capyba (u/capyba) - Readit News

capyba commented on Using Python for Scripting hypirion.com/musings/use-... · Posted by u/birdculture

Currently developing a tkinter app, and loving, that I don't have to install an additional GUI framework. This will be much easier to package than with GTK or QT or Pyside or something. I am sure people have figured out all of that, but my project has so minimal dependencies, and yet offers a full GUI.

capyba · 5 days ago

tkinter is the best kept secret in the Python std lib.

Pair it with numpy and matplotlib (two external dependencies that personally I consider part of Python itself), and you’ve got 80% of an interactive scientific simulation environment.

capyba commented on Purdue University approves new AI requirement for all undergrads forbes.com/sites/michaelt... · Posted by u/rmason

capyba · 5 days ago

What exactly is an “AI working competency”? How to have a conversation with a chatbot? How to ask a chatbot a question that you confirm with a Google search and then confirm that with a trusted online reference and confirm that with a book you check out of the library three weeks later?

Perhaps the world is going the direction of relying on an AI to do half the things we use our own brains for today. But to me that sounds like a sad and worse future.

I’m just rambling here. But at the moment I fail to see how current LLMs help people truly learn things.

capyba commented on Brent's Encapsulated C Programming Rules (2020) retroscience.net/brents-c... · Posted by u/p2detar

writebetterc · 10 days ago

I can't edit my comment any longer, but I really like nullprogram.com

capyba · 10 days ago

Same here! That’s a great blog with a lot of good advice.

capyba commented on I wasted years of my life in crypto twitter.com/kenchangh/sta... · Posted by u/Anon84

OhMeadhbh · 11 days ago

Like most kids, I had my Randian phase. But I grew out of it before moving to Sili Valley.

I've always been a bit of a fan of Adam Curtis' documentary style, and "All Watched Over by Machines of Loving Grace" (named after the Brautigan poem) is worth watching. I'm not sure how much of his narrative of Rand is accurate, but it's well presented:

https://youtu.be/I6EBpLfLHCA?si=SE93Dp9nsl11vnU3

capyba · 11 days ago

Hearing someone proudly describe themselves as a libertarian always reminds me of the ol’ twitter quote that goes something like “libertarians are like house cats - fiercely self-assured of their own independence, yet completely reliant on a system they don’t appreciate or understand.”

capyba commented on Average DRAM price in USD over last 18 months pcpartpicker.com/trends/p... · Posted by u/zekrioca

markbao · 15 days ago

Most people have phones that can handle webpages with 1-5MB JS bundles. Why artificially limit what you can do on the web? Why limit ourselves to 1GB RAM when more resources means tech becomes more useful?

Returning to simple webpages is popular idea on HN but it’s like wanting a car with no backup camera and crank windows. If your goal is to have your car be as simple as possible, then sure, but that’s not the case for most people.

Most people want their cars to be safe and convenient, and their webpages useful and rich, more so than they want to return to some idealized simplicity.

A simple webpage or blog with minimal styling that runs as an ARM binary on a TV remote is cool and fun but it’s not economically useful. It’s the equivalent of a manual scooter. We can build better apps (in the same way that car manufacturers can build less crappy infotainment systems) but optimizing for scarcity isn’t the answer in a world where abundance tends to grow.

(Edit: your downvotes mean nothing to me, I’ve seen what gets upvoted!)

capyba · 15 days ago

I’d argue that in many of these instances, less is far more.

I want my car to just be really good at being a car, reliably get me from A to B. A Bluetooth connection to the stereo system is nice, but I don’t need a freaking 20” phablet right next to my face when I’m driving.

When I go to a website, I’m usually looking for information, to read something. I don’t often want fancy scroll and animations, I just want clear readable text free of distractions.

More and more these two examples seem to be going away, we’re losing the plot of what the point of these things are.

capyba commented on It’s been a very hard year bell.bz/its-been-a-very-h... · Posted by u/surprisetalk

capyba · 17 days ago

I feel for the author. I do both mechanical and software engineering and I’m in this career(s) because I love making things and learning how to do that really well. Been having the most difficult time accepting the idea that there isn’t a good market for people like us - artisans, craftsmen, whatever the term might be - who are obsessive about exceptional quality and the time and effort it takes to get there. In this day and age, and especially when LLMs look ever more like they can produce at least a cheap, dollar store approximation of the real deal, “doing things really well” is going to be relegated to an ever more niche market.

capyba commented on Datacenters in space aren't going to work taranis.ie/datacenters-in... · Posted by u/mindracer

cladopa · 19 days ago

It is not a good idea listening to experts tell you what can't be done. Science and technology progresses one funeral at at time. Einstein's ideas were crazy for classical scientists and Heisenberg's for Einstein.

The most important thing is making space access ten to one hundred times cheaper with reusable rockets. Then a lot of the problems in the article will not be problems at all.

E.g ISS was designed and created when access to space was extremely expensive. Solar technology and batteries was extremely bad but also super expensive.

You can not use convention but radiation works incredibly well and you can also use the thermal technology of mobile devices.

The most important thing being cheap is that access to the Space become possible for way more people with creativity. Not just a few people with academic titles but people with practical engineering and scientific mastery (that certainly run circles around them on real projects).

There are so many opportunities to use creativity in space, with possibilities that do not exist on earth. For example you can spin or rotate things super fast and so you could have convention inside the machines that rotate.

capyba · 19 days ago

Radiation does not work “incredibly well”, especially at the temperature range of interest. Forced convection (what every large terrestrial electronics system uses, from gaming laptops to terrestrial data centers) is orders of magnitude more efficient at pulling heat out of electronics than radiation. Normally electronics generate heat in a very small area relative to the entire package size, and conduction+radiation offers many practical issues to efficiently dissipating that heat to deep space.

Source: many years of practical engineering experience solving this exact problem.

capyba commented on Shai-Hulud Returns: Over 300 NPM Packages Infected helixguard.ai/blog/malici... · Posted by u/mrdosija

venturecruelty · 25 days ago

Because it is not a serious ecosystem run by serious people. Do you know what serious people do? They have package repositories with people called "maintainers", who are, crucially, trusted members of a community who don't write the software they package. "Oh but that's GATEKEEPING!", they screech. Yes, that's the entire point. Gatekeeping prevents shit like this from happening. There's a reason why this doesn't happen to Debian, but JavaScript developers get defensive and mean when you suggest that maybe the equivalent of a public S3 bucket isn't the best way to host a package repository.

capyba · 24 days ago

Agreed that some level of gatekeeping and some level of friction to protect quality are useful things.

capyba commented on Shai-Hulud Returns: Over 300 NPM Packages Infected helixguard.ai/blog/malici... · Posted by u/mrdosija

mx7zysuj4xew · 25 days ago

It won't, it's a culture issue

Most rust programmers are mediocre at best and really need the memory safety training wheels that rust provides. Years of nodejs mindrot has somehow made pulling into random dependencies irregular release schedules to become the norm for these people. They'll just shrug it off come up with some "security initiative* and continue the madness

capyba · 24 days ago

I only personally know one Rust programmer (works in scientific HPC) and he’s fantastic, but in general I do get the sense that most Rust devs migrated from JS and are just now figuring out “omg strong typing and compiled code native to the client hardware is really nice!” and think it’s a ground breaking revelation.

Saying this as someone who is cautiously optimistic about Rust for my own work.

capyba commented on Diabetes Treatment May Deliver Insulin Through a Skin Cream sciencealert.com/breakthr... · Posted by u/gmays

lolc · a month ago

Yeah could be useful for basal delivery. But I wonder how variable it will be. Temperature, moisture, rub-off, other lotions, could all hinder the delivery. Don't want additional variability on a medication this sensitive to dosage.

The biggest danger I see that it's a deadly cream. Untrained people are unlikely to inject insulin by mistake. With a cream, they might just rub some on.

capyba · a month ago

Honestly hadn’t even thought of that - easy to say “more is better, right?” or miscalculate what the dose should be.