chaboud (u/chaboud) - Readit News

chaboud commented on D4D4 nmichaels.org/musings/d4d... · Posted by u/csense

chaboud · 6 days ago

Do you want obfuscated supply-chain state-actor vulnerabilities? Because this is how you get obfuscated supply-chain state-actor vulnerabilities!

(Unless someone stays up all night to find the bugs....)

chaboud commented on GenAI FOMO has spurred businesses to light nearly $40B on fire theregister.com/2025/08/1... · Posted by u/rntn

mrsilencedogood · 7 days ago

"intern or college-hire"

It's well known that these fresh employees are not going to contribute to velocity of a team for at least a year. They're investments. I've seen levelling docs specifically call this out.

"It's prone to spiraling off into the weeds, makes silly mistakes, occasionally mangles whole repos (commit early, and often), and needs very crisp instruction and guidance"

This describes a team of juniors. If it's describing an entire team, then everyone above mid-level needs to be fired.

I will say that I think "the bottom of the market getting eviscerated" is going to apply to software devs too. There is now very little point in hiring someone who already only produces slop as their best output. The main people who need to be afraid of AI in the next 5 years is probably offshore and near-shore people, and perma-juniors who have done the "1 year of experience 10 times" thing.

chaboud · 6 days ago

We hire folks who make slop so we can form them into folks who turn that energy into elevated output. However, I expect that the junior engineer crop will teach us a thing or two about assisting coding techniques, and we'll owe it to them to level up their system design and abstraction skills.

chaboud commented on Show HN: I was curious about spherical helix, ended up making this visualization visualrambling.space/movi... · Posted by u/damarberlari

sfink · 7 days ago

Awesome visualizations.

The part that I was expecting to see but didn't: how can you move at a constant speed? For the original purpose of positioning objects along a path, it doesn't matter. But when moving, you can see it's moving much more slowly at the beginning and end (mostly determined by the radius). What if I want it to travel at a constant rate? Or even apply an easing function to the speed?

I'm sure there's some fancy mathematical trick that would just do it. If I were only more comfortable with math... my handwavy sketch would be to compute the speed function by differentiating the formulas to get dx, dy, and dz and passing them through the Pythagorean equation, then reparameterize on a t' variable using the inverse of the speed function? Maybe? I feel like I'm speaking using words I don't understand.

chaboud · 7 days ago

The instinct to sort of slow t is right, as the governing functions are maintaining angular velocity with respect to t but scaling radius also with respect to t.

It’s sort of like an Archimedean spiral. So, yeah, if you parameterize velocity and make that constant, you’re in better shape. Note that the radius starts at zero, though, so something is going to have to deal with limits.

A simpler path following approximation (e.g., for a game) might be to just give an iterative system path and tangent targets with respect to Z and then provide an iterative constraint on velocity with some sort of basic tweening (e.g., new = a * old + (1 - a) * target). Then just drag the thing along Z, like bead toys for toddlers.

chaboud commented on GenAI FOMO has spurred businesses to light nearly $40B on fire theregister.com/2025/08/1... · Posted by u/rntn

mrsilencedogood · 9 days ago

I think vibe coding will get good enough that things like vercel's "0 to POC" thing are going to stick around.

I think AI-powered IDE features will stick around. One notable head-and-shoulders-above-non-AI-competitor feature I've seen is "very very fuzzy search". I can ask AI "I think there's something in the code that inserts MyMessage into `my.kafka.topic`. But the gosh darn codebase is so convoluted that I literally can't find it. I suspect "my", "kafka", and "topic" all get constructed somewhere to produce that topic name because it doesn't show up in the code as a literal. I also think there's so much indirection between the producer setup and where the "event" actually first gets emitted that MyMessage might not look very much like the actual origination point. Where's the initial origin point?"

Previously, that was "ctrl-shift-F my.kafka.topic" and then ask a staff engineer and hope to God they know off-hand, and if they don't, go read the entire codebase/framework for 16 hours straight until you figure it out.

Now, LLMs have a decent shot at figuring it out.

I also think things like "is this chest Xray cancer?" are going to be hugely impactful.

But anyone expecting anything like Gen AI (being able to replace a real software engineer, or quality customer support rep, etc) is going to be disappointed.

I also think AI will generally eviscerate the bottoms of industries (expect generic gacha girl-collection games to get a lot of AI art) but also leave people valuing the tops of industries a lot more (lovingly crafted indie games, etc). So now this compute-expensive AI is targeting the already low-margin bottoms of industries. Probably not what VCs want. They want to replace software engineers, not make a slop gacha game cost 1/10th of its already low cost.

chaboud · 8 days ago

I've been quite happy with thinking of agentic IDE operation as being akin to a highly energetic intern. It's prone to spiraling off into the weeds, makes silly mistakes, occasionally mangles whole repos (commit early, and often), and needs very crisp instruction and guidance. That said, I get my answers back in minutes/hours rather than days/weeks. For the cost, for things that would otherwise be delivered by an intern or college-hire SDE, it's a pretty solid value vs. paying a salary and keeping a desk available.

What it isn't, at present, is an investment in the future. I'm not making these virtual interns better coders, more thoughtful about architecture, or more autonomous in the future. Those aspects of development of new hires are vastly more valuable than the code output I'm getting in my IDE. So I'm hoping that we land in a place where we're fostering both rather than hoping that someone else is going to do the hard work of closing the agentic coding gap and growing maturity. Pulling an Indiana Jones style swap could be a really destructive move if we try to pull the human pipeline out of the system too early.

Just paying attention to near term savings runs a real risk falling into that trap.

chaboud commented on Monero appears to be in the midst of a successful 51% attack twitter.com/p3b7_/status/... · Posted by u/treyd

chuckadams · 15 days ago

The thing about 51% attacks is they're hard to pull off in secret. And once they happen, who's going to accept the coin anymore? Plenty of potential for sheer destruction, but it seems pretty counter-productive to value.

chaboud · 15 days ago

If only someone offered derivatives contracts that could be used to make money from destruction...

https://www.kraken.com/en-ca/features/derivatives/monero

chaboud commented on We'd be better off with 9-bit bytes pavpanchekha.com/blog/9bi... · Posted by u/luu

Taniwha · 20 days ago

Not really - I worked on a DSP with 9-bit bytes in the 90's (largely because it was focused on MPEG decode for DVDs, new at the time) largely because memory was still very expensive and MPEG2 needed 9-bit frame difference calculations (most people do this as 16-bits these days but back then as I said memory was expensive and you could buy 9-bit parity RAM chips)

It had 512 72-bit registers and was very SIMD/VLIW, was probably the only machine ever with 81-bit instructions

chaboud · 20 days ago

Mpact 2?

If memory serves, I had a Creative Labs DXR2 that I almost immediately regretted.

PDP-10 could do 9-bit (or 7, or 6) bytes into 36-bit words. It seems like something that would be fun for 1-2 days.

chaboud commented on MacBook Pro Insomnia manuel.bernhardt.io/posts... · Posted by u/speckx

metabagel · a month ago

> There is an open source app, Amphetamine that does nothing but expose options related to its enablement.

What does this mean?

chaboud · a month ago

Amphetamine is an app that allows one to keep their device running, awake, unlocked, etc.

I use Amphetamine all the time, especially with agentic coding, and it’s been an essential app for me for years for other reasons (live data processing, presentations, etc.).

chaboud commented on Why you can't color calibrate deep space photos maurycyz.com/misc/cc/... · Posted by u/LorenDB

klysm · a month ago

Recently I've been on a bit of a deep dive regarding human color vision and cameras. This left me with the general impression that RGB bayer filters are vastly over-utilized (mostly due to market share), and are they are usually not great for tasks other than mimicking human vision! For example, if you have a stationary scene, why not put a whole bunch of filters in front of a mono camera and get much more frequency information?

chaboud · a month ago

I think you want a push broom setup:

https://www.adept.net.au/news/newsletter/202001-jan/pushbroo...

Hyperspectral imaging is a really fun space. You can do a lot with some pretty basic filters and temporal trickery. However, once you’re out of hot mirror territory (near IR and IR filtering done on most cameras), things have to get pretty specialized.

But grab a cold mirror (visible light cutting IR filter) and a nighvision camera for a real party on the cheap.

chaboud commented on Marathon fusion claims to invent alchemy, making 5000 kgs gold per gigawatt marathonfusion.com/... · Posted by u/apugoneappu

MereInterest · a month ago

> (note: I have no intention of using gold for beverage containers... I like my skin not blue)

I thought gold was biologically inert. Any chance you’re thinking of argyria, which is caused by exposure to elemental silver?

chaboud · a month ago

Gold salts (e.g., old arthritis treatment) can lead to gold poisoning, but I was really just making a joke. If you have a gold chalice in your cupboard, I think you’ll be alright.

chaboud commented on Marathon fusion claims to invent alchemy, making 5000 kgs gold per gigawatt marathonfusion.com/... · Posted by u/apugoneappu

chaboud · a month ago

Actual industrial/product use of gold is less than 10%. A massive amount of gold is used for store of wealth. If gold became less scarce, it would be less expensive.

The Washington monument capstone is aluminum because aluminum was expensive in 1884. Now we make beverage containers out of aluminum. (note: I have no intention of using gold for beverage containers... I like my skin not blue)