Hacker News: galangalalgol

New comment by galangalalgol in "Rust Style Guide"

galangalalgol — Thu, 22 Oct 2026 13:57:18 +0000

The suggestion seems to be for api changes where the api is generated from an idl. So proto or something. If my service was built several versions prior to that value being added then I by definition don't care about it. The catch all is fine. If other services care that I don't care, they can file a ticket. You could be nice and leave out the catch all and then the deserialization will panic or throw and error. And the mect CI pipeline where the new IDL gets used will fail to compile. Both ways it is a runtime error at first. If you don't require exhaustive at all, that just lets you persist the situation without migrating my old service to the new api... Non exhaustive is the one option I can't agree ever makes sense.

New comment by galangalalgol in "The 1.5°C goal of the Paris Agreement is no longer viable"

galangalalgol — Thu, 22 Oct 2026 13:31:57 +0000

Human nature being what it is, we won't hit the 2 degree target either. We could! We won't. The likelihood we get into some of the nastier feed forward events seems near 100%. Yes, we could build masks, then suits, then huddle in domes. Or we could build a thermostat into the place. Human nature is fine with spending trillions to fix a problem that billions would have avoided. But it wont do the avoiding. It is just how we are.

New comment by galangalalgol in "The 1.5°C goal of the Paris Agreement is no longer viable"

galangalalgol — Thu, 22 Oct 2026 03:27:05 +0000

Sure, per capita makes sense and that pushes some middle eastern countries to the top, with china and india way behind the us in emissions. But the post that started this was about voting to fix the climate. My whole point was that all the countries that are producing the majority of emissions aren't very democratic (us, india), or aren't at all (china russia), so voting is really quite irrelevant.

New comment by galangalalgol in "The 1.5°C goal of the Paris Agreement is no longer viable"

galangalalgol — Wed, 21 Oct 2026 15:35:51 +0000

As I said, they are aggressively contributing to the engineering side of emissions reductions. Probably the worlds most effective contributor in that regard. They are also the worlds largest emitter of greenhouse gases. Both are true. My final point is that those contributions are not altruistic, and their motivations could change if the entire oil production of Russia gets piped to them, they achieve naval dominance enough to secure malacca etc.

New comment by galangalalgol in "The 1.5°C goal of the Paris Agreement is no longer viable"

galangalalgol — Wed, 21 Oct 2026 15:28:30 +0000

The less-bad guys maybe? Good guys are pretty hard to find in any honest history books. The moment is gone in any case. Emissions reductowould no longer be sufficient even of we had any confidence they would occur. Engineering solutions need to start focusing on climate engineering in parallel to clean energy. Both will definitely be needed to mitigate the losses to human quality of life.

New comment by galangalalgol in "The 1.5°C goal of the Paris Agreement is no longer viable"

galangalalgol — Wed, 21 Oct 2026 13:02:47 +0000

35% of greenhouse gases are released by China and Russia. These are not democracies. They have killed their people to remain in power.

Another 8-9% is from India which while still classified as a flawed democracy is borderline.

And 11% is in the US which I guess we will find out if it is a flawed democracy or hybrid regime over the next few months. But at best it is paralyzed by polarization on the issue. And also due to lobbying/bribery from oil producing nations and states. The electoral system enforces two party rule which caused this problem in many nations, most of which are no longer classified as democracies.

These are also incidentally the nations best poised to solve the engineering issue of maintaining modern QOL while reducing emissions. The US has certainly contributed and China is working the issue very aggressively, largely out of a need for energy independence. But both of those contributions are fragile. The polarization is affecting it in the US and if China secured sources of energy that were cheaper but emitted, they would not hesitate.

New comment by galangalalgol in "C# now beats Rust on WASM size"

galangalalgol — Wed, 21 Oct 2026 12:17:13 +0000

I think the benchmark game was really useful. It wasn't a which is better, it was what are the tradeoffs. Some of that was provided subjectively by curating it into safe and portable vs hyperoptimized categories. But there is also memory footprint etc. It was also a gauge of which languages people who care about performance preferred, as those got rapid updates.

New comment by galangalalgol in "How Amazon pushes up prices all across the Internet"

galangalalgol — Wed, 14 Oct 2026 13:41:03 +0000

While I get your point, there is obviously a middle ground between eastern block communism and unregulated anarchocapitalism that many nations can and do inhabit. Antitrust is a good example. The free market can't solve everything, and monopolies are bad for innovation despite what Thiel says.

New comment by galangalalgol in "Hackers activate automatic defrosting in supermarket fridges across Europe"

galangalalgol — Tue, 13 Oct 2026 03:52:01 +0000

That is a dangerous game, especially when affecting food supply. Widespread cyber attacks on critical infrastructure are deemed grounds for nuclear response in most national doctrines. This obviously is way out of scale, but concerted widespread efforts by decentralized groups could end up triggering ww3 by accident. Not when they try to play a game of chess, but when they shut down a water treatment plant, and some other unrelated group shuts down gas pumps, and suddenly there are millions of people with no fresh water and no fuel to get it to them...

New comment by galangalalgol in "Lobbying is corruption"

galangalalgol — Sat, 10 Oct 2026 15:05:44 +0000

Precisely. Information you don't pay for isn't news, it is propaganda. If you didn't pay for the product, you are the product.

New comment by galangalalgol in "Returning from vacation? The government can search your phone without a warrant"

galangalalgol — Thu, 01 Oct 2026 12:33:14 +0000

No, but cbp could have a k9 at any bottleneck they want and those dogs read their partners body language, so if they are a racist idiot it might alert on excessive melanin providing probable cause. Assuming they didn't just train it to alert on command. And if it alerts yeah they can demand to search your phone. I don't hear about it getting used, but that could be because they are careful not to use it on anyone who might start a case that could get it ruled unconstitutional. They openly use it where they think there is actually smuggling.

New comment by galangalalgol in "Returning from vacation? The government can search your phone without a warrant"

galangalalgol — Thu, 01 Oct 2026 12:28:20 +0000

The law makes it clear that the rules are only suspended in the customs zone of the airport and within 100 miles of the airport. They seem to follow that. The checkpoints you see in Washington state or down near the border with Mexico do not show up around denver or dfw. The reality is bad enough we don't need to exaggerate it. And they can't just grab every phone as they walk around LA either, they have to signal their dog to alert on you to give them probable cause...

New comment by galangalalgol in "September 2026: The world today, as seen by one Polish guy"

galangalalgol — Wed, 30 Sep 2026 12:12:22 +0000

The baltics have even more vivid memories of soviet life don't they? And nato trip wire troops so any attack would be killing french and uk soldiers (nuclear powers). Trump was talking about taking Greenland by force right up until the trip wire forces arrived. It is an odd job as a soldier to be a hostage I think, but it seems to work. It would be more reliable for Poland to obtain its own nuclear deterrent, along the lines of the buffers vs dependencies argument in the post. There has been talk, but that seems difficult.

New comment by galangalalgol in "September 2026: The world today, as seen by one Polish guy"

galangalalgol — Wed, 30 Sep 2026 11:45:56 +0000

The more likely hyperbolic step would be to blow up outgoing pipelines and apply secondary sanctions. Or, as threatened, blow up power and water treatment plants killing large swaths of the civilian population. Nukes wouldn't be necessary to cause mass death.

New comment by galangalalgol in "Starlink ground station in Poland hit by fire in suspected arson attack"

galangalalgol — Thu, 24 Sep 2026 11:42:18 +0000

And the West can and does return the favor. Perhaps Poland should fund the destruction of some Siberian pipeline pump stations? Article 5 against Russia is not going to get consensus anyway, so making it formal just increases the risk of escalation.

New comment by galangalalgol in "'We hacked the FBI:' Hackers say they have data on all FBI employees"

galangalalgol — Wed, 23 Sep 2026 11:00:48 +0000

If you look at my sibling post I explain that is how they used to do control, but they outgrew it. The spinnup times made it act like a spring damper system and it had bad control states even then.

New comment by galangalalgol in "'We hacked the FBI:' Hackers say they have data on all FBI employees"

galangalalgol — Wed, 23 Sep 2026 10:17:41 +0000

They sent the data along the lines. Initially that was just the frquency. Drooped low? Ramp it up, running high, turn it down. That is effectively a spring mass damper system and it always had instability conditions that caused problems. They begand to modulate additional data, including voice, analog over the lines to add additional controls. As more people joined, and load became less predictable even that wasn't enough. Every endpoint now measures load at something like 30hz and that won't fit across the lines. They added separate dedicated fiber or microwave along towers. Those still get used. Probably sometimes unencrypted still. They are targets I'm sure. Then we have renewables and nuclear with their mostly inflexible power supply, that makes it harder to stabilize yet. The control loop stuff is often physically separate, but that is the older stuff and less secure. The data from all those houses still has to get onto the logically/physically isolated control network somehow, so that is a vulnerability too. Anyone with a zigbee radio cam see the encrypted packets.

New comment by galangalalgol in "'We hacked the FBI:' Hackers say they have data on all FBI employees"

galangalalgol — Wed, 23 Sep 2026 00:06:26 +0000

Air gaps are not magical, they will not stop the flood. The electrical grid has to communicate with itself to load balance, so you can run dedicated wires with giant cut-me signs pointing at it, or you can use symmetrical key encryptors to route it over the intenet. You needed to use the encryptors anyway, so why not. If bad software gets in via thumb drives music disks etc (and it will of the flood is pointed at you) it can still do bad things. But so can a hunting rifle pointed at a transformer station. That nearly blacked out all of socal once.

New comment by galangalalgol in "MiMo v2.6"

galangalalgol — Tue, 22 Sep 2026 11:27:39 +0000

The scenario we are all dancing around is if there is a war over reunification. That would be between the worlds two superpowers. No one would walk into a nuclear Holocaust on purpose I bthink, but miscommunication happens. Even if no other nations intervened, the reunification would definitely destroy all the worlds leading fabs, and even if it didn't, I read ASML can and would shut their machines down remotely. So those researchers would shift to figuring out what they can do at the 28nm node... Meanwhile the rest of us ponder why old powerful men can't let things be.

New comment by galangalalgol in "Heretic removes restrictions from language models"

galangalalgol — Mon, 21 Sep 2026 12:19:06 +0000

I think that was the point being made? Outlawing something does nothing if enforcement is not feasible. The music and movie industries didn't crush torrents, they switched business models to streaming with prices being determined mostly by how much hassle was avoided by skipping the torrents.