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serallak commented on Data centers in space makes no sense   civai.org/blog/space-data... · Posted by u/ajyoon
pclmulqdq · 8 days ago
Solar panels in space are more efficient, but on the ground we have dead dinosaurs we can burn. The efficiency gain is also more than offset by the fact that you can't replace a worn out panel. A few years into the life of your satellite its power production drops.
serallak · 8 days ago
If they plan to put this things in a low orbit their useful life before reentry is low anyway.

A quick search gave me a lifespan of around 5 years for a starlink satellite.

If you put in orbit a steady stream of new satellites every year maintenance is not an issue, you just stop using worn out or broken ones.

serallak commented on Alleged Jabber Zeus Coder 'MrICQ' in U.S. Custody   krebsonsecurity.com/2025/... · Posted by u/todsacerdoti
aswegs8 · 3 months ago
Why should the CIA need to kidnap someone from Italy if they can just provide info about the person to the Italian govt so he gets arrested and extradited?
serallak · 3 months ago
Well about that ...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abu_Omar_case

This is well know case of a "person of interest" kidnapped by the CIA in Milano, Italy. While the CIA was assisted by the Italian Intelligence, it was a completely illegal operation, without any due process or judiciary oversight.

serallak commented on The illegible nature of software development talent   surfingcomplexity.blog/20... · Posted by u/hackthemack
tikhonj · 4 months ago
It's used here as a specific term from Seeing like a State[1][2], which is one of those books that got popular with a specific set of online tech folks. "Legibitility" in that particular sense is a very useful concept with no other convenient word, so I'm not too surprised it caught on.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seeing_Like_a_State

[2]: available free to read online: https://files.libcom.org/files/Seeing%20Like%20a%20State%20-...

serallak · 4 months ago
For what is worth, I read the book this year, after reading about it in the blog Bits about Money by patio11.
serallak commented on Microsoft 365 Copilot's commercial failure   perspectives.plus/p/micro... · Posted by u/jukkan
w0m · 4 months ago
> It’s “installed” at my company but basically refuses to interact with basic company data like files in sharepoint.

on my work computer - there's a sep. 365Copilot app that is tied into Teams,Sharepoint, outlook, and I believe our engineering wiki. Probably other stuff I'm not aware of.

I'm honestly shocked how often I use it now.

If I get a random Pipeline failure; I'll copy/paste it into the o365 Copilot app - and it points me to an email I didn't notice ~3 months ago about a new policy change, and then points me to discussion thread I wasn't on ~2 weeks ago about how to get in compliance with direct links to EngWiki 'how to fix..' documentation, and an Teams link to join the breaking teams Office Hours.

Just off a single ~1 sentence prompt and a stack trace

It's kind of amazing.

serallak · 4 months ago
The part where it gave you access to a thread you were not a part of seems scary to me..

In this case your absence from the thread was probably an oversight, but in general there could be a very good reason for it

serallak commented on What if I don't want videos of my hobby time available to the world?   neilzone.co.uk/2025/09/wh... · Posted by u/speckx
RajT88 · 4 months ago
Agree. I went to a family gathering recently, and my wife's cousin was walking around live streaming. People were pissed once they figured out that private conversations were uploading live to the internet.

The same guy did similar when his mom was on her death bed. Jesus Christ.

serallak · 4 months ago
A friend that was going to deliver a child told us about a dad-to-be that was going around the maternity ward making videos ...
serallak commented on Programmers aren’t so humble anymore, maybe because nobody codes in Perl   wired.com/story/programme... · Posted by u/Timothee
DonHopkins · 6 months ago
I remember encountering exactly that problem in the late 80's when trying to write down a Perl program that I mentally designed by foolishly thinking in terms of Lisp / PostScript (later Python / JavaScript / Ruby) polymorphic arrays with normal object references.

I had a clear simple straightforward mental model of how Lisp and PostScript references and also C pointers worked, which only misled and confused and disappointed me when thinking about Perl:

https://donhopkins.medium.com/the-shape-of-psiber-space-octo...

When I sat down and tried to type my simple straightforward design in as Perl, I suddenly realized that you can't have a reference to something that doesn't have a name, and that Perl name based references, as much as they masqueraded as C or C++ "&" syntax that takes the address of an object, were a TOTALLY DIFFERENT THING.

Perl loved to cherry pick and amalgamate the syntax of other languages (usually terrible languages like bash and awk), presumably to "help people who know that language learn Perl easily", but without any of the semantics, which actually makes it MUCH harder to learn, because "&" LOOKS like C but behaves completely differently and is much more limited and quirky.

You don't have to assign a C value to a global variable in order to take its address.

The syntax and choice of sigils isn't the hard part about learning a language, and if you get the semantics wrong, imitating just the shallow surface syntax of another language that got the semantics right only confuses and disappoints.

When you haphazardly mix and match the "syntactic sugar" of many poorly designed languages together into a discordant stew of artificial sweeteners with bizarrely different semantics, you get "syntactic syrup of ipecac".

Pre-Perl 5 (Perl 4 and earlier):

References were purely symbolic, built on typeglobs and package-variable names. You could only alias or refer to a variable that lived in the symbol table; there was no way to grab a pointer to a literal or temporary value, and you couldn't take a reference to a lexical (my) variable under strict. This made nested or nameless data structures effectively impossible without heavy manual bookkeeping.

Perl 5.0 (October 1994) — Hard references and anonymous structures:

Perl 5 finally introduced true, first-class references via the backslash operator (\) and the anonymous data constructors: [ … ] for arrays and { ... } for hashes. This let you write things like:

  my $tree = { name => "root", children => [ { name => "leaf" } ] };
without ever giving the inner hash or array a global name.

Explicit dereferencing, context-sensitivity, and autovivification:

Even with hard references, you must unpack them explicitly ($ref->[0], $href->{key}), and Perl’s context rules (scalar vs. list vs. void) can still be tricky. Perl’s autovivification feature (auto-creation of nested hashes/arrays on first dereference) eases some boilerplate—but can also surprise newcomers used to more explicit models.

How Perl compares to Lisp, PostScript, JavaScript, Ruby, Python, etc:

Lisp: Lists are built from cons cells and can be manipulated directly as first-class values, e.g. (list 1 2 (list 3 4)).

PostScript: Arrays ([1 2]) and dictionaries (<< /Key (Value) >>) are literal, nested, and don’t require separate pointer syntax.

JavaScript / Ruby / Python: All provide JSON-style literals ([1,2,[3,4]], {"x":1,"y":[2,3]}) and let you dive into nested structures without ever writing a backslash or sigil beyond the top-level container.

By not getting references right from day 1, then reluctantly iterating over decades on experimental hacks and after-the-fact syntactic baggage layered on top of the initial terrible design, Perl made trade-offs that cost much more than they saved from the self-inflicted problems they were trying to solve.

Fragmented syntax: Multiple dereferencing forms and feature-gated tweaks (postfix deref, autovivification pragmas) splinter Perl into a patchwork of behaviors.

Surprise side-effects: Autovivification can silently spawn large, unused data structures, leading to hidden memory/performance hits.

Subtle bugs: Context-sensitive rules (when autovivify, when not) remain a common gotcha, even for veteran Perl hackers.

Compatibility drag: Supporting both legacy 5.x versions and modern features forces extra version-checks, boilerplate, and warning squelches.

Cognitive overhead: Juggling backslashes, sigils, and varied deref styles demands a more fragmented mental model than the uniform list/map syntax of Lisp-style or JSON-based languages.

"The unspoken, right brain constraint here is that the complexity introduced by a solution to a design problem must be somehow proportional to the problem's importance." -Guido van Rossum

Edit: Of course Perl finally apes JSON-style literal syntax almost verbatim, but still has the old bad semantics, and getting there plastered over deep complexity you still have to cope with:

Feature-gated syntax: New deref forms (postfix, slices) require pragmas or newer Perl versions.

Autovivification surprises: Nested lookups can silently create unused data, bloating memory.

Multiple deref styles: Backslashes, braces, arrows and sigils—each with its own context rules—fracture your mental model.

Legacy support: To run on <5.24, you need version checks, warning silences, or to avoid modern sugar altogether.

Hidden complexity: Under the JSON-like literals lies a maze of sigils, contexts, and edge-case behaviors—far from the uniform simplicity of Lisp / PostScript / JS.

"Many, if not most" isn't good enough, because the edge cases always come back to bite you. You can't just rearrange the deck chairs on the Titanic and expect the ship not to sink. And sank it did, a long time ago.

serallak · 6 months ago
> JavaScript / Ruby / Python: All provide JSON-style literals ([1,2,[3,4]], {"x":1,"y":[2,3]})

The Perl syntax for this is pretty similar:

[1,2,[3,4]], {"x", 1,"y", [2,3]}

that can also be written, with a bit of syntactic sugar:

[1,2,[3,4]], {x => 1, y => [2,3]}

For many, if not most, cases, given a Perl data structure, the round trip "Perl -> JSON -> Perl" is transparent.

serallak commented on Doge Put Free Tax Filing Tool on Chopping Block After One Meeting with Lobbyists   wired.com/story/doge-dire... · Posted by u/josefresco
AlecSchueler · 7 months ago
> Why can't I log in, see what information employers and banks and whatnot have submitted about my income, add any pertinent information about deductions or additional income, appeal any inaccurate information, then click 'request refund' or 'pay dues', select which bank account to use from the information they already have, and be done?

This is exactly how it works here in The Netherlands.

serallak · 7 months ago
Also here in Italy, of all places.
serallak commented on When the sun dies, could life survive on the Jupiter ocean moon Europa?   space.com/astronomy/when-... · Posted by u/amichail
quantadev · 8 months ago
Without the sun the only source of energy would be starlight. Planets don't _generate_ energy of their own, they only radiate away energy. So without the sun everything will simply freeze to near absolute zero, once it radiates away all heat energy.
serallak · 8 months ago
Geothermal energy is also a thing.

Is the heat produced inside a planet, mostly from the radioactive decay of natural isotopes.

Volcanoes are not powered by the Sun. Of course this production will cease when all isotopes will be depleted, but that will take a very long time.

serallak commented on Dijkstra On the foolishness of "natural language programming"   cs.utexas.edu/~EWD/transc... · Posted by u/nimbleplum40
dr_dshiv · 10 months ago
He didn’t understand the concept of the vibe. Here’s the best theory article I’ve read

https://www.glass-bead.org/article/a-theory-of-vibe/

serallak · 10 months ago
The difference between the clarity of Dijkstra writing and the text at this link is astounding.
serallak commented on The top 10% owns 87% of the stocks   awealthofcommonsense.com/... · Posted by u/jasdi
sigmoid10 · a year ago
Your source says that it depends on how you look at it. See the similar discussion regarding Iraq war spending in the other comments.

But it is also totally irrelevant, because the point is that Washington was one of the richest people in America before the war started and even richer when he died. There is no doubt about that.

serallak · a year ago
I'm not doubting that Washington was very very rich.

I'm doubting the different and very specific claim that "George Washington could have financed the entire Revolutionary War" with just a third of his wealth.

To me, the math simply does not add up. I suppose it can be chalked up to hyperbole ?

I also don't see how a discussion of the Iraq war could be relevant to that claim ...

u/serallak

KarmaCake day121November 22, 2019View Original