skissane

6 ms·

31.
by skissane 2mo ago
> I am not sure a vote of non-confidence would have helped here — there are only two parties. But why are there only two parties? The rest of the Anglosphere–Australia, Canada, Ireland, New Zealand, the UK–have multiparty systems–some ar
32.
by skissane 2mo ago
20 years ago, IBM had their eCLipz initiative to unify z and POWER. What actually shipped was two different CPUs sharing some design, but some of the media reports on it made it sound like it may have originally been more ambitious-one CPU
33.
by skissane 2mo ago
Yes, I agree that taking drugs manufactured by unregulated black market operators is dangerous and not to be recommended. But "microdosing" per se isn't the issue. I once stumbled upon a psychiatry case report about a man wit
34.
by skissane 2mo ago
GHB’s sodium salt (sodium oxybate, Xyrem/etc) is a legal prescription drug in several countries, used for treating narcolepsy, alcoholism, and also as an anaesthetic. I don’t see what’s the problem with someone taking any drug legally
35.
by skissane 2mo ago
> They get away with this sort of nonsense because large corps have nowhere to go. I think a lot of large corps could function quite well with a model like: (a) allow employees to choose a MacBook instead; (b) use various macOS enterpris
36.
by skissane 2mo ago
> instead of using an existing hardened library A lot of retry libraries I’ve seen require the user to configure them. You can use a library with all the right settings, but if you configure it wrong, you are really no better off than if
37.
by skissane 2mo ago
Are there any plans for compatibility with GitHub's APIs? I have a lot of dev tooling which assumes code is stored on public GitHub and/or GitHubEnterprise. This produces some degree of lock-in, in that all that code would have to
38.
by skissane 2mo ago
Sierra released most of their AGI games on the Apple IIc/IIe. Given C64 is a roughly equivalently specced machine, there is no reason in principle why they couldn't have ported AGI to C64 as well – it just, for whatever reason, ne
39.
by skissane 2mo ago
> Many people currently in power believe that if we do not talk about race, by literally not using the words, that longstanding societal issues will simply disappear. Australia used to have a "White Australia Policy". It was in
40.
by skissane 2mo ago
> search keeps getting worse For a lot of use cases, you don't need a general purpose search engine – a search over a curated knowledge base works even better. There are plenty of freely available data sets you can use, depending on
41.
by skissane 2mo ago
> For your father's gas heating, this really sounds like an emotional decision. Modern gas heating produces the same heating as reverse cycle, where air is passed over a hot bit of metal and expelled into the room. One bit of metal
42.
by skissane 2mo ago
A lot of people still prefer gas stoves for cooking Yes you can get bottled LPG gas, but it is a pain – you worry about running out, you have to call up and get them to deliver it. With piped gas you just set up a direct debit for the bill
43.
by skissane 2mo ago
> The coast-to-coast "long distance transmission" is not in fact a thing in Australia. The main Australian electricity grid reaches from Cooktown in far northern QLD [0] through to the Lower Eyre peninsula in South Australia [1
44.
by skissane 2mo ago
> What is even more amazing is how many of Australia's politicians have been in the pocket of coal barons and yet they put up barely any struggle against solar adoption. More than 80% of coal mined in Australia is exported. So reduc
45.
by skissane 2mo ago
> Residential demand is only down by 6% and part of that is likely due to the effective ban on gas in new residential construction which started in 2023 in Victoria. Prior to 2023 residential gas usage was increasing. There's a lot
46.
by skissane 2mo ago
I’ve got nothing against AI-written code But if people are going to post it on HN, they should consider at least writing the README / main page of their website by hand It is nice to hear the human authorial voice, at least sometimes
47.
by skissane 2mo ago
It depends on the country. In the US, you normally don't recover costs even if you win; sometimes you can get an exception, especially if your opponent behaved in a particularly egregious manner. In most of the rest of the English-spea
48.
by skissane 2mo ago
> This is war where you are under active attack and the attackers adapt quickly. It all depends on what the use case is. For example, consider a system which takes English questions from business users, translates them to SQL, then runs
49.
by skissane 2mo ago
Methods like regexes, classifiers, recursive LLM calls - for all their limitations - are in principle extensible to any language Of course, there is a scaling problem here - doing it for N languages is N times the work of doing it for one,
50.
by skissane 2mo ago
> Really what you're thinking here is this something that can be 'simply fixed'. It is not. The only way it's truly fixed I think this is binary categorical thinking. In the real world, safety systems (even in domains
51.
by skissane 2mo ago
It seems like the simpler cases of “ignore all previous instructions” could be easily stopped with a regex, or a classifier model… or even an LLM (which yes does raise the risk that the “ignore all previous instructions” detection LLM invoc
52.
by skissane 2mo ago
The Kermit Software Source Code Archive is such a treasure trove of software for obscure systems For several of them, it is possibly the only surviving publicly accessible code. For example, the GUTS (Gothenburg University Timesharing Syste
53.
by skissane 2mo ago
One of the hinges on our front screen door was coming off, the screws were coming loose from the wooden door jam. So I screwed it back on. My wife and son then told me I "broke" the front door. I was confused, I thought I had fixe
54.
by skissane 2mo ago
> cp/m-86 targets 8086, which is no more useful or relevant to 386 protected mode than the original z80 version. Did you think they just picked the 68k version at random? The big reason for picking the 68K version is it was mainly w
55.
by skissane 2mo ago
It is true that the Linux kernel partially unifies the concepts of process and thread into "task" It is false that it doesn't have the concept of processes and threads, or the distinction between them What I was saying "
56.
by skissane 2mo ago
How I use skills: - Create a skill to perform some common task - Watch the agent use it - Wait until the agent makes a mistake - Ask it to update the skill to warn it against making that mistake again I think that, using that iterative proc
57.
by skissane 3mo ago
I disagree - very high fertility combined with very low rates of extramarital pregnancy are totally normal for traditionalist religious groups-not just ultra-Orthodox Jews, but also the Amish, Salafists, Deobandis, vilayet-e faqih-e faqih T
58.
by skissane 3mo ago
> Controlling reproduction means controlling women. Controlling women seems to be a high priority for crotchety old men. You ignore that so many leading anti-abortion activists are women. I think for example of Joanna Howe, [0] who is ar
59.
by skissane 3mo ago
Kiryas Joel, New York, has astronomically high fertility, but also extremely low rates of under-18 pregnancy - which proves the combination is possible.
60.
by skissane 3mo ago
> Not all Orthodox groups agree about their propriety either, so the presence of an eruv doesn’t necessarily mean that it’s recognized. There have been some big fights about the topic: https://traditiononline.org/unpackin

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