Hacker News: raisin_churn

New comment by raisin_churn in "Who is Satoshi Nakamoto? My quest to unmask Bitcoin's creator"

raisin_churn — Thu, 09 Apr 2026 04:29:54 +0000

They cannot because PGP has no such vulnerability.

New comment by raisin_churn in "The Pentagon's Silicon Valley Problem"

raisin_churn — Wed, 27 Mar 2024 15:39:02 +0000

Are you familiar with FISC? I'd say go familiarize yourself with its case law, but you can't, because it's secret. And it authorizes methods much more powerful and invasive than a simple search warrant. Precedent exists, but nobody outside the national security state actually knows what it is.

New comment by raisin_churn in "Japan's first-ever soft lunar landing with SLIM spacecraft [video]"

raisin_churn — Sat, 20 Jan 2024 02:12:19 +0000

Fortunately with EVA construction you can now just send Bill to glue one on. I hope JAXA is running >1.11.

New comment by raisin_churn in "Rising Temperatures in the Netherlands"

raisin_churn — Sat, 16 Dec 2023 15:33:11 +0000

Extremely rapidly, and it is wholly unprecedented in the geological record[0]. At this point, expressing curiosity about this rather than putting forth the trivial effort to find the amply available high-quality evidence is difficult to read as anything other than bad faith.

[0]https://phys.org/news/2021-11-global-temperatures-years-toda...

New comment by raisin_churn in "Montreal’s new rapid transit line saved millions per mile"

raisin_churn — Mon, 06 Nov 2023 05:22:52 +0000

I noticed it when I was in Brooklyn two months ago. In DC, where speed and stop cameras are the only form of traffic enforcement and where the bus cameras are also being piloted, the proportion of cars with fake (temp Maryland tags printed on a library printer) or obscured plates is probably approaching 10% of vehicles on the road, and 90% of routine reckless drivers. If NYPD demonstrates a studied indifference to public safety, DC MPD is doing a post-doc in the field.

New comment by raisin_churn in "[dead]"

raisin_churn — Tue, 17 Oct 2023 04:17:22 +0000

> Also, while we’re on the subject, can we talk for a second about how completely unnecessary a 900-mile EV is? Why not use a battery a third of the size to give us something much more affordable with a still-useful 300-mile range?

I guess the headline they went with is catchier, but this is the real lede. Don't give me a 900-mile battery, give me a 250-mile battery that weighs and costs 1/4 as much. 900 miles is 12 hours of non-stop driving at highway speeds. I can't even conceive why anybody would want a personal car that does that. (Long-haul buses with bathrooms onboard and the ability to seamlessly switch drivers would be great, though trains would be greater still.)

New comment by raisin_churn in "The Average New EV Costs $14,000 Less Than It Did a Year Ago: KBB"

raisin_churn — Sun, 15 Oct 2023 05:18:33 +0000

Sorry, I did not intend to imply that was your case. I was more responding to a the reply (whether sarcastic or not) wishing that a car existed that combined both commuter and "move stuff" characteristics. I know an alarming number of people who do actually have a second "move stuff" vehicle, and my partner took months to convince to sell our second vehicle which was being (dis)used exclusively for "move stuff" after we relocated to a city with good bike and transit options.

New comment by raisin_churn in "The Average New EV Costs $14,000 Less Than It Did a Year Ago: KBB"

raisin_churn — Sun, 15 Oct 2023 04:45:45 +0000

I can fit 8' lumber or hundreds of pounds of soil in my Prius. That covers over 95% of my needs as a DIY homeowner. When I need 10' lumber, I rent a truck for $60 and a half hour of my time, which is more than paid for by the cheaper operating costs and insurance. When you throw in the purchase price, owning a second vehicle just to move large/heavy objects doesn't make sense unless you do it multiple times a week for a few years.

New comment by raisin_churn in "FCC Proposes Voluntary Security Labels for IoT Most Companies Will Likely Ignore"

raisin_churn — Fri, 08 Sep 2023 16:03:29 +0000

The problem is "oh, we're still supporting it, we just released an update yesterday that fixed an issue with kerning when selecting certain fonts on the built-in LCD. What do you mean 12 critical CVEs unpatched for years?" So now you have to define "supported," which will be lobbied to death by every vendor in the world.

New comment by raisin_churn in "I only lost 10 minutes of data, thanks to ZFS"

raisin_churn — Wed, 23 Aug 2023 03:39:00 +0000

Or non-bespoke.

New comment by raisin_churn in "The unpublished preface to Orwell’s Animal Farm"

raisin_churn — Tue, 15 Aug 2023 14:27:34 +0000

And humans, if their survival depends on it, or they just happen to want to.

New comment by raisin_churn in "Anti-mimetic tactics for living a counter-cultural life (2021)"

raisin_churn — Sun, 25 Jun 2023 05:22:46 +0000

To become an autodidact, first, teach yourself to be an autodidact.

New comment by raisin_churn in "Police sue rapper Afroman for using footage of home raid in his music videos"

raisin_churn — Fri, 24 Mar 2023 03:17:50 +0000

I know there are issues with it, because small plaintiffs would mostly suffer it at the hands of extremely well-funded respondents, but I do wish there was some kind of automatic penalty for bringing such a outrageous suit. Like if the judge can´t stop laughing at you for being such an idiot, you get tarred and feathered in the courtroom and Afroman gets to use footage of that in a music video. Which I guess would be a particularly just punishment in this case.

New comment by raisin_churn in "The False Promise of Chomskyism"

raisin_churn — Thu, 09 Mar 2023 14:38:48 +0000

He only seems to agree.

New comment by raisin_churn in "The False Promise of Chomskyism"

raisin_churn — Thu, 09 Mar 2023 13:43:07 +0000

Loads of people have intimated that ChatGPT shows we're on the precipice of a breakthrough in that direction. Chomsky says we're not. If Chomsky's argument is a strawman, Aaronson could write a blog post saying that, instead of a blog post stuffing his own strawman. Anyways, I'm summarizing Chomsky's argument as I understood it, you can read it yourself.

New comment by raisin_churn in "The False Promise of Chomskyism"

raisin_churn — Thu, 09 Mar 2023 13:38:38 +0000

I don't know, that's Chomsky's claim. If I, again a non-expert, had to take a position on it, it seems far more likely to be true than not. Humans have access to a wide variety of non-language stimuli, and demonstrate signs of intelligence well before they have any functional mastery of language. Even after I "mastered" language, I developed lots of skills that haven't the faintest relation to language, like riding a bike. I'm sure ChatGPT can produce a textual explanation of riding a bike, but neither ChatGPT nor a human who doesn't know how to ride a bike can convert that textual explanation into the act of riding an actual bike. But a human, unlike ChatGPT, could, given a bike, learn to ride it by trying to ride it.

New comment by raisin_churn in "The False Promise of Chomskyism"

raisin_churn — Thu, 09 Mar 2023 13:22:50 +0000

This is not a response to the Chomsky piece. The main argument advanced by Chomsky et al is that LLMs are neither AGIs nor are they precursors to what we might consider AGIs, because, among other reasons, LLMs "learn" differently to how humans do, and that difference comes with strict limitations on the upper bounds of what LLMs can achieve. I'm certainly no expert on linguistics or AI/ML, so I don't know about all that, but this blog post avoids engaging with that claim, and opts instead for ad hominem.

New comment by raisin_churn in "Europe pushing for lunar time zone"

raisin_churn — Thu, 02 Mar 2023 08:44:54 +0000

Name the first permanent moon settlement New Greenwich, problem solved.

New comment by raisin_churn in "Steam Deck: First Anniversary"

raisin_churn — Tue, 28 Feb 2023 04:31:38 +0000

Your reply is conflating two different things: updates to games, and updates to Proton. IME Proton updates almost never result in regressions (I think I've heard of it happening once, maybe twice ever), and Valve has and uses the ability to prefer specific Proton versions for specific games.

Game updates are what I have read about breaking compatibility with Proton. In this case AFAICT Valve's only option is to try to fix it with a Proton patch. I don't think Valve's standard distribution agreement gives them the right to distribute whatever old version of a publisher's game Valve feels like. Most games I've seen, Steam enforces automatic updates to the latest version. Pinning a previous version is such a rare use case, it is confusingly under the "Betas" tab of the game properties when it is even available to the user.

Even when Valve has the rights to arbitrarily pick an old version of the game to distribute, the only way to find out if an update is breaking is to test it, so if the developer doesn't test it, the players do. So either way, if Proton isn't a target platform, you have a higher risk of breaking bugs making it in front of players. I guess since serious bugs make it into release so frequently on supported platforms, this may not seem like an issue, but there is a very real psychological phenomenon where when software breaks on Windows, it is the software's fault, and when software breaks on Linux, it is Linux's fault.

New comment by raisin_churn in "Steam Deck: First Anniversary"

raisin_churn — Mon, 27 Feb 2023 13:04:19 +0000

It's still not a target platform (either native Arch Linux or Proton) for very many games, so updates have broken a number of games that were previously rated "playable" or "verified", rendering them unplayable. TBF in every case I've heard of this happening, Valve has been quick to address it, so you may or may not consider that an issue. I don't game much these days, but when I do it's exclusively on my Linux desktop, so I have a high tolerance for troubleshooting occasional issues, but I definitely think it's a stretch to call that "ultimate."