rayiner

5 ms·

61.
by rayiner 25d ago
Have you looked at the code before rendering judgment? It seems pretty readable and well-structured: https://github.com/eval-exec/neomacs/tree/main/crates/neomac... Emacs, meanwhile, has a 50,000 li
62.
by rayiner 25d ago
> To some extend I hope that the Republican party wins the next election. They should be the ones fixing the economy, raising taxes, and doing something responsible for once. The last small-government Republican was Herbert Hoover. Reaga
63.
by rayiner 25d ago
What's hilarious is that typing was nearly perfect on my 3gs (with "iPhone OS 3"--back before it was even "iOS").
64.
by rayiner 25d ago
Obama sped up the rate of growth of the debt around 2010 and the percentage growth annually has been consistent since then (i.e. linear on the log scale): https://usafacts.org/answers/how-much-debt-does-the-us-have&#x2F
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by rayiner 25d ago
Yeah, I agree with you on that point.
66.
by rayiner 25d ago
> Every single H1B I worked with was brilliant in their field - and paid extremely well often in excess of $400K. I know several that are earning well past $500K. If you claim these are generic Jira pushers, well you are showing ignora
67.
by rayiner 25d ago
Remember H1B is a lottery . So yes, some of them will have the qualifications to get hired at places like FAANG. But many (most?) are pretty mediocre. There's also an extra allocation for people who get "advanced degrees" fr
68.
by rayiner 26d ago
He tutors math and science, my aunt (who also has a graduate degree) works in a daycare. Canadian welfare is also quite generous. Their son is doing well, but I don’t see how it makes economic sense for Canada at that point. It boils down t
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by rayiner 26d ago
My uncle is a skilled immigrant to Canada (electrical engineer) and was never able to find an engineering job. They live in an immigrant-heavy subsidized housing neighborhood full of people in the same situation.
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by rayiner 26d ago
That would make sense if the purpose of the program was to get the most valuable top talent. How do we decide who is the most valuable? We let the market decide. But that would cause upward wage pressure, which would undermine the real purp
71.
by rayiner 26d ago
That's an insufficiently granular question. How much of the talent in frontier labs has an H1B rather than an O visa? Out of the people who have an H1B, how many employers would be willing to eat the $100k fee because those employees a
72.
by rayiner 26d ago
The H1B debate has a lot of factions, but one thing is clear: AI is going to be replacing some to a lot of entry level knowledge jobs. Even if it doesn't get any better than what we have now, it'll create a pipeline problem where
73.
by rayiner 26d ago
Your first point is correct, but your second point doesn't follow. Lack of protectionism is based on the notion that the U.S. will always be technologically one step ahead of China because China can only copy. That's what has gott
74.
by rayiner 26d ago
Underestimating China's capability to make homegrown technology is a mistake I could understand 20 years ago. Now it's just a sign of poor judgment.
75.
by rayiner 26d ago
I had Claude evaluate my vibe-coded extractor against yours on the EcoFactor corpus, which I didn't test on, and an internal corpus I have: > The EcoFactor result inverts. There, on hand-authored gold over 21 pages of clean native t
76.
by rayiner 26d ago
> The only culture whose fertility rate isn't declining and converging around 0.5-1 U.S. Muslims and Mormons both have a total fertility rate well above replacement (2.2-2.5). https://news.rakwa.com/2025/08&#x2F
77.
by rayiner 27d ago
> By the way, you don't have to look at public transit schedules when your public transit works. I recommend visiting countries outside the US that have functional infrastructure. I go to Japan once or twice a year. Even in Japan, m
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by rayiner 27d ago
A “one time tax” is pure third worldism. It’s like Chicago trying to close its deficit by selling off its parking meters. But Brin should propose an alternative tax that is sustainable.
79.
by rayiner 27d ago
You’re overlooking the Gallup studies showing that the desired fertility rate has been stable at 2.7, well above the replacement rate. > The historical total fertility rate was because women were not educated and empowered; forward looki
80.
by rayiner 27d ago
Sounds like he wants to avoid the race to the bottom in terms of pricing that is resulting from AI becoming a commodity.
81.
by rayiner 27d ago
> Desired fertility is like desired Lambos, all that matters is realized fertility. Sure, people are having less kids because we banned building housing and then filled the housing we have with government subsidized illegal immigrants. W
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by rayiner 28d ago
> Childfree/childless rates are up, and will continue to climb Desired family size is still 2.7 kids, and has been stable at that number for over 50 years: https://news.gallup.com/poll/694640/americans-idea
83.
by rayiner 28d ago
The census definition of “urban area” means nothing. I technically live in an “urban area” according to the census definition, but there’s soybean farms five minutes down the road from me. The same is true for the definition of “childless”
84.
by rayiner 28d ago
The things you’re describing aren’t “alternatives to driving.” They perform a different function. Most Americans don’t aspire to live like Chinese people packed into high rises with 0.8 kids taking the train to work. They want to live where
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by rayiner 28d ago
> Vote for people who will drop tariffs and allow the import of cheap EVs manufactured at scale No. Globalism is bad. Better to have cars made domestically that are a bit more expensive to buy, but support local jobs. Better yet, ban ele
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by rayiner 28d ago
Yes, the tool I’m describing works on what the pdf_oxide crate returns, which includes glyph positions. Here’s a public appendix from a recent Federal Circuit case. It has a representative assortment of documents (opinions, briefs, patents,
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by rayiner 28d ago
> This is why LLMs / VLMs are so much better at this task, because they can look at the document holistically like we can. Totally agreed. But in this use case, PDFs are the working format, not just an archival format. An offline ba
88.
by rayiner 28d ago
A PDF is a command stream designed for rendering. Interpreting the command stream to get the positions of each glyph is deterministic and existing libraries (I use both pdf_oxide and lopdf) do that fine. Once you have glyph positions, you n
89.
by rayiner 28d ago
The use case is basically the same ones where a programmer would use grep on source files, and it’s too slow to run the model on it directly for the same reasons. Existing tools do text extraction (pdftotext) but not that great when there’s
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by rayiner 28d ago
Crazy, but not universalist so they can only harm themselves.

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