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alhirzel

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Alex Hirzel - thinker/tinkerer, owner of Lake Superior Algorithmic Solutions

you can reach me at <first name>@<last name>.us (personal) or alex@lsa.solutions (contracting)

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news.ycombinator.com 1y ago

Ask HN: License to Protect Training Data?

alhirzel
2pts1
pulse.kitware.com 1y ago

Pulse Physiology Engine

alhirzel
1pts0
www.youtube.com 1y ago

High Res WiFi Signal Mapping [video]

alhirzel
2pts0
computationalthinking.mit.edu 2y ago

Introduction to Computational Thinking

alhirzel
2pts0
www.youtube.com 2y ago

Observing the Infinitely Inverting Signal [video]

alhirzel
4pts1
news.ycombinator.com 2y ago

Google Giving 502

alhirzel
3pts2
en.wikipedia.org 2y ago

Fork (File System)

alhirzel
2pts0
news.ycombinator.com 2y ago

Idea – machine learning algorithm that browses the web?

alhirzel
1pts0
status.nearlyfreespeech.net 2y ago

NearlyFreeSpeech Catastrophic Power Failure

alhirzel
5pts3
help.clickup.com 3y ago

ClickUp AI Overview

alhirzel
1pts0
news.ycombinator.com 3y ago

Mattermost Cloud Free will no longer be offered after July 26, 2023

alhirzel
22pts5
news.ycombinator.com 3y ago

Ask HN: What was your scariest reboot ever?

alhirzel
1pts0
news.ycombinator.com 3y ago

Ask HN: State of Real Time Biosensors?

alhirzel
5pts1
twitter.com 3y ago

History of Firefox on its 18th birthday

alhirzel
3pts2
news.ycombinator.com 3y ago

Ask HN: Google Search down?

alhirzel
108pts269
en.wikipedia.org 4y ago

Blind Spot Test

alhirzel
1pts0
www.mlive.com 4y ago

World’s oldest loon couple breaks up after 25 years

alhirzel
3pts0
glos.org 4y ago

Great Lakes Observing System: Seagull

alhirzel
3pts0
news.ycombinator.com 4y ago

Ask HN: Parser for pseudo-English domain-specific languages?

alhirzel
2pts3
github.com 4y ago

Show HN: Wordle Helper

alhirzel
1pts0
news.ycombinator.com 4y ago

Ask HN: Creative/interesting FUSE filesystems?

alhirzel
5pts2
lornajane.net 4y ago

Navigating Bash History with Ctrl+R (2011)

alhirzel
6pts4
swfound.org 4y ago

Global Counterspace Capabilities: An Open Source Assessment [pdf]

alhirzel
1pts0
www.kingdomofloathing.com 5y ago

The Kingdom of Loathing (free online game)

alhirzel
1pts0
www.schoolofmotion.com 5y ago

The Essential 3D Motion Design Glossary

alhirzel
1pts0
www.thestreet.com 5y ago

Teledyne to Acquire FLIR Systems

alhirzel
54pts18
stackoverflow.com 5y ago

Compiling an application for use in highly radioactive environments

alhirzel
4pts0
forum.babylonjs.com 5y ago

Path Tracing with Babylon, Background and Implementation

alhirzel
27pts0
news.ycombinator.com 6y ago

Ask HN: How do you manage multiple project commitments?

alhirzel
10pts1
www.youtube.com 6y ago

Plots – Lmfao Shots Parody

alhirzel
1pts0

I was too busy waxing my armchair and didn't do any reading on the actual practices. Thank you for replying with this. It makes sense. I wonder if this level of purity will survive the test of time; since there are paid kernel developers, the situation could be very different from e.g. an entirely volunteer-maintained project.

I am assuming that many of these are found with automatic analysis tools that are very creative (i.e. LLMs) and there may be a high proportion of very "cornered" cases. I think there needs to be a triage method that would amount to the severity, likeliness, and detection dimensions used to rank risks in a systematic framework [1]. I think if this could be submitted (or estimated) along with such bug reports, it could go a long way toward sustainable intake patterns for this number of possible defects.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Failure_mode_and_effects_analy...

I think it depends on how good is "good enough". Personally, I think as long as tasks are not coding, there would be a ton of "good enough" value in having your own personal Google on a hardware device. I think the company that designs and licenses the architecture that packages the silicon for the largest market share will be the winner in commercializing this product. Wouldn't be surprised if this is part of Apple's roadmap to retaining existing customer loyalty.

I have been on the board of directors of a land trust, and this situation is a poster-child for why an existent concern must retain standing to litigate. A lot of what the Land Trust Alliance (LTA) does is ensure things like the legal nuts-and-bolts of conservation stays possible and durable, including conservation easements. CEs can be a lot of work, especially as the legal landscape changes. I think the dismissal of this lawsuit is not necessarily a risk to CEs, but could be widened into one in the future. This is the risk that LTA exists to mitigate.

The land trust you work with - are they accredited with LTA?

It's the butterfly effect. After the momentum exchange (the rocket slamming, stuff being ejected in the impact, etc), the entire system was left with different properties. From now on, the equation F=Gm1m2/r^2 will have a different m1, and you can sum the equation over all m2 (literally every other massive object in the universe).

KiCad 10.0.0 RC1 5 months ago

So many new features! The little things like 45 degree crosshairs, dynamic animation of overlapping lines, indication when bumping up against a selection filter - truly great polish. Board variants, propagation delay profiles, groups - the future is here! I hope KiCad is the next Blender-grade success story in OSS. It is certainly poised to disrupt commercial options.

This is going to get crazy as soon as companies start to assert their control over open source code bases (rather than merely proprietary code bases) to attempt to overturn policies like this and normalize machine-generated contributions.

OSS contribution by these "emulated humans" is sure to lever into a very good economic position for compute providers and entities that are able to manage them (because they are inexpensive relative to humans, and are easier to close a continuous improvement loop on, including by training on PR interactions). I hope most experienced developers are skeptical of the sustainability of running wild with these "emulated humans" (evaporation of entry level jobs etc), but it is only a matter of time before the shareholder's whip cracks and human developers can no longer hold the line. It will result in forks of traditional projects that are not friendly to machine-generated contributions. These forks will diverge so rapidly from upstream that there will be no way to keep up. I think this is what happened with Reticulum. [1]

When assurance is needed that the resulting software is safe (e.g. defense/safety/nuclear/aero industries), the cost of consuming these code bases will be giant, and is largely an externalized cost of the reduction in labor costs, by way of the reduced probability of high quality software. Unfortunately, by this time, the aforementioned assertions of control will have cleared the path, and the standard will be reduced for all.

Hold the line, friends... Like one commenter on the GitHub issue said, helping to train these "emulated humans" literally moves carbon from the earth to the air. [2]

[1] https://github.com/matplotlib/matplotlib/pull/31132#issuecom...

[2] https://github.com/markqvist/Reticulum/discussions/790

The physics of magnetic torquing maybe could probably work in most if not all locations on Earth for a sufficiently small and power dense vertical top that spins sufficiently slow. Want the smallest possible local dot product of gravity vector and magnetic field for an ordinary top (without considering "sideways" tops), which may lead to better performance in some locations on Earth (could map this with e.g. IGRF). 3D field actuation would be beneficial to allow higher efficiency and longer periods of actuation around the window where the Earth's magnetic field is maximized in the spun plane, while minimizing imbalance: this actuation timing is probably the only strategy that would make practical sense for most of the magnetic power, because you will need to take a break once in a while for sensing. Another practically difficult part would be avoiding on-board soft iron noise in magnetic field, because higher spin speed would require the device and environment to damp out the device-induced magnetic field at a higher minimum rate to afford any budget for accurate sensing of the background field during the "off"-time. That is: sensing trades with spin speed because it takes non-zero time and requires a stable environment.

To implement this, I think you'd first want to test in a controlled environment with a larger magnetic field and then gradually turn down the applied field until it is Earth-like. I am honestly unsure whether you could practically get there, so earlier I used the words "maybe could", but humans are crazy so I appended the "probably".

This would be a fun YouTube video to watch.

If you are talking about having the copyrighted source code not be used to train an AI, you could look at the discussions surrounding a recent license change in the Reticulum project [1].

I had previously been curious about this, and made a post on HN that got limited attention [2], but if you are wanting your software to not be used to create training data for third-party models, it could be a little relevant.

[1] https://github.com/markqvist/Reticulum?tab=License-1-ov-file...

[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43384196

This reminds me of the following, a story from my personal life. My wife and I both ski, and early in our relationship one of us told the other about the coolest poster ever about snowflakes. We each described it. We were sure we were talking about the same one - the one that graphed how snow changes over temperature and helped explain why it can feel so different. One of us pulled it up, and we realized, well...

[1] https://vermontsnowflakes.com/cdn/shop/products/Snowflake_Th...

[2] https://physics.montana.edu/demonstrations/video/1_mechanics...

She was talking about #1 (the work of Bentley made into a collage), and I was talking about #2. It turned out to be a pretty good way of thinking about how imperfect communication is, and how hard it is to get on the same page about things that are even more important when all we have is words.

Years ago, this very subject was an interview question at a national lab (at an undergrad level). The question was roughly:

the ends of windmill blades look a lot like a jet on radar. If you were assigned to this project, what would your approach be to avoiding false positives?

This was in 2011/2012. I find it difficult to believe the problem is not solved.

+1 for CADQuery - it lets you easily specify surfaces as the basis for manipulation, and results in much less fragile designs than OpenSCAD.