fmbb (u/fmbb) - Readit News

fmbb commented on Working quickly is more important than it seems (2015) jsomers.net/blog/speed-ma... · Posted by u/bschne

acituan · a day ago

Funny how this exactly applies to instrument playing. Unearned speed only begets sloppiness. The only way to go past a certain velocity is to do meticulous metronome work from a perfectly manageable pace and build up with intention and synchrony. And even then it is not a linear increase, you will need to slow back down to integrate every now and then. (Stetina's "Speed Mechanics for Lead Guitar"; 8 bpm up, 4 bpm down)

fmbb · a day ago

I don’t thinking applies at all.

When you practice your instrument you get better att doing the exact same things the sloppy player is doing, but you do it in time and in tune.

When you get faster at building software by (ostensibly) focusing on quality you do not do the same thing as someone that focuses on quick results.

fmbb commented on Iceland declares ocean-current instability a national security risk edition.cnn.com/2025/11/1... · Posted by u/donohoe

gnarlouse · 20 days ago

My (paranoid) unpopular take: the AI boom we’re currently experiencing is a concerted effort by the billionaires to maintain operational agency (the ability to think and do at a massive scale) once society begins to collapse due to climate change.

~~ edit ~~

Thank you for the sane responses. I’m reconsidering how much I believe this.

fmbb · 20 days ago

How would that work? AI cannot run if society collapses.

Maintaining all that infrastructure and supplying spare parts is not going to work.

Also AI cannot do anything on its own. Barely anything with support from humans.

fmbb commented on Loose wire leads to blackout, contact with Francis Scott Key bridge ntsb.gov:443/news/press-r... · Posted by u/DamnInteresting

jacquesm · a month ago

Oh, there are plenty of villains here. But they're in offices and wearing ties.

And they should be smacked down hard, but that isn't going to happen because then - inevitably - the role of the regulators would come under scrutiny as well. That is the main issue here. The NTSB did a fantastic job - as they always do - at finding the cause, it never ceases to amaze me how good these people are at finding the technical root cause of accidents. But the bureaucratic issues are the real root cause here: an industry that is running on wafer thing margins with ships that probably should not be out there, risking peoples lives for a miserly wage.

Regulators should step in and level the playing field. Yes, that will cause prices of shipping to rise. But if you really want to solve this that is where I think they should start and I am not at all saying that the system is too powerful to change, just that for some reason they seem to refuse to even name it, let alone force it to change.

fmbb · a month ago

Fwiw and since you received several comments about it, your first comment did not come off to everyone as making excuses. It was pretty clear you were trying to turn peoples attention to the real problem.

There was also no fatalistic tone about the system being too powerful to change. Just clear sharing of observations IMO.

It is not unusual to receive this reaction (being blamed for fatalism and making excuses) from observations like these, I have noticed.

fmbb commented on Android and iPhone users can now share files, starting with the Pixel 10 blog.google/products/andr... · Posted by u/abraham

netsharc · a month ago

Ah, makes me think of MacOS system 7 days. MacOS formatted the 3.5" disks with its own filesystem, so if you copied a file onto it, and put the disk in a Windows PC (or DOS?), the PC would go "Huh?".

3 decades later, hooray, now we can share files between Android and iPhone!

fmbb · a month ago

System 7 had built in tools to read and write DOS disks: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_File_Exchange

fmbb commented on Europe is scaling back GDPR and relaxing AI laws theverge.com/news/823750/... · Posted by u/ksec

basisword · a month ago

It worked to highlight the insane amount of tracking every fucking website does. Unfortunately it didn’t stop it. A browser setting letting me reject everything by default will be a better implementation. But this implementation only failed because almost every website owner wants to track your every move and share those moves with about 50 different other trackers and doesn’t want to be better.

fmbb · a month ago

50 is not even close.

Those banners often list up to 3000 ”partners”.

fmbb commented on I have recordings proving Coinbase knew about breach months before disclosure jonathanclark.com/posts/c... · Posted by u/jclarkcom

KetoManx64 · a month ago

Possible. But Bitcoin is hard capped at 21 million coins. The government can peint more paper money to bail a company out if it makes stupid decisions, but they cannot print more Bitcoin. This will devalue the paper currency even more and also increase the value of Bitcoin. Bitcoin is called a hedge against inflation for a reason.

fmbb · a month ago

The government can bail Bitcoin owners out by buying a lot of Bitcoin and holding it, or even burning the wallets.

fmbb commented on Winamp clone in Swift for macOS github.com/mgreenwood1001... · Posted by u/hyperbole

Arubis · a month ago

[MacAMP](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MacAmp) was real and official, directly from Nullsoft, a million years ago.

fmbb · a month ago

Fun and easy to reskin as well!

fmbb commented on AGI fantasy is a blocker to actual engineering tomwphillips.co.uk/2025/1... · Posted by u/tomwphillips

Aransentin · a month ago

Growing almonds uses 1.3 trillion gallons of water annually in California alone.

This is more than 4 times more than all data centers in the US combined, counting both cooling and the water used for generating their electricity.

What has more utility: Californian almonds, or all IT infrastructure in the US times 4?

fmbb · a month ago

Depends on what the datacenters are used for.

AI has no utility.

Almonds make marzipan.

fmbb commented on Meta replaces WhatsApp for Windows with web wrapper windowslatest.com/2025/11... · Posted by u/DearAll

mihaaly · a month ago

> This is always what efficiency leads to, higher resource consumption. The phenomenon was described already in the 1800s: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jevons_paradox

Completely wrong an irrelevant analogy!

I see where you went sideways, you confused trigger with consequence completely. Here the efficiency for the very same application got very, very very, increadibly hugely, galactically worse. Not better. The premise of the linked article is that the same application gets more efficient. Then comes the increased use of the affected resource. Here the same application went shit, complete shit, concerning efficiency, and had no effect on memory manufacture and prices, WhatsApp is not that significant in computing.

Probably a better analogy was that if technological and tigtly related economical advances raise the availability of resources (here memory, CPU) then things go dumb. If something then the generalized (from time to any resources) Parkinson's law is relevant here: increasing available resources beyond reasonable leading to waste and bad quality outcomes, overcomplication.

fmbb · a month ago

The resource is compute, flops, instructions, cpu seconds, bogomips. And RAM.

The application is ”business logic”.

The engine is JS. The more efficient JS engines get the more compute and memory JS will use to deliver business logic in the universe.

fmbb commented on Meta replaces WhatsApp for Windows with web wrapper windowslatest.com/2025/11... · Posted by u/DearAll

specproc · a month ago

A reasonable comment, unfairly downvoted.

That said, I do firmly agree with the parent: there is choice involved here, engineering decisions.

The Microsoft world is particularly bloated, as they insist on shoehorning in unwanted anti-features into their OS. Much more efficient operating systems (and ways of building a chat client) exist.

Jevon's paradox may describe a general tendency, but it's no excuse for awful software.

fmbb · a month ago

Oh it’s not an excuse for anything. It is just an observation about our economic system.