mkhalil

Joined 14 years ago

Karma
1,108
Submissions
343
Member since
Aug 24
email me: me @ mkhalil dot org.
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Recent submissions

Comment · 1 month ago
A multi-billon dollar company dropping quarters (performance/ux) to pick up pennies (development savings from not maintaining a native app) never made mathematical sense to me.

[ aside: Meta founded the development of RN and they don't even strictly use it; plus, any troubles/hacks they need, they can make to the Framework itself ]

Comment · 2 months ago
People might think that Americans are selfish - and there ofc is truth to that - but I strongly believe that many-to-most of us WANT the world to 'reverse-uno' any tariffs or ridiculousness that the administration in power force upon others. We BEG for someone on the outside to standup; because clearly the people in power on the inside are not willing to.

People fail to understand that our system of checks and balances are not some magic potion - or some Boolean flag - that flips on when a violation occurs; its just the power that is given to certain government bodies and people. The failure to use them is not much different than if they didn't exist in the first place.

Comment · 2 months ago
"Why LLMs ARE dumber than they appear" is much closer to the reality I live in.
Comment · 3 months ago
Good for you!

Some of us are professionals and like to understand our systems and how they work. I don't write assembly instructions by hand either, nor do I design CPUs much, but I want to - and likely need to - know how they work to make the best judgements.

Comment · 3 months ago
In this economy, if you're playing catchup to competitors you really can't have growth AND large profit margins. Why is that not obvious?

XBOX brought in 5 billion, and after all development costs, marketing, operating expenses, investment in research, etc., they are STILL left with 200 million dollars.

What's the problem here? Shareholder value? (as in the mythical/speculative value of MSFT, because OF COURSE they don't want/care for part of the profits/dividends)

If the money being invested in research has a good return - i.e. a great product/service is created - then you will grow.

Chopping down the employees here is a horrible move. Besides crashing employee morale into the ground, losing hard-to-replace developers/staff, it also generally gives off shitty vibes to consumers.

People will think why invest more into a failing entity? I can see people worried about the future of their "purchases" (if you can call them that these days).

This announcement so soon after XBOX had to start yelling "we are not shutting down" from the roof tops doesn't look good.

Comment · 4 months ago
microservices / clusters / zones - really all of these are other "cell-based" architectures as well. there is absolutely no written rule that a microservice was just an API or a singular service, it basically can be a independent instance that is testable/usable/gives value on itself.

that said: still a nice write up, learning about some of the architectural choices that AMEX makes is definitely insightful (and relavent/useful to what i am working on right now as well!)

Comment · 5 months ago
> "while also working out how to make AI generated video that's impossible to detect."

what gives you that impression?

Google is spends millions of dollars researching and implementing SynthID [0]; ensuring all videos generated have a watermark to ensure they can be detected. As well as using SynthID to detect AI-generated videos, which is what I am guessing they are using @ YT to detect and label the AI videos.

I am far from a Google or AI fanboy, closer to an admiring hater, but I just don't see how they are making AI generated video impossible to detect if they are going out of the way to ensure SynthID /AI watermarks are present in any video generated on the platform.

unless you mean impossible to detect by human eyes; but if that's the case, so is everyone else. except everyone else is NOT spending resources on research for watermarking and keep the detection algorithms ahead of the curve.

Comment · 5 months ago
>> * Moving code off of GitHub doesn't change any of this: AI companies are free to download your git repo no matter where it is hosted, just like they can any other content on a publicly accessible website.

C'mon, I'm not even apart of the movement to move away from GitHub, but that's not really a valid argument. Sure, they CAN download the source code, but its not nearly as automatic. They don't get to download it all, en masse, from copying hard drives/databases they already own. They have to go over the internet. They don't get automatic notifications when new code gets pushed. And finally, if one wanted, they can make it harder for bots.

I certainly believe that these companies do get away with a lot more than the average Joe - see: Facebook downloading Anna's Archive, every pirated eBook - but that doesn't mean you have to hand it to them on a silver platter.

Plus, even if your code is private on GitHub, you can guarantee that they can't train there models on it anyway; unlike if you host it yourself, or somewhere else.

Does anyone else find it ironic when closed-source GitHub claims it's some super hero for open source?

Comment · 6 months ago
Why would folks be better paying 5.5% fee to OpenRouter ("Open") if most people just use one or two providers? Just use the provider's API.
Comment · 6 months ago
yeah, the context is federally here; so from my federal income taxes which are MUCH higher than my state, sales, and property taxes combined
Comment · 6 months ago
Not to mention, that Opus cost orders of magnitude more money. These are VERY impressive and usage.

FAANGS love to give away money to get people addicted to their platforms, and even they, the richest companies in the world, are throttling or reducing Opus usage for paying members, because even the money we pay them doesn't cover it.

Meanwhile, these are usable on local deployments! (and that's with the limited allowance our AI overlords afford us when it comes to choices for graphics cards too!)

Comment · 6 months ago
So we spent more on interest for the deficit than we spent on the doubling the combined spending on all of the following:

transportation government operations natural resources community development education & social services agriculture international affairs science & space and energy

...anxiety rises.

Comment · 11 months ago
I'm sure its happened before, but this is the first time i finally get to see some sort of modern hardware in KiCad.

Pretty cool to see all 6 layers, paste layers, and adhesive layers as well. I've always wondered how the cake was made and if big projects do/could use KiCad. Seems like a lot more work relative to those Single Layer PCBs on YouTube for things like emulators and custom PCBs. Glad I now know for sure, that I can't do this.

Comment · 11 months ago
I use pnpm, but even so: thankfully naming things is hard, and all my env variable names are very_convuluted_non_standard_names for things lol.
Comment · 11 months ago
That's why it should be rounded for everything. No pennies should probably mean that any final transaction totals are rounded to the nearest nickel. Whether they pay with cash, credit, debit, snap, gift card, etc...

IMO, rounding for cash purchases only sounds worse than keeping the pennies.

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