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theon144

Re:"Token anxiety", a slot machine by any other name on Tuesday February 17, 2026 @05:21PM (#47054257)
Given that pre-paid plans are the most popular way to subscribe to Claude, it quite plainly is a "the less tokens you use, the more money Anthropic makes" kind of situation.

In an environment where providers are almost entirely interchangeable and tiniest of perceived edges (because there's still no benchmark unambiguously judging which model is "better") make or break user retention, I just don't see how it's not ludicrous on its face that any LLM provider would be incentivized to give unreliable answers at some high-enough probability.

Re:Qualcomm to Acquire Arduino on Tuesday October 07, 2025 @01:57PM (#45506454)
I have troubles calling something a "cash grab" when it's been arguably the single most influential project in the hacker/maker/DIY electronics space.

I don't doubt the boards could've been sold cheaper, but they clearly were doing something right given how much it changed the hobbyist landscape

Re:Qualcomm to Acquire Arduino on Tuesday October 07, 2025 @01:54PM (#45506441)
I feel like this has to be a toolchain issue, there's no reason the pin number -> register table couldn't be resolved at compile time, similar with conditionally compiling certain things based on the CPU features.

I'm not saying it's not a real or an easy problem, just that I wonder if it truly is the reason Arduino is "bad"

Re:GTP Blind Voting: GPT-5 vs. 4o on Sunday August 10, 2025 @08:43AM (#44854806)
Huh, I got 9/10 for GPT-5, and I was pretty convinced I was picking 4o in several questions based on the style. Interesting!

The questions were pretty much unlike anything I've ever asked an LLM though, is this how people use LLMs nowadays?

Re:Material 3 Expressive: Better, Easier, Emotional UX on Friday May 16, 2025 @02:50PM (#44008681)
I actually have no idea what you mean with the example, all the toolbars on the page fit 4 or more buttons, I tried viewing it in various window widths, can you be a bit more specific?
Re:Don't unwrap options: There are better ways (2024) on Tuesday May 13, 2025 @04:00PM (#43977055)
They do, `map` and `and_then`.

As for the article, I'm also a bit confused because I'm really not sure whether people write that sort of code at the beginning "very commonly" - match and `ok_or` to handle None by turning them into proper Errors is one of the first things you learn in Rust.

Re:Obscura VPN – Privacy that's more than a promise on Thursday February 20, 2025 @10:35AM (#43115940)
>It was also developed by the United States Navy

Cool, sounds like an organization that is heavily incentivized to make their communication hard to intercept and eavesdrop on.

Re:Security Issues in Matrix's Olm Library on Thursday August 15, 2024 @03:17AM (#41253769)
Somewhat tangential, but there are much better options if you're looking for opportunities for optimization. It's literally trying to improve efficiency by skimping on safety features, like trying to save on vehicle weight by removing unnecessary seatbelts or crumple zones. Eliminating side channels concincingly is very difficult, you're just better off taking the tiny performance hit and virtually* eliminating that vector instead of trying to come up with a novel low-density seatbelt.

(I say virtually, because even constant time crypto isn't bulletproof - GoFetch, a recent Apple M-series CPU vulnerability inadvertently broke the "constant" part because of a quirk of the prefetcher. Side channels are hard, no need to make it harder.)

The post you're probably talking about was hidden under "Show Probable Spam" on my end.
Re:LibraryBox on Tuesday March 05, 2024 @10:04AM (#39604300)
The project met the exact same end its predecessor (the PirateBox) did, and for pretty much the same reason. However, the project is quite old, and the focus on reflashing portable routers was a necessity then, but not so anymore - specifically, PirateBox (2011) actually predates the first Raspberry Pi (2012), and especially the first Pi with an onboard Wi-Fi (2016).

I'm just wondering, why hasn't a SBC-based alternative popped up yet? I think the project is/was awesome, I actually did maintain 2 public PirateBoxen for a while. Is it a simple lack of interest? The fact LibraryBox tried to pick up after PirateBox kind of suggests otherwise. I feel like it's actually easier now than ever to build a Libary/PirateBox-like project (although I do imagine an on-board network card probably has way worse performance than even those old portable routers).

I've even tried to put together an image like that in the past but I couldn't find a reproducible solution for creating raspi images so that put me off, maybe it's time to give it another try...

Re:JPEG XL and the Pareto Front on Friday March 01, 2024 @07:32AM (#39561154)
>I don't believe QOI will ever have any sort of real-world practical use

Prusa (the 3d printer maker) seems to think otherwise! https://github.com/prusa3d/Prusa-Firmware-Buddy/releases/tag...

Okay, but your one file type is more likely to be included in the 1600 that libmagic supports rather than Magika's 116?

For that matter, the file types I care about are unfortunately misdetected by Magika (which is also an important point - the `file` command at least gives up and says "data" when it doesn't know, whereas the Magika demo gives a confidently wrong answer).

I don't want to criticize the release because it's not meant to be a production-ready piece of software, and I'm sure the current 116 types isn't a hard limit, but I do understand the parent comment's contention.

Re:Microsoft seeks Rust developers to rewrite core C# code on Saturday February 03, 2024 @06:27PM (#39245839)
>It would be a red flag if you were interviewing for react and decided to bring up vue or svelte or angular or whatever else as well.

...why?

Seriously, why on earth? I don't follow this train of thought at all; if they demonstrate proficiency within the scope of the position, why does it matter if they also happen to know other technologies?

"Oh, Alice? Yeah, she was a great candidate, unfortunately she also had experience in Vue, so there's nothing we could do. We decided to hire Bob, who has 3 years less experience with React, but fortunately that's the only stack he's ever heard of."

If anything, it's a sign the person is interested in learning, most great devs I've met were not proficient only with a single technology. This sounds completely alien to me.

Just higher than 80Hz should be enough via Nyquist's theorem, or no?
Re:Apollo 11 vs. USB-C Chargers (2020) on Wednesday December 27, 2023 @05:14AM (#38780625)
I have no clue as to the I/O requirements of the AGC, but I imagine that with ~500x the performance, a simple I/O expander could fill the gap?
Re:An Open Source Mouse and Trackpad Utility for Mac on Friday June 23, 2023 @02:31PM (#36450579)
Not sure what you mean; Windows doesn't force mouse acceleration.
Re:Is the madness ever going to end? on Wednesday January 12, 2022 @09:32AM (#29906732)
>one sr front end dev who started doing $10 mn ARR [...] all by his lonesome

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

Re:A curated list of warez and piracy links on Friday January 07, 2022 @07:37AM (#29838384)
>I am aware that a number of websites featured in this list rely on operating under obscurity, and that this list could potentially contribute to their demise through excess exposure. I'm sorry about that - I just like making lists.

Well, at least the author is responsible and owns up to being one of the cheaf reasons sites like these die :)

>The Linux kernel has around 27.8 million lines of code. An increase of .35%

This is horribly misleading; most of these lines of code are drivers, which this patchset doesn't even concern.

It's still a massive change that only a handful of developers will ever be able to review in entirety - a fact to which the size of the project is completely irrelevant - if anything, actually, it urges even more caution, given the implied complexity. Which I believe was (at least in part) parent comment's point - given the importance and ubiquity of the Linux kernel, this may be concerning.

That said, I am very confident in the structures put in place by the kernel devs, their competence and the necessity for such a change - but trivializing a 100k LoC patchset because the project it's intended to land in is even more colossally complex isn't how I'd choose my approach.

And the Wii was different to motion controls of the past, but you don't exactly see that flourish these days.

It's not really about the improvements in technology, rather than the inherent limits in its use cases - there's only so many games and media experiences that truly benefit from VR, and as a rule, they're designed for VR from the beginning.

Without a doubt, VR is a huge leap and a drastically different and exciting medium, but that doesn't mean it's ever going to be more than gimmick worth a couple evenings' entertainment to most people.

AIUI the decision was made via standard procedure (a Request for Comments sub-page), and it was the consensus of the editors (that is, the ominous "they" in your comment) that it is unreliable as a source.

Now there is an obvious need for quality control of accepted sources in a project like Wikipedia, the process was transparent, and its conclusion is up for debate (hence being conducted through a Request for Comments). What would you propose instead?

Re:Ask HN: Why is building Windows apps so complicated? on Sunday December 12, 2021 @09:09AM (#29529723)
Right, like Visual Studio and VS Code, which are completely separate products with vastly different use cases; named as if they were different versions of one thing, and in probably the most confusing way possible (Code? Isn't that what all IDEs are about?).

Not to mention the whole "Windows Forms, WinUI3, Win32 and WPF" mess.

Re:Protected Content, Delete by Date, Device Management and more on Wednesday December 08, 2021 @08:24AM (#29484400)
>The most common would be to screen _record_ prior to opening, that usually isn't detected — or alternatively, for us rooted users just use a screenshot app which ignores those soft-blocks.

According to other comments in this thread, this just freezes when switching apps, and fails. I'm not too surprised, given that the feature (at least on Android) is meant as a security measure (i.e. most of the banking and 2FA apps use it to some extent).

Re:I returned my Remarkable2 on Sunday November 28, 2021 @03:39PM (#29372761)
>* Never looks up how to do the basic gestures

To me, it read like it just didn't work, not that he didn't try or look it up.

>* Complains about the size, when it's comically obvious what the size is from the constant advertising.

It's still a valid criticism, no? The digital pen/e-ink combo gives you way less feedback, hence precision, hence density of writing in a given area. I'm not just speculating, I've tried out a Remarkable 2 my friend got, and that was my impression - nearly like paper, but I still had to focus more and write slightly bigger letters for it to be legible.

Now I like to make fun of cryptobros like anyone else, but...

Isn't it ironic that this one joke site actually helps solve one of the most commonly quoted issues people have with NFTs, i.e. that "you only own an URL which can be taken down at any time", by providing means of wide-scale decentralized P2P storage?

Re:I just want to run this one Python script on Monday November 08, 2021 @12:41PM (#29151872)
>Ever had a script that's compatible with both, Python 2 and 3...

The article is literally about this scenario, which is why I'm also confused. Yes, `/usr/bin/env python` is a bad idea IF your script depends on a certain version, but that's exactly what the author doesn't need!

Also known as "facets". Sometimes you might want to browse "year/album/artist" too (think Various Artists / compilation albums), instead of the more common "artist/year/album". Or even "artist/year/album" for the more prolific artists out there.

Progressively "drilling down" is super low-hanging fruit with regards to tag-based organization, it's seriously neglected.

Liquidsoap is great! It's hugely flexible, I can hardly imagine a broadcast-like use-case that wouldn't be covered by it.

Strange timing though; according to the liquidsoap slack channel, the "hopefully last beta" of 2.0.0 was released just two weeks ago, and it has some great improvements, like "first-class support of video" (which is huge, it's not just video multiplexing or these 24/7 YouTube streams, but some advanced real-time stuff[1] was already possible), and "Enhanced language features making the script language a fully-featured language" which sort of was a headache in my experience - it was in this "Greenspun's moratorium"[2] where you could do a lot of things, but some of it was really awkward, and there were walls in unexpected places.

So, when I saw this post, I thought 2.0.0 was out, but it seems it's right around the corner still? Anyway, I'm really looking forward to it, and I recommend anyone interested to follow the project!

[1]: https://www.liquidsoap.info/doc-1.4.4/video.html#detailed-ex... [2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greenspun%27s_tenth_rule

Re:Aspartame and cancer – new evidence for causation on Saturday August 14, 2021 @06:53PM (#28184628)
Right, but how popular is diet soda? Anecdotally, there's huge differences between soda consumption in USA and Europe.
Re:Windows Defender blocks qBittorrent on Monday July 26, 2021 @11:40AM (#27960800)
There absolutely is, per the last comment in the thread: https://github.com/qbittorrent/qBittorrent/issues/14489#issu...

However, that also means disabling protection against cryptominers and a host of other nasty stuff, so it's not really a great solution IMHO.

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