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Balooga

Re:The $6.3B Binance Hack Was Pulled Off in Just 20 Minutes on Friday October 30, 2026 @01:59PM (#50307753)
They clicked the "pi" symbol on the Binance homepage [1].

[1] - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pXPXMxsXT28

Is your request made one-on-one or in front of the whole "guys" group? If it is not one-on-one, then you have set the other person up in front of the entire group.

> "I feel excluded by 'guys', any chance we could settle on something else?"

In agreeing to your preference this person can no longer use the word 'guys' at all, ever? Or they can, but before doing so must first scan the faces of everyone in the group and if they see you then use an alternate?

This is the problem with personal preferences. They are personal to you, not to anyone else.

If your company orders pizza for lunch and your personal preference is for no pepperoni, then expect that the person placing the order asks for a cheese pizza and several pepperoni pizzas. Don't expect that everyone gets cheese pizza.

Get rid of the fixed mortgage rate. Owners will sell when they can't afford the mortgage rate; the new owner will pay property taxes at the current rate.

Apart from the US, there aren't may other countries that allow fixed rate mortgages, and not a 30-year fixed.

Well, the law says that the person behind the wheel is responsible.
Re:Strands Decider 2B: a small, open-source, decision model on Wednesday October 07, 2026 @12:53AM (#49988369)
Oh! You probably want ChatTJB [1]

[1] - https://chattjb.org/about

Re:Ocean the Man Who Listens to Whales on Tuesday October 06, 2026 @11:42PM (#49987847)
This is called a dichotomy. People are able to hold two opposing views in their heads without too much trouble.

For example; I hate to think of cows being tortured or otherwise abused. I do like a good hamburger.

This was back in 1996 and we were the primary systems integrators for the new Malaysian Astro direct to home satellite broadcasting service. Which meant we were responsible for getting the new Conditional Access systems, new program guide systems, new mpeg video and audio encoders producing new streams, into new multiplexers, all installed into a new facility with new everything else, into a Transport Stream, up and down from a new satellite, and into a new set top box and working.

That job taught me the value of good specifications.

Graduated from college and day one in my first real job, I was handed a hardcopy of the MPEG-2 transport stream spec and told to read it and come back with questions.

That's how you onboard.

Re:Plunging test scores are a slow-moving catastrophe on Saturday September 26, 2026 @06:48PM (#49861320)
How about instead of just saying what's wrong, say what's better?
My parents still have the fridge they received as a wedding present in 1969 from my mom's parents. Still running as the second fridge in the garage.
Re:I am done with this shit on Thursday September 24, 2026 @03:08AM (#49827266)
This isn't the ME's domain so they aren't aware of the guardrails to enforce.

For example in years gone by, the ME may have requested data and would have been provided a weekly SQL dump of relevant data in CSV format. No harm if that data is becomes corrupted as it will be replaced in a couple days time.

But now, the ME can prompt the LLM. The LLM may search the company wiki, emails, Sharepoint servers, discover some AWS credentials, and directly access whatever environments those credentials allow, perhaps the production systems. The ME didn't know to tell the LLM to not do this. The ME asked for "n", and the LLM went off and did a bunch of stuff to accomplish "n". Huge harm if production data becomes corrupted, tables modified, etc.

Re:I am done with this shit on Wednesday September 23, 2026 @03:14PM (#49821062)
Back in the day, folks without software skills were able to build certain things themselves; from standalone Microsoft Access databases with simple Visual Basic 6 frontends, to finance maintaining huge spreadsheets as pseudo databases, etc.

The issue now is that LLMs increase the blast radius. Before it was one person lighting a firecracker. Now it's one person setting fire to the fireworks factory. For example, the LLM exposes the ME's tools and internal company data to the Internet.

Re:I didn't sign the Fields medallists' letter on Thursday September 17, 2026 @03:06PM (#49745141)
> Seems like AI could help massively there, by removing a huge bottleneck around technical elaboration and application seeking.

Are you proposing that humanity should rely on AI to determine the fields of study that should be perused and those that should be defunded?

Why don't you first come up with an AI that can predict if the stock market will go up or down tomorrow, with 99.999% accuracy. Should be really simple as it only needs to answer what will happen tomorrow.

After that, come up with the AI that will predict how actions or non-actions today may affect outcomes 100 years into the future.

Agreed. What surprised me is just how small a single serving of peanuts is. 28 grams - 180 calories. Spoiler, that's a lot less than two handfuls and going back for seconds.
> How about; if it's already documented, make it available to the end user.

There's documentation, and then there's documentation. What passes for documentation in the modern era is scattershot over thousands of JIRA tickets and Confluence pages. Most outdated.

Re:Don't Let Anyone Take Away Your Big Box of Cables on Thursday September 10, 2026 @04:50PM (#49649996)
The trouble with old cables is after years they can become "tacky" or "melt" softer plastics they come into contact with. So storage is important.
Having grown up in South Africa, moving to the states was the first time I ever heard of such a thing as a peanut allergy, or shrimp allergy, or gluten allergy, or any kind of allergy that wasn't having to wear a medic-alert bracelet to indicate an allergic reaction to penicillin.

Removing one's shoes before entering a house isn't a thing in South Africa.

Filth can sometimes be a good thing.

Now I'm feeling pretty good about getting 10-11 tokens/sec running Qwopus 3.6-35B-A3B Q6_K on an old Mac Pro 2013 (trashcan) with 128GB RAM (DDR3), 12 core Xeon, dual D700s. Arch Linux and llama.cpp.
Re:GUIs should be fully keyboard-driven on Friday August 28, 2026 @02:50PM (#49482799)
I'm surprised the person responsible for <backspace> mapping to Back navigation didn't mandate that <del> would be super awesome for Forward navigation.
Re:Six Months of Writing Code Exclusively with Agents on Thursday August 27, 2026 @12:12PM (#49467172)
There is the level of understanding of the concept of a Quicksort function, how it works, when to use it.

And then there is the level of understanding gained of opening up an editor and trying to write a Quicksort function in Go or C++ or Python or whatever.

I wouldn't consider the latter to be "laying bricks".

Re:YouTube Format IDs on Thursday August 27, 2026 @11:44AM (#49466686)
Not at all. If you toggle between SD and HD in front of them, it's plain to see.

But if you tuned to a random channel, most people couldn't tell you if what they are looking at is SD or HD. "It's all digital, right?"

Again, if you then swapped to the HD version, they would immediately notice.

But we had so many stories of installers visiting customers homes on service calls to be confronted by massive TVs displaying 480i or 480p. And the customer as happy as can be with the picture quality.

And there were two version of this; (a) Two physical channels, one channel SD and one channel HD, and (b) a single HD channel and the DVR is can be set to down convert to SD.

Re:YouTube Format IDs on Thursday August 27, 2026 @03:14AM (#49461034)
Are you joking? Most people don't notice a difference between 480i and 1080p when blown up on a large TV in their living room. I know this from experience having worked at a satellite TV provider and hearing actual customer feedback.
Re:U.S. State Department Pauses Immigrant Visa Applications on Wednesday August 26, 2026 @08:43PM (#49457932)
> Do you think non-citizens can get Social Security or a US Passport?

Non-citizen Nationals can get a US passport. For example, folks born in American Samoa.

Re:U.S. State Department Pauses Immigrant Visa Applications on Wednesday August 26, 2026 @08:28PM (#49457806)
> You also get treated differently if things go wrong.

Not treated differently. Treated the same.

You are required by law to enter your country of citizenship using that country's passport (this is true for every country). Not doing so can result in fines or jail time. This is precisely to stop idiots from playing the "foreigner" card to try to, for example get out of paying a speeding ticket or parking fines.

Re:YouTube Format IDs on Wednesday August 26, 2026 @03:35PM (#49454604)
Fox Sports was 720p.

Back then, all broadcasters had to conform to ATSC 1.0 MPEG2 transport and MPEG2 encoding due to terrestrial broadcasts. The choices were 480i/p, 720p, or 1080i/p.

Re:How Complex Systems Fail on Monday August 24, 2026 @10:57AM (#49420710)
Yes, and the cause is almost always due to many small errors, the Swiss Cheese Model[1]

[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swiss_cheese_model

Re:Does AI stop children from learning? on Friday August 21, 2026 @03:22PM (#49392730)
Have you never watched The Karate Kid?

"Wax on. Wax off" -- memorization and repetition are the basis for understanding.

How useful it is to remember useless information that one day turns out to not be so useless after all.

Re:Does AI stop children from learning? on Friday August 21, 2026 @03:07PM (#49392559)
Mastery requires memorization.

You can't play an instrument without muscle memory.

Why are commercial airline pilots required to spend hundreds of hours in simulators? So that when things go wrong they don't have time to think, they just react. And their reaction will be the correct course of action because that's what they have drilled on.

How many times have you gone "Oh, this new thing I have just encountered reminds me of this other thing?". How can you make such leaps without knowing that other thing?

Re:What Happens When the Cost of Intelligence Drops 100x on Friday August 21, 2026 @11:00AM (#49389181)
Jevons Paradox [1]

> when technological improvements that increase the efficiency of a resource's use lead to a rise, rather than a fall, in total consumption of that resource.

[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jevons_paradox

Las Vegas replaced the expensive incandescent lighting on the strip with cheaper to run LED equivalents. But the costs didn't come down because they were able to add more lights and larger displays.

I think the same will happen with tokens. As the cost of tokens comes down, these models will just consume more tokens.

Re:Copyright does not protect AI-generated content in EU on Thursday August 20, 2026 @09:19PM (#49382499)
This then implies that in the EU, AI-generated content cannot have a license applied? MIT, GPL, CC, etc?

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