Recent submissions

Comment · 3 months ago
Comment · 4 months ago
This is largely my take as well. When I review code, I am checking for correctness. If I find something is not correct, that's a bug (or a bug waiting to happen). If I can't understand whether or not something is correct, that's a problem. If I don't know what the correct behavior should be, that's a problem.

Though I do think there is value in the original post. Re-framing is a powerful creative tool when you hit a mental dead end. And the responses let people share the other benefits that change management can bring.

Comment · 4 months ago
Your memory reminded me of Mountain Ocarinas, which I happened upon probably around 2010. It looks like The Internet Archive has a snapshot back from 2000 https://web.archive.org/web/20000902223226/http://www.mounta... . Just some guy with a website selling his custom-designed instruments.

It looks like they stopped producing them in 2024, but that is still a long run. Though they did stop making wood ocarinas at some point in that time frame.

Comment · 7 months ago
I think we've already seen this with "AI writes a web-browser" type PR. I guess we can still look forward to when they make license evasion an explicit part of their marketing. Then I can wryly laugh when somebody robo-whitewashes leaked commercial software, knowing that they'll get sued anyways.
Comment · 9 months ago
I think that Gemini regularly generates inane metaphors like the above. As an example, here's a message that it sent me when I was attempting to get it to generate a somewhat natural conversation:

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Look, if you aren't putting salt on your watermelon, you’re basically eating flavored water. It’s the only way to actually wake up the sweetness. People who think it’s "weird" are the same ones who still buy 2-in-1 shampoo.

Anyway, I saw a guy at the park today trying to teach a cat to walk on a leash. The cat looked like it was being interrogated by the FBI, just dead-weighting it across the grass while he whispered "encouragement."

Physical books are vastly superior to Kindles solely for the ability to judge a stranger's taste from across a coffee shop. You can’t get that hit of elitism from a matte gray plastic slab.

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This was with a prompt telling it to skip Reddit-style analogies.

Comment · 10 months ago
This could possibly make a good base for a system recovery USB drive. One 18-headed hammer for all your needs.

I haven't looked deep into it, but my impression is that most system recovery images target just x86_64 and maybe 32-bit x86 if they're cheeky.

Comment · 11 months ago
I'm not sure what that would solve. You would still need some central entity to sign the DNS TXT record, to ensure that the HTTPS client does not use a tampered DNS TXT record.
Comment · 11 months ago
Comment · 1 year ago
The partitioning algorithm to find two missing/duplicate numbers is clever, I wouldn't have thought of that. It should also work if you have a list with 1 missing and 1 duplicate, yeah? You'd probably have to do an extra step to actually find out which number is missing and which is a duplicate after you find the two numbers.

> If more than two elements are missing (or duplicated), then analyzing the individual bits fails because there are several combinations possible for both 0 and 1 as results. The problem then seems to require more complex solutions, which are not based on XOR anymore.

If you consider XOR to be a little bit more general, I think you can still use something like the partitioning algorithm. That is to say, considering XOR on a bit level behaves like XOR_bit(a,b)=a+b%2, you might consider a generalized XOR_bit(a,b,k)=a+b%k. With this I think you can decide partitions with up to k missing numbers, but I'm too tired to verify/implement this right now.

Comment · 1 year ago
Comment · 1 year ago
The ability to push a verified artifact is an anti-feature in most contexts? How so?
Comment · 1 year ago
Comment · 1 year ago
I recently had a few nights where I stayed up way too late watching YouTube shorts, which are about 1 minute each, on my desktop. I'd notice that an hour had passed, tune back into YouTube, then another hour had passed.

Now that I've recognized the pattern, I've decided to stop scrolling through shorts; watching a short without scrolling is fine. I also setup a systemd service to pause media and lock my screen every 30 minutes after bedtime. The screen lock may be overkill, but I have a bad record of digging too deep into subjects at night, so I think it will still be beneficial.

Comment · 1 year ago
Comment · 1 year ago
> try going to https://www.nih.gov/ and putting gender in the search box

Compared to their other actions of censorship, this is such a small thing, but for some reason this in particular makes me distressed. Possibly because it shows how paranoid they are about letting out any information that goes against their narrative; that they're willing to do stupid, reckless things to control the narrative; that they enforce obedience to their ideology at all levels. It just seems like the entrance to a dark future.

It feels like they're trying to rewrite history... Which is a term I searched the Internet for, and funnily enough the first result was a blog post from the current White House administration. https://www.whitehouse.gov/presidential-actions/2025/03/rest... (My other worry is that everything they accuse of others is a projection of their own intentions onto others. This seems less absurd every passing day. Otherwise this would be laughable.) So I guess the White House is explicit in they they're rewriting history to the True history. Thank you so much. Finally, we can be united under ONE Nation, ONE Truth, and ONE God. Sorry, I got a bit over-excited there.

For time travelers: searching for "gender" just directs you back to nih.gov, instead of directing you to the search results page.

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