mightybyte (u/mightybyte)

mightybyte commented on The Offline Club theoffline-club.com... · Posted by u/esher

apgwoz · 2 months ago

This is [Meetup](https://www.meetup.com). Meetup has obviously not aged well, but this is mostly due to changes in ownership and leadership. It’s original mission of “a Meetup Everywhere about Most Everything” is pretty much exactly what The Offline Club seems to be seeking.

I think they’ll find a lot of the same challenges:

    1. Finding space to have events
    2. Ensuring that people who said “I’m going” actually end up going. 
    3. Bootstrapping groups such that when I stumble upon The Offline Club, I can signup for something relevant to me, happening a short time from now. 
    4. Keeping organizers willing to continue hosting events
    5. Keeping away organizers who see it as lead gen for their sales job

Basically, good luck!

Edit: On second look, this is different than Meetup in that it’s not centered around a specific topic … except for being “offline” together, which obviously could create other opportunities for hobbies, etc.

mightybyte · 2 months ago

It definitely has things in common with meetup.com. But it looks meaningfully distinct to me because the appear to specifically have some kind of strong preference against connected devices. Honestly, I've been wishing for things in this vein recently because of the feeling that our world is growing too superficial with our faces buried in phones and being fed by addictive algorithms.

That being said, I think you're right about some of the challenges that an effort like this will encounter.

mightybyte commented on Solving LinkedIn Queens Using Haskell imiron.io/post/linkedin-q... · Posted by u/agnishom

ralferoo · 2 months ago

Thanks for that. Having read the article, I was left with the overwhelming impression that I'd have solved it in a totally different way if I was trying in OCaml.

Briefly, I'd have started with an array which for each colour had an array containing the coordinate pairs for that colour. I'd probably then have sorted by length of each array. The state also has an empty array for the coordinates of each placed queen.

To solve, I'd take the head array as my candidates, and the remaining array of arrays as the next search space. For each candidate, I'd remove that coordinate and anything that was a queen move from it from the remaining arrays, and recursively solve that. If filtering out a candidate coordinate results in an empty list for any of the remaining arrays, you know that you've generated an invalid solution and can backtrack.

At no point would I actually have a representation of the board. That feels very imperative rather than functional to me.

To me, this solution immediately jumps out from the example - one of the queens in on a colour with only 1 square, so it HAS to be there. Placing that there immediately rules out one of the choices in both colours with 2 squares, so their positions are known immediately. From that point, the other 2 large regions have also been reduced to a single candidate each.

mightybyte · 2 months ago

Yeah, comparing to how you'd solve this in any other mainstream language is really an apples-to-oranges comparison here because this is explicitly tackling the contrived problem of solving it at the type level rather than at the much more common value level. Very few languages in existence have the ability to do this kind of type-level computation. I'd say Haskell is really the only language that could conceivably be called "viable for mainstream use" that currently supports it, and even in Haskell's case the support is new, largely experimental, in a state of active research, and not well integrated with the ergonomics of the rest of the language.

mightybyte commented on Solving LinkedIn Queens Using Haskell imiron.io/post/linkedin-q... · Posted by u/agnishom

codethief · 2 months ago

Reminds me of this classic: https://aphyr.com/posts/342-typing-the-technical-interview

mightybyte · 2 months ago

As a professional haskeller, I feel it necessary to point out for people in this thread who are less exposed to Haskell and who may be Haskell-curious...this is not what real-world commercial Haskell code looks like. To use a C analogy, I'd say it's closer to IOCCC entries than Linux kernel code.

mightybyte commented on Garfield Minus Garfield garfieldminusgarfield.net... · Posted by u/mike1o1

noman-land · 5 months ago

Since I'm too lazy to do this myself, I'm putting it out there for the world to make for me.

I want to see Rogan Minus Rogan and Lex Minus Lex podcasts where all the host's speaking parts are cut out and you only hear the guest's replies.

Thanks in advance.

mightybyte · 5 months ago

In this same vein, Hot Ones minus Sean might be pretty entertaining as well.

mightybyte commented on Recursion kills: The story behind CVE-2024-8176 in libexpat blog.hartwork.org/posts/e... · Posted by u/spyc

mightybyte · 5 months ago

I would argue that the title is misleading and overly alarmist here. This particular bug may have involved recursion and a stack overflow, but that's like saying "malloc kills" in the title of an article about a heap overflow bug. The existence of stack overflow bugs does not imply that recursion is bad any more than the existence of heap overflow bugs implies that malloc is bad. Recursion and malloc are tools that both have pretty well understood resource limitations, and one must take those limitations into account when employing those tools.

mightybyte commented on Tell Mozilla: it's time to ditch Google mozillapetition.com/... · Posted by u/notpushkin

mightybyte · 5 months ago

My default uninformed assumption would be that Google is paying Mozilla for making Google the default search engine for Firefox. Does anyone know if this is the case, and if so, what the likely magnitudes are? Because it seems like Google can throw quantities of money at Mozilla that would easily overwhelm whatever pressure this petition might put on them.

mightybyte commented on Ask HN: How did the internet discover my subdomain? · Posted by u/govideo

mightybyte · 6 months ago

If you've made any kind of DNS entries involving this subdomain, then congratulations, you've notified the world of its existence. There are tools out there that leverage this information and let you get all the subdomains for a domain. Here's the first one I found in a quick search:

https://pentest-tools.com/information-gathering/find-subdoma...

mightybyte commented on Mark Cuban offers to fund former 18F employees techcrunch.com/2025/03/01... · Posted by u/softwaredoug

matt_s · 6 months ago

Privatization is what a lot of people believe is the answer, thinking that there is so much waste and useless things the Federal government does. These people must have never worked at a large corporation. I have a relative in the federal government and we would share stories because the dysfunctions are basically the same.

Any large organization of humans working uses a pyramid organization since like the middle ages (or even well before). There will be inept people, waste, corruption, people stealing, etc. but there will also be the vast majority trying to do a good job and feel satisfaction in their work. It doesn't matter if its the federal government or a private corporation, its simply a trade-off of the organization structure. I don't think we, as humans, know of a better/different way to organize that would be more effective.

mightybyte · 6 months ago

There's a spectrum of efficiency/redundancy choices an organization can make. On one (theoretical) end of the spectrum the organization maximally leverages each individual's unique skills/knowledge. This is the most efficient part of the spectrum. On the other end every person is an interchangeable cog. This is the most resilient but also least efficient part of the spectrum. Small organizations usually skew much more to the efficiency end of the spectrum because they typically have significant resource constraints. As an organization grows, more people depend on its existence, and my observation has been that resilience and self preservation typically become more important than efficiency. This phenomenon is not unique to governments, it happens in all kinds of organizations.

mightybyte commented on Scalable watermarking for identifying large language model outputs nature.com/articles/s4158... · Posted by u/ghshephard

mightybyte · 10 months ago

I have a question for all the LLM and LLM-detection researchers out there. Wikipedia says that the Turing test "is a test of a machine's ability to exhibit intelligent behaviour equivalent to, or indistinguishable from, that of a human."

Three things seem to be in conflict here:

1. This definition of intelligence...i.e. "behavior indistinguishable from a human"

2. The idea that LLMs are artificial intelligence

3. The idea that we can detect if something is generated by an LLM

This feels to me like one of those trilemmas, where only two of the three can be true. Or, if we take #1 as an axiom, then it seems like the extent to which we can detect when things are generated by an LLM would imply that the LLM is not a "true" artificial intelligence. Can anyone deeply familiar with the space comment on my reasoning here? I'm particularly interested in thoughts from people actually working on LLM detection. Do you think that LLM-detection is technically feasible? If so, do you think that implies that they're not "true" AI (for whatever definition of "true" you think makes sense)?

mightybyte commented on ChatGPT Search openai.com/index/introduc... · Posted by u/thm

greenavocado · 10 months ago

Has google completely stopped working for anyone else?

I can still search things, i get results but, they're an ordered list of popular places the engine is directing me to. Some kind of filtering is occurring on nearly every search i make that's making the results feel entirely useless.

Image search stopped working sometime ago and now it just runs an AI filter on whatever image you search for, tells you there's a man in the picture and gives up.

Youtube recommendations is always hundreds of videos i've watched already, with maybe 1-2 recommendations to new channels when i know there's millions of content creators out there struggling who it will never introduce me to. What happened to the rabbit holes of crazy youtube stuff you could go down?

This product is a shell of its old self, why did it stop working?

mightybyte · 10 months ago

Google search is completely broken IMO. I stopped using Google search years ago and every time I go back on the off chance that it's bigger index has something that DuckDuckGo couldn't find for me.

Image search isn't great either but it still often gives me something close and that usually satisfies my image searching needs.

I still find YouTube recommendations quite good for me, but there are occasional ones I've watched already. I still go down its fun (and educational!) rabbit holes all the time.