[-] bitofhope@awful.systems 18 points 4 months ago* (last edited 4 months ago)

I don't think he ever cared that much about Harry Potter in the first place. Much of HPMOR has these odd little uncommented contradictions with the original books that seem to result from skimming or basing your info on fan wikis.

[-] bitofhope@awful.systems 18 points 6 months ago

I don't want to live in the world of The Very Hungry Caterpillar.

I don't want to live in the world of The Giving Tree.

I don't want to live in the world of Pippi Longstocking (Sweden).

I want to live in the world of Goosebumps, The Yellow Pages, and JBL Tune Beam Quick Start Guide.

[-] bitofhope@awful.systems 18 points 8 months ago

To be fair, the typesetting of the papers is quite pleasant and the pictures are nice.

[-] bitofhope@awful.systems 18 points 8 months ago

Oh, sorry, I got so absorbed into reading the riveting material about features predicting state name tokens to predict state capital tokens I missed that we were quibbling over the word "next". Alright they can predict tokens out of order, too. Very impressive I guess.

[-] bitofhope@awful.systems 18 points 10 months ago

I distinctly recall a lot of people a few years ago parroting some variation of "well I don't know about Bitcoin specifically, but blockchain itself is probably going to be important and even revolutionary as a technology" and sometimesI wish I'd collected receipts to say "I told you it's not".

Here we are, year of Nakamoto 17 and the full list of use cases for blockchains is:

  • Speculative trading of toy currencies made up by private nobodies
  • Paying through the nose to execute arbitrary code on SETI@Home's evil cousin
  • Speculative trading of arbitrary blobs of bytes made up by private nobodies

And no, Git is not a fucking blockchain. Much like the New York City Subway is not the fucking Loop.

[-] bitofhope@awful.systems 18 points 11 months ago

As an advocate of free software, it would be better if the so-called AI systems were free and open source software. I don't think this is feasible. The models are trained on data that is, in part, incredibly proprietary. To "open source" these algorithms would mean to "open source" all media on the internet. Imagine convincing Disney to release all their movies under an open source license. Now imagine making everyone else do that too. That is what it would take to "open source" AI as it exists.

[-] bitofhope@awful.systems 18 points 1 year ago

Wow, it took until 2024 but politics have finally arrived into software. Having politics is not at all in the spirit of the GPL. Not giving these people a privileged access to the codebase is discrimination obviously. What do you have against apolitical entities like Baikal Electronics?

[-] bitofhope@awful.systems 18 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

Yea who would want to live in a dusty, arid, brown and yellow wasteland city like that? Certainly not the "Occupy Mars" guy.

The dark theme is nice, btw.

[-] bitofhope@awful.systems 19 points 1 year ago

I don't claim to be an expert on nuclear power, so take what I say with a grain of salt, but from what I've seen, smaller reactors don't seem to make much sense. The trend seems to be towards bigger reactors with bigger power output. Some of it thanks to the bureaucracy of getting permits per reactor, but also the physics, engineering, real estate and economics involved. Conventional (i.e. existent) reactors are typically a fairly small part of a nuclear power plant's footprint, so no matter how much you miniaturize them you will have the overhead of security, operations, cooling and electrical infrastucture.

If someone can fill me in on the benefits of smaller, more modular nuclear reactors and how they might outweight those of large installations, I'm interested.

[-] bitofhope@awful.systems 18 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

Little of this was news to me, but damn, laid out systematically like that, it's even more damning than I expected. And the stuff that was new to me certainly didn't help.

Very serious people at HN at it again:

The only argument I find here against it is the question of whether someone's personal opinions should be a reason to be removed from a leadership position.

Yes, of course they should be! Opinions are essential to the job of a leader. If the opinions you express as a leader include things like "sexual harassment is not a real crime" or "we shouldn't give our employees raises because otherwise they'll soon demand infinite pay" or "there's no problem in adults having sex with 14 year olds and me saying that isn't going to damage the reputation of the organization I lead" you're a terrible leader and and embarrassment of a spokesman.

Edit: The link submitted by the editors is [flagged] [dead]. Of course.

[-] bitofhope@awful.systems 18 points 1 year ago

You can totally hack a plane using a buffer overflow. C airlines don't check how many tickets they sell on a single flight. Usually if you overbook a flight, they will simply reallocate some of their buffer into business class. However, if you buy a bunch of tickets to one flight at once, you can craft a scenario where you overwrite the pilot.

[-] bitofhope@awful.systems 19 points 1 year ago

I think killing someone is a pretty major violation of that person's bodily autonomy.

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