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theon144 commented on "Token anxiety", a slot machine by any other name   jkap.io/token-anxiety-or-... · Posted by u/presbyterian
bandrami · a month ago
> What's Anthropic's optimization target??? Getting you the right answer as fast as possible!

Wait, what? Anthropic makes money by getting you to buy and expend tokens. The last thing they want is for you to get the right answer as fast as possible. They want you to sometimes get the right answer unpredictably, but with enough likelihood that this time will work that you keep hitting Enter.

theon144 · 25 days ago
Given that pre-paid plans are the most popular way to subscribe to Claude, it quite plainly is a "the less tokens you use, the more money Anthropic makes" kind of situation.

In an environment where providers are almost entirely interchangeable and tiniest of perceived edges (because there's still no benchmark unambiguously judging which model is "better") make or break user retention, I just don't see how it's not ludicrous on its face that any LLM provider would be incentivized to give unreliable answers at some high-enough probability.

theon144 commented on Qualcomm to acquire Arduino   qualcomm.com/news/release... · Posted by u/janjongboom
pclmulqdq · 5 months ago
Arduino has always been a naked cash grab disguised as a "hacker-friendly nonprofit." The gross margin on their boards is >90%, and yeah, the software is mostly a ripoff of wiring.
theon144 · 5 months ago
I have troubles calling something a "cash grab" when it's been arguably the single most influential project in the hacker/maker/DIY electronics space.

I don't doubt the boards could've been sold cheaper, but they clearly were doing something right given how much it changed the hobbyist landscape

theon144 commented on Qualcomm to acquire Arduino   qualcomm.com/news/release... · Posted by u/janjongboom
estimator7292 · 5 months ago
Broad support for many different chips is precisely why Arduino is so bad. It has to check pin numbers against a gigantic table for every gpio call.

You want chip-specific libraries. When the software is designed for the hardware everything works better.

The native AVR and esp-IDF frameworks are very good. There's also micropython and circuit python. I've heard good things, but I don't partake in Python.

Personally I think attempting to provide a cross-platform library for microcontrollers is an enormous mistake. This is not x86, you can't rely on any CPU feature existing, which results in awful branching code in places that in a sane framework is a single instruction updating a CPU register

theon144 · 5 months ago
I feel like this has to be a toolchain issue, there's no reason the pin number -> register table couldn't be resolved at compile time, similar with conditionally compiling certain things based on the CPU features.

I'm not saying it's not a real or an easy problem, just that I wonder if it truly is the reason Arduino is "bad"

theon144 commented on GTP Blind Voting: GPT-5 vs. 4o   gptblindvoting.vercel.app... · Posted by u/findhorn
theon144 · 7 months ago
Huh, I got 9/10 for GPT-5, and I was pretty convinced I was picking 4o in several questions based on the style. Interesting!

The questions were pretty much unlike anything I've ever asked an LLM though, is this how people use LLMs nowadays?

theon144 commented on Material 3 Expressive   design.google/library/exp... · Posted by u/meetpateltech
eviks · 10 months ago
> In many cases, we chose to exceed existing standards for tap target size, color contrast, and other important aspects that can make interfaces easier to use.

So now even more space is wasted, making interfaces harder to use, but yes, the less important metric "how much time does it take on first use to spot a button" will shoot through the roof of you make the button full screen width (10x faster!). Thought it will fail to capture the more important metric of time wasted scrolling since a simple message doesn't fully fit on screen

And of course there are no user customizations to rectify these usability errors...

PS A great example of this awesomeness in action: on https://m3.material.io/components/toolbars/guidelines they can't even fit 2 (two!) toolbar buttons fully because the huge left/right buttons and all the extra white space padding and margins prevent the button content from being seen.

But there is enough space to fit all 4 (or at least 3 depending on text size and icons) toolbar buttons, and even if one doesn’t fit fully you could show its partial text, so navigation would still be faster without having to press the scroll button first and then the toolbar button

theon144 · 10 months ago
I actually have no idea what you mean with the example, all the toolbars on the page fit 4 or more buttons, I tried viewing it in various window widths, can you be a bit more specific?
theon144 commented on Don't unwrap options: There are better ways (2024)   corrode.dev/blog/rust-opt... · Posted by u/mu0n
tengbretson · 10 months ago
I'm not very familiar with Rust. Do the built in Option and Result types not implement map and flatMap?
theon144 · 10 months ago
They do, `map` and `and_then`.

As for the article, I'm also a bit confused because I'm really not sure whether people write that sort of code at the beginning "very commonly" - match and `ok_or` to handle None by turning them into proper Errors is one of the first things you learn in Rust.

theon144 commented on Obscura VPN – Privacy that's more than a promise   obscura.net/... · Posted by u/lostin01010101
0xEF · a year ago
It was also developed by the United States Navy and has been criticized for not being as secure as it claims it is. This should come as no surprise since the US military and agencies have a history of demanding backdoors in software, which just means more attack vectors for outsiders to sniff out.

I make no claims that commercial VPNs are more secure, but at least they have some level of interest in keeping their promises if people are paying them, whereas a free service does not carry the same incentive.

Pick your poison, I guess.

theon144 · a year ago
>It was also developed by the United States Navy

Cool, sounds like an organization that is heavily incentivized to make their communication hard to intercept and eavesdrop on.

theon144 commented on Security Issues in Matrix's Olm Library   soatok.blog/2024/08/14/se... · Posted by u/todsacerdoti
201984 · 2 years ago
Yeah, that's pretty much what I was asking.

  start = gettime()
  variable_time_crypto_operation()
  end = gettime()
  sleep(1sec - (end - start)) // Use a loop if necessary here
If the operation takes a couple ms and the sleep was 1sec, then how much information would realistically leak here? Sure the sleep might not be perfect, but I'd imagine the actual timing difference would get lost just in how much longer the sleep is.

theon144 · 2 years ago
Somewhat tangential, but there are much better options if you're looking for opportunities for optimization. It's literally trying to improve efficiency by skimping on safety features, like trying to save on vehicle weight by removing unnecessary seatbelts or crumple zones. Eliminating side channels concincingly is very difficult, you're just better off taking the tiny performance hit and virtually* eliminating that vector instead of trying to come up with a novel low-density seatbelt.

(I say virtually, because even constant time crypto isn't bulletproof - GoFetch, a recent Apple M-series CPU vulnerability inadvertently broke the "constant" part because of a quirk of the prefetcher. Side channels are hard, no need to make it harder.)

theon144 commented on visionOS thermally throttles based on how much it hears the fans in the mics   twitter.com/ShinyQuagsire... · Posted by u/anonred
hyperhopper · 2 years ago
The thread explains one possible reason why. You should read the link before commenting.

The reason proposed is that if the environment is loud, you won't be bothered by additional noise from the fans.

theon144 · 2 years ago
The post you're probably talking about was hidden under "Show Probable Spam" on my end.
theon144 commented on LibraryBox   jasongriffey.net/libraryb... · Posted by u/Tomte
theon144 · 2 years ago
The project met the exact same end its predecessor (the PirateBox) did, and for pretty much the same reason. However, the project is quite old, and the focus on reflashing portable routers was a necessity then, but not so anymore - specifically, PirateBox (2011) actually predates the first Raspberry Pi (2012), and especially the first Pi with an onboard Wi-Fi (2016).

I'm just wondering, why hasn't a SBC-based alternative popped up yet? I think the project is/was awesome, I actually did maintain 2 public PirateBoxen for a while. Is it a simple lack of interest? The fact LibraryBox tried to pick up after PirateBox kind of suggests otherwise. I feel like it's actually easier now than ever to build a Libary/PirateBox-like project (although I do imagine an on-board network card probably has way worse performance than even those old portable routers).

I've even tried to put together an image like that in the past but I couldn't find a reproducible solution for creating raspi images so that put me off, maybe it's time to give it another try...

u/theon144

KarmaCake day1635December 9, 2011View Original