Hacker News: errantspark

New comment by errantspark in "Windows 10 refuses to go gentle into that good night"

errantspark — Thu, 02 Oct 2025 14:01:30 +0000

I will not have an operating system that shows me ads. This is my computer. It will do what I want.

New comment by errantspark in "Classic 8×8-pixel B&W Mac patterns"

errantspark — Thu, 04 Sep 2025 20:50:35 +0000

Nice! I did one of these ages and ages ago copying the win 3.1 pattern editor (which doubtless is a ripoff of the mac one anyway)

https://errantspark.github.io/3.1/#0056755500caaeaa

New comment by errantspark in "AI PCs Aren't Good at AI: The CPU Beats the NPU"

errantspark — Thu, 17 Oct 2024 04:18:03 +0000

I get a lot of use out of the PRUs on the BeagleboneBlack, I would absolutely get use out of an FPGA in a laptop.

New comment by errantspark in "AI PCs Aren't Good at AI: The CPU Beats the NPU"

errantspark — Wed, 16 Oct 2024 21:04:45 +0000

Wait sorry back up a bit here. I can buy a laptop that has a daughter FPGA in it? Does it have GPIO??? Are we seriously building hardware worth buying again in 2024? Do you have a link?

New comment by errantspark in "Boeing to sell at least $10B in shares to plug cash drain"

errantspark — Tue, 15 Oct 2024 22:41:29 +0000

wat, we have plenty of aerospace companies, Boeing is the only one making consumer air travel jets right now, but they're far from the only aerospace company in the US

New comment by errantspark in "Ban warnings fly as users dare to probe the "thoughts" of OpenAI's latest model"

errantspark — Fri, 20 Sep 2024 00:27:49 +0000

The claim is that llama is "lobotomized" because it was trained with safety in mind. You can't untrain that by finetuning. For what it's worth the non-instruct llama generally seems better at reasoning than instruct llama which i think is a point in support of OP.

New comment by errantspark in "Empathy for the user having sex with your software"

errantspark — Sun, 21 Jul 2024 18:08:06 +0000

I tried to use buttplug years ago but I found it to be difficult to work with and introduce too much latency into play. My partner and I have replaced it with 37 lines of javascript that give us more realtime control of our toys (albeit only Lovense, by just spamming .writeValueWithoutResponse()).

I'm curious what your background is that you approached the problem in the way that you did? I appreciate that you're covering all the edge cases for a lot of different toys, but it also really feels like you use 1000 lines of code where 10 will do.

New comment by errantspark in "Friendlyjordies forced to take down video after having his house firebombed"

errantspark — Fri, 02 Feb 2024 03:06:44 +0000

Mostly bad take. The long term solution is to remove the incentives for criminal behavior and enact laws that prevent power concentration, authoritarianism is not stable. That being said I can see the value in an authoritarian clamp down as a way to rapidly improve the situation in a country as far gone as El Salvador, I remain extremely skeptical about the long term efficacy. Australia is not in a situation analogous to El Salvador by any stretch of the imagination.

New comment by errantspark in "Open Challenges in LLM Research"

errantspark — Thu, 17 Aug 2023 04:23:59 +0000

Fun fact: I took the photo she used as a cover for one of her books, she asked me if she could use it and I said I'd like to be compensated and her response was something akin to "oh I was just asking assuming you'd say yes, I'm going to do it anyway". Nobody's perfect, maybe she regrets it, and it hasn't really crossed my mind in years, but I guess it still sort of irks me to be reminded of it. Anyway if anyone needs a portrait for a book cover feel free to hit me up XD.

New comment by errantspark in "Hex-rays is moving to a subscription model"

errantspark — Wed, 15 Dec 2021 03:20:50 +0000

> So don't pay the engineers that built the product and continue to maintain it?

Saas isn't the only way to pay people.

> most software is living and breathing and requires continual investment

Is it though? or is this broadly another side effect of value extraction focused engineering? I'm quite happy to buy a new version if it makes my life notably easier. CS2 is broadly a better experience than CC, etc. etc.

New comment by errantspark in "Hex-rays is moving to a subscription model"

errantspark — Tue, 14 Dec 2021 22:02:25 +0000

The real reason for the software as a service model is that it makes it easier to extract/capture value. Many SaaS offerings would be better at providing value to customers with non-SaaS architectures, unfortunately providing value to customers is second to providing value to shareholders.

Don't pay for SaaS, don't encourage this bullshit. If foss offerings don't cover your usecase piracy is better for humanity than paying.

New comment by errantspark in "CPUC Guts Solar Power in name of “equity,” adds $8/kW monthly charge paid to PGE [pdf]"

errantspark — Mon, 13 Dec 2021 21:35:53 +0000

Oh yeah this is absolutely fucking stupid, my dad put solar on his roof recently and if this shit goes through he may end up with a bigger monthly energy bill than pre-solar. Make that make sense to me. Where's the fucking equity when you're trying to be sustainable and efficient in your electricity use and you get punished for it. Talk about perverse incentives.

At least it'll be fun to help him build a fully off grid system.

New comment by errantspark in "Terms of Service: Monitoring and Anti-Cheat"

errantspark — Sun, 12 Dec 2021 20:00:31 +0000

Ranked matchmaking is worse at delivering a competitive experience than a community of people who want to have a competitive experience. Don't kid yourself, competitive gaming existed long before ranked matchmaking.

New comment by errantspark in "Terms of Service: Monitoring and Anti-Cheat"

errantspark — Sun, 12 Dec 2021 18:54:47 +0000

This wasn't near as much an issue when you had actual servers run by actual people. Too bad the technology to implement a server browser has been lost to time. : ( Perhaps one day we will rediscover it.

New comment by errantspark in "Ask HN: What things has tech made worse in your life?"

errantspark — Fri, 10 Dec 2021 18:24:09 +0000

I don't think it's always been that way, not exactly, the distribution gets less flat as people are able to make more optimized choices.

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-021-27089-8

New comment by errantspark in "Cat meow sounds visualized with auto-correlation function"

errantspark — Fri, 10 Dec 2021 09:45:59 +0000

No, it's not. Java and C++, hell even Java and C# are much more relevantly dissimilar than setting A at 440 vs 432. I'd love to see a citation on Vivaldi's love for 432, he wasn't even playing in 12-TET was he? He'd probably be playing in meantone during that era right? I figure he'd be way more mad about using the wrong intonation to play his music than a difference absolute pitch reference.

> rounding 432 to 440

Rounding from what to what? Why does the number cycles relative to seconds being any particular number matter?

New comment by errantspark in "Cat meow sounds visualized with auto-correlation function"

errantspark — Thu, 09 Dec 2021 20:43:49 +0000

Ahh yeah, magnitude vs. power, my mistake on the terms.

New comment by errantspark in "Cat meow sounds visualized with auto-correlation function"

errantspark — Thu, 09 Dec 2021 19:40:34 +0000

Is "dropping the phase" the same thing as computing the spectral power distribution?

P.S. A4 = 432Hz is a stupid fad that can't die soon enough.

New comment by errantspark in "CT scans of AirPods evolution"

errantspark — Mon, 06 Dec 2021 23:35:34 +0000

This is such cool content but the way it's presented is so fucking frustrating to me. I wish the narrative wasn't so intrinsically tied to the actual data. I hate that I can't blow up and rotate the models side by side, the whole thing feels so shallow. Now to be clear in an absolute sense this is a good article, this is cool content and the scrolling as something other than scrolling works better than in most instances.

My criticism is that the format does a disservice to the data, it's not the best way to present something this cool.

New comment by errantspark in "Ask HN: Why is everything changing too fast?"

errantspark — Mon, 06 Dec 2021 18:07:16 +0000

:waves:

You can cite me for one! I didn't even grow up on it, it was honestly a more recent thing for me to pick up seriously, I wrote significant amounts of JavaScript, Ruby, Go, Rust and various LISPS before I seriously used C in anger. Nowadays it's the language I reach for second most often after JS and it's honestly something I often really look forward to writing. I love how it just gets out of my way and lets me do things, it's so fucking refreshing.