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andriamanitra

Re:Our approach to EU text provenance rules on Monday October 05, 2026 @05:56PM (#49971419)
1% false positive rate is completely unacceptable, and if you can bypass it by changing some of the words what's even the point? This is only going to catch low effort slop.
Re:I advertise malicious software on Google Ads on Wednesday September 09, 2026 @08:49AM (#49625711)
I'm guessing "race term" got automatically flagged because it can be understood as "word or expression that refers to a racial group or to race/ethnicity" i.e. an euphemism for a slur.
I think "avoid naming things after people without a deep personal connection to the thing being named" and "prefer established names used by locals" are pretty good principles to follow.

> The Koyukon people who inhabit the area around the mountain have referred to the peak as "Denali" for centuries. In 1896, a gold prospector named it "Mount McKinley" in support of then presidential candidate William McKinley, who later became the 25th president.

Re:AI;DR (AI; Didn't Read) on Monday August 17, 2026 @07:12PM (#49338971)
Even when LLMs add something it's a better idea to let the readers use LLMs to augment content. They have the best knowledge of their own background and what they're looking for.

Sharing information that is already in the corpus is simply not that valuable in a world where everyone has access to their own LLMs.

I don't see how a wealth tax that starts at $100M could possibly disproportionately (or at all) land on the middle class.

I'm sure the parasitic class will always find ways to partially dodge taxes but compared to income and capital gains taxes a strongly worded wealth tax would be much more difficult to avoid. We just need to be careful with the wording of the law to make sure lobbyists are not allowed to carve out any loopholes that can be abused by tax planners.

Because the fixed cost of deploying infrastructure (digging the fiber to the house) is extremely expensive compared to the marginal cost (of serving data over an already installed fiber). 20 different companies all digging their own fibers to the same house would be tremendously wasteful.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Natural_monopoly

That argument might be valid if there were no urban areas in America. However it fails to explain why, for example, New Jersey does not have affordable 25 Gbit residential internet either. It is half the size of Switzerland but has similar population and much more favorable geography. And even if you wanted to only look at a place like Idaho, the explanation (and solutions!) provided by the article is even more applicable to places where building infrastructure is hard/costly.

Claiming the lack of healthy competition in the ISP space is because of (geography|population density|[a-z]+) is a prime example of the defeatist attitude in which one seeks to explain/excuse problems instead of even trying to address them. I've started noticing this pattern more and more after Evan Edinger pointed it out in a video (addressing some American comments on his videos): [1]

> We all default to what we know, that is just very natural. The problem is when new information arrives and instead of sitting with it and thinking about it, we immediately reach for any reason that it must be wrong. Because if it's wrong, nothing has to change.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uDyPHGZCmNE&t=17m17s

Re:Mojo 1.0 Beta on Saturday May 09, 2026 @03:53AM (#48072913)
The changelog looks reasonable, seems like the language is moving in the right direction. I'm excited to try it out once it's open sourced. The dependency on glibc is an unfortunate limitation as it means you can't install Mojo on musl-based systems.

[1] https://mojolang.org/releases/v1.0.0b1/

Re:Bun is being ported from Zig to Rust on Tuesday May 05, 2026 @02:35AM (#48018843)
Was there even a PR? The post from Bun [1] says they have no plan to upstream it, and that ziggit post says the changes are undesirable. It sounds like there never was anything to reject.

[1] https://x.com/bunjavascript/status/2048428104893542781

Re:The AI Industry Is Discovering That the Public Hates It on Saturday April 25, 2026 @08:20PM (#47906029)
The cost of living would certainly rise somewhat but the point is that UBI is redistributive: the same absolute amount to everyone raises low incomes by a larger percentage than high incomes. Long term effects are hard to predict but in the short term it would mean the poor doing slightly better while the middle class is slightly worse off. The non-working (owning) class would be mostly unaffected as assets are insulated from inflation.

Another factor to consider is that putting more money in the hands of people in need of <thing> means producing <thing> becomes more profitable and thus more investment and resources are directed towards <thing>. If we assume the economy works the way the proponents of capitalism say it does, this should eventually drive the cost of living back down.

But personally I think the biggest benefit of UBI would be the reduction in number of people who are desperate enough to accept work – both legal and illegal – that is unfairly compensated, inhumane and/or immoral. The existence of that class of people is the driving force behind many societal problems. Exorbitant amounts of resources are wasted treating the symptoms of those problems instead of fixing the root cause.

Where did you get the idea that EVs have caused it? As far as I know the amount of road dust from EVs is within the same ballpark so the claim that it has led to overall higher pollution levels sounds inconceivable. I can't even find sources that indicate high pollution levels in Oslo besides a Bloomberg article that says the situation has actually improved in recent years. [1] On the contrary Oslo seems to be doing comparatively well according to the air quality data from iqair. [2]

[1] https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2025-04-11/why-oslo-...

[2] https://www.iqair.com/us/norway/oslo/oslo

Re:RE#: how we built the fastest regex engine in F# on Wednesday March 04, 2026 @07:27AM (#47246502)
This is very interesting. I'm a bit skeptical about the benchmarks / performance claims because they seem almost too good to be true but even just the extended operators alone are a nice improvement over existing regex engines.

The post mentions they also have a native library implemented in Rust without dependencies but I couldn't find a link to it. Is that available somewhere? I would love to try it out in some of my projects but I don't use .NET so the NuGET package is of no use to me.

Re:Julia: Performance Tips on Friday February 27, 2026 @04:01AM (#47178322)
If you need to deal with matrices Julia's built-in support for that kind of stuff is the best out of any language I've ever seen (and I've tried dozens of different languages). It's like having first-class numpy arrays without installing any third party packages, and the syntax is even more convenient than Python. The standard library is reasonably comprehensive (not quite as big as in Python or Ruby or Go, but it's usually more well-designed).

It is also an excellent language for messing about because the language and especially the REPL have tons of quality-of-life features. I often use it when I want to do something interactively (eg. inspect a data set, draw a graph, or figure out what's going on with an Unicode string, or debug some bitwise trickery).

What Julia is not great at is things where you need minimal overhead. It is performant for serious number crunching like simulations or machine learning tasks, but the runtime is quite heavy for simple scripting and command-line tools (where the JIT doesn't really get a chance to kick in).

That model breaks when you don't have perfect knowledge of whether or not you will perish. Therefore in every practical situation we are forced to assign a finite cost to risk. And generally people tend to prefer tiny increases to societal risk over compromising their personal comfort.
Re:Claude's C Compiler vs. GCC on Monday February 09, 2026 @07:44AM (#46944630)
Would you want it to? The further the goal posts are the more progress we are making, and that's good, no? Trying to make it into a religious debate between believers and non-believers is silly. Neither side can predict the future, and, even if they could, winning the debate is not worth anything!

What is interesting is what can do with LLMs today and what we would like them to be able to do tomorrow so we can keep developing them into a good direction. Whether or not you (or I) believe it can do that thing tomorrow is thoroughly uninteresting.

That's really neat! I found a bunch of cool repositories I had never heard of by looking up my username and a few of my favorite projects.
Marketing for cars and soda isn't that far off from actual scams. Ads are a big part of why (especially American) car and food culture is so toxic. The ad-driven demand for sugary drinks and large, impractical, environmentally unconscientious cars has almost certainly caused more death and misery than many actual scams.
It's not possible to become a billionaire with a B without fucking over a lot of people, but for a billionaire he isn't so bad. If we can't get rid of billionaires the next best thing is to hope they are more like Buffett and less like Musk or Thiel or Trump...
Profit is not an appropriate measure of how well a business is operated. I'm sure they have been prioritizing growth because the whole point of the platform is to introduce competition to Steam. Keeping the margins low (or even negative) is smart when the primary goal is not to make profit but to insure the parent company against monopolistic behavior.
Corruption and nepotism does not get much more blatant than this. The president's son is involved in one of the American drone companies that stand to gain the most from this policy. Their investor presentation boasts about regulations as the first bullet point under the title "Our competitive advantage".

[1] https://www.forbes.com/sites/zacheverson/2025/10/29/donald-t...

[2] https://www.unusualmachines.com/about-us/company-presentatio...

> If they are enemy combatants you are allowed to follow up and ensure they have been killed

Not true. Launching an attack on shipwrecked enemy is a blatant violation of the Geneva conventions. [1, Chapter II Article 12] It's also prohibited by DoD's own guidelines. [2, page 1071, section 17.14]

It's not a question of whether or not what happened was illegal, it's a textbook example of a war crime. It's a matter of whether or not the justice system still has enough power to identify who is responsible and hold them accountable.

[1] https://ihl-databases.icrc.org/assets/treaties/370-GC-II-EN....

[2] https://media.defense.gov/2023/Jul/31/2003271432/-1/-1/0/DOD...

Re:Advent of Code 2025 on Sunday November 30, 2025 @12:37PM (#46098678)
I think Ruby is the ideal language for AoC:

* The expressive syntax helps keep the solutions short.

* It has extensive standard library with tons of handy methods for AoC style problems: Enumerable#each_cons, Enumerable#each_slice, Array#transpose, Array#permutation, ...

* The bundled "prime" gem (for generating primes, checking primality, and prime factorization) comes in handy for at least a few of problems each year.

* The tools for parsing inputs and string manipulation are a bit more ergonomic than what you get even in Python: first class regular expression syntax, String#scan, String#[], Regexp::union, ...

* You can easily build your solution step-by-step by chaining method calls. I would typically start with `p File.readlines("input.txt")` and keep executing the script after adding each new method call so I can inspect the intermediate results.

Re:A Remarkable Assertion from A16Z on Friday November 28, 2025 @11:46AM (#46080263)
The list is clearly mostly machine generated but the name typo is an unlikely error for LLM to make. I'm guessing the "general editing pass" that introduced it was done by an actual human while trying to make the text flow better (less LLM-like).

https://github.com/a16z-infra/reading-list/commit/f8d149495a...

Complicated, sure, but opaque? EU is incredibly transparent – the amount of information on the European Council website [1] is daunting. There are vote results, meeting schedules, agendas, background briefs, lists of participants, reports, recordings of public council sessions, and so on and so on. All publicly available in each of the 24 EU official languages for whoever cares enough to look. And it's not just the council! The EU Treaties and Charter of Fundamental Rights of the EU gives any EU citizen the right to access documents possessed by EU institutions, bodies, offices and agencies (with a few exceptions for eg. public security and military matters) [2].

The problem is mostly the sheer amount of things going on, you couldn't possibly keep up with it all.

[1] https://www.consilium.europa.eu/

[2] https://www.ombudsman.europa.eu/en/document/en/163352

> No? It’s not just crime, it’s harassment, antisocial behavior, and other things that are not strictly crimes but you don’t want to be around. A lot of crimes are crimes of opportunity where someone strikes because they’re in the same place as you and see an opening. The more time they’re in the place, the more opportunities for those crimes.

Isolating people from each other is a really dystopian "solution" to reduce crime and antisocial behavior. Things naturally tend to happen more when people come together – in both good and bad. The good usually outweighs the bad by a wide margin.

Re:Make product worse, get money on Saturday November 22, 2025 @12:09AM (#46012300)
> capitalism (where ownership is detached from operation)

That is a really eloquent way to phrase one of my main gripes with capitalist societies. Thanks, I will be stealing it.

Re:Make product worse, get money on Friday November 21, 2025 @11:50PM (#46012213)
The article misses the most important factor: the customers have no way of knowing they would be getting a better product or extra 25 millimeters of leg room if they paid 3% more. The higher prices could just as well be for completely unrelated reasons (greed, inefficiency, ...). No one is going around measuring and documenting every single difference between products and services, and, even if someone did, almost no one has time to do such thorough research for every purchase. It is increasingly difficult to find objective information about any commercial product. Any attempt at providing impartial information gets drowned in an ocean of marketing content, sponsored reviews, astroturfing, and brand tribalism.

Consequence of the above is that marketing and anecdotal evidence are much more influential factors in purchase decisions than quality of the product. Using marketing campaigns to brainwash people is significantly easier (and cheaper) than improving a product enough for them to notice – especially if the product already has a zombie customer base that chooses a familiar brand out of habit rather than merit. We have built a world where money is valued over value, and making better products is often a terrible business strategy.

Re:Firefox 147 Will Support the XDG Base Directory Specification on Thursday November 20, 2025 @01:28PM (#45995924)
First .mkv support and now this! I really like what Firefox has been doing recently. The only major annoyance that still remains is hard-coded keyboard shortcuts, fingers crossed!
Re:Fizz Buzz without conditionals or booleans on Wednesday November 19, 2025 @12:31AM (#45976204)
I gave it a go in C (I wanted to do assembly but couldn't be arsed to write string to int and int to string conversions). [1] The trickiest part was figuring out how to terminate the program. My first attempt invoked nasal demons through dividing by zero, but I then realized I could intentionally cause a segfault with high probability (which is much better, right?). One could argue that my `fizz` and `buzz` variables are still "disguised booleans", but at least the generated assembly contains no branching or cmov instructions (aside from the ones inside libc functions like atoi and sprintf).

[1] https://gist.github.com/Andriamanitra/5c20f367dc4570dd5c8068...

Re:Iran begins cloud seeding operations as drought bites on Sunday November 16, 2025 @02:09PM (#45947538)
Iran's military spending (as percentage of GDP) is fairly similar to that of the U.S. and European countries. The most recent numbers I could find (from 2024) indicate that they spent 2.0% compared to 3.4% in the U.S. [1], although there have been reports that military spending has increased significantly in the most recent budget.

I agree with the sentiment that the humanity should focus on producing something more useful than bombs, but bringing it up specifically when talking about Iran comes off as a bit disingenuous, especially when they have been recently bombed by both the U.S. and Israel. [2] Imagine the roles were reversed: How would we react to an Iranian or Russian citizen suggesting that the U.S. or an European country should focus on infrastructure instead of building an army?

[1] https://milex.sipri.org/sipri

[2] https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2025/6/22/satellite-images-sh...

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