angry_albatross

What do you think I am I reading incorrectly? The post seems pretty clear:

"I filled 10 32-GB Kingston flash drives with pseudo-random data."

"The years where I'll first touch a new drive (assuming no errors) are: 1, 2, 3, 4, 6, 8, 11, 15, 20, 27"

And from the blog: "Q: You know you powered the drive by reading it, right? A: Yes, that’s why I wrote 10 drives to begin with. We want to see how something works if left unpowered for 1 year, 2 years, etc."

Did you miss that there are 10 different drives and so they have 10 different years of tests where they are testing a completely untouched drive?

You know that he already has stopped participating in the world championship organized by FIDE, right? The current 'world champion' is Gukesh Dommaraju, who took it from Ding Liren the year before, but of course Magnus would probably still be the world champion if he kept competing for it.

It moved. The old location redirects to neal.fun now.

The shortcut to flip between models in an expanded view is nice, but the original image should also be included as one of the things to flip between, and should be included in the side by side view.

I interpreted the function code as being a deliberately exaggerated satirical example that was illustrative of the experience he was having. So yes, in that example it was probably told to be overly cautious, but I agree with him that the default of LLMs seems to be a bit more cautious than I would like.

You think that the free market has regulated or audited Tether? I don't think so, that company is about as sketchy as it is possible to be, and yet it continues to dominate the stablecoin market.

It seems misleading to say that this is "rendered in ASCII art"... more like the phase is being rendered, and it has an ASCII art moon background. If I copy and paste the moon text into a text editor, the phase is gone, so it's not actually part of the text.

And as others have pointed out, phases don't work like that.

I noticed a weird bug where sometimes the game will auto-move for a player. In particular, this seems to happen when one queen captures a piece, and the opposing side has the ability to capture that queen with their queen, the game automatically makes the 'queen takes queen' capture.

> Instead of trying to discuss that (and I could) - on HN there are plenty links to thinks I don't consider useful, like retrocomputing, programming in AGDA or yet another rust rewrite of some tool. I don't go around and leave nonproductive comments there, i just don't click them. Why do you feel a need to do so?

Mostly because unlike those other examples, cryptocurrency is actively doing harm to society by accelerating climate change, enabling various forms of crime, and doing financial damage to many people who have been convinced to put their savings into various ponzi schemes. So I view it as a sort of moral obligation to be a dissenting voice in these conversations.

I don't intent to be actively nonproductive with things I say though, and you might be right that it would be better to not engage with my original comment. The parent comment I replied to was not very productive either though. Mostly just "this is good". So my intention was just to represent the opposition and say something like "I disagree, and think this is part of something that is harmful."

I was just repeating the quoted comment from the post I was replying to. Wasn't intending to say that the article was about tokens.

More generally, I would say that Etherium itself is mostly nonsense. I will admit I don't understand very well what the purpose of the "blobs" are that are being discussed in the article, but from my perspective the entire idea of blockchain technology is not useful. I have yet to be convinced that there is any real problem being solved by it, but there are a lot of problems that are created, which then need to be resolved with ever more esoteric and unproven solutions, like what is described in this article.

I think you mean Huffman codes, not Hamming codes.

I think that is a fine description of the backing of the US Dollar.

For Bitcoin though, it sounds like you are defending Bitcoin as an investment, which I don't agree with. Unlike Bitcoin, the US Dollar is not considered an investment. It's just a currency, a medium of exchange. It loses some value over time, and we're ok with that. Bitcoin is pretty difficult to use as a currency, so people usually promote it as an investment instead.

Here is what I have to say about it as an investment: where is the money actually coming from for the returns? In order for the price to keep going up, people have to keep adding more money to the pool. This is pretty clearly a negative sum game, where the players on average must lose more than they win. Some people may win, but they are mathematically in the minority. Most people who appear to be winning are only winning on paper right now. If everyone who was currently holding tried to withdraw their money and cash out, who would be the ones buying them out? It's not clear. There is no utility to the thing that they own. It's essentially just a number in a spreadsheet.

The price of bitcoin should generally not be considered newsworthy. There is no underlying value there, and engaging in this weird distributed Ponzi scheme is harmful to society. We can all do our part to help make it irrelevant by ignoring it completely, or maybe engaging in thoughtful conversations with the people who have been misled into thinking that this is a reasonable "investment".