Hacker News: marginalia_nu

New comment by marginalia_nu in "Tell HN: docker pull fails in spain due to football cloudflare block"

marginalia_nu — Sun, 12 Apr 2026 15:43:06 +0000

Given the context of the HN audience, it's probably something you can do.

New comment by marginalia_nu in "Why weekends are under threat"

marginalia_nu — Sun, 12 Apr 2026 13:30:34 +0000

Discrepancy is that we're mixing (lunar) months and weeks with solar timekeeping, in a solar calendar. These are fundamentally incompatible, so we've gone with cramming the approximate periodicity of the lunar calendar into the solar calendar, while ignoring the fact that we're no longer tracking the moon, and that the weeks don't line up with the year, and the fact that the months are randomly different lengths because they also don't line up and we don't want a weird half-month at the end.

Another potential fix would be having two calendars. A lunar calendar for weeks/months, and a solar calendar for seasons/years.

New comment by marginalia_nu in "JVM Options Explorer"

marginalia_nu — Sun, 12 Apr 2026 12:52:22 +0000

GC threads are generally often useful on multi-tenant systems or machines with many cores, as Java will default-size its thread pools according to the number of logical cores. If the server has 16 or more cores, that's very rarely something you want, especially if you run multiple JVMs on the same host.

Not JVM options, but these are often also good to tune:

    -Djdk.virtualThreadScheduler.parallelism
    -Djdk.virtualThreadScheduler.maxPoolSize
    -Djava.util.concurrent.ForkJoinPool.common.parallelism

In my experience this often both saves memory and improves performance.

New comment by marginalia_nu in "Previously unknown verses by Empedocles found on papyrus"

marginalia_nu — Sat, 11 Apr 2026 18:40:59 +0000

It's in the picture, I presume. Just gotta brush up on that Koine Greek. Or if you read Egyptian hieroglyphs already, you can use the Rosetta Stone to reconstruct the Koine Greek from first principles.

New comment by marginalia_nu in "After 20 years I turned off Google Adsense for my websites (2025)"

marginalia_nu — Fri, 10 Apr 2026 19:08:33 +0000

There's a moral aspect even to deciding to claim that you like potatoes.

For one, if you don't like potatoes, and you claim to do so, you're a liar, and lying is considered by many to be vicious.

On the other hand, if you genuinely do like potatoes, the moral thing would be to acknowledge this, rather than concealing this or claiming you're more of a rice stan, as again, honesty is considered by many to a virtue.

New comment by marginalia_nu in "Native Americans had dice 12k years ago"

marginalia_nu — Wed, 08 Apr 2026 22:15:38 +0000

Yeah, coins have distinct faces and can be flipped to generate random numbers.

New comment by marginalia_nu in "After 20 years I turned off Google Adsense for my websites (2025)"

marginalia_nu — Wed, 08 Apr 2026 10:13:56 +0000

What decisions aren't?

The very open ended core question of the field of ethics is nothing more or less than "what is the best way to act".

New comment by marginalia_nu in "After 20 years I turned off Google Adsense for my websites (2025)"

marginalia_nu — Tue, 07 Apr 2026 00:49:25 +0000

Well it's a trade off right?

If the benefit outweighs the drawbacks, you say yes, and when the benefits evaporate leaving only the drawbacks, it's a no.

New comment by marginalia_nu in "OpenJDK: Panama"

marginalia_nu — Mon, 06 Apr 2026 00:04:42 +0000

Well, yeah. It's the explicit design philosphy of the language to wait and see what works as other languages do the experimenting.

New comment by marginalia_nu in "Caveman: Why use many token when few token do trick"

marginalia_nu — Sun, 05 Apr 2026 13:21:36 +0000

I wonder if a language like Latin would be useful.

It's a significantly much succinct semantic encoding than English while being able to express all the same concepts, since it encodes a lot of glue words into the grammar of the language, and conventionally lets you drop many pronouns.

e.g.

"I would have walked home, but it seemed like it was going to rain" (14 words) -> "Domum ambulavissem, sed pluiturum esse videbatur" (6 words).

New comment by marginalia_nu in "The Indie Internet Index – submit your favorite sites"

marginalia_nu — Sat, 04 Apr 2026 20:50:47 +0000

Yeah I'd prefer to be seen contributing to an ecosystem[1], rather than sucking all of the air out of web discovery.

[1] Of either collaboration or friendly competition. Keeps everyone involved honest.

New comment by marginalia_nu in "A Recipe for Steganogravy"

marginalia_nu — Fri, 03 Apr 2026 15:31:16 +0000

I wonder if you can construct a function between the encoder and decoder such that for any given input, both the raw and manipulated embeddings decode to plausible meanings that are guaranteed to be different.

New comment by marginalia_nu in "An NSFW filter for Marginalia search"

marginalia_nu — Mon, 30 Mar 2026 21:51:39 +0000

The 'No AI' statement is about gen AI, which is I think what most people think of when you say AI.

But sure if I was looking for government or research funding, then for sure this would be AI. Not just AI, but the literal state of the art AI. Dario wakes in a flop sweat every night, terrified of my breakneck advances in single hidden layer classifiers that are probably at least 30% sentient. It would be so much AI I can't even hold all this AI.

New comment by marginalia_nu in "A sea of sparks: Seeing radioactivity"

marginalia_nu — Mon, 30 Mar 2026 20:44:22 +0000

The banhattan project has been a fiasco.

Chicago Peel 1 accomplished fission of fruit flies, which we felt was promising.

The subsequent banana nuclear bomb tests have been an unmitigated disaster. There are so many damn bananas in and around the bikini atolls, just nothing. Not even a fizzle. Mojave is littered with peels. Oppenheimer slipped and broke his leg.

Rumors are the Soviets are using avocados. Maybe that is the key. We are now constructing a demon core from an avocado split lengthwise.

New comment by marginalia_nu in "An NSFW filter for Marginalia search"

marginalia_nu — Mon, 30 Mar 2026 20:24:46 +0000

Wouldn't work very well, in that you'd get awful recall.

The way the filter is implemented, it runs after the query has been executed. I'd have to run it at document processing time, code in a pseudo-keyword for the label, and then add that to the query.

It's doable, but I question whether the juice is worth the squeeze.

New comment by marginalia_nu in "An NSFW filter for Marginalia search"

marginalia_nu — Mon, 30 Mar 2026 20:08:08 +0000

It does not use any transformer models right now. I've made experiments with BERT-adjacent methods, but not found them fast enough to be useful. Basically, whatever approach is used, it needs to do inference at ~10us latencies to either make real-time result filtering viable, or <1ms not add unreasonable overhead to processing-time result labeling.

New comment by marginalia_nu in "An NSFW filter for Marginalia search"

marginalia_nu — Mon, 30 Mar 2026 18:54:55 +0000

Meta tags are almost universally garbage, but the presence of '18 USC 2257' (or U.S.C.) is a very strong NSFW signal.

New comment by marginalia_nu in "An NSFW filter for Marginalia search"

marginalia_nu — Mon, 30 Mar 2026 18:52:40 +0000

0 disables all filtering

1 filters 'harmful' sites per the UT1 blacklists

2 is 1 + the new NSFW filter.

The new filter works pretty good in my assessment. It's not infallible, but it gives significantly cleaner results.

And if you do find queries it fails to sanitize, I'd love to hear about them.

New comment by marginalia_nu in "An NSFW filter for Marginalia search"

marginalia_nu — Mon, 30 Mar 2026 18:13:50 +0000

This was a very meandering project, and trying to corral it into some sort of coherent narrative was a bit of an undertaking on its own. Hopefully it makes some sense.

New comment by marginalia_nu in "When do we become adults, really?"

marginalia_nu — Sun, 29 Mar 2026 22:10:04 +0000

That stable environment was always more or less a myth.

Some people live the 'on rails' lifestyle, others never find the tracks, some get kicked off after a few years.

At its best it's a tool for helping make sense of life and society, but it can also be a destructive myth that leads to resentment and anger in those who end up somewhere else, like they're entitled to this outcome that just wasn't in their cards. Easy to get lost in that darkness and fail to actually make something of life.