DabbyDabberson (u/DabbyDabberson)

DabbyDabberson commented on MLB says Yankees’ new “torpedo bats” are legal and likely coming thelibertyline.com/2025/0... · Posted by u/cf100clunk

scoofy · 9 months ago

I play golf. I write about golf. I genuinely love golf. Over the last 50 years, we have slowly broken the game of golf by allowing incremental technological advancements -- just like this -- that make it easier to do something that is hard, that is making it easier to hit the sweet spot.

I am sending a grave warning to baseball fans here from the future that you will arrive at by following this road.

Golf used to be a finesse game with moments of power. Now everyone is swinging out of their shoes on every shot, and the strategy of the game has reached Nash equilibrium where you basically want to hit the ball as hard as you can at every opportunity, despite any strategic element on the course.

Professional baseball is always what I point to when I talk about what we've lost. You don't need the most optimized equipment to enjoy the game, in fact, ultimately, you don't even want it. Just use simply, standardized equipment, accept the limitations of that equipment, and enjoy a simple game, where strategy can be used to overcome the limitations of equipment. The best thing that the MLB ever did was reject aluminum bats.

DabbyDabberson · 9 months ago

baseball is an arms race though. In golf the ball is on a tee. In baseball, the pitchers get better every year, and throw faster every year.

There's innovation happening on both ends.

DabbyDabberson commented on Ask HN: 2025 Resolutions? · Posted by u/Bluestein

Alex-Programs · a year ago

Not sure. I ought to go back to the gym. Once you're there, you're glad you're went, and in daily life it's also quite pleasant to be physically and mentally healthier.

I'm starting uni in September. I'd like to really get a lot done in the remaining portion of my gap year. Not just the hard stuff (my project[0], revising maths and physics after a long break, etc), but also literature and reading.

I'm worried about AI. Really quite worried, actually. I get the sense that this forum is almost engaged in a collective exercise of cognitive dissonance to avoid the implications of the rapid progress that we're all so aware of.

It's funny, I chose a physics degree in part because I felt it would provide some security from AI, but that seems to be disappearing before I've even started it.

Really, though, I have done what I can. What else is there to do but wait and see? A New Year's resolution won't do anything about it.

So perhaps, instead, I should merely resolve to sleep. It's 1AM here and I'm on Hacker News!

[0] https://nuenki.app . Couldn't resist :P

DabbyDabberson · a year ago

Those of us that have been around quite a while have seen consistent ‘rapid progress’ in technology and automation over the last 30+ years. This isn’t the first time there’s a new world changing technology.

DabbyDabberson commented on Using gRPC for (local) inter-process communication (2021) mpi-hd.mpg.de/personalhom... · Posted by u/zardinality

DashAnimal · a year ago

What I loved about Fuchsia was its IPC interface, using FIDL which is like a more optimized version of protobufs.

https://fuchsia.dev/fuchsia-src/get-started/learn/fidl/fidl

DabbyDabberson · a year ago

loved - in the past tense?

DabbyDabberson commented on Is Tor still safe to use? blog.torproject.org/tor-i... · Posted by u/Sami_Lehtinen

throwaway37821 · a year ago

75% [0] of all Tor nodes are hosted within 14 Eyes [1] countries, so it would actually be quite trivial for the NSA to de-anonymize a Tor user.

It baffles me that Tor Browser doesn't provide an easy way to blacklist relays in those countries.

[0] Here, you can do the math yourself: https://metrics.torproject.org/rs.html#aggregate/all

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Five_Eyes#Fourteen_Eyes

> Edit: For all the cynics and doomsayers here, consider this: Tor has been around for a long time, but there has never been an uptick in arrests that could be correlated to cracking the core anonymity service. If you look closely at the actual high profile cases where people got busted despite using tor, these people always made other mistakes that led authorities to them.

Maybe someone, somewhere, has decided that allowing petty criminals to get away with their crimes is worth maintaining the illusion that Tor is truly private.

It's also worth noting that it's significantly easier to find the mistakes someone has made that could lead to their identity if you already know their identity.

DabbyDabberson · a year ago

Its important to realize that TOR is primarily funded and controlled by the US Navy. The US benefits from the TOR being private.

It provides a channel for operatives to exfiltrate data out of non-NATO countries very easily.

DabbyDabberson commented on The Roman siege of Masada lasted just a few weeks, not several years phys.org/news/2024-09-rom... · Posted by u/wglb

Beefin · a year ago

i assume you've created a negative association with zionism (from the news?) but that is far from the case.

zionism is the belief that the jews have the right to live in their ancestral homeland (ancient judea), which is not at the expense of anyone else.

any jew that's gone on birthright visits Masada, it's a right of passage. the vast majority of jews around the world are zionist and believe israel is the original homeland of jews, which historically is true.

now if there's an argument to be made that there should be no religious centric nations, well then we should hold the christian and muslim majority states to the same standard, no?

DabbyDabberson · a year ago

To be fair, not all definitions of Zionism refer to colonizing the area around jerusalem. More generally, zionism is around creating a jewish state and controlling their own destiny.

DabbyDabberson commented on Synthetic diamonds are now purer, more beautiful, and cheaper than mined worksinprogress.co/issue/... · Posted by u/bswud

indoordin0saur · a year ago

I'm planning on buying an engagement ring very soon and my own plan (as someone who has never done this before!) is to get a good lab grown diamond but spend more money on the metal in the ring. You can make a gem stone in a lab but until we become a Kardashev II civilization we won't be making any sufficient quantity of gold in a lab. If I buy a good loose lab grown diamond will I be able to find someone who will fit it into a high quality gold ring?

DabbyDabberson · a year ago

most people taking this strategy that I know use platinum instead of gold. Most engagement rings only have ~~~$200 worth of gold on them.

DabbyDabberson commented on Princeton group open sources "SWE-agent", with 12% fix rate for GitHub issues github.com/princeton-nlp/... · Posted by u/asteroidz

noncoml · 2 years ago

If you are afraid that LLMs will replace you at your job, ask an LLM to write Rust code for reading a utf8 file character by character

Edit: Yes, it does write some code that is "close" enough, but in some cases it is wrong, in others it doesn't not do exactly what asked. I.e. needs supervision from someone who understands both the requirements, the code and the problems that may arise from the naive line that the LLM is taking. Mind you, the most popular the issue, the better the line LLM is taking. So in other words, IMHO is a glorified Stack Overflow. Just as there are engineers that copy-paste from SO without having any idea what the code does, there will be engineers that will just copy paste from LLM. Their work will be much better than if they used SO, but I think it's still nowhere to the mark of a Senior SWE and above.

DabbyDabberson · 2 years ago

The way I see it, its undetermined if Generative AI will be able to fully do a SWE job.

But, for most of the debates I've seen, I don't think it the answer matters all too much.

Once we have models that can act as full senior SWEs.. the models can engineer the models. And then we've hit the recursive case.

Once models can engineer models better and faster than humans, all bets are off. Its the foggy future. Its the singularity.

DabbyDabberson commented on Show HN: I made a cheap alternative to college-level math & physics tutoring · Posted by u/eltonlin

nonameiguess · 2 years ago

I didn't attend MIT, but the existence of OCW is exactly what made me wince a bit reading this. This guy really experienced professors refusing to record lectures to encourage attendance? That doesn't track with MIT being a pioneer among US universities in recording lectures and making them freely available, not just for their own students, but for anyone anywhere with an Internet connection. I used OCW extensively when going back to school for grad school, even though it was not at MIT. Those resources are terrific and invaluable.

DabbyDabberson · 2 years ago

('18 alum) Yeah I agree. We even had internal-only versions of OCW with more recent recordings and more material.

Although I agree that professors were not accessible, and TAs were often not that helpful. But, I never felt like I didn't have the resources I needed. I just lacked enough time.

I did feel like i would have been able to _learn_ better from a smaller school with fewer students, and teachers hired for teaching instead of research. But I still don't think that would have outweighed the benefit of the MIT community and resources.

DabbyDabberson commented on When Armor Met Lips crookedtimber.org/2024/03... · Posted by u/akkartik

ivanbakel · 2 years ago

Wikipedia says pinnipeds are monophyletic, so there's only a single evolutionary branch they originated from.

The travel question is much more interesting. Napkin math puts the distance between the polar circles at 12500 miles, the max swim speed of a seal at 25mph, giving a travel time of ~3 weeks of nonstop swimming as the crow flies. How does that happen? What would a pod of Arctic seals have eaten along the way, and what would have compelled them to make the trip out of familiar territory? How and why did they cross the temperate equatorial seas with a load of blubber?

DabbyDabberson · 2 years ago

Look up monkey raft theory. How did monkeys from Africa get to South America? Also roughly 30 MYA.

DabbyDabberson commented on Could a giant parasol in outer space help solve the climate crisis? nytimes.com/2024/02/02/cl... · Posted by u/gmays

DabbyDabberson · 2 years ago

the US has been investigating these ideas since early in the cold war. It started as a means of mass destruction (could we silently reduce solar radiation over russia and cause their crops to fail?), but really could be a means to cool down the ocean.

There are tons of other impacts of carbon, but we could reduce the solar energy hitting the ocean with currently technology if we needed to.