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carschno commented on Are the Three Musketeers allergic to muskets? (2014)   ox.ac.uk/news/arts-blog/a... · Posted by u/rolph
Tuna-Fish · 8 days ago
The original novel is set in 1625-1628. At that point, firearms are well and truly established, having proven themselves to be the war-winning weapon in the Italian Wars more than a century ago. They are not new and unproven technology; they are the weapon that the great grandparents of the main characters fought and won with.

But they are a symbol of the wrong social class. A musket is something that a peasant or a burgher can use to kill a noble. All the main characters in the three musketeers are nobility, and their social class has suffered greatly from the "democratization" of war. They, like almost everyone like them historically, much prefer the old ways from when they were more pre-eminent, and look down their noses at firearms. They spend very little time at war, and a lot more time duelling and participating in schemes.

The high-tech of the early 17th century wasn't even matchlocks anymore, it was flintlocks. Those took another ~50 or so years to become general issue, but at the time of the novels upper class people who can afford modern weapons wouldn't have been fumbling with matches anymore.

carschno · 8 days ago
I suppose you are right about the history of firearms. However, the novel was written in 1844, more than 200 years after the time in which it is set. Which makes me wonder if the author (Alexandre Dumas) knew and cared about the historic facts.
carschno commented on GitHub Actions has a package manager, and it might be the worst   nesbitt.io/2025/12/06/git... · Posted by u/robin_reala
mfenniak · 10 days ago
On the plus side, Forgejo Action's implementation is still actively improving, where it seems that for GitHub if it's not AI, it's not being touched.

However, as noted in the article, Forgejo's implementation currently has all the same "package manager" problems.

carschno · 10 days ago
Good point, also to illustrate that open-source is not a panacea. It merely holds a higher potential for certain issues to be fixed/improved than.
carschno commented on GitHub Actions has a package manager, and it might be the worst   nesbitt.io/2025/12/06/git... · Posted by u/robin_reala
carschno · 10 days ago
It is concerning that GitHub hosts the majority of open-source software, while actively locking its users into a platform that is based on closed source for eerything except Git itself. This issue with Actions shows how maintaining proprietary software inevitably ends up rather low on the priority list. Adding new features is much more marketable, just like for any other software product. Enshittification ensues.

For those who can still escape the lock-in, this is probably a good occasion to point to Forgejo, an open-source alternative that also has CI actions: https://forgejo.org/2023-02-27-forgejo-actions/ It is used by Codeberg: https://codeberg.org/

carschno commented on DeepSeek OCR   github.com/deepseek-ai/De... · Posted by u/pierre
pietz · 2 months ago
My impression is that OCR is basically solved at this point.

The OmniAI benchmark that's also referenced here wasn't updated with new models since February 2025. I assume that's because general purpose LLMs have gotten better at OCR than their own OCR product.

I've been able to solve a broad range of OCR tasks by simply sending each page as an image to Gemini 2.5 Flash Lite and asking it nicely to extract the content in Markdown under some additional formatting instructions. That will cost you around $0.20 for 1000 pages in batch mode and the results have been great.

I'd be interested to hear where OCR still struggles today.

carschno · 2 months ago
Technically not OCR, but HTR (hand-written text/transcript recognition) is still difficult. LLMs have increased accuracy, but their mistakes are very hard to identify because they just 'hallucinate' text they cannot digitize.
carschno commented on Fastmail desktop app   fastmail.com/blog/desktop... · Posted by u/soheilpro
wiseowise · 2 months ago
> I'm beyond saddened that they are wasting my hard-earned money in this... what, electron bundle?

Vote with your feet. Go to mailprovider with native app (and leave sane people alone)!

carschno · 2 months ago
I think the actual question was: why would a mail provider develop their own an email client?

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carschno commented on Copilot broke audit logs, but Microsoft won't tell customers   pistachioapp.com/blog/cop... · Posted by u/Sayrus
planb · 4 months ago
I am assigned to develop a company internal chatbot that accesses confidential documents and I am having a really hard time communicating this problem to executives:

As long as not ALL the data the agent hat access too is checked against the rights of the current user placing the request, there WILL be ways to leak data. This means Vector databases, Search Indexes or fancy "AI Search Databases" would be required on a per user basis or track the access rights along with the content, which is infeasible and does not scale.

And as access rights are complex and can change at any given moment, that would still be prone to race conditions.

carschno · 4 months ago
> I am having a really hard time communicating this problem to executives

When you hit such a wall, you might not be failing to communicate, nor them failing to understand. In reality, said executives have probably chosen to ignore the issue, but also don't want to take accountability for the eventual leaks. So "not understanding" is the easiest way to blame the engineers later.

carschno commented on LLM Embeddings Explained: A Visual and Intuitive Guide   huggingface.co/spaces/hes... · Posted by u/eric-burel
carschno · 5 months ago
Nice explanations! A (more advanced) aspect which I find missing would be the difference between encoder-decoder transformer models (BERT) and "decoder-only", generative models, with respect to the embeddings.
carschno commented on Measuring the impact of AI on experienced open-source developer productivity   metr.org/blog/2025-07-10-... · Posted by u/dheerajvs
TeMPOraL · 5 months ago
Right. Let's take a bunch of semi-related groups I don't like, and make up an acronym for them so any of my criticism can be applied to some subset of those groups in some form, thus making it seem legitimate and not just a bunch of half-assed strawman arguments.

Also, I guess you're saying I'm a paid shill, or have otherwise been brainwashed by marketing of the vendors, and therefore my positive experiences with LLMs are a lie? :).

I mean, you probably didn't mean that, but part of my point is that you see those positive reports here on HN too, from real people who've been in this community for a while and are not anonymous Internet users - you can't just dismiss that as "grassroot marketing".

carschno · 5 months ago
> I mean, you probably didn't mean that

Correct, I think you've read too much into it. Grassroots marketing is not a pejorative term, either. Its strategy is to trigger positive reviews about your product, ideally by independent, credible community members, indeed.

That implies that those community members have motivations other than being paid. Ideologies and shared beliefs can be some of them. Being happy about the product is a prerequisite, whatever that means for the individual user.

u/carschno

KarmaCake day816October 15, 2013View Original