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kevinmchugh

Some of the people that don't participate are people who aren't even aware of the benefit that will be available to them. Should I speak up at every meeting in favor of a high rise apartment building because I might move into it? Anywhere in the country? I'm not sure I can do that. Public meetings might preclude non-residents, which privileges the status quo very directly.

Should I speak on behalf of my young kids and say they might like to live there in twenty years?

I haven't tried it but if you separated it into two steps: decompile and describe, then implement from the specs, that looks like clean room reverse engineering, which is perfectly legal in the US
> in every other zoonosis, we have lineages and source animals and collateral infections. we have none of that for covid

I'm ignorant but thought that the evidentiary record for ebola was also really thin? Where we have lineages and source animals, sometimes that has taken many years, I think?

Re:Tao: Open math problems being non-renewably mined by AI on Tuesday September 08, 2026 @11:31PM (#49620556)
I agree, with the caveat that it probably matters how novel the paper is, the effect size, and the confidence interval. A reputed new psychological phenomenon I'd be more skeptical of than, idk, a newly detected exoplanet.

That alleged superconductor from a few years ago - everybody kind of held their breath and waited for the reproduction.

There's a few modernist cooking tricks that require small amounts - tenths of a gram - for big impacts. Sodium citrate can make any cheese melt beautifully into a smooth sauce, using something like 1% of the weight of the cheese.

Any juice can take the roll of lime or lemon (in cocktails or baking) by adding a bit of citric or malic acid. Orange juice is 1% citric acid, so add 3g citric and 2g malic per 100g juice and now you can make an orange daiquiri or "key" orange pie.

Emulsifiers get goopy if you use a lot, but can make a smooth syrup in small amounts. You can make a nice syrup from any nut milk with a small amount of xanthan and gum arabic.

There's a wide array of ingredients including xanthan and gum arabic used in tiny amounts in gluten free baking

Re:Has the New Cocaine Arrived? on Sunday August 02, 2026 @10:31AM (#49145050)
If a drug is compatible with a healthy social or productive lifestyle it would seem unreasonable to ban it. Danger of withdrawals might be a consideration.

Caffeine is pretty safe. The withdrawals, for those of us who experience them, are safe if unpleasant.

There's prescription drugs that cause dependency but are widely prescribed. Gabapentin is a good example?

Alcohol is the drug that best fits the "grandfathered" idea, since it's for many folks not compatible with a healthy lifestyle and the withdrawals can be fatal. Alcohol is impossible to ban, though, because the precursors are in every grocery store on the planet and grow on trees

That's my understanding. Decompilation is legally protected in the US, and you can do a reimplementation based on a decompilation. Sony v connectix is aiui the precedent.

Theoretically you could clean room by having different agents/models/context windows to do both decompilation and reimplementation. This is untested in court afaik and I don't think anyone wants to spend money to find out.

There was a non-clean room reimplementation of gta3 a few years ago. The gta publisher DMCAd and of course the fans who did it didn't have any money to fight in court (and probably couldn't find anyone who would take a big complicated case on such bad facts pro bono). https://www.gamingonlinux.com/2021/02/take-two-interactive-h...

Re:I Love the Computer on Monday June 15, 2026 @11:27PM (#48550201)
JJ Abrams, Rian Johnson, Dave Filoni, Jon Favreau: all big Star Wars fans.

Tony Gilroy is not!

It was remade in 2006
Re:Child prodigies rarely become elite performers on Wednesday February 04, 2026 @11:10PM (#46895580)
Dennis Rodman grew up overshadowed by his sisters' basketball skills, and then had some unheard of growth spurt of 8" after finishing high school. He hadn't even played much high school ball.
Re:Child prodigies rarely become elite performers on Wednesday February 04, 2026 @11:06PM (#46895562)
There's a story about, I think, the kickboxer/fighter Alistair Overeem that he was playing Connect 4, and lost, and kept demanding rematches until he had the winning record. Just a refusal to be the loser. That matches every story I've ever heard about Michael Jordan.
We also have a treaty with Canada about the usage of water from the Great Lakes.
Higher rise pants help. I have a long torso and started buying higher rise pants for the aesthetic difference, but they also make me less concerned about a t shirt becoming a belly shirt
Re:Using Git add -p for fun (and profit) on Sunday December 14, 2025 @08:05PM (#46269079)
I occasionally forget to add a new file but don't mind it much. I consider it a significantly smaller problem than committing a file that shouldn't be. CI is gonna run and my tests are surely gonna fail if I didn't commit some file. So I'll see that and commit --amend or fixup to add the new file.

unless the file I forgot to commit is the tests, which hopefully I'll catch by the time of the PR

Re:Using Git add -p for fun (and profit) on Sunday December 14, 2025 @10:34AM (#46263772)
I almost exclusively use add -p. It's another moment to review my changes and it saves me from having to type out the names of the files I've changed. I don't know if I've ever committed a file unintentionally since adopting it.

I like it especially in concert with git commit --amend, which lets me tack my newest changes onto the previous commit. (Though an interactive rebase with fixup is even better)

Re:Coca Cola has an executive dedicated to McDonald's on Thursday December 04, 2025 @09:44PM (#46156300)
I went to Bentonville, Arkansas a few years ago. You'll see every major consumer packaged good company represented in the skyscrapers there, because Walmart is hq'd there. They want to have people close to Walmart, since Walmart is always a big part of their sales
You mean the casual sense of "innocence", but they are literally innocent in they they've not been convicted of the crime they were killed for allegedly committing.
Re:The Greatness of Text Adventures on Tuesday October 21, 2025 @09:29PM (#45663950)
Counterfeit Monkey is very high up on my favorite games of the 2010s: https://ifdb.org/viewgame?id=aearuuxv83plclpl

The puzzles are all excellent, the writing is remarkable, both for game and fiction.

Apple announced M5s recently, so these are the old chips.
Re:Ruby Blocks on Saturday October 18, 2025 @05:26PM (#45630474)
Fun fact - there's no Boolean class in Ruby. True is an instance of TrueClass and false is an instance of FalseClass
Re:You did no fact checking, and I must scream on Friday October 17, 2025 @02:56PM (#45620560)
Aiui the New Yorker has always been the most rigorous in its fact checking.
Reddit has an easy way to choose moderation, just stop going to the reddits that are poorly moderated.
Re:Pre-Record Your Demos on Thursday October 02, 2025 @09:42PM (#45457872)
Yes - I call them "the other cake" demos
Re:Show HN: Autism Simulator on Thursday October 02, 2025 @09:46AM (#45449528)
I quit caffeine with no withdrawal symptoms by reducing my intake by 10% every day for 10 days. I weighed how much iced tea I drank on day 0, then had 90% of that on day 1. The last day was just a shot glass full.

I probably picked the idea up here, but don't know from whom so I thought I ought to continue sharing it

Re:Did a US Chess Champion Cheat? on Friday September 26, 2025 @02:05PM (#45389298)
Well that's one hole plugged
I saw this the other day: https://www.reddit.com/r/chicagofood/comments/1na3fer/commen...

So some places are optimizing their fries for delivery.

I've also noticed some restaurants are better at adapting the packaging, like punching out ventilation so fried products don't steam themselves in transit. Lawrence Seafood (which rules) did that for a side of tempura we got this weekend.

But I agree in large part. I wouldn't order fried chicken delivered via door dash in any event. People doing that are optimizing for something other than quality.

Re:16-Inch Softball on Thursday September 04, 2025 @02:42PM (#45130742)
Re:Agent Client Protocol on Sunday August 31, 2025 @09:09AM (#45082881)
In no particular order: LLMs seem, for some reason, to be worse at some languages than others.

LLMs only have so much context available, so larger projects are harder to get good results in.

Some tools (eg a fast compiler) are very useful to agents to get good feedback. If you don't have a compiler, you'll get hallucinations corrected more slowly.

Some people have schedules that facilitate long uninterrupted periods, so they see an agent work for twenty minutes on a task and think "well I could've done that in 10-30 minutes, so where's the gain?". And those people haven't understood that they could be running many agents in parallel (I don't blame people for not realizing this, no one I talk to is doing this at work).

People also don't realize they could have the agent working while they're asleep/eating lunch/in a meeting. This is why, in my experience, managers find agents more transformative than ICs do. We're in more meetings, with fewer uninterrupted periods.

People have an expectation that the agent will always one-shot the implementation, and don't appreciate it when the agent gets them 80% of the way there. Or that, it's basically free to try again if the agent went completely off the rails.

A lot of people don't understand that agents are a step beyond just an LLM, so their attempts last year have colored their expectations.

Some people are less willing to attempt to work with the agent to make it better at producing good output. They don't know how to do it. Your agent got logging wrong? Okay, tell it to read an example of good logging and to write a rule that will get it correct.

Re:De minimis has ended on Saturday August 30, 2025 @05:03PM (#45077987)
De minimis also impacts all goods, including those made by well-paid laborers and from countries that meet our exceed American labor standards.
Re:I hacked Monster Energy on Saturday August 23, 2025 @01:26PM (#44997530)
(Gen-Z/Millennial/Gen-X)

This covers like sixty years?

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