jerf

4 ms·

1.
by jerf 5d ago
Every year it gets more and more important to learn how to not be sucked in by a small amount of convenience. "Capitalism" has figured out how to abuse your desire for maximum convenience. You need to figure out what your price is
2.
by jerf 6d ago
There were games being written in days where every byte was precious, and the indirection necessary for something like the decorator pattern was just infeasible. There was a lot of direct stat manipulation upon equip & unequip back in t
3.
by jerf 8d ago
I've had some success writing certain explicitly technical documents, with a style guide provided to the LLM that it can match, and then going over it by basically iterating on every sentence in the document and asking "can this s
4.
by jerf 8d ago
"I am already seeing my "normie" friends getting locked out of accounts due to not understanding passkeys." In a weird way this is good news for us. If people are losing passkeys, getting locked out, and incurring non-tr
5.
by jerf 9d ago
Let me just check the schedule here... ah, yes, it looks like we should be getting "AIRSHIPS - HAS THEIR TIME FINALLY COME" swinging back around here in about 6 weeks. See you all then.
6.
by jerf 9d ago
If you're trying to sarcastically imply something, I'm not sure what it is. That is also a necessary key to understanding a certain era of history. Not the current one, though.
7.
by jerf 9d ago
You elided if you want to understand what is going on more deeply , which is a rather important part. I say that precisely because I know that in reality most people aren't that interested. Which feel like I'm insulting people or
8.
by jerf 9d ago
Research the "Monroe doctrine"... by which I mean, don't just look up a one paragraph summary, spend a bit of time with it. A few pages of text at least. Ideally in a modern formulation you should encounter the term "Wor
9.
by jerf 10d ago
Are you sure it wasn't prorated? If it wasn't prorated anyone who approved the contract needs training and/or firing. If it is prorated, that is generally not a problem. Small outages aren't even worth the effort of tryi
10.
by jerf 10d ago
You can use -log10(1-p). On the "nines" it is exactly the number of nines you have: $ python3 Python 3.12.3 (main, Aug 31 2026, 10:18:26) [GCC 13.3.0] on linux Type "help", "copyright", "cred
11.
by jerf 10d ago
Ah, hardware disk drive replacements, that would make sense. I'm very software oriented so wasn't considering the hardware implications. Thank you.
12.
by jerf 10d ago
"Shrinkflation" as a word only caught on when the process got to the point it is completely impossible to miss. It has actually been going on for a while. If you take a "basket of goods" since the 1990s, inflation will b
13.
by jerf 10d ago
No joke, my final statistics class I had to take for my computer science degree back in the late 1990s would very frequently use as a sample problem "here is the run statistics of some industrial creation process, how much excess quali
14.
by jerf 10d ago
Honest question, not a challenge: In what way will this improve preservation of PS2 games? My impression was that PS2 emulation was already solved, which I mention precisely to invoke Cunningham's Law. What PS2 things don't work r
15.
by jerf 11d ago
Everything has become a lemon market: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Market_for_Lemons Even if a brand stays solid for 100 years, for all I know as I'm standing there in the store deciding whether to buy someth
16.
by jerf 11d ago
You asked a question. I gave you an answer. I seriously doubt that if you and I sat down together at a table and banged on this for an hour that we would come to the same definition of "valid". Ask 10 people, get 12 answers to tha
17.
by jerf 11d ago
It's possible, but "aphantasia is fairly rare" and "aphastastics abound on HN, even moreso than is apparent if there's a number of people like jerf who are aphantastic and still unaware despite even posting on stori
18.
by jerf 11d ago
We've already seen frontier models refuse to answer almost any question that touches on computer security and be very likely to kick out biology and chemistry questions even if they aren't all that close to breeding dangerous viru
19.
by jerf 11d ago
I've also wondered whether this entire conversation is just all of us collectively talking past each other for the entire conversation and we all in fact have quite similar experiences. The recent use of brain imaging to examine this q
20.
by jerf 11d ago
This is the SaaS advantage you can still have in an AI era. You can beat your competition by being exposed to more of the real world than them. For example, anyone can vibe code an accounting app, but no matter how good AIs get no vibe-code
21.
by jerf 11d ago
The precedent on this matter is surprisingly thin on the ground, but the legal system has declined to agree with "their store, their rules" for web sites, with a particularly interesting precedent on that matter from "Sandvig
22.
by jerf 12d ago
I'm looking forward to the modding community finally having full, unfettered access to a single hardware deploy target that will allow them to do a lot of interesting work that may be technically possible right now, but is very hard in
23.
by jerf 12d ago
That would require a very improbable sequence of events for it to happen right this second. Moreover, if the theory is true, it is happening all around us, all the time. Every consciousness that has ever existed, human or otherwise, is stil
24.
by jerf 12d ago
One of the scariest science fiction stories I've ever read is "The White Plague" by Frank Herbert... yeah, the Dune guy. In this story a molecular biologist's family is murdered in a terrorist event, goes insane, and dec
25.
by jerf 12d ago
As I said, anyone who takes comfort in the hypothesis doesn't understand it. The dominant probability has nothing to do with benevolent aliens reaching down and inevitably resurrecting you to youth and health. It is you, minimally cons
26.
by jerf 12d ago
From the point of view of the old people, exponentially large injections of improbability. This is also where it is important to understand the argument is parameterized. If your acceptance function is "a full human body living a full
27.
by jerf 12d ago
"Don't solve this problem without doing stuff that harms people" is the cover story they sell to you. "Ensure that the right people stay in the right sort of power, as defined by the people currently in power, and nobody
28.
by jerf 12d ago
This is the civilization-scale Quantum Immortality argument... no civilization can be around that witnessed the end of civilization. (I refer to it that way rather than a "variant" because Quantum Immortality should always be para
29.
by jerf 12d ago
With a bit of practice and enough ciphertext you can half-decode a simple Caesar cipher that still spaces between words in your head. There's only so many letters in English that double, only a few letters that can stand words themselv
30.
by jerf 12d ago
I'm not sure what you're trying to say. We've been around the "wheel of reincarnation" multiple times [1]. It has worked many times. And there's even more things that you can do, even if you don't, e.g.,

More ›