zarzavat (u/zarzavat)

zarzavat commented on Irish man with valid US work permit held in ICE detention for five months theguardian.com/us-news/2... · Posted by u/n1b0m

profsummergig · 2 hours ago

Per article he owns a business.

Usually a pre-Green-Card work permit doesn't allow that (you need a GC to own a business).

This article is an example of sophisticated co-mingling of facts and omissions, designed to obfuscate the context.

zarzavat · 2 hours ago

> you need a GC to own a business

Citation needed.

zarzavat commented on TSMC to make advanced AI semiconductors in Japan apnews.com/article/semico... · Posted by u/dev_tty01

petesergeant · 11 hours ago

If you don’t think the US security apparatus will come up with a reasonable plan for doing just that within 2 months of it opening, I don’t think you’re thinking hard enough about this.

> What are you going to do when none of the Taiwanese workers turn up for work, or worse they do turn up and sabotage the fab.

You’re going to offer them a lot of money, citizenship, and exfiltration of their family to turn up at work, and threaten them with lifetime in supermax if they sabotage anything.

What US judge isn’t going to allow you to do what the hell you want under national security provisions if it comes to that?

zarzavat · 7 hours ago

> You’re going to offer them a lot of money, citizenship, and exfiltration of their family to turn up at work, and threaten them with lifetime in supermax if they sabotage anything.

This is exactly the attitude I'm talking about. You can't operate a fab based on coercion. It requires positive relationships. There are simply too many people involved doing things that the would-be coercers don't understand.

The idea that an entire TSMC fab is going to commit treason en mass is about as believable as thinking that NASA faked the moon landings and covered it up en mass. Large groups of people don't behave the same way as small groups of people.

If the US wants a fab, just give Intel money to build one. Trying to steal one from TSMC is a nonsensical plan. At least Intel would know how to operate their own fab.

zarzavat commented on Ask HN: What are you working on? (February 2026) · Posted by u/david927

zarzavat · 11 hours ago

Today I'm writing a Postgres native function to derive UUIDs from an integer primary key using AES intrinsics. This lets me expose public UUID keys while still using an efficient 64-bit sequential primary key.

Not sure if I'll use it compared to just using conventional uuidv7 but it's nice to have options.

zarzavat commented on TSMC to make advanced AI semiconductors in Japan apnews.com/article/semico... · Posted by u/dev_tty01

yanhangyhy · 15 hours ago

Taiwanese politicians, like those under American-style democracy in many regions, only care about safeguarding their own interests and have no concern for how to protect the interests of the public. Once TSMC’s factories are completed in Japan and the United States and the technology is secured, Taiwan will no longer have any value worth protecting. Of course, the politicians can always take planes and leave in advance.

zarzavat · 12 hours ago

TSMC can shut the fabs down whenever they want. If the US think they can take over a fab like it's a t-shirt factory and keep it running without TSMC's cooperation they are sorely mistaken. What are you going to do when none of the Taiwanese workers turn up for work, or worse they do turn up and sabotage the fab.

zarzavat commented on Beyond agentic coding haskellforall.com/2026/02... · Posted by u/RebelPotato

OutOfHere · 2 days ago

Agentic coding doesn't make any sense for a job interview. To do it well requires a detailed specification prompt which can't reliably be written in an interview. It ideally also requires iterating upon the prompt to refine it before execution. You get out of it what you put into it.

zarzavat · 2 days ago

In the UK the driving test requires a portion of driving using a satnav, the idea being that drivers are going to use satnavs so it's important to test that they know how how to use them safely.

The same goes for using Claude in a programming interview. If the environment of interview is not representative of how people actually work then the interview needs to be changed.

zarzavat commented on Xcode 26.3 – Developers can leverage coding agents directly in Xcode apple.com/newsroom/2026/0... · Posted by u/davidbarker

allthetime · 6 days ago

Honest question.

I've been using XCode for 10 years. For me, it's only improved and I don't have any real pain points. They are definitely fixing bugs. I make software for iOS, macOS, car play, and apple watch.

Sure sometimes I've got to reset or clear a cache, but this has never stopped my day.

What is so horrible about XCode?

zarzavat · 5 days ago

Xcode is perpetually decade(s) behind the curve. VSCode is so much more advanced, even Atom 10 years ago was.

To put it in a language Apple understands, it's like forcing music producers to use GarageBand when everyone else is on Logic.

zarzavat commented on Data centers in space makes no sense civai.org/blog/space-data... · Posted by u/ajyoon

jillesvangurp · 5 days ago

You are confusing engineering challenges with show stoppers. Cooling in space is a well studied problem with a few possible solutions. They all boil down to needing a lot of mass to radiate heat out to the universe and ways to conduct heat. We've been doing that at small scale for decades. SpaceX is already operating a fleet of many thousands of satellites that they built and engineered. They'd be well familiar with this challenge.

Once you have solutions, it turns into a cost problem. And if that cost is too high (for whatever arbitrary threshold you use for that) it becomes an optimization problem.

This whole thread reads like a lot of "but ... but ... but ...". It all boils down to people assuming things about what is too much or too hard. And it's all meaningless unless you actually bother to articulate those assumptions. What exactly is too hard here? What would it take to address those issues? What would the cost be? Put some numbers on it. There are also all sorts of assumptions about what is valuable and what isn't. You can't say something is too hard or too costly without making assertions about what is worth paying for and what isn't.

The answers are going to be boring. We need X amounts of giga tons launched to orbit at Y amount of dollars. OK great. What happens if launch cost drops by 1 or 2 orders of magnitude? What happens if the amount of mass needed drops because of some engineering innovation? Massively dropping launch cost is roughly what SpaceX is proposing to do with Star Ship. Is it still "too hard"? You can't have that debate until you put numbers on your assertions.

There's a bit of back of the envelope math involved here but we're roughly talking about a million satellites. In the order of ~2.5 million tonnes of mass (at 2.5 ton per satellite). Tens of thousands of Star Ship launches basically. It's definitely a big project. We're talking about 1-2 order magnitude increase of the scale of operations for SpaceX going from lower hundreds to thousands of launches per year spread over maybe 10-15 years to work up to a million satellites.

I'm more worried about what all that mass is going to do when it burns up in the atmosphere / drops in the oceans. At that scale it's no longer just a drop in the ocean.

zarzavat · 5 days ago

Nobody is saying that building a data center in space is impossible. It's merely expensive.

Who is going to pay the money to rent capacity in space when they could rent the same capacity on Earth for a fraction of the cost?

zarzavat commented on xAI joins SpaceX spacex.com/updates#xai-jo... · Posted by u/g-mork

mrweasel · 7 days ago

Microsoft did do the experiment (Project Natick) where they had "datacenters" in pods under the sea with really good results. The idea was simply to ship enough extra capacity, but due to the environment, the failure rates where 1/8th of normal.

Still, dropping a pod into the sea makes more sense than launching it into space. At least cooling, power, connectivity and eventual maintenance is simpler.

The whole thing makes no sense and is seems like it's just Musk doing financial manipulation again.

https://news.microsoft.com/source/features/sustainability/pr...

zarzavat · 6 days ago

> The whole thing makes no sense and is seems like it's just Musk doing financial manipulation again.

It's a fig leaf for getting two IPOs in one. There's no sense in analyzing it any further.

zarzavat commented on Ian's Shoelace Site fieggen.com/shoelace/... · Posted by u/righthand

zarzavat · 8 days ago

I have been using the Secure variant for the last 10 years. It's effective, in that time my shoelaces have become loose precisely zero times, even though the knot is otherwise easy to untie.

zarzavat commented on A Crisis comes to Wordle: Reusing old words forkingmad.blog/wordle-cr... · Posted by u/cyanbane

thaumasiotes · 8 days ago

> people want to guess words they use or have heard of, not "aahed"

That isn't a correct diagnosis; people have heard of aahed. You'll find it naturally in the expression "[someone] oohed and aahed".

People don't want aahed, and their instinct that it shouldn't count is reasonable, but unfamiliarity isn't the problem with it.

zarzavat · 8 days ago

Ooh and aah aren't words, they're sounds (onomatopoeia). A sound is just a sequence of letters used for their phonological values.

You can spell the sound "ah" however you like: ah, ahh, aah, aahh, there's no wrong way to spell it.

If you write "the washing machine tringged when it finished", 'tring' is not a word, even though it's following the rules of English morphology, you could have written any sequence of letters that most faithfully reproduces the sound of the washing machine. You could have written katrigged or puh-tringged.