, but its interesting how poorly the measure correlates with anything we'd describe as "success".

The apologists enter the chat and state "well, its because they're frauds or they're gaming the system" without an ounce of recognition that this is exactly what we're designing AI systems to do: Cheat the test. If you expect being able to pass intelligence evals as being a way to grow intelligence, well, I suspect that will work out just about as well as IQ tests do for identifying individuals capable of things like highly creative invention.

Arch-TK · 23 days ago

You are throwing around anecdotes. They're not that helpful.

It's worth noting that success in life (for whatever that is defined as) is not the same thing as intelligence. And being intelligent isn't even enough for you to be successful in intellectual pursuits either.

You can be highly intelligent and receive no education, have no access to books (or be unable to read) and then you might be able to intelligently solve the problem of eating a sandwich but that wont get you anywhere.

Likewise, you can be intelligent and have access to the right tools but you might be too anxious to try to excell. Maybe you're intelligent and have unmedicated ADHD causing you to constantly fail to actually get anything completes in a timely manner.

There are a lot of things between IQ and success in life. But we do know for a fact that when controlling for other factors, we see positive trends between IQ and life success. That doesn't mean that IQ is the only factor.

Certainly the fact you can pull out a handful of anecdotes about high IQ individuals and talk about how uninspiring their lives are doesn't mean that all high IQ people are living uninspiring lives, or that living an inspiring life is uncorrelated with IQ, or that there is even a meaningful definition of an inspiring life.

Lastly, please note that there are lots of successful people who had an IQ test where they scored really low, and lots of unsuccessful people who had an IQ test where they scored high. This will in part be due to the fact that IQ doesn't corelate at 100% with anything, but also due to the fact that IQ doesn't correlate with itself over time at 100%. You can do an IQ test on an exceptionally bad day, or an exceptionally good day, you might get an IQ test which is not good at measuring you in particular. That's why when we do research on this topic we apply multiple different tests, we control for variables, and we run these on large groups of people.

Whether intelligence is useful for a model or not, who knows. All I can tell you with relative confidence is that IQ tests are designed with humans in mind, and when you apply them to models, it is no longer clear what they measure.

One thing models don't have (yet) is lives which they can live and which we can study.

Arch-TK commented on A surprise with how '#!' handles its program argument in practice utcc.utoronto.ca/~cks/spa... · Posted by u/SeenNotHeard

jolmg · 24 days ago

Sorry, I should probably think more widely, but I was just considering Linux distros.

> /bin is the "standard" location for bash on a subset of Linux distributions

Considering "location" such that it includes /bin symlinks, that would be nearly all distros, I would think...

> What's more, bash isn't a standard shell.

De facto and specifically among Linux distros, it is. It's probably an underestimate that 95% of all Linux distro installations have it preinstalled.

Arch-TK · 23 days ago

It's only really NixOS as far as I know that doesn't ever put bash in /bin/bash (as far as Linux distributions go). But, on the other hand, there are quite a few distros (or at least flavours of distros) which don't ship bash by default (alpine, minimal versions of most distros, and embedded-Linux focused stuff if you count it). I imagine the most common "installation" of Linux is userspace in a container (yeah I know there's no kernel there, but nobody who talks about "Linux" broadly speaking specifically cares about the kernel) and a good chunk of those will be minimal with no bash.

Bash has to be explicitly installed on OpenBSD, FreeBSD, NetBSD (I think, haven't used it in a while) and probably a bunch of others. And in all of those cases (that I know of) it doesn't end up in /bin/bash once installed.

The default bash shipped on macs is so abhorrently ancient that it would be strictly better if it didn't exist because it would reduce the number of people who think bash scripts I write are broken (they're not broken, they just inevitably depend on some bash 4+ feature). Moreover, hardcoding /bin/bash as your shebang in this case will prevent anyone from remediating this problem by installing a non-ancient bash because the old one in /bin/bash will still get used.

Arch-TK commented on 210 IQ Is Not Enough taylor.town/iq-not-enough... · Posted by u/surprisetalk

827a · 24 days ago

The "world's smartest man" very recently predicted on X that Bitcoin would hit $220k by the end of the year. [1]

Here's the thing: IQ probably doesn't mean much of anything. But it is one of only a handful of ways we have to benchmark intelligence. The training of AI systems critically requires benchmarks to understand gain/loss in training and determine if minute changes in the system is actually winging more intelligence out of that giant matrix of numbers.

What I deeply believe is: We're never going to invent superintelligence, not because its impossible for computers to achieve, but because we don't even know what intelligence is.

[1] https://finance.yahoo.com/news/world-smartest-man-predicts-b...

Arch-TK · 24 days ago

This is a weird argument.

First off, we don't have a good way to actually measure an individual's intelligence. IQ is actually meant to correlate with g which is a hidden factor we're trying to measure. IQ tests are good insofar as you look at the results of them from the perspective of a population. In these cases individual variation in how well it correlates smooths out. We design IQ tests and normalise IQ scores such that across time and over the course of many studies these tests appear to correlate with this hidden g factor. Moreover, anything below 70 and above 130 is difficult to measure accurately, IQ is benchmarked such that it has a mean of 100 and a standard deviation of 15. Below 70 and above 130 is outside of two standard deviations.

So, in summary, IQ is not a direct measure of intelligence. What you're doing here is pointing at some random guy who allegedly scored high on an IQ test and saying: "Look at how dumb that guy is. We must be really bad at testing."

But to say we don't know what intelligence is, is silly, since we are the ones defining that word. At least in this sense. And the definition we have come up with is grounded in pragmatism. The point of the whole field of research is to come up with and keep clarifying a useful definition.

Worth also noting that you can study for an IQ test which will produce an even less correlated score. The whole design and point of IQ tests is done with the idea of testing your ability to come up with solutions to puzzles on the spot.

Arch-TK commented on A surprise with how '#!' handles its program argument in practice utcc.utoronto.ca/~cks/spa... · Posted by u/SeenNotHeard

jolmg · 24 days ago

Because /bin is the standard location for bash. The only one that breaks that expectation is NixOS (and maybe GuixSD?), apparently. I'm surprised they didn't symlink /bin or put a stub. Last time I tried NixOS was like 10 years ago. I thought there was a /bin/bash, but maybe it was just a /bin/sh?

Other interpreters like python, ruby, etc. have more likelyhood of being used with "virtual environments", so it's more common to use /usr/bin/env with them.

Arch-TK · 24 days ago

/bin is the "standard" location for bash on a subset of Linux distributions and basically no other Unix...

So it's not really a standard.

/bin/sh is a much more common convention but once again, not a standard.

There really isn't a truly portable shebang, but the same can be said about executables themselves. As part of the build or install step of whatever thing you're making, you should really be looking these up and changing them.

What's more, bash isn't a standard shell.

Arch-TK commented on Aldous Huxley predicts Adderall and champions alternative therapies angadh.com/inkhaven-7... · Posted by u/surprisetalk

alterom · a month ago

This article (and the title alone) is harmful. Adderall is not about increasing mental efficiency.

What Adderall is about is:

- helping with executive dysfunction for people who suffer from it.

- allowing people with ADHD like me to function. To do the things that everyone else does, things that we want to do and need to do, but can't do because of the way our brains are wired.

- increasing the lifespan of ADHD people who don't get help. Women with ADHD die about 9 years younger than those without ADHD [1].

- making our lives less painful, since every small task incurs pain, resulting in 3x depression rates [2] and alarmingly high suicidal ideation rates (50% of ADHD adults [3]).

Please, please, educate yourself about ADHD and medication for it before writing something like this title.

No, Aldous Huxley didn't. "predict" Adderall.

To understand more, I've put together a resource which, I hope, will be easy enough to digest. Here's my experience of getting prescribed Adderall for my ADHD:

https://romankogan.net/adhd/#Medication

If I have attention deficit and I could write it, I hope you (and the author of the text we're discussing) could spare some attention to it before talking about Adderall, amphetamines, and other stimulants prescribed for ADHD.

Thank you in advance.

[1] https://www.npr.org/sections/shots-health-news/2025/01/23/nx...

[2] https://add.org/adhd-and-depression/

[3] https://crownviewpsych.com/blog/adhd-increased-risk-suicide-...

Arch-TK · a month ago

Amazing website.

One thing I noticed is that while I hate being told what to do, and my partner hates being told what to do, and we understand deeply how we feel when someone tells us what to do, we still tell each other what to do (which goes especially badly after a long day).

Edit: I am glad you wrote this, so I didn't have to. It feels like reading my own autobiography. But the problem with reading about this stuff is that, if you forget for a minute that it's literally just how life is for you, it reads like some fantastical fiction comedy. I avoid telling anyone I deal with that I have ADHD because I feel like if I tell them they'll lump me in with some crappy mental model, and I avoid telling anyone I deal with about these problems because they sound completely absurd.