Hacker News: SeptiumMMX

New comment by SeptiumMMX in "CDC data are disappearing"

SeptiumMMX — Sun, 02 Feb 2025 01:59:00 +0000

Interesting. If you don't mind me asking, at what age do you plan to retire, what funds to you plan to use to cover the living expenses, and what skill set are you trying to pass to your kids so they will be able to afford moving out and staring their own families?

I'm asking because things things are getting harder every year and the media has a permanent blind eye on them.

New comment by SeptiumMMX in "CDC data are disappearing"

SeptiumMMX — Sat, 01 Feb 2025 23:15:16 +0000

That's the problem. Real humans in real world cannot be impartial and will always have biases. So if you expose the public to many different biased opinions and let them learn to recognize the biases and see past them, the "cumulative mindset" will be more objective and less prone to manipulation.

But if you let one biased group decide what the majority is allowed to see, the public opinion will inevitably align with the interests of that group, and won't be necessary beneficial to the public.

Have you noticed how in the past decade or two we have totally abandoned the pursuit of happiness through self-reliance and independence? How being depressed and outraged is normal, and is all but encouraged. This is all coming from the media actively shaping what gets into one's attention span and it will only be causing more and more misery with no end in sight.

And this comes down to a very simple formula. Media likes people who will create content for free. People who are willing to do are often unhappy and have a mindset that causes unhappiness. Media broadcasting their content (to their own profit, of course) is popularizing that mindset and making more people miserable. Bingo!

New comment by SeptiumMMX in "CDC data are disappearing"

SeptiumMMX — Sat, 01 Feb 2025 21:57:22 +0000

Well, fact-checking works if it's done impartially. So, if you want to fairly fact-check a political debate, each side should have their own team of researchers/fact-checkers being equally able to object to an argument made by the opposing party. Due process, sort of, kind of.

But I don't think I've ever seen that done actually. Usually, fact checkers are akin to Reddit moderators. Technically independent, but with one important twist. These are people that have a lot of free time and are willing to spend it doing unpaid (or underpaid) work. And that's a huge bias. Big enough to question impartiality, if you ask me.

New comment by SeptiumMMX in "Bzip3: A spiritual successor to BZip2"

SeptiumMMX — Sat, 01 Feb 2025 19:57:02 +0000

Given that it's BWT, the difference should be the most prominent on codebases with huge amounts of mostly equivalent files. Most compression algorithms won't help if you get an exact duplicate of some block when it's past the compression window (and will be less efficient if near the end of the window).

But here's a practical trick: sort files by extension and then by name before putting them into an archive, and then use any conventional compression. It will very likely put the similar-looking files together, and save you space. Done that in practice, works like a charm.

New comment by SeptiumMMX in "Commercial jet collides with Black Hawk helicopter near Reagan airport"

SeptiumMMX — Thu, 30 Jan 2025 04:34:27 +0000

Because things can go from routine to multiple simultaneous life-threatening failures very quickly. Something like one flight declaring a mayday while another one just lost communication, all while the radar just started glitching in a weird way. Human intuition and common sense can sort it out. Deterministic algorithms would not.

New comment by SeptiumMMX in "Five years of React Native at Shopify"

SeptiumMMX — Fri, 17 Jan 2025 05:53:30 +0000

Check out Avalonia [0]

It's a cross-platform spiritual successor of WPF and it kicks ass! You get proper separation of models and views, you can separate what controls there are from how they look (themes/styles), you can build the entire thing into a native compiled application with very reasonable speed and memory use.

[0] https://avaloniaui.net

New comment by SeptiumMMX in "Stop Trying to Schedule a Call with Me"

SeptiumMMX — Sun, 12 Jan 2025 06:00:43 +0000

I don't think the 4-hour SLA customers subsidize the 72-hour ones. It's more about managing the volume of support. If know you won't get an until 3 days after, you will google obvious things yourself, and only contact support if you can't get the answer otherwise. But shorter SLAs, let alone phone support, encourages a particular kind of customers to just copy-paste any error message they encounter (that may not necessarily come from your product) and expect support to untangle it. Been there, seen that.

New comment by SeptiumMMX in "Short Message Compression Using LLMs"

SeptiumMMX — Tue, 31 Dec 2024 05:52:45 +0000

The practical use for this could be satellite messaging (e.g. InReach) where a message is limited to ~160 characters, and costs about a dollar per message.

New comment by SeptiumMMX in "The new science of controlling lucid dreams"

SeptiumMMX — Sat, 28 Dec 2024 07:11:30 +0000

Had similar shenanigans. Solved by consistently having half a glass of water before bed (yes, you'll need to wake up to let it out), and another half at night if there's any hint of sleep problems.

New comment by SeptiumMMX in "The new science of controlling lucid dreams"

SeptiumMMX — Sat, 28 Dec 2024 07:07:35 +0000

Except, it doesn't render anything. It's the recently used parts of the higher layers of the inference network starting to have electrical activity of their own to do some kind of optimization/defragmentation.

New comment by SeptiumMMX in "Cognitive load is what matters"

SeptiumMMX — Wed, 25 Dec 2024 20:54:12 +0000

You always need to look at the track record of the team. If they were not producing solid consistent results before you joined them, it's a very good indicator that something's fishy. All that "they are working on something else that we can't tell you" is BS.

If they were, and you were the only one treated like that, hiring you was a decision forced upon the team, so they got rid of you in a rather efficient way.