ccvannorman (u/ccvannorman)

ccvannorman commented on Dark Alley Mathematics blog.szczepan.org/blog/th... · Posted by u/quibono

dooglius · a month ago

EDIT: ok this was nagging at me for a while as something being off, I think this is actually wrong (in some way that must cancel out to accidentally get the right answer) because I need to multiply by 2 pi c to consider all rotations of centers around (0,0) at a given radius, but then my integral no longer works. Ah well, that's what I get for trying to method act and solve quickly, I guess the hooligan stabs me. I think at least this approach done properly could save some dimensions out of the Jacobian we need to calculate. Original post below:

Much more elegant: consider every circle that fits inside the unit circle, and we will work backward to find combinations of points. We only need consider centers on the x axis by symmetry, so these are parameterized by circle center at (0,c) and radius r with 0<c<1 and 0<r<1-c. Each circle contributes (2 pi r)^3 volume of triples of points, and this double integral easily works out to 2 pi^3/5 which is the answer (after dividing by the volume of point triples in the unit circle, pi^3)

ccvannorman · a month ago

took me a few reads but this is indeed correct (lol)

ccvannorman commented on GitHub Actions is slowly killing engineering teams iankduncan.com/engineerin... · Posted by u/codesuki

ccvannorman · a month ago

I just finished an implementation of CI across three codebases totalling >50k lines and I can confirm a lot of the author's pain points, especially around logging and YAML variables.

Commit with one character YAML difference? Check.

Commit with 2-3 YAML lines just to add the right logging? Check.

Wait 5+ minutes for a YAML diff to propagate through our test pipeline for the nth time today? .. sigh .. check

BUT, after ironing all these things out (and running our own beefy self-hosted runner which is triggered to wake up when there's a test process to snack on), it's .. uh.. not so bad? For now?

ccvannorman commented on Apple introduces new AirTag with longer range and improved findability apple.com/newsroom/2026/0... · Posted by u/meetpateltech

c-hendricks · 2 months ago

I bought one for my cat, never did help with finding him, just the general area.

They're not great for tracking things that move on their own, or things that avoid people.

ccvannorman · 2 months ago

We use them on our cats and have found the trouble-maker cat 3 times out of 3 when needed (in an urban apartment area; most recently the cat was scared by a noise which may have kept her hidden out all night in the cold, unless we had found her/shooed her back to the house)

ccvannorman commented on Trump says Venezuela’s Maduro captured after strikes reuters.com/world/america... · Posted by u/jumpocelot

abigail95 · 2 months ago

They extradited a guy for crimes also illegal in Venezuela. What would the point of sanctioning actions like this be?

This is about the cleanest extraterritorial action you can take. A guy probably did some seriously illegal stuff in your country and his, who was probably illegally elected, who probably had people killed.

Why not do this? Why not say to Venezuela, hand him over or we'll take him ourselves?

He's not going to gitmo, he'll have the same due process that every other American gets. Rights Maduro denied to millions. If you asked me to describe "justice" - I have to give this as a good example. He's going to die in prison like Noriega, after a fair trial.

ccvannorman · 2 months ago

By your reasoning, Putin invading the US and kidnapping President Trump for his crimes is equally valid

ccvannorman commented on Instacart reaches into your pocket and lops a third off your dollars pluralistic.net/2025/12/1... · Posted by u/hn_acker

ccvannorman · 3 months ago

I would personally pay $2x market price for a Phone, Computer, Tablet that guaranteed privacy (via whatever technical means necessary) for all my interactions with the internet.

Is that so much to ask?

Could the next "Apple" produce such hardware/software stack to black box this for the consumer -- simply buy "Pineapple" products and guarantee this stuff can't touch you (user obsfuciation for all external platforms could be a hard technical challenge, I know - hence the big value if delivered)

ccvannorman commented on Show HN: JSON Query jsonquerylang.org/... · Posted by u/wofo

ccvannorman · 5 months ago

I can't help myself and surely someone else has already done the same. But the query

  obj.friends.filter(x=>{ return x.city=='New York'})
  .sort((a, b) => a.age - b.age)
  .map(item => ({ name: item.name, age: item.age }));

does exactly the same without any plugin.

am I missing something?

ccvannorman commented on Police Break Up Lego Theft Ring nytimes.com/2025/10/18/us... · Posted by u/sanj

em-bee · 5 months ago

they are putting a new face on crime solving

by stacking one clue on top of another.

ccvannorman · 5 months ago

they'll take apart this criminal empire brick by brick

ccvannorman commented on Claude Sonnet 4.5 anthropic.com/news/claude... · Posted by u/adocomplete

nosianu · 5 months ago

> the major breakthrough would have to be brain-computer interfaces so the agent can literally read the user's mind.

And even that would not be enough.

In reality, it would have to put the user to sleep and go through various dream scenarios to have the user's brain really build an internal model that is not there in the first place. No brain interface can help find what is not there.

We usually need interactions with reality to build the internal model of what we actually want step by step, especially for things we have not done before.

Even for info that is there, that's also a limit to fantasy or sci-fi brain scanning. The knowledge is not stored like in a RAM chip, even when it is there. You would have to simulate the brain to actually go through the relevant experiences to extract the information. Predicting the actual dynamic behavior of the brain would require some super-super sub-molecular level scan and then correctly simulating that, since what the neurons will actually do depends on much more than the basic wiring. Aaaaand you may get a different result depending on time of day, how well they slept, mood and when and what the person ate and what news they recently read, etc. :)

ccvannorman · 5 months ago

That is also not enough. An agent could build an application that functions, but you also need to have a well-designed underlying architecture if you want the application to be extensible and maintainable - something the original dreamer may not even be capable of - so perhaps a shared extended dream share with a Sr. architect is also needed. Oh wait .. I guess we're back to square 1 again? lol

ccvannorman commented on Comprehension debt: A ticking time bomb of LLM-generated code codemanship.wordpress.com... · Posted by u/todsacerdoti

ccvannorman · 5 months ago

I joined a company with 20k lines of Next/React generated in 1 month. I spent over a week rewriting many parts of the application (mostly the data model and duplicated/conflicting functionality).

At first I was frustrated but my boss said it was actually a perfect sequence, since that "crappy code" did generate a working demo that our future customers loved, which gave us the validation to re-write. And I agree!

LLMs are just another tool in the chest; a curious, lighting fast jr developer with an IQ of 85 who can't learn and needs a memory wipe whenever they make a design mistake.

When I use it knowing its constraints it's a great tool! But yeah if used wrong you are going to make a mess, just like any powerful tool