paulgb

10 ms·

91.
by paulgb 2y ago
I have no inside knowledge but the speculation I’ve heard is that this was not about a lack of funding per se so much as what happened to the money. E.g. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35930310
92.
by paulgb 2y ago
This could use a (2021)
93.
by paulgb 2y ago
I’m kind of glad that its reached its logical conclusion. It’s always been pure speculation, at least now they’ve dropped the pretense.
94.
by paulgb 2y ago
(author here) some people in this thread and elsewhere asked me about whether an LLM could decode this, and the answer seems to be: not likely by itself, but it often can if it has access to a Python interpreter! Here's a demo of Gemin
95.
by paulgb 2y ago
I did some experimentation today. I wouldn't expect AI to solve it using only their own reasoning, but I've had a decent hit rate of getting AI to solve them when they have access to a Python interpreter. Here's Gemini Flash
96.
by paulgb 2y ago
I haven’t tried it but I’ve heard that at least some unicode normalizers do not strip sequences of variation selectors.
97.
by paulgb 2y ago
I got Claude to get “the raisons play at midnight" from an emoji in one prompt and three uses of its "analysis" tool. (the X Y at mightnight is a snowclone that Claude has probably seen, but I randomly picked "raisons&qu
98.
by paulgb 2y ago
I think the Rust is more readable for bytemucking stuff than dynamic languages because the reader doesn't have to infer the byte widths, but for what it's worth the demo contains a TypeScript implementation: https://git
99.
by paulgb 2y ago
I just tested and private use characters render as boxes for me (󰀀), the point here was to encode them in a way that they are hidden and treated as "part of" another character when copy/pasting.
100.
by paulgb 2y ago
I see what you did there ;)
101.
by paulgb 2y ago
Wow, that's interesting! I wonder if this reproduces with a different message, or if it was a lucky guess. I looked at how the strings tokenize and they do appear to conserve enough information that it could be decoded in theory.
102.
by paulgb 2y ago
The key in local-first is the _first_. The stated goal is to give people the benefits of local applications (no spinners, data outlives the app) with the benefits of cloud applications (low-friction collaboration).
103.
Smuggling arbitrary data through an emoji(paulbutler.org)
769 points by paulgb 2y ago|195 comments
104.
by paulgb 2y ago
> WebAssembly is a true write-once-run-anywhere experience. (Anywhere that can spin up a V8 engine, which is a lot of places these days.) This is true if your wasm code is purely computational, but if it interacts with the outside world
105.
by paulgb 2y ago
One thing to keep in mind is that when you LISTEN on a connection, you remove it from the connection pool until you are done with it. The straightforward approach of using one connection per connected client can quickly consume all of the c
106.
by paulgb 2y ago
“Interactive” is overly broad and doesn’t imply multi-user sync. “Duplex” tells me about the transport layer, not the desired functionality — some of the patterns in the article are achieved with half-duplex transports. “Realtime” in this s
107.
by paulgb 2y ago
I work on an open source project for doing just that: https://plane.dev It follows the model used by Figma where each active document gets its own process on a cluster of machines, and requests are routed to the document server.
108.
Smuggling arbitrary data through an emoji(paulbutler.org)
8 points by paulgb 2y ago|1 comments
109.
by paulgb 2y ago
In a normal administration, gutting the NSF would be the main story. If his statements on Gaza are indeed just bluster, they still succeed in focusing attention away from his current actual actions.
110.
by paulgb 2y ago
Running the Bitcoin network securely is expensive. Currently, about 95% of the cost is covered by issuance of new Bitcoin, but the amount of remaining Bitcoin decays exponentially (currently it’s down to the last 5%). The incentive design o
111.
by paulgb 2y ago
I’m not talking about losing mindshare, I mean in the literal sense that transaction volume is necessary for Bitcoin to avoid an attack on the network. The incentive system that secures it is designed to increasingly rely on transaction fee
112.
by paulgb 2y ago
It’s relevant here that “doxxing” here just means “exposing their names and internet posts”, right? In that case, yes, the OPM already “doxxes” most federal employees, even making their salary data public. It’s seen as a worthwhile tradeoff
113.
by paulgb 2y ago
The trouble is, it needs to be more than that if it is to survive. Since inception, mining has mostly been subsidized by new bitcoin, which is capped by design (and about 95% distributed). Satoshi’s paper assumed that transaction costs wo
114.
by paulgb 2y ago
This is nuts, 18F was one of the few groups in the federal government that is/was good at making software! (login.gov is a good example of craft you don't generally see in commercial enterprise software, let alone government softw
115.
by paulgb 2y ago
Cursor also just got support this week. Overall it’s still early (MCP only came out a couple of months ago) but seeing multiple clients that allow it to be used with non-Anthropic models, and getting good results, makes me bullish for MCP.
116.
by paulgb 2y ago
You already could have a client that treats a block as a mute. Easier to just open an incognito tab though. > In theory, a bad actor could create their own rogue client or interface which ignores some of the blocking behaviors, since the
117.
by paulgb 2y ago
How do you arrive at that estimate?
118.
by paulgb 2y ago
Microsoft has at least one maps product (Bing Maps), and at one time had an encyclopedia with an atlas. You’d think they’d have a way of dealing with disputed territory.
119.
by paulgb 2y ago
When I see instantdb in the domain on here I always know it's going to be a good read :) Nicely done!
120.
by paulgb 2y ago
This seems to be largely predicated on the idea that the more you understand how AI works the more the magic disappears[1], but I think the opposite is true -- I like to think I understand this stuff from the logic gates to backpropagation

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