Hacker News: seiferteric

New comment by seiferteric in "Saving 100 terabytes of memory by optimizing 1.1.1.1's DNS cache"

seiferteric — Thu, 27 Aug 2026 19:52:40 +0000

That's only when the authoritative server cant be reached though

New comment by seiferteric in "Saving 100 terabytes of memory by optimizing 1.1.1.1's DNS cache"

seiferteric — Thu, 27 Aug 2026 19:21:55 +0000

then they would be breaking DNS at scale.

New comment by seiferteric in "Saving 100 terabytes of memory by optimizing 1.1.1.1's DNS cache"

seiferteric — Thu, 27 Aug 2026 18:31:25 +0000

You have to cache, cloudflare doesn't know all the records ahead of time, they have to do recursive lookups to the authoritative servers that own the records and that is only good for the period of the TTL of the record. There is no "global" DNS record database or something like that.

New comment by seiferteric in "Xwayland 26.1.0 rc1"

seiferteric — Thu, 20 Aug 2026 04:38:29 +0000

I think the flexibility issues is more that you can't easily do things that used to be trivial. Try to spin up a bunch of headless wayland gnome sessions with VNC on a modern linux distro running on a server, it basically can't be done. This was trivial in the past, you just launched an X11 server for each one and handed it to VNC and you were done.

New comment by seiferteric in "Xwayland 26.1.0 rc1"

seiferteric — Wed, 19 Aug 2026 23:45:15 +0000

i like the idea of wayland but i agree about the loss of flexibility. they seem very concerned about security and make screen sharing very complex now if you stray from the accepted path. systemd complicates this further with logind seat management etc. as a result our companies dev servers where we run a bunch of simultaneous VNCs and independent mate desktop sessions can really only work with X11 for now. There is a way to do it with nested cgroups running n number of systemd instances etc but its a pain and then we would have to use gnomes built in rdp thing which we dont want to use… anyway i actually vibe coded a way to get it working with wayland in containers with a dummy kernel video driver, my own fake logind etc. etc. etc. it was a harrowing experience but fun.

New comment by seiferteric in "Claude writing a macOS driver for my obscure HP printer built only for Windows"

seiferteric — Tue, 18 Aug 2026 15:47:23 +0000

I just fix a long standing bug on my Linux desktop I have had for years and kept meaning to look into to see if I could fix. The issue was I have a sound blaster katana sound bar and it works okay but the volume on the device is not in sync with the volume in Linux. In Windows it stays in sync. I can work around it by each time I boot, I press the button to go to max volume, then lower the volume in Linux to the desired level but it's been an annoyance. I described the issue to codex and within a few minutes it had it fixed by updating the pipewire device profiles to use the volume control it exposes. Honestly amazing since I doubt I would have ever gotten around to figuring this out since I didn't even know what level of the stack the issue was, I thought maybe it was in the driver itself.

New comment by seiferteric in "GPT-5.6 used a prompt to close a 30-year gap in convex optimization"

seiferteric — Sat, 18 Jul 2026 17:19:23 +0000

Not really the kind of biased I meant though. There was a recent article about a AI disproving I think an Erdos conjecture by doing similar things humans have tried, but it was much messier and less "beautiful". I think it is a common bias in science and math that things should be "beautiful" but there is no real reason to think that.

New comment by seiferteric in "GPT-5.6 used a prompt to close a 30-year gap in convex optimization"

seiferteric — Sat, 18 Jul 2026 13:53:32 +0000

They also have ability to go deep and wide in a way that humans just can't. We have limits, get tired, distracted and biased where AI does not. I think there a lot of problem where all the information needed to solve them is there, but we just can't put the pieces together. Like no matter how many people you throw at some problems, you hit human limits and more people won't help, but AI will because it is just relentless.

New comment by seiferteric in "A metallurgist's doubts about self-replicating probes"

seiferteric — Tue, 14 Jul 2026 16:10:50 +0000

thats what i meant.

New comment by seiferteric in "A metallurgist's doubts about self-replicating probes"

seiferteric — Tue, 14 Jul 2026 15:47:10 +0000

Wouldn't a counter this argument be biological systems? These are reasonable points as long as we are talking about current methods, but I assume if we were to get to the point of self replicating probes it would be done by something like nanotechnology, synthetic biology like systems.

New comment by seiferteric in "California has more money than projected after admin miscalculated state budget"

seiferteric — Tue, 21 Apr 2026 21:54:24 +0000

Didn't something like this just happen last year (or year before) but in the opposite direction?

New comment by seiferteric in "Measuring progress toward AGI: A cognitive framework"

seiferteric — Wed, 18 Mar 2026 21:32:24 +0000

How could we know this? AFAIK all we can say is the volume of the brain has been relatively stable for that long, how can we say the structures of the brain have not evolved since then? It seems plausible to me anyway that humans could have co-evolved with ideas in a way.

New comment by seiferteric in "WA income tax clears House after 24-hour debate"

seiferteric — Wed, 11 Mar 2026 18:10:26 +0000

There are plenty of ways that you might make a large income in a single year like selling a business you have spent years or decades building up. Your "income" for that year might be several million that year, but it took you years to "earn" it. In general I don't think taxing people that actually have to work for a living is a great thing, all you are doing is prolonging the amount of time they have to work to save enough to either retire or start their own business. I would prefer to shift taxes to cap gains (why do long term cap gains rates exist???) and corporate taxes as well as sales tax.

New comment by seiferteric in "WA income tax clears House after 24-hour debate"

seiferteric — Wed, 11 Mar 2026 14:20:14 +0000

I think I don't like income tax as it disincentivizes labor and also makes it harder for working people to build up wealth. Making a million a year sounds like a lot, but who knows how long someone might be making that kind of money? Meanwhile already wealthy people are mostly untouched. Would rather see majority of taxes come from corporate taxes and capital gains.

New comment by seiferteric in "The first sodium-ion battery EV is a winter range monster"

seiferteric — Sun, 08 Feb 2026 19:22:27 +0000

> Gasoline engines are already 15% less efficient at 20F.

Is that actually true once the engine has reached operating temperature?

New comment by seiferteric in "Pretty soon, heat pumps will be able to store and distribute heat as needed"

seiferteric — Mon, 02 Feb 2026 22:18:36 +0000

The problem is, energy use is only one part of the equation. Often times new appliances that are more efficient end up being more prone to breaking due to more complexity and companies trying to cut costs to meet a price point. This leads to people needing to replace there appliances much more often which really makes me question how much energy is actually saved if you include the energy used to produce them...

New comment by seiferteric in "What came first: the CNAME or the A record?"

seiferteric — Mon, 19 Jan 2026 19:29:33 +0000

Now that I have seemingly taken on managing DNS at my current company I have seen several inadequacies of DNS that I was not aware of before. Main one being that if an upstream DNS server returns SERVFAIL, there is no distinction really between if the server you are querying is failed, or the actual authoritative server upstream is broken (I am aware of EDEs but doesn't really solve this). So clients querying a broken domain will retry each of their configured DNS servers, and our caching layer (Unbound) will also retry each of their upstreams etc... Results in a bunch of pointless upstream queries like an amplification attack. Also have issue with the search path doing stupid queries with NXDOMAIN like badname.company.com, badname.company.othername.com... etc..

New comment by seiferteric in "Dead Internet Theory"

seiferteric — Mon, 19 Jan 2026 02:40:26 +0000

My parents were tricked the other day by a fake youtube video of "racist cop" doing something bad and getting outraged by it. I watch part of the video and even though it felt off I couldn't immediately tell for sure if it was fake or not. Nevertheless I googled the names and details and found nothing but repostings of the video. Then I looked at the youtube channel info and there it said it uses AI for "some" of the videos to recreate "real" events. I really doubt that.. it all looks fake. I am just worried about how much divisiveness this kind of stuff will create all so someone can profit off of youtube ads.. it's sad.

New comment by seiferteric in "Dell UltraSharp 52 Thunderbolt Hub Monitor"

seiferteric — Fri, 16 Jan 2026 19:29:50 +0000

I have a Samsung neo g9 57" which is like 1/2 an 8k monitor (or 2 4k monitors side-by-side) which is sweet since I use picture-by-picture mode to have my work computer on one side and my personal computer on the other side.

New comment by seiferteric in "How have prices changed in a year? NPR checked 114 items at Walmart"

seiferteric — Wed, 14 Jan 2026 18:50:15 +0000

I think the real issue is that for the powers that be, inflation is seen as either neutral or a good thing. The only people it hurts is the working class and the blame is nebulous. So it is used as a tool to increase taxes without changing laws, lower the cost of debt, and cut labor wages since they don't get pay raises commensurate with inflation. So I think it is a trick played upon the working class to screw them over in the long term while the wealthy are protected because all their assets simply go up in value with inflation. I think the target inflation rate should be 0%, not 2%. I simply don't believe the justification for the 2% target.