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Aransentin

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joined 2022 September 04 19:44:29 UTC
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User ID: 123

Aransentin

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0 followers   follows 0 users   joined 2022 September 04 19:44:29 UTC

					

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User ID: 123

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"Glitching" can be any error, really. It doesn't really convey the "you haven't plugged the cable in all the way" or the like that "glapp" does.

Depends on what you mean by "solve", but the implication was that e.g. UBSan does detect many instances of UB at runtime – but not in the sense of it solving the problem in production as in catching and handling it, but solving the problem of easily detecting it during debugging and testing since you get graceful crashes instead of the program potentially loading garbage and continuing.

Presumably media has policies in place for their low-level employees to only print the exact verifiable events (erring on cautiousness) when there's an important breaking story, and then updating later when all the decision makers have rushed in place. Companies are always gonna be a little slower than individual people that can basically watch events live when it comes to that.

Yeah, the question is if Grok is really using that, and if so how much better it is compared to Dev. It could even plausibly be worse if it's simply a bigger variant of Schnell.

Neat.

Apparently the least known word is stotinka, the cent-analogue for the lev (the currency of Bulgaria). The first one I knew was the tenth least known, witenagemot. Helps to have played Crusader Kings I guess.

If a English isn't your native language, are there any words that aren't in English that you miss?

As a Swedish speaker, glapp is one example. It means a loose connection somewhere in a circuit. E.g. if the sound intermediately cuts out in a livestream, you can say "the sound is glapping". A useful concept to be able to quickly express, but sadly lacking in English. Any others?

Hm, yeah, thinking about it that would create an enormous uproar for sure. Even if you spent a huge amount of time and resources to perfect the plan people wouldn't really know that; you'd have lots of people assuming anyone can now buy a drone on aliexpress and easily assassinate people without getting caught.

As for the viability itself, it's still kinda iffy:

  • I think letting out a drone from a hotel room window might easily get noticed as well? They aren't exactly silent.
  • The police is going to wonder where the drone came from, and for sure check out who rented the rooms in the nearby hotel.
  • A switchblade-style kamikaze drone seems exceedingly hard to make yourself. The repurposed commercial drones used in e.g. Ukraine simply drop grenades, and take a lot of time to position. That works for soldiers hunkering down for a long time in trenches, not so great for a person walking to his car.
  • Renting a hotel room takes time. You'd have to know the exact itinerary of the target to prepare all that in advance, and sit around waiting for a really long time for the moment to strike. The more time it takes, the more potential for mistakes and random events leading to your discovery.

The idea that GDP is fake is mostly cope (and I say that as an European), but there is a nugget of truth in it as a lot of things rich societies spend money on really is 'fake' in a way:

  • Positional goods. Things that only/mostly benefit you if you have better stuff than everybody else. This includes luxuries like fashion, but also much of higher education, and all ways people price out poor people to e.g. not having to live next to them.

  • Waste. The government spending a gazillion dollars on a 4-year environmental pre-study for some infrastructure project without any tangible result absolutely counts as GDP but doesn't really benefit society much.

  • Paying for results that other people get for free. If you live in a high-crime area and have to spend a bunch of money on replacing stolen goods, security, insurance, fixing vandalism etc. you are contributing to GDP even though somebody living in a low-crime place get that automatically.

This has probably always happened in all societies to some degree or other, but it's just more prevalent in the richer ones that can afford the slack.

I have two software projects I'm tinkering on.

The first one is a display library for the Zig programming language. You'd use it to get a platform-agnostic way of rendering graphics, so you can make really tiny (a handful of kilobytes!) graphical applications that compile to every platform (well, at least Windows, Mac, and Linux). For fun and bragging rights I'm making it ridiculously backwards-compatible, so it's e.g. supporting Windows all the way back to Windows 95 (not especially hard, the core Windows API hasn't really changed that much since the 90s).

My second projects is a superoptimizer for the 6502 CPU. It takes CPU/memory states as input, and bruteforces all possible assembly instructions until it finds the shortest/fastest* possible program that satisfies some output for each possible input. The 6502 was the CPU used in the Nintendo NES, so the program would be pretty useful for making extremely optimized routines for homebrew games and such (given that the generated code stays below a few bytes). I'm also writing a blog post in parallel where I explain all the little tricks I'm doing to speed up the search, which I'll probably post to Hacker News or something after I'm done.

* Actually it prints all** programs on the speed/size tradeoff frontier, though usually it's just one.

** Up to a configurable cycle limit, I have not actually solved the halting problem.

All of this Citizens United stuff kinda rests on the assumption that money in politics actually has much of an effect at all.

From what I've read it doesn't really change the outcomes anyway; e.g. Steven Levitt (of Freakonomics fame) conducted this study where he controlled for the fact that politicians who are more likely to win get more donations in the first place, and concluded that extra campaign spending has an extremely small impact on election outcomes.

The funniest but highly improbable explanation would be that Trump is speaking Lojban.

"ka mabla" literally means "shittiness" (or more accurately "[generic derogative]-ness", but that's harder to translate).

Petty programming nitpicks that don't matter, but still:

in C you can't do this because array's do not contain their own length

Arrays do (in compile-time, so if you have the type sizeof will return the actual size), it's just that they decay to pointers if you do anything with them like pass it to a function.

literally would have instant crashed.

Accessing data outside of an array is undefined behaviour and often won't crash if it's just 1 access outside of the end, it'll just fetch garbage instead. You'd have to build the program with an "undefined behavior sanitizer" that detects stuff like that, but I don't know if that's compatible with running in the windows kernel.

Seems complicated and pretty likely to fail. The logistics are also questionable; he'd have to hide away somewhere in the middle of the city with his gear, and then either keep the drone in the air as he waited (which will get noticed), or launching it when the victim was approaching (which takes time and requires you to rush positioning etc). Much easier to hang around with a gun in your pocket.

Also if your intent is to cause terror you'd want to show that anybody could be a potential terrorist. Very few people could construct a viable kamikaze drone, while a lot of people can buy a gun and stand on a street corner.

A lot of this is surely just random accidents that gets blamed on Israel right now due to paranoia.

It should be noted that the Grok image generation is just a wrapper calling the open "Flux" model behind the scenes: https://x.com/bfl_ml/status/1823614223622062151

Anything Grok can generate for you, you can generate yourself manually on your own computer (given a sufficiently beefy GPU) with zero guardrails since you can give it any text you want.