Hacker News: tcmart14

New comment by tcmart14 in "Why the US Navy won't blast the Iranians and 'open' Strait of Hormuz"

tcmart14 — Tue, 31 Mar 2026 22:24:32 +0000

Worked as a chemical systems technician for a bit. Can confirm, lots of the chemicals we used (most, some of which were pharma grade but we weren't pharma), had to come from either China or Germany. And we really did try to source as much in the US as possible. So it wasn't even a question of cost, it was simply no one here wanted to make what we needed.

Now granted, I'm not naive enough to think we should be able to be self-sufficient and manufacture everything ourselves. I think it is fine to import stuff. My bigger concern is, for some things, there just isn't a lot of options. I think its fine to buy some of the raw materials from Germany and China, but I'd also like to see a few more countries that they could be bought from.

New comment by tcmart14 in "The Hateful Eight is 85% of S&P 500 Decline"

tcmart14 — Mon, 30 Mar 2026 21:18:06 +0000

It depends. People can always say, "zoom out," but that only works if you plan to be long term invested. Really it's more of a, what is your investment horizon/window. If you were planning to reap what you sowed in the stock market right now, you'd maybe be screwed. But like myself, the money I put in (personal account), Im not looking to touch for at least 10 years. Although right now/near term, it's not clear if we will be going up anytime soon. We were already stalling for the better part of the last 6-7 months on growth. Now we are going down with potential macro events that may keep it going down or stall growth for a bit. But as I said, if you're putting in money today planning not to touch it in 10-20 years, don't sweat it. Until the recent events in the Middle East, my international ETF was out performing the S&P500 by quite a bit.

Also consider there was a period it took the NASDAQ something like 15 years to recover from a crash after ATH. If your 20 and don't plan to touch it till your 60, whatever. But if you were 55 and looking to capitalize on it at 65, well, zoom out doesn't mean much to you.

New comment by tcmart14 in "Hold on to Your Hardware"

tcmart14 — Fri, 27 Mar 2026 17:45:40 +0000

I think that is a little bit unfair. I think plenty of developers, myself included wouldn't mind or would like to do native applications. Every time someone does those, a mountain of people ask "why" and "this shoulda/coulda been a web app." And some of that is somewhat reasonable. It's easier to achieve decent-ish cross platform. But also tons of consumers also just don't wanna download and install applications unless it comes from an App Store. And even then, it's iffy. Or most often the case, it's a requirement of the founders/upper management/c-suite. And lets be honest, when tons of jobs ask for reactive experience or vue.js, what motivates developers to learn GTK or Qt or Winforms or WinUI3?

New comment by tcmart14 in "Moving from GitHub to Codeberg, for lazy people"

tcmart14 — Fri, 27 Mar 2026 04:29:36 +0000

By the same company who admits that disabling telemetry does not in fact disable telemetry and refuse to fix it.

New comment by tcmart14 in "Epic Games to cut more than 1k jobs as Fortnite usage falls"

tcmart14 — Tue, 24 Mar 2026 21:09:29 +0000

I agree with your sentiment, but I also don't know if CD Projekt is a great example because its not their original IP. I am sure the games saw a boast in sales from awareness given by the TV show. But I am assuming Andrzej Sapkowski is probably the one who gets most of the money from licensing from Netflix. Although I will say, I don't 100% know all the details for the Netflix deals. And due to lawsuits and what not, exactly what Andrzej has the ability to sell rights to isn't very easy to find out with quick searches.

Edit: Ah, maybe CD Projekt does own the rights completely? They may have bought the right completely from Andrzej? So Andrzej may not have been the primary party selling the rights? Or maybe not? Andrzej may have retained film/tv rights and not sold those to CD Projekt.

New comment by tcmart14 in "Epic Games to cut more than 1k jobs as Fortnite usage falls"

tcmart14 — Tue, 24 Mar 2026 21:04:19 +0000

Steam will also provide publishers with free activation keys that they can sell direct to customer without the 30% charge.

New comment by tcmart14 in "Epic Games to cut more than 1k jobs as Fortnite usage falls"

tcmart14 — Tue, 24 Mar 2026 21:02:37 +0000

And lets not forget Tim Sweeney's dishonest representation. Sure, Steam can take a 30% cut, but they also offer a lot of avenues to avoid that. With Steam, a publisher can get a ton of activation codes and sell those activation codes on their site and not get hit with the 30% cut. No fee on in-game transactions, and as you build a user base for your games, Steam also lowers the 30%.

New comment by tcmart14 in "Epic Games to cut more than 1k jobs as Fortnite usage falls"

tcmart14 — Tue, 24 Mar 2026 20:55:08 +0000

As much as I love steam, some of this isn't even a high bar. I've always had issues with stuff loading slow or odd behavior on the steam store tab in the application. My understanding is it's because the store tab in the steam application is essentially a web browser, and it sorta works like ass.

New comment by tcmart14 in "If you thought code writing speed was your problem you have bigger problems"

tcmart14 — Tue, 17 Mar 2026 19:55:59 +0000

And none of that means it isn't non-deterministic. Compilers still satisfy the, given the exact same environment and input, you get the same output. It doesn't matter the number of inputs. So long as f(3, 2) always gives 5, it's deterministic. Doesn't matter what f(x,y) does so long as it always gives the same output per input. LLM generation does not do this. If given f(3,2), sometimes it says 5, sometimes 6, sometimes 1001, sometimes 2.

And we are talking compilers, not query optimizers, so I don't really care what they do.

New comment by tcmart14 in "If you thought code writing speed was your problem you have bigger problems"

tcmart14 — Tue, 17 Mar 2026 19:30:20 +0000

I commented elsewhere, but that doesn't mean it's not deterministic. Deterministic means given the same input it gives the same output. Compilers can still have bugs and generate the wrong code. But so long as given the same input it generates the same wrong output, it is still deterministic.

New comment by tcmart14 in "If you thought code writing speed was your problem you have bigger problems"

tcmart14 — Tue, 17 Mar 2026 19:24:42 +0000

Deterministic doesn't mean correct. Compilers can have bugs. What deterministic means, given the same input you get the same output every time. So long as given the same code it generates the same wrong thing every time, its still deterministic.

New comment by tcmart14 in "If you thought code writing speed was your problem you have bigger problems"

tcmart14 — Tue, 17 Mar 2026 19:22:18 +0000

I really hate the trying to make LLM coding sound like it's just moving up the stack and is no different from a compiler. A compiler is deterministic and has a set of rules that can be understood. I can look at the output and see patterns and know exactly what the compiler is doing and why it does and where it does it. And it will be deterministic in doing it.

New comment by tcmart14 in "Florida judge rules red light camera tickets are unconstitutional"

tcmart14 — Mon, 09 Mar 2026 20:36:39 +0000

I would say they could be, but its needs to under strict circumstances. Easiest is with guns, I loan you my gun knowing your going to go and use it to commit a crime, but that is covered under being an accessory. With cars, the only situation I can think of is if you loaned your car to someone you knew was drunk and was going to drive. Or you loaned me the car knowing I was going to use it as a get away vehicle in a bank robbery. But I assume the second case would also be covered under being an accessory to the crime.

But for the purposes of traffic tickets, yea, its ridiculous. It also has a lot of faults. I got a traffic ticket from a red light camera for a car I owned when I was stationed in California. The ticket came to me in Oregon 5 years AFTER I traded that vehicle in (I traded it in right before moving to Oregon) and the traffic cam ticket was from Texas, a state I've never driven a vehicle in. My only presence in Texas has been being in the airport in Dallas. The ticket was also for a year prior to when I received it. So I hadn't owned it in 4 years when it ran a red light in Texas.

New comment by tcmart14 in "MacBook Pro with M5 Pro and M5 Max"

tcmart14 — Tue, 03 Mar 2026 17:10:07 +0000

I'm not really into AI and LLMs. I personally don't like anything they output. But the people I know who are into it and into running their own local setups are buying Studios and Minis for their at home local LLM set ups. Really, everyone I personally know who is doing their build your own with local LLMs are doing this. I don't know anyone anymore buying other computers and NVIDIA graphics cards for it.

New comment by tcmart14 in "CBP signs Clearview AI deal to use face recognition for 'tactical targeting'"

tcmart14 — Fri, 13 Feb 2026 22:39:39 +0000

I'm sure the anti-vax crowd who were foaming at the mouthes over the vaccine containing tracking chips will explain why this is needed and why its not a big deal.

New comment by tcmart14 in "The US is flirting with its first-ever population decline"

tcmart14 — Tue, 10 Feb 2026 16:44:04 +0000

Yup and thats part of the issue. Too many people want to simplify it down to, "if we just did x, then we will see y." Nah, this is a complicated problem. Its probably gonna take the whole alphabet of solutions, but there is no political will or too much squabbling to since people want their idea why we have population decline to be right. But the bottom line is, having kids is expensive. You can make it less expensive, but that alone probably isn't gonna solve it.

New comment by tcmart14 in "GrapheneOS is the only Android OS providing full security patches"

tcmart14 — Sat, 06 Dec 2025 23:28:20 +0000

There are some good stuff on the software side that people mention, but a big one is the driver support. We would need device makers to upstream support so there is less worrying about reverse engineering or needing to run modified ROMs based on old builds. Or just publish specs on the hardware that is enough for implementation. Sure, you can buy a specific phone and run a de-googled android or linux, but that only really works for the hobbyist who wants to spend time doing this. Which makes it difficult to create a market that encourages developers of software to port their software or write new software. With out being able to broadly support devices, most people are gonna be better off running Google's android.

New comment by tcmart14 in "Most technical problems are people problems"

tcmart14 — Fri, 05 Dec 2025 19:24:04 +0000

Makes me think of something my dad and I both talked about with our time in the military. He was Army and I was Navy. But when the ability to promote is tied with ranking against your peers, if you really want to game the system, you essentially sabotage your peers. Which is the exact opposite you want in the military or really any organization. You want to foster a, rising tide lifts all boats with getting the work done. But it hard when your performance evaluations are the complete opposite of that, and I have seen people do it.

I got qualified on our equipment quick and was in a position where I was training my peers who I was ranked against. If I were an asshole, I would have trained them poorly and drug it out. I didn't, but someone who is goal oriented to climb through the ranks as fast a possible, it is a logical action that I could have taken.

New comment by tcmart14 in "A brief look at FreeBSD"

tcmart14 — Sat, 15 Nov 2025 22:52:49 +0000

Will check this out! I knew there was a group who had a version working, but it wasn't upstreamed and last I check was still stuck at .NET 5. While I would like to migrate from Debian to FreeBSD, probably won't get management to okay that with current services, but future one, maybe!

New comment by tcmart14 in "A brief look at FreeBSD"

tcmart14 — Thu, 13 Nov 2025 06:01:33 +0000

In case you were not aware, there is a large overlap between people who work/worked on NetBSD and OpenBSD that also work on Void Linux, which is why Void feels like that. Juan Pardines being an example of one individual.