nucleardog (u/nucleardog)

nucleardog commented on Ban me at the IP level if you don't like me boston.conman.org/2025/08... · Posted by u/classichasclass

sarchertech · a day ago

> I wanted to order something while I was in America at my friend’s place. Fuck me of course. Not just my IP was problematic, but my phone number too.

Your mobile provider was routing you through Austria while in the US?

nucleardog · a day ago

Not OP, but as far as I know that's how it works, yeah.

When I was in China, using a Chinese SIM had half the internet inaccessible (because China). As I was flying out I swapped my SIM back to my North American one... and even within China I had fully unrestricted (though expensive) access to the entire internet.

I looked into it at the time (now that I had access to non-Chinese internet sites!) and forgot the technical details, but seems that this was how the mobile network works by design. Your provider is responsible for your traffic.

nucleardog commented on The cost of interrupted work (2023) blog.oberien.de/2023/11/0... · Posted by u/_vaporwave_

sublinear · 3 days ago

Sure, but what if the person moving the tables is in the middle of a larger logistical problem?

Caterers and guests are coming. More interruptions in the form of calls, texts, and emails don't stop and each is also "just 10 seconds".

I think it's pretty rare to find jobs where your role is so clearly defined that all you have to do is move tables. Most work asks that you solve a high level problem nobody else wants to deal with. You probably weren't asked to move tables. You were more likely asked to coordinate a venue for a wedding or something. The people assigned to you who were told they'd only have to move tables end up not finding them. Interrupting them is just as unacceptable because now they have to rush to home depot to buy them at the last minute and they're out of billable hours. They deliver the new tables and now you're the one moving them yourself.

Interruptions suck for everyone because there are always leaky abstractions and messy dependency trees. People incorrectly assume some details are trivial and factoring out the pain points is at least discouraged if not considered insubordination. Bad management and bad planning are everywhere.

nucleardog · 3 days ago

> Interruptions suck for everyone because there are always leaky abstractions and messy dependency trees

I think the "dependency trees" is usually the most obvious killer. You're putting tables away... who made sure everyone's even out of the building? Who cleared the stuff off the tables?

Even ignoring that... Even if the job is just purely "move tables", I'd propose a simple thought experiment: We're operating a venue for events. Imagine a church basement. We have 75 tables and a large closet we keep them all in between events.

You can choose one of two people to clean up after an event:

Person A has put these tables away 176 times over that past year.

Person B has put these tables away 3 times over the past year.

(If you're not looking and going "yeah those two things look exactly equal", than intuitively I think you have some sense that even unskilled positions benefit from experience and skill.)

If I'm the venue owner and I'm paying hourly for cleanup, I'd put my full faith in Person A. It's not a "skilled" position or a "knowledge" job, but someone that has done it that many times has likely found the easiest and quickest way to get it done with minimal wasted time. When exceptions come up they know what to do or who to talk to. They've also realized that carrying a rag in their pocket and wiping the table before they put it away costs them 5% extra time now, but saves us overall a bunch of time because the event set up shift no longer needs to run around with paint scrapers to remove dried cheese from half the tables after fondue night.

I think, in general, the idea of "unskilled" labour should be applied more to "the barrier to entry" more than "the people that work in that labour". Many "unskilled labours" _can_ be done by someone with no skill. They are done _well_ by someone with a lot of experience and effort that I think make a lot of "knowledge jobs" look pathetic in comparison.

nucleardog commented on The cost of interrupted work (2023) blog.oberien.de/2023/11/0... · Posted by u/_vaporwave_

apercu · 3 days ago

I’ve been saying for years that an interruption costs me _at least_ 15 minutes.

Knowledge work is not the same as physical work. Both are noble in my opinion, but not the same.

nucleardog · 3 days ago

When I'm doing "physical labour" I find interruptions almost as impactful. (Though I'd accept that I'm the type to just overthink things.)

"Take this pile of stuff and pack it in that moving truck."

I mean, sure, I might just grab the nearest thing, carry it and set it in the first available spot and repeat... But usually I'm putting a little more into it than that. Unless the destination is comically oversized, I need to make sure I'm making good use of the space. Even just packing boxes, putting a 150lb plastic tub full of ammo on top of a bunch of boxes full of dishes is... probably not going to turn out well at the other end.

I started by doing a quick walk through and looking at labels to figure out roughly what I have to deal with. If the boxes are somewhat standard, I've probably found a pattern to how they best fit to minimize wasted space. I may have some piles I'm working on on the side that are "very heavy" or "very light" to try and at least roughly sort them into "heavy on the bottom light on top". That also lets me cut down the number of trips since the "very light" boxes can probably be carried two or three at a time. The boxes stack 6" short of the top of the truck, so I should probably put these bed frame boards aside and once I have solid base of boxes I can slide those right on top...

So I'm walking around with the context of a couple of temporary piles, a couple things to go once I have the right spot for them, the rough shape of the source pile, vaguely what the inside of the truck looks like and what I need next for each stack, the next couple moves to make, and more all floating around in my head. Losing that is not without consequence.

"Get all these pallets off of the loading dock and into the store."

They probably weren't put into the truck and then unloaded based on any sort of knowledge of the layout of the store at all. And each individual stack of pallets was stacked for the lower one supporting the upper one sufficiently to survive a semi ride across the continent. (If you have two pallets of TVs and two pallets of toilet paper, you don't make a stack of each.) I could just grab the next stack, set it down where the first pallet belongs, grab the one on top, drive that to where the next belongs...

Or I could see "Hey there's two stacks here with TVs on the bottom and toilet paper on top. Those are opposite corners of the store. Let me spend a few seconds on the loading dock to restack these, and cut my driving way down."

I _could_ take this one with that one I see back there... but that one way back there is deep into the pile, and I've got limited "scratch" space to drop stuff. In all likelihood, if I don't just take this one now and eat the drive across the store, it's going to just be in my way for the next hour. Screw it.

If someone pulls me on to something else for a bit and I lose all the context, the next few steps I have planned, why I put that pallet to the side for now, etc... yeah, I'm gonna come back and operate less efficiently.

(And if you're thinking "well yeah but you're clearly an insane person" or "that's just bringing a CS background to forklift driving"... I had and have no CS background, and while I picked this stuff up way more intuitively this was something the "lifers", who in some cases had literal brain damage, were teaching to the new guys.)

"Count these recyclables by type and write down the number on this paper."

Okay this one there's no real crazy context to hold in your head, but you definitely get into a flow where your brain is almost checked out besides your hands moving containers and your brain keeping tally marks.

While I _can_ do basic math, there were a number of slightly embarrassing incidents where I'd done things like looked at a paper where I'd written "100", "100", "12" and decided that added up to "112" because I was so deep into "put containers in fingers, put in correct bin, make tally mark" apparently the math part of my brain had fully turned off.

> Knowledge work is not the same as physical work.

I do disagree. I don't mean to give you any shit about it though. If I hadn't started in it when I was 14 years I have no doubt I'd be here emphatically agreeing with you.

I think the main difference between "knowledge work" and "labour" is basically where the floor is to get the job done.

Anyone can move boxes from A to B--a good mover can do it much faster, fit more things in less space and get it to the other end in one piece much better.

Anyone not a complete idiot could be shoved in a backhoe and dig a hole without tipping it over. An experienced operator can do shit that borders on magic. (I mean, go look up some YouTube videos.)

Anyone can grab a tub of drywall mud and a can of paint and patch and repaint a room. A good drywaller/painter can take your wavy wall full of holes and turn it into a piece of glass.

Anyone can glue two pipes together. A good plumber can look and get a picture of the entire plumbing _system_ the house and figure out how the gurgle in that drain means there's an air lock and the plumbing vent on your roof is blocked. Or figure out that the reason your reverse osmosis system's pump keeps cycling on and off is because the transformer supplying it power has failed. (Yeah, I had a plumber pull out a bench power supply to fix my water system...)

Anyone can drive a forklift around. Someone with a minimal amount of sense and training can do it safely. An experienced operator is trying their best to optimize for some sort of traveling salesman problem involving the locations being queued in multiple stacks on a 2D plane with imperfect knowledge.

Someone at the floor of these roles... yeah, they haven't put enough thought into it for an interruption to matter. But if you ever deal with a "really good" mover, equipment operator, tradesperson, or anything else... that shit makes a difference.

The difference between a knowledge worker and a labourer is that no one's asking their forklift driver making $35k/yr how to make their job more efficient. They're asking their MBA making $150k/yr and software engineer making $300k/yr to create a program to design software to give the driver a more efficient route.

nucleardog commented on How does the US use water? construction-physics.com/... · Posted by u/juliangamble

rconti · 4 days ago

Honestly, if you're maintaining a lawn in places that don't get year-round rain, you need to water it. I grew up in Seattle and it never occurred to me that there were places where you didn't need to water a lawn.

nucleardog · 4 days ago

> Honestly, if you're maintaining a lawn in places that don't get year-round rain, you need to water it.

Only if you want to grow non-native species and always have it looking like a magazine cover.

My house is sitting in a five acre clearing covered in whatever flora decides to grow there, with minimal "curation" (tend to avoid cutting beautiful native flowers to encourage them to spread, do try and deal with removing things like poison ivy).

When it rains, everything greens up, grows quickly, needs lots of mowing. If it doesn't rain for a few weeks while the sun cooks it, some things will go a bit brown and lifeless. Then the next rain comes and it all perks right back up. When winter comes, it all sits under the snow for months and months and when the snow melts it picks right back up where it left off.

Most of these plants were here before we were and they'll be here after. They don't need my help.

nucleardog commented on AI crawlers, fetchers are blowing up websites; Meta, OpenAI are worst offenders theregister.com/2025/08/2... · Posted by u/rntn

ajsnigrutin · 5 days ago

Why would they have to?

What's wrong with crawlers? That's how google finds you, and people find you on google.

Just put some sensible request limits per hour per ip, and be done.

nucleardog · 5 days ago

> Just put some sensible request limits per hour per ip, and be done.

I have no personal experience, but probably worth reading like... any of the comments where people are complaining about these crawlers.

Claims are that they're: ignoring robots.txt; sending fake User-Agent headers; they're crawling from multiple IPs; when blocked they will use residential proxies.

People who have deployed Anubis to try and address this include: Linux Kernel Mailing List, FreeBSD, Arch Linux, NixOS, Proxmox, Gnome, Wine, FFMPEG, FreeDesktop, Gitea, Marginalia, FreeCAD, ReactOS, Duke University, The United Nations (UNESCO)...

I'm relatively certain if this were as simple as "just set a sensible rate limit and the crawlers will stop DDOS'ing your site" one person at one of these organizations would have figured that out by now. I don't think they're all doing it because they really love anime catgirls.

nucleardog commented on Ballot Hand Counts Lead to Inaccuracy votingrightslab.org/2024/... · Posted by u/bediger4000

philips · 7 days ago

How many positions and measures do you vote on in your ballots?

In my US County I vote on 20+ ballot measures and positions most elections. Very few other countries have the ballot complexity and sheer number of votable items like the US.

nucleardog · 7 days ago

Agreed. With _what_ Americans are electing, the number of additional policy questions, etc, I can see how hand counting could be a lot more difficult than elsewhere.

However my question would be more one of... why do that then?

Are voters actually able to make a conscious, informed decision on the governor, state rep, coroner, judge, board of equalization member, insurance commissioner, etc? Or are they looking at the governor and _maybe_ state rep and just voting R/D down the ballot?

In that case, at _best_ a candidate can influence who people vote for mostly based on how much money they can spend on advertising, memorable sound bites, and advocating to change things that may not need changing. Maybe we don't need a bazillion ads telling us how "tough on crime" the judge will be in a country with almost 5x the rate of incarceration as China?

Maybe Arizona would have an easier time counting elections if people didn't need to vote for the State Mine Inspector?

It varies by province, but in Canada generally the judges are selected by having an arms-length committee of some lay people, a couple judges and a couple lawyers select a few possible candidates from people who meet some reasonable qualifications, and the minister of justice picks from the list and has it confirmed by the current government.

nucleardog commented on Blood oxygen monitoring returning to Apple Watch in the US apple.com/newsroom/2025/0... · Posted by u/thm

skadamou · 12 days ago

That's definitely a danger zone for healthy people but interestingly enough people with things like COPD may have a blood oxygen level in the 80s and while that is indicative of the disease, they may be totally stable and may not even need oxygen [1].

[1] https://www.drugs.com/medical-answers/normal-oxygen-level-so...

nucleardog · 12 days ago

Bodies are generally pretty amazing in that sense. As long as things go out of spec _slowly_, we will often adapt quite well. In the short term, we will tend to balance even fairly extreme changes out through various chemical processes and in the long term people can even develop heritable genetic changes. (E.g., how people acclimatize and have in some cases adapted to living at higher altitudes[0])

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Effects_of_high_altitude_on_hu...

nucleardog commented on Ask HN: How can ChatGPT serve 700M users when I can't run one GPT-4 locally? · Posted by u/superasn

potatolicious · 18 days ago

Would anybody buy the hardware though?

Sure, datacenters will get rid of the hardware - but only because it's no longer commercially profitable run them, presumably because compute demands have eclipsed their abilities.

It's kind of like buying a used GeForce 980Ti in 2025. Would anyone buy them and run them besides out of nostalgia or curiosity? Just the power draw makes them uneconomical to run.

Much more likely every single H100 that exists today becomes e-waste in a few years. If you have need for H100-level compute you'd be able to buy it in the form of new hardware for way less money and consuming way less power.

For example if you actually wanted 980Ti-level compute in a desktop today you can just buy a RTX5050, which is ~50% faster, consumes half the power, and can be had for $250 brand new. Oh, and is well-supported by modern software stacks.

nucleardog · 18 days ago

> Sure, datacenters will get rid of the hardware - but only because it's no longer commercially profitable run them, presumably because compute demands have eclipsed their abilities.

I think the existence of a pretty large secondary market for enterprise servers and such kind of shows that this won't be the case.

Sure, if you're AWS and what you're selling _is_ raw compute, then couple generation old hardware may not be sufficiently profitable for you anymore... but there are a lot of other places that hardware could be applied to with different requirements or higher margins where it may still be.

Even if they're only running models a generation or two out of date, there are a lot of use cases today, with today's models, that will continue to work fine going forward.

And that's assuming it doesn't get replaced for some other reason that only applies when you're trying to sell compute at scale. A small uptick in the failure rate may make a big dent at OpenAI but not for a company that's only running 8 cards in a rack somewhere and has a few spares on hand. A small increase in energy efficiency might offset the capital outlay to upgrade at OpenAI, but not for the company that's only running 8 cards.

I think there's still plenty of room in the market in places where running inference "at cost" would be profitable that are largely untapped right now because we haven't had a bunch of this hardware hit the market at a lower cost yet.

nucleardog commented on EHRs: The hidden distraction in your doctor's office spectrum.ieee.org/electro... · Posted by u/pseudolus

fluidcruft · 23 days ago

I work in hospitals and it's just a constant stream from IT of "oh you just figured it out! congratulations! time to change they way you do things! this time we've solved all your problems that you're not complaining about! try to reengineer how to do anything now! lol! we hear you and feel your pain! here read ten pages of drivel that tells you how important and amazing IT is but won't actually tell you how to do anything with the new new tools and lives in some fantasyland that has nothing to do with the work that you actually need to get done!" all while simultaneously making every single computer and workflow somehow slower and more complex. Add another login here... force a quicker logout there... And then admin will come in with "thanks IT! you're doing amazing work! by the way everyone else we expect your productivity and caseload to increase!"

Meanwhile getting things to work is filing tickets followed by "oh gosh that's so complex!" and months of moron pitcrew showing up " to fix it" who can't fix anything and who seem to think it's just that we're dumbasses who can't figure out who to reboot a computer.

Honestly it's difficult to not grow the instant opinion that IT should just shut the fuck up and fire themselves. Who the hell do they even work for?

nucleardog · 23 days ago

> Honestly it's difficult to not grow the instant opinion that IT should just shut the fuck up and fire themselves. Who the hell do they even work for?

Management. Management whose goals and incentives don't align with yours. Or IT's.

If management cared about your experience and quality of life, then presumably they'd be riding IT to get shit fixed. They'd be providing staff and resources necessary to resolve the issues. They'd be consulting with the staff using the programs before buying/deploying them. They'd be consulting with IT before buying/deploying them. They're not because they don't care.

They went and bought some EHR system and an expensive support contract based pretty much entirely on price and/or how many golf games the vendor would pay for, dropped the steaming pile of turds into IT's lap, and had them implement it. They probably also told them to go ahead and integrate it with all the other systems in use that they sourced the same way.

Meanwhile, every time they've done a budget for the past 20 years they've cut IT just a bit more because it's a cost center so the lower you can get that on your spreadsheet, the better you look, so there's like two kids and a grumpy old balding guy who spends most of his day working on reports for audit and compliance and they're responsible for the entire hospital.

(At the hospital one friend worked at he was responsible for taking support tickets along-side the two other IT staff, working the on-call, and also _every single integration between systems in the hospital_. He wasn't a software developer or anything. He'd just started as purely help desk and seemed to have a vague idea how to write documentation and only cost like $35k/yr so he was clearly the best person to be responsible for communicating with all the vendors and making sure the EHR system could talk to the MRI machines.)

But don't worry, even if this comedy of errors somehow gets to a working state... when that contract's up for renewal, they're going to look at the price and if a better one comes along they'll do the same thing again. Same for every other system in use all of which will have a ripple effect across every other system.

Hey, at least you have job securi--what's that? The hospital was just bought by private equity and merged with another hospital and the entire IT department's laid off effective immediately?

nucleardog commented on If you're remote, ramble stephango.com/ramblings... · Posted by u/lawgimenez

BoxFour · 23 days ago

This strikes me as a somewhat unfair characterization of many of these communities. In my experience, a much more common issue is that the people who do have answers end up ignoring the group and it becomes pointless. It rarely becomes a source of career hindrance or long-lasting judgement, it just ends up being useless because there's not a lot of incentive for the expert side of the equation.

People who are likely to judge people for dumb questions are rarely involved in those groups in the first place, for exactly all the obvious reasons.

The more realistic outcome isn’t that your boss ends up a drunk puking slob (and for what it’s worth most of these groups don’t include leadership anyway, so not sure why anyone's boss would be involved) but that an intern floats a terrible idea ("I'm thinking of taking these 10 shots of 151"), nobody responds, they take silence as approval, and they end up causing a mess and then being judged for the mess they caused.

A quick gut check from them with a healthy group might get a few eye rolls and a "here's why that's a bad idea", but not any lasting judgement unless they completely ignored the advice.

The only case I can think of where that might happen is if they already did something which has policy or legal implications ("hey i accidentally dumped the whole user base including PII to my phone"), in which case - good? There should be a review mechanism, including consequences if they ignored a bunch of roadblocks.

nucleardog · 23 days ago

> It rarely becomes a source of career hindrance or long-lasting judgement, it just ends up being useless because there's not a lot of incentive for the expert side of the equation.

Yeah, the incentive structure for something like this is totally misaligned for this to work effectively in many cases outside of a very small, tight-knit team. (In which case... why the formality in the first place?)

For the "juniors": Why waste time digging through documentation, searching, or thinking--I can just post and get an answer with less effort.

For the "seniors": I'm already busy. Why waste time answering these same questions over and over when there's no personal benefit to doing so?

Sure, there are some juniors that will try and use it as a last resort and some seniors that will try their best to be helpful because they're just helpful people... but I usually see the juniors drowned out by those described above and the experts turn into those described above.

I think we _could_ come up with something that better aligned incentives though. Spitballing--

Juniors can ask a question. Once a senior answers, the junior then takes responsibility for making sure that question doesn't need to be answered there again--improving the documentation based on that answer. Whether that's creating new documentation, adding links or improving keywords to help with search, etc. That change then gets posted for a quick edit/approval by the senior mainly to ensure accuracy.

Now we're looking at something more like:

For the "juniors": If I ask a question, I will get an answer but it will create additional work on my end. If I ask something already answered in the documentation that I could have easily found, I basically have to publicly out myself as not having looked when I can't propose an improvement to the documentation. And that, fairly, is going to involve some judgement.

For the "seniors": Once I answer a question, someone is going to take responsibility for getting this from my head into documentation so I never need to answer this again.

This has an added benefit of shifting some of the documentation time off of the higher paid, generally more productive employees onto the lower paid, less productive employees and requiring them to build out some understanding in order to put it into words. It may also help produce some better documentation because stuff that a senior writes is more often going to assume knowledge that stuff a junior writing may think to explain because _they_ didn't know it. It also means that searching in the Slack/other channel, any question you find should end up with a link to the documentation where it's been answered which should help you discover more adjacent documentation all of which should be the most up-to-date and canonical answer we have.