Hacker News: jrpear

New comment by jrpear in "Design is compromise"

jrpear — Sun, 26 Jul 2026 18:11:07 +0000

Yes, when you can, find "The 3rd Alternative". It's a nice idea I first read about in one of Steven Covey's books. Looks like he eventually wrote a book by that name.

New comment by jrpear in "Anthropic downgraded cache TTL on March 6th"

jrpear — Mon, 13 Apr 2026 03:12:38 +0000

Of course not necessarily, but I keep seeing articles about how wind and especially solar power just keep getting cheaper.

New comment by jrpear in "Anthropic downgraded cache TTL on March 6th"

jrpear — Sun, 12 Apr 2026 17:41:58 +0000

Even if you take it as true that prices have risen recently, and may continue to rise as the VC subsidies dry up, they will fall again long-term. Inference will get more power efficient with model-on-chip solutions like Taalas and God willing we will get cheaper and cheaper renewable energy.

Despite this I don't think engineers should feel threatened. As long as there is a need for a human in the loop, as today, there will still be engineering jobs. And if demand for engineering effort is elastic enough, there could easily be even more jobs tomorrow.

Rather than threatened, I think engineers should feel exposed. To danger, yes, but opportunity as well.

New comment by jrpear in "Don't trust AI agents"

jrpear — Sat, 28 Feb 2026 20:54:17 +0000

It looks to me like what is called a "container escape" in this context isn't necessarily as bad as it seems. For example, in the advisory for CVE-2025-31133 affecting runc[1]:

> Container Escape: ...Thus, the attacker can simply trigger a coredump and gain complete root privileges over the host.

Sounds bad. But...

> this flaw effectively allows any attacker that can spawn containers (with some degree of control over what kinds of containers are being spawned) to achieve the above goals.

The attacker needs already to have the capability to spawn containers! This isn't a case of "RCE within the container" -> "RCE outside the container", which is what I would think prima facie reading "container escape".

I have always thought that running an untrusted image within an unprivileged container was a safe thing to do and I still believe so.

[1] https://github.com/opencontainers/runc/security/advisories/G...

New comment by jrpear in "Vet is a safety net for the curl | bash pattern"

jrpear — Thu, 24 Jul 2025 22:55:49 +0000

For those install scripts which allow changing the install prefix (e.g. autoconf projects---though involving a built step too), I've found GNU Stow to be a good solution to the uninstall situation. Install in `/usr/local/stow` or `~/.local/stow` then have Stow set up symlinks to the final locations. Then uninstall with `stow --delete`.

New comment by jrpear in "Antiqua et Nova: Note on the relationship between AI and human intelligence"

jrpear — Fri, 31 Jan 2025 00:15:29 +0000

They just can't be. Concepts like the soul, the inherent dignity of man, and the orientation of humanity toward a single Good are incomprehensible in the framework of modern psychology or physiology. They are ruled out or at least set aside by the presuppositions used to simplify the world for scientific analysis. And these concepts do a lot of work in the note.

New comment by jrpear in "StyleTTS2 – open-source Eleven-Labs-quality Text To Speech"

jrpear — Sun, 19 Nov 2023 21:15:41 +0000

You can! [rhvoice](https://rhvoice.org/) is an open source example.

New comment by jrpear in "OsmAnd 4.3 for Android devices"

jrpear — Fri, 27 Jan 2023 19:08:26 +0000

One use of that data is creating 3d renders, like this site: https://osmbuildings.org/

MuseScore 4 – A Gigantic Overhaul

jrpear — Wed, 14 Dec 2022 18:21:27 +0000

Article URL: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Nc08RhOQDR4

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33987498

Points: 1

# Comments: 0

New comment by jrpear in "Washington state shuts down Amazon price-fixing program nationwide"

jrpear — Sat, 29 Jan 2022 05:42:34 +0000

> I don't know of any large retailer that eats the cost of unsold goods.

Trader Joe's does this. Though they also rebrand the products they sell.

New comment by jrpear in "You block ads in your browser, why not in your city?"

jrpear — Mon, 27 Dec 2021 00:53:02 +0000

Oh another Santa Barbara resident! I was initially a little confused reading this thread until I remembered our great regulations.

New comment by jrpear in "Eric Weinstein: How Not to Formulate a Theory of Everything"

jrpear — Fri, 19 Nov 2021 18:56:27 +0000

> This person mentioned Einstein, but Einstein was just the byproduct of a time when people had the balls to publish what could be perceived as extravagant theories.

As an outsider, while I can see many problems in academia today, I'm not sure that an exceptional fear to publish extravagant theories is one of them.

It seems to me that the opposite is true. The replication crisis is a symptom of a general unfriendliness towards uninteresting publications.