Recent submissions

Comment · 6 days ago
Won't anyone think of the leopards? They can't subsist on faces alone and yet people keep feeding themselves to the leopards?
Comment · 23 days ago
I have a time of use electric plan and adjust load (grow lights, dehumidifier, AC, battery backups) at certain times to save money. Smart home can be pure tinkering but it can control some pretty practical things.

You do you though, mechanical outlet timers work perfectly well.

Comment · 1 month ago
There are much better ways of device enrollment; at a minimum they could require device activation that doesn't blindly use a token with no further checks.
Comment · 1 month ago
Move fast and break things*

* Privacy, civic trust, society if you get a chance!

This is the end product of tech leadership taking fat rips of disruption cocaine for the last 15 years. Flock Safety got VC money so that they could build a panopticon. There is nothing surprising about the fact that they did a hack job with terrible security; the fact that their service names are various types of alcohol is beyond parody.

Oh well, at least Flock Safety's IPO will be a critical cash infusion in the pursuit of building the torture nexus so that's cool.

Comment · 1 month ago
Your bank's mainframe would like to know your location.
Comment · 1 month ago
In this metaphor the police are corrupt, running a protection racket, and might get drunk and shoot you while your dealer is in the mafia. The mafia link might be a problem at some point but the person with the badge and the gun is a problem right now.
Comment · 2 months ago
The difference is that their TV wasn't spying them but our TVs definitely are (aka ACR).
Comment · 2 months ago
In practice this requires duplicating the upstream build and release pipelines, so now you need yet another agent running in the background (+ periodically going off the rails + eating tokens) which incurs more up front cost and cognitive overhead.

In my experience "throw another agent at it/fork it" consistently creates unsupervised trainwrecks.

Comment · 2 months ago
Exactly, kinda like what we did with CFCs!

Granted fossil fuels are much more ubiquitous than CFCs and comparatively more difficult to replace, but we have prior art for changing industrial practices in the interest of improving climate conditions.

Comment · 2 months ago
I'm still on opus 4.6 for a healthy chunk on work; the technical competence has lagged behind but the slop-comment generation and misdirected self-initiated actions on newer models ultimately burn more time than a little more babysitting, but I'm optimizing for minimized slop generation over sheer generation speed.
Comment · 2 months ago
Show me a fully LLM-generated database with an implement that's clear, documented, and adequately bug free.

Codebases degenerate when the authors do not understand the system in which they operate and make changes that degrade the cohesion of the system as a whole. Humans do this all the time; at my company we had a 10k line lua function (within a 250k loc lua service) that grew through ten thousand point modifications. It's bad and humans caused it. Now, it's 15k lines of code and 10k lines of misleading slop comments.

LLMs do not go through the struggle of understanding and don't experience the distress of "wtf am I reading?" and don't experience the drive to make things less horrible for the next person. That suffering loop is how many codebases halt degradation and in the absence of suffering LLMs will pile bugs and rot endlessly.

Comment · 2 months ago
Virginia has more power infrastructure in place but said infrastructure is already seeing significant DC build out; I know little about power distribution in Louisiana but would be surprised if there was extensive spare capacity in the transmission lines and generation facilities. I'm surprised that the rust belt hasn't seen more uptake since they had all that manufacturing capacity but the backing power generation/distribution may have atrophied in the intervening years.
Comment · 2 months ago
With the amount of cash OpenAI is splashing around they could easily write it into the contracts, but the current incentive structure prioritizes time between ground breaking and powered GPUs in racks. OpenAI has shown complete disinterest in the impact of AI writ large and will only reduce their community/infra impact to optimize that time to racked GPU along the Pareto frontier.
Comment · 2 months ago
This is a collection of "OpenAI will boldly act in the abstract to provide air coverage for Texas leadership." With data centers under construction one would think they would have examples of successes or projects in progress available for reference. They'd claim credit if they had it so the silence is telling.

Big tech has consistently valued profit and growth above good stewardship; the onus is entirely on OpenAI to demonstrate that any of these claims aren't fluff with the projects that are already greenlit. When OpenAI presents plans to the communities prior to/alongside city counsels and drops the NDAs then there will be merit to this but our expectations should be somewhere between "super deep kola borehole" and "upper mantle".

Comment · 2 months ago
For a standalone Pi power via USB is fine. As soon as these devices get embedded or you're running more than two in proximity the USB spaghetti gets pretty miserable.

There are so many quirks with the Raspberry Pi that make it a pain to work with, from the lack of mainline Linux support on the Pi 5 to the awkward by default power arrangement to the fact that the architecture is a GPU with a CPU glued onto the side. The Raspberry foundation made SBCs much more ergonomic and kudos to them but working with them still feels like walking through a field of tiny rakes.

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