Recent submissions

Comment · 6 days ago
Check this article, use Google translate if needed https://pt.wikipedia.org/wiki/Punhal_Verde_e_Amarelo

The Supreme Court in Brazil can be as rotten of political as it wants, to make a plan to assassinate political rivals is just completely unacceptable.

And before someone tries to defend the bolsonaros by saying they were not involved in this, don't use a defense that they themselves did not use. The defense that Flávio Bolsonaro said about the incident was "thinking of killing someone is not a crime".

Comment · 1 month ago
Publish whatever you want vs publish in a particular journal.

You want to publish in a journal you follow their rules. You want to publish something? Go ahead.

And results are not great results because they are published in top journals. Top journals are top journals because they attract the publication of great results. But the math always speaks for itself.

Comment · 2 months ago
Copyright is not a natural right.

So in your ancap ideal, producers are not getting anything, why would I sign a contract with them if I can just copy it?

Comment · 4 months ago
Yup, some of my first contributions when I was a teenager, was to an open source project where I was able to find a couple of bugs, and implement a hacky solution that I shared with the team on the forum. My code was absolutely awful, but by having done both the effort of tracking down the cause of the bug, and one possible way of fixing it (which was badly coded, but worked), made the developers able to quickly turn around and edit my patches into actual patches that got merged into the project.

And it was actually a pretty good feeling. Made me feel that even as a newbie programmer, I was adding value to the community, which I was!

Comment · 4 months ago
Thats the thing with giant PRs. They never really needed to be reviewed anyway. In cultures with strong review culture I have worked at, if you send me a thousand line PR and ask me to review it, I will look at the giant blob of text, and immediately fire off a "it's too long, can you cut it into smaller PRs?".

Because I don't trust myself to review a giant PR. It takes too much cognition to properly review it.

And now that people are making PRs with AI, this is even more important. If the AI was good enough to have coded it, please instruct it to make the changes in reviewable chunks.

Comment · 4 months ago
> the person who said this has the coding skills of a Claude Opus 4.5 or whenever the frontier was when they flipped

It's not about just skill. It's a matter of skill, time, and how critical the software you are writing is. There is a lot of software that is not critical. That is not close to security mechanisms. And that even if the code quality is not the highest, it does not matter.

Even if you are the best coder in the world, you would already become more productive by using ai. Things that in the past you might have not coded yourself but delegated to an intern, or things that you wouldn't even delegate to an intern because they are just too boring to do like some refactorings.

Like I had this project at work that was written without typescript strict mode turned on. When I turned it on, it had over 700 errors. I might be better than AI to fix every single of one these errors. But my time is worth more than that in doing other things. But I can, and did, ask AI to fix every single one. And then I reviewed it batches, and something that my team wanted to do for multiple years and nobody had the time for, finally got done.

Comment · 4 months ago
Yup. If you are bilingual, you quickly realize how some translations are very bad. How some translations are very good. And how hard it is to translate. With dry, simple text, it might be easy. But when it involves art? Some jokes don't translate directly. There is pun. Sounds of words. Double meaning. Ambiguity. Cultural background. The creation of new words.

It can be reasonably argued that some poetry can be impossible to translate from some languages to others. A poem might be explained, but by a lenghty, dissecting explanation, that completely loses the point of it.

Comment · 4 months ago
It is possible it is just time. Modern humans are considered to have existed for 300k~ years. Civilizations are about 6k years old.

So who knows. Maybe if you gave them an extra 10k years, they would have achived "civilization". It is not much for the scale of human existance. But it is longer than any of our civilizations has existed for.

Comment · 5 months ago
Or maybe 100 years from now, your toaster will be powerful enough to run the game.

To me this is about both preserving the access to what consumers purchased, but also future preservation of art.

Copyright is not a natural right. It is a monopoly granted by the government to creators, specifically with the goal of the progress of art and science.

Games that completely die because their servers are shut off, in my opinion should just lose copyright outright. Why should the people via the government provide you with a monopoly on publishing something that you have stopped publishing?

Comment · 5 months ago
From all their desperation in making sure api keys are not used in contexts where they are not supposed to, I would say that they actually appear to have services where their profit is negative, if a customer is actually using their api to the limits they set, they lose money. They wouldn't have been this desperate in trying to shut off OpenClaw if it wasn't this way. Most companies that provide api infrastructure love when a killer app using their api is made by outsiders.

And while you can beat low margin with scale, there is the famous joke "we lose money on every sale, but make it up in volume".

If you scale a low margin operation, you can become giant. If you scale a loss making operation, you go bankrupt.

Comment · 5 months ago
Commentary and criticism are by law protected as fair use. Why would revenue share be done "ideally"? News reporting is also covered under fair use, do you expect news organizations to pay for reporting on movies?

Ideally fair use would be defended, it is the law of the land, and when a takedown notice was emitted maliciously, with known bad faith, the actor that did that would have to pay for the amount of time that the legal content was down.

Comment · 5 months ago
Can't answer for others, but I look at this law from the viewpoint of foreign workers, cause I am a foreigner worker. In Canada. Decided to absolutely never immigrate to the US due to the US blatant rise in xenophobia.

And the US has proven me correct over and over again in that assessment. Will watch with great pleasure the brain drain your country will face, and I honestly hope your economy will completely collapse.

Comment · 5 months ago
And even if you do end up writing an unsafe block, that should be a massive flag that the code in said block should deserve extra comments on why it is safe, and extra unit tests on verifying that it does not blow up.

How do you know the unsafe operation is safe? What are the preconditions the code block has? Write it down, review it, test it.

Comment · 5 months ago
> you can never have too many sources of entropy

This is so true. And the beauty is that with algorithms, we don't even need to know much about the entropy to be able to extract it.

There is the Von Neumann method of generating an unbiased coin from a biased coin. Of throwing it twice, and checking if you got HT or TH. And completely discarding all HH or TT results. It doesn't matter if the coin you are using is 20% or 80%, the result will be a true 50/50.

There are more modern algorithms that can be even better (in that they need less coin tosses if you have a very unbalanced coin).

And then there is modern cryptographic hashing. Feed it all the bits you can. Collisions end up only happening in the real world if every single one of those bits is identical. So if you have actual entropy being fed, that cannot be controlled, predicted, or replicated, modern cryptography tells you that the end result is unique.

Comment · 7 months ago

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