xyzzy123 (u/xyzzy123)

xyzzy123 commented on Nokia N900 Necromancy yaky.dev/2025-12-11-nokia... · Posted by u/yaky

sollewitt · 4 days ago

The N900 was my peak “mobile computing is awesome” device.

I went to see District 9 in the cinema in Helsinki. Uh oh, the alien parts are only subtitled in Finnish and Swedish and my Finnish is not up to that.

I installed a BitTorrent client, found the release on Pirate Bay, successfully torrented just the subtitle file, and used an editor to read the subtitles for scenes with a lot of alien.

The N9 had much better UI, but there was something of the cyberpunk “deck” idea in that thing, it was great.

xyzzy123 · 4 days ago

Yeah the cyberpunk part is you can compute without explicitly needing someone's permission.

xyzzy123 commented on Cancer is surging, bringing a debate about whether to look for it nytimes.com/2025/12/08/he... · Posted by u/brandonb

kulahan · 8 days ago

I'm pretty sure every medical show had an episode where the "money-grubbing hospital admin" character want to start selling full body medical scans, and the "very well-respected and honor-bound doctor" character points out how this is quite literally one of the most useless and corrupt ways for a hospital to make money.

There are probably a dozen things wrong with your body right now. That doesn't mean they're even affecting you. While you may have some type of cancer that is at the absolute first day of detectability, or a bone slightly out of place, or a weird spot on your heart, someone else has a case that is 6 months deeper and needs more dire treatment.

There is zero benefit to society to massively overburden our healthcare system (this is true of any nation) by searching constantly for random problems that may or may not exist.

If there were good reason to do this, you'd have regularly-scheduled checkups, like with colon or breast cancer.

xyzzy123 · 8 days ago

You also have the issue of information creating liability. A thing that nobody knows about is nobody's problem, a thing that COULD be a problem but probably isn't in someone's professional judgement creates liability for the decision maker.

xyzzy123 commented on I failed to recreate the 1996 Space Jam website with Claude j0nah.com/i-failed-to-rec... · Posted by u/thecr0w

measurablefunc · 8 days ago

Sound deductive rules of logic can not create novelty that exceeds the inherent limits of their foundational axiomatic assumptions. You can not expect novel results from neural networks that exceed the inherent information capacity of their training corpus & the inherent biases of the neural network (encoded by its architecture). So if the training corpus is semantically unsound & inconsistent then there is no reason to expect that it will produce logically sound & semantically coherent outputs (i.e. garbage inputs → garbage outputs).

xyzzy123 · 8 days ago

Maybe? But it also seems like you are that you are not accounting for new information at inference time. Let's pretend I agree the LLM is a plagiarism machine that can produce no novelty in and of itself that didn't come from what it was trained on, and produces mostly garbage (I only half agree lol, and I think "novelty" is under-specified here).

When I apply that machine (with its giant pool of pirated knowledge) _to my inputs and context_ I can get results applicable to my modestly novel situation which is not in the training data. Perhaps the output is garbage. Naturally if my situation is way out of distribution I cannot expect very good results.

But I often don't care if the results are garbage some (or even most!) of the time if I have a way to ground-truth whether they are useful to me. This might be via running a compile, a test suite, a theorem prover or mk1 eyeball. Of course the name of the game is to get agents to do this themselves and this is now fairly standard practice.

xyzzy123 commented on I failed to recreate the 1996 Space Jam website with Claude j0nah.com/i-failed-to-rec... · Posted by u/thecr0w

measurablefunc · 9 days ago

This is known as the data processing inequality. Non-invertible functions can not create more information than what is available in their inputs: https://blog.blackhc.net/2023/08/sdpi_fsvi/. Whatever arithmetic operations are involved in laundering the inputs by stripping original sources & references can not lead to novelty that wasn't already available in some combination of the inputs.

Neural networks can at best uncover latent correlations that were already available in the inputs. Expecting anything more is basically just wishful thinking.

xyzzy123 · 8 days ago

Using this reasoning, would you argue that a new proof of a theorem adds no new information that was not present in the axioms, rules of inference and so on?

If so, I'm not sure it's a useful framing.

For novel writing, sure, I would not expect much truly interesting progress from LLMs without human input because fundamentally they are unable to have human experiences, and novels are a shadow or projection of that.

But in math – and a lot of programming – the "world" is chiefly symbolic. The whole game is searching the space for new and useful arrangements. You don’t need to create new information in an information-theoretic sense for that. Even for the non-symbolic side (say diagnosing a network issue) of computing, AIs can interact with things almost as directly as we can by running commands so they are not fundamentally disadvantaged in terms of "closing the loop" with reality or conducting experiments.

xyzzy123 commented on Estimates are difficult for developers and product owners thorsell.io/2025/12/07/es... · Posted by u/todsacerdoti

alphazard · 9 days ago

The best hack for improving estimation is first never giving a single number. Anyone asking for a single number, without context, doesn't know what they are doing; it's unlikely that their planning process is going to add any value. I think they call this being "not even wrong".

Instead you should be thinking in probability distributions. When someone asks for your P90 or P50 of project completion, you know they are a serious estimator, worth your time to give a good thoughtful answer. What is the date at which you would bet 90:10 that the project is finished? What about 99:1? And 1:99? Just that frameshift alone solves a lot of problems. The numbers actually have agreed-upon meaning, there is a straightforward way to see how bad an estimate really was, etc.

At the start of a project have people give estimates for a few different percentiles, and record them. I usually do it in bits, since there is some research that humans can't handle more than about 3 bits +/- for probabilistic reasoning. That would be 1:1, 2:1, 4:1, 8:1, and their reciprocals. Revisit the recorded estimates during the project retrospective.

You can make this as much of a game as you want. If you have play-money at your company or discretionary bonuses, it can turn into a market. But most of the benefit comes from playing against yourself, and getting out of the cognitive trap imposed by single number/date estimates.

xyzzy123 · 9 days ago

One interesting angle for me is that I am seldom given complete specs or requirements when asked for an estimate. Of course you ask questions to try to determine key information that has not been specified but often the answers are not available or fully reliable.

So any estimate has to include uncertainty about _the scope of the work itself_ as well as the uncertainties involved in delivering the work.

The natural follow on question when you present a range as the answer to an estimate is: what would help you narrow this range? Sometimes it is "find out this thing about the state of the world" (how long will external team take to do their bit) but sometimes it is "provide better specs".

xyzzy123 commented on The past was not that cute juliawise.net/the-past-wa... · Posted by u/mhb

M95D · 9 days ago

Compressor is replaceable. Also, how do you judge reliability of a compressor before buying it?

Instead, try to find a refrigerator with access to the cooling pipes. Last fridge I threw away had a leak that couldn't be patched because the pipes were all embedded in the plastic walls of the fridge.

xyzzy123 · 9 days ago

Yeah I think the caveat is that the compressor and maybe seals, lights and few other bits are the ONLY repairable parts of most fridges. The whole structure of a modern fridge is foam panels and sheet metal folds that aren't ever meant to come apart after being assembled.

xyzzy123 commented on MinIO is now in maintenance-mode github.com/minio/minio/co... · Posted by u/hajtom

nodesocket · 12 days ago

I've quickly come to this conclusion. Essentially looking for offsite backup of my NAS and currently paying around $15-$20/mo to Backblaze. I thought I might be able to roll my own object store for cheaper but that was idiotic. :-)

xyzzy123 · 12 days ago

Totally fair. There are some situations where you can "undercut" cloud native object storage on a per TB basis (e.g. you have a big dedi at Hetzner with 50TB or 100TB of mirrored disk) but you pay a cost in operational overhead and durability vs managed object store. It's really hard to make the economics work at $20 price point, if you get up to a few $100 or more then there are some situations where it can make sense.

For backup to a dedi you don't really need to bother running the object store though.

xyzzy123 commented on MinIO is now in maintenance-mode github.com/minio/minio/co... · Posted by u/hajtom

nodesocket · 13 days ago

I'm looking at deploying SeaWeedFS but the problem is cloud block storage costs. I need 3-4TB and Vultr costs $62.50/mo for 2.5TB. DigitalOcean $300/mo for 3TB. AWS using legacy magnetic EBS storage $150/mo... GCP persistent disk standard $120/mo.

Any alternatives besides racking own servers?

*EDIT* Did a little ChatGPT and it recommended tiny t4g.micro then use EBS of type cold HDD (sc1). Not gonna be fast, but for offsite backup will probably do the trick.

xyzzy123 · 12 days ago

I'm confused why you would want to turn an expensive thing (cloud block storage) into a cheaper thing (cloud object storage) with worse durability in a way that is more effort to run?

I'm not saying it's wrong since I don't know what it's for, I'm just wondering what the use-case could be.