cameronh90 (u/cameronh90)

cameronh90 commented on Why was Apache Kafka created? bigdata.2minutestreaming.... · Posted by u/enether

njitbew · 11 hours ago

> and it feels bloated (Java!)

I'm curious, what exactly feels bloated about Java? I don't feel like the Java language or runtime are particularly bloated, so I'm guessing you're referring to some practices/principles that you often see around Java software?

cameronh90 · 10 hours ago

> what exactly feels bloated about Java?

https://docs.spring.io/spring-framework/docs/2.5.x/javadoc-a...

cameronh90 commented on Pixel 10 Phones blog.google/products/pixe... · Posted by u/gotmedium

ge96 · 3 days ago

That fake zoom with AI is gross ugh

If I'm taking a picture of something I want it to be real light-to-pixel action not some made up wambo-jambo

cameronh90 · 3 days ago

Digital has never been light-to-pixel.

At a minimum, you have demosaicing, dark frame subtraction, and some form of tone mapping just to produce anything you'd recognise as an photo. Then to produce a half-way acceptable image will involve denoising, sharpening, dewarping, chromatic aberration correction - and that just gets us up to what was normal at the turn of the millennium. Nowadays without automatic bracketing and stacking, digital image stabilisation, rolling shutter reduction, and much more, you're going to have pretty disappointing phone pics.

I suspect you're trying to draw a distinction with the older predictable techniques of turning sensor data into an image when compared to the modern impenetrable ones that can hallucinate. I know what you're getting at, but there's not really a clear point where one becomes the other. You can consider demosaicing and "super-res zoom" as both types of super-resolution technique intended to convert large amounts of raw sensor data into image that's closer to the ground truth. I've even seen some pretty crazy stuff introduced by an old fashioned Lanczos-resampling based demosaicing filter. Albeit, not Ryan Gosling[0].

Of course, if you don't like any of this, you can configure phones to produce RAW output, or even pick up a mirrorless, and take full control of the processing pipeline. I've been out of the photography world for a while so I'm probably out of date now, but I don't think DNGs can even store all of the raw data that is now used by Apple/Google in their image processing pipelines. Certainly, I never had much luck turning those RAW files into anything that looked good. Apple have ProRAW which I think is some sort of hybrid format but I don't really understand it.

[0] https://petapixel.com/2020/08/17/gigapixel-ai-accidentally-a...

cameronh90 commented on Claudia – Desktop companion for Claude code claudiacode.com/... · Posted by u/zerealshadowban

Aeolun · 6 days ago

I think the thing is that most of the people implementing stuff for Claude have already realized it’s just the best option available for… basically everything. I’ve switched to different models before, but I always come back to Sonnet or Opus for doing anything sensible.

cameronh90 · 6 days ago

I'm finding GPT 5 (via Codex CLI on a pro subscription) is far better than Opus for my use cases. Much more than the small difference on swe-bench would suggest. However, the Codex CLI is so immature by comparison that I'm still mostly using Claude, and only escalating to Codex when Claude snookers itself.

cameronh90 commented on Why LLMs can't really build software zed.dev/blog/why-llms-can... · Posted by u/srid

ausbah · 10 days ago

those are really good points, but LLMs have really started to plateau off on their capabilities haven’t they? the improvements from gpt2 class models to 3 was much bigger then 3 to 4, which was only somewhat bigger than 4 to 5

most of the vibe shift I think I’ve seen in the past few months to using LLMs in the context of coding has been improvements in dataset curation and ux, not fundamentally better tech

cameronh90 · 10 days ago

I'm not sure I'd describe it as a plateau. It might be, but I'm not convinced. Improvements are definitely not as immediately obvious now, but how much of that is due to it being more difficult to accurately gauge intelligence above a certain point? Or even that the marginal real life utility of intelligence _itself_ starts to plateau?

A (bad) analogy would be that I can pretty easily tell the difference between a cat and an ape, and the differences in capability are blatantly obvious - but the improvement when going from IQ 70 to Einstein are much harder to assess and arguably not that useful for most tasks.

I tend to find that when I switch to a new model, it doesn't seem any better, but then at some point after using it for a few weeks I'll try to use the older model again and be quite surprised at how much worse it is.

cameronh90 commented on Open models by OpenAI openai.com/open-models/... · Posted by u/lackoftactics

captainregex · 18 days ago

I’m still trying to understand what is the biggest group of people that uses local AI (or will)? Students who don’t want to pay but somehow have the hardware? Devs who are price conscious and want free agentic coding?

Local, in my experience, can’t even pull data from an image without hallucinating (Qwen 2.5 VI in that example). Hopefully local/small models keep getting better and devices get better at running bigger ones

It feels like we do it because we can more than because it makes sense- which I am all for! I just wonder if i’m missing some kind of major use case all around me that justifies chaining together a bunch of mac studios or buying a really great graphics card. Tools like exo are cool and the idea of distributed compute is neat but what edge cases truly need it so badly that it’s worth all the effort?

cameronh90 · 18 days ago

The cloud AI providers have unacceptable variation in response time for things that need a predictable runtime.

Even if they did offer a defined latency product, you’re relying on a lot of infrastructure between your application and their GPU.

That’s not always tolerable.

cameronh90 commented on OpenAI's ChatGPT Agent casually clicks through "I am not a robot" verification arstechnica.com/informati... · Posted by u/joak

dimal · 24 days ago

As I get older, I can see a future where I’m cut off from parts of the web because of captchas. This one, where you just have to click a button, is passable, but I’ve had some of the puzzle ones force me to answer up to ten questions before I got through. I don’t know if it was a glitch or if I was getting the answers wrong. But it was really frustrating and if that continues, at some point I’ll just say fuck it and give up.

I have to guess that there are people in this boat right now, being disabled by these things.

cameronh90 · 24 days ago

Not sure if it's just me or a consequence of the increase in AI scraping, but I'm now being asked to solve CAPTCHAs on almost every site. Sometimes for every page I load. I'm now solving them literally dozens of times a day. I'm using Windows, no VPN, regular consumer IP address with no weird traffic coming from it.

As you say, they are also getting increasingly difficult. Click the odd one out, mental rotations, what comes next, etc. - it sometimes feels like an IQ test. A new type that seems to be becoming popular recently is a sequence of distorted characters and letters, but with some more blurry/distorted ones, seemingly with the expectation that I'm only supposed to be able to see the clearer ones and if I can see the blurrier ones then I must be a bot. So what this means is for each letter I need to try and make a judgement as to whether it's one I was supposed to see or not.

Another issue is the problems are often in US English, but I'm from the UK.

cameronh90 commented on Reverse engineering GitHub Actions cache to make it fast blacksmith.sh/blog/cache... · Posted by u/tsaifu

formerly_proven · a month ago

Nowadays you would use nftables, which like most new-ish kernel infra uses netlink as an API, and supports at least atomic updates of multiple rules. That's not to say there's documentation for that; there isn't.

cameronh90 · a month ago

I spent a decade and a bit away from Linux programming and have recently come back to it, and I'm absolutely blown away at how poor the documentation has become.

Back in the day, one of the best things about Linux was actually how good the docs were. Comprehensive man pages, stable POSIX standards, projects and APIs that have been used since 1970 so every little quirk has been documented inside out.

Now it seems like the entire OS has been rewritten by freedesktop and if I'm lucky I might find some two year out of date information on the ArchLinux wiki. If I'm even luckier, that behaviour won't have been completely broken by a commit from @poettering in a minor point release.

I actually think a lot of the new stuff is really fantastic once I reverse engineer it enough to understand what it's doing. I will defend to the death that systemd is, in principle, a lot better than the adhoc mountain of distro-specific shell scripts it replaces. Pulseaudio does a lot of important things that weren't possible before, etc. But honestly it feels like nobody wants to write any docs because it's changing too frequently, but then everything just constantly breaks because it turns out changing complex systems rapidly without any documentation leads to weird bugs that nobody understands.

cameronh90 commented on GLP-1s are breaking life insurance glp1digest.com/p/how-glp-... · Posted by u/alexslobodnik

cm2187 · a month ago

I don't know, I tend to notice the effect wears off over time. Not sure it's a good idea to consume it permanently. Perhaps a better use would be for short periods to course correct.

cameronh90 · a month ago

I have found the same thing, but my experience (YMMV; not recommended that you take my advice!) is that a one week break almost entirely resets it.

I now take a one week break every few months and have not noticed any decline in effects over time.

My suggestion would be to find an endocrinologist that specialises in obesity and these weight loss drugs. They will have dealt with patients who have experienced tolerance and have developed ways to work around it from real life experience. Obviously well-studied protocols with evidence would be preferable, but with how new these drugs are there hasn't been long enough to collect it yet.

cameronh90 commented on At Least 13 People Died by Suicide Amid U.K. Post Office Scandal, Report Says nytimes.com/2025/07/10/wo... · Posted by u/xbryanx

tialaramex · a month ago

So long as the jury understands this, it's all fine.

If you're on trial for doing X and your jury is told by a prosecution witness "mrkramer did X" and under cross they admit that's based on computer records which are often bogus, inconsistent, total nonsense, it doesn't take the world's best defence lawyer to secure an "innocent" verdict. That's not a fun experience, but it probably won't drive you to suicide.

One of the many interlocking failures here is that the Post Office, historically a government function, was allowed to prosecute people.

Suppose I work not for the Post Office (by this point a private company which is just owned in full by the government) but for say, an Asda, next door. I'm the most senior member of staff on weekends, so I have keys, I accept deliveries, all that stuff. Asda's crap computer system says I accepted £25000 of Amazon Gift Cards which it says came on a truck from the depot on Saturday. I never saw them, I deny it, there are no Gift Cards in stock at our store.

Asda can't prosecute me. They could try to sue, but more likely they'd call the police. If the police think I stole these Amazon cards, they give the file to a Crown Prosecutor, who works for the government to prosecute criminals. They don't work for Asda and they're looking at a bunch of "tests" which decide whether it makes sense to prosecute people.

https://www.cps.gov.uk/about-cps/how-we-make-our-decisions

But because the Sub-postmasters worked under contract to the Post Office, it could and did in many cases just prosecute them, it was empowered to do that. That's an obvious mistake, in many of these cases if you show a copper, let alone a CPS lawyer your laughable "case" that although this buggy garbage is often wrong you think there's signs of theft, they'll tell you that you can't imprison people on this basis, piss off.

A worse failure is that Post Office people were allowed to lie to a court about how reliable this information was, and indeed they repeatedly lied in later cases where it's directly about the earlier lying. That's the point where it undoubtedly goes from "Why were supposedly incompetent morons given this important job?" where maybe they're morons or maybe they're liars, to "Lying to a court is wrong, send them to jail".

cameronh90 · a month ago

> Asda can't prosecute me.

They can, actually. Anyone in the UK can launch a private prosecution. It's rare because it's expensive and the CPS can (and often do) take over any private prosecution then drop it.

Nevertheless, the power exists and has been intentionally protected by parliament. I think most would agree it needs reform, however.

cameronh90 commented on IKEA ditches Zigbee for Thread going all in on Matter smart homes theverge.com/smart-home/7... · Posted by u/thunderbong

Toutouxc · a month ago

> If you have a bunch of Zigbee devices, but at some point want to add some of the new ones, you need to start thinking about replacing all the perfectly working Zigbee devices or have a fragmented network.

Yes, if you're using the manufacturer's half-assed smartphone app, but if you're on Home Assistant, like basically anyone who's serious about their smart home, having multiple kinds of smart devices isn't really a problem. It's just one more radio to configure. Some people run both Zigbee and Zwave, some people run Zigbee + Wi-Fi or even Zigbee + Zwave + Wi-Fi + cloud integrations, Home Assistant doesn't care.

cameronh90 · a month ago

It is still somewhat annoying for those of us with solid walls.

I can't just add a new Thread device at the other side of my house as the walls attenuate the signal between it and the border router. Equally I can't start replacing Zigbee devices willy-nilly in case I create Zigbee dead zones.

Not the biggest problem in the world but it does mean I'll likely need to get some pointless Thread smart plugs as temporary network extenders when I add my first Thread device.