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eastern commented on Don't Get Distracted (2017)   calebhearth.com/dont-get-... · Posted by u/Kerrick
amoss · 9 months ago
In a different place a long time ago we were approached by a company that wanted a collaboration. They had a very specific project in mind, with requirements already set. It was a humanitarian project to "find earthquake survivors". If you read the requirements in a very positive way it was an ethically clean project.

But the company is a major defense contractor and it was very unusual for them to be involved in humanitarian work. So it made sense to question the requirements after a less generous reading. Detecting mostly occluded humans in a highly cluttered and destroyed urban environment has other use cases. They got as far as "highlighting the survivors with a laser designator" before I started to ask some very pointed questions and start discussing the ethical considerations of us helping to build a system to kill people.

I was asked to leave.

After that meeting the potential collaboration was rejected and it never came up again. The company continued shopping around other places to get help building their "earthquake rescue system".

Never get distracted. Always question the purpose of work. Consider ethics.

Getting another job can be a pain. Living with knowing what you helped to build would be much harder.

eastern · 9 months ago
What about questioning the purpose of the taxes you pay?
eastern commented on Lies I was told about collab editing, Part 1: Algorithms for offline editing   moment.dev/blog/lies-i-wa... · Posted by u/antics
theamk · 9 months ago
heh, I bet no matter what kind of textual explanation you required, I can provide the situation it does not cover.

You say this word is only required if it's a part of this whole sentence? OK, the other edit kept the whole sentence, but changed a single other word in it, which happened to be the subject.

eastern · 9 months ago
100%.

The given situation is solvable only by the humans involved. They want different things. Either one of them has authority over the other, or they talk it over.

eastern commented on Lossless Log Aggregation – Reduce Log Volume by 99% Without Dropping Data   bit.kevinslin.com/p/lossl... · Posted by u/benshumaker
eastern · 9 months ago
The obvious answer is a relational structure. In the given example, host, status, path and target should be separate relations. They'll all be tiny ones, a few rows each.

Of course, performance etc are a separate story but as far as the shape of the data goes, that's what the solution is

eastern commented on What does this button do? – My new car has a mysterious and undocumented switch   blog.koenvh.nl/what-does-... · Posted by u/Koenvh
afh1 · 9 months ago
The scary part is not the GPS installed by the fleet company that previously owned the car, which in all likelihood was just forgotten there, but the GPS and eSIM that comes with most (all?) new cars and that in most (all?) new cars cannot be disabled.

Apart from privacy concerns of your data being used or sold by the car vendor, government outreach is also a concern. There was a bill announced in the US for all new cars to be equipped with "driver impairment" tech which was called a "kill switch". Media rushed to say it's not really a kill switch, just "sensors or cameras to monitor the driver’s behaviors, head or eye movements" and "block the driver from operating the vehicle". So... a kill switch. https://apnews.com/article/fact-checking-402773429497

Anyway, I'm staying with my old gas Honda until it dies which is probably never with proper maintenance and eventually restoration. I'll never go electric. Modern cars are just smartphones on wheels at this point, and smartphones are just spying devices at this point.

eastern · 9 months ago
Media people obviously thought that kill switch meant something that can kill the driver and rushed to reassure the public that no that was not the case.

They're good people at heart. Don't misunderstand them.

eastern commented on The number given as % CPU in Activity Monitor   eclecticlight.co/2024/11/... · Posted by u/Brajeshwar
MBCook · 10 months ago
Yeah. When the article compares what Apple is doing to Intel, I think they mean “classic Intel processors of years ago” that didn’t frequency scale. Like the numbered Pentiums, IIRC. That did stand out to me a little bit.

You’re right that everyone has been doing this for quite a while, it’s certainly not an Apple invention.

The Electric Light Company often covers Mac stuff and Activity Monitor is the tool you use to view this stuff in OS X, so it’s just the domain this article is focusing on.

eastern · 10 months ago
It's not as if they don't know that this is a false comparison, specially because generations of Intel CPUs used in Macs also did frequency throttling.

"Unlike traditional Intel CPUs, CPU cores in Apple silicon chips can be run at a wide range of frequencies, as set by macOS."

The use of the word 'traditional' here is essentially gaslighting.

eastern commented on Rearchitecting: Redis to SQLite   wafris.org/blog/rearchite... · Posted by u/thecodemonkey
meowface · a year ago
Was interested and considering switching until I saw this part:

>According to the benchmarks, Redka is several times slower than Redis.

Still a cool project, don't get me wrong. But this kind of doesn't give me any incentive to switch.

eastern · a year ago
The slowness would be inevitable because the architecture combines the weak point of Redis (network stack) with the weak point of sqlite (disk access).

It abandons Redis' in-memory data and sqlite's in-process speed... for what?

eastern commented on Google's real monopoly is on the user data   propellernet.co.uk/google... · Posted by u/illdave
eastern · a year ago
Early in this article, there's this sentence: Google’s results are really good.

Reminds me of the comedian who, when asked, "How's your wife," would say, "Compared to what?"

eastern commented on Claude 3.5 Sonnet   thezvi.substack.com/p/on-... · Posted by u/elsewhen
aappleby · a year ago
I don't need an AI to write code for me, but it is _astoundingly_ helpful to have it summarize various design options and new technology stacks without me having to scavenge Google for the obscure corner-cases I care about.

I have an idea for a project that involves streaming 3 giabits of data per second from a USB 3.0 device out over a 10 gig Ethernet connection, and it was able to compare/contrast various levels of support for high-bandwidth USB 3 and Ethernet in multiple frameworks and languages.

And the whole conversation, with code examples, cost me 3 _cents_ of Anthropic credits.

My new fear is when people start asking AIs "Hey AI, here is my codebase, my org chart, and commit histories for all my employees - how can I reduce the number of humans I need to employ to get this project done?"

eastern · a year ago
Even without writing code, on personal projects it's worth it for the three things I'm always lazy about:

1. Good, detailed commits 2. Tests 3. Docstrings

eastern commented on Backdoor in upstream xz/liblzma leading to SSH server compromise   openwall.com/lists/oss-se... · Posted by u/rkta
jonathankoren · a year ago
You don’t even have to be this conspiratorially minded to believe the NSA is a legitimate suspect here. (For the record, I think literally every intelligence agency on Earth is plausible here.)

You kind of lost the thread when you say, “act against the interests of American citizens and companies”. Bro, literally anyone could be using xz, and anyone could be using Red Hat. You’re only “acting against Americans” if you use it against Americans. I don’t know who was behind this, but a perfectly plausible scenario would be the NSA putting the backdoor in with an ostensibly Chinese login and then activating on machines hosted and controlled by people outside of the US.

Focusing on a specific distro is myopic. Red Hat is popular.

eastern · a year ago
100%.

The HN crowd has come a long way from practically hero-worshipping Snowden to automatically assuming that 'state actor' must mean the countries marked evil by the US.

eastern commented on Ask HN: What are your oldest "online" accounts still in use?    · Posted by u/throwaway_08932
eastern · a year ago
My Yahoo mail account was created as a Rocketmail account, likely in 1996 or 97, when Rocketmail launched and became the biggest Hotmail rival.

Yahoo acquired it and it became Yahoo mail.

So 27 or 28 years

u/eastern

KarmaCake day281February 5, 2011View Original