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enriquto

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  just another C hacker
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Xeyes is cute until one considers the practical implications…

what's the problem with xeyes? it reads data on your computer and displays it. Just like vim or cat.

If, for some reason, you want to run a program that you don't trust, you should sandbox it from the outside. But granting full rights to distro-provided programs like vim or xeyes is perfectly sane. Just like you trust your kernel.

On The <dl> (2021) 2 months ago

It's not that inconvenient if you omit unnecessary closing tags:

    <tr>
    <td> first
    <td> second
    <tr>
    <td> what
    <td> ever
I find it simpler and cleaner than any of the markdown table markups

there's still something mystical and unintuitive for me about the area under an entire curve being related to the derivative

the discrete version is much clearer to me. Suppose you have a function f(n) defined at integer positions n. Its "derivative" is just the difference of consecutive values

     f'(n) = f(n+1) - f(n)
Then the fundamental theorem is just a telescopic sum:
     f(b) - f(a) = \sum_a^b f'(n)

This is cool, but my problem is the opposite: I have a modern laptop screen with tiny pixels. What I need is then a huge bitmap font... does anybody have any?

I'm probably your twin, separated at birth... may you share your bitmap font?

I don't believe in anti-aliasing for a coding font, not even on a retina display

This is a very good point. As resolution increases, antialiased fonts become less ugly, but also less necessary. Thus at no resolution they make any sense; but they look ridiculous for different reasons.

the city announced that the land is now paid parking to the city

what a strange way to put it... why didn't they just say that they are not using any more taxpayer money to finance your parking space? Land in a city is not "for free".

It's very easy to call another group entitled if you're not one of them

yeah, well: my point, exactly!

Paris can be cold and rainy

I cycle in Paris every week, and the only annoying experience climate-wise is the extreme heat you can get some days in july and august. If it's cold or wet, you can just wear appropriate clothes and be comfortable. But if it's sunny and 35°C, you are going to be drenched in sweat no matter what! Of course, being in the metro those days is even worse...

GIMP 3.2 released 4 months ago

but nobody argues against undo/redo in gimp!

going by your text editor analogy, we are arguing against implementing undo/redo as a "non-destructive delete", based on adding backspace control characters within the text file. I want infinitw undo/redo, but i also want that when I delete a character it is really gone, not hidden!

GIMP 3.2 released 4 months ago

I always found it odd that scaling down an image now and then scaling it back to its original size 2 seconds later with the same tool resulted in a loss of quality

I'm honestly baffled at your surprise... say, if you crop an image, and 2 seconds later you enlarge it to its original size; do you expect to get the inital image back? Or a uniform color padding around your crop?

Scaling is just cropping in the frequency domain. Behaviour should be the same.

unless the participants in the deal are being coerced.

Here's the nice thing about it: they are! If they don't work (for any of the equally exploitative companies in their country) they die.

It sounds like Onlyfans is exploiting workers and their own customers.

But this is the basic principle of capitalism. The company exploits workers (in order to obtain a net benefit from their work), and exploits customers (by selling the lowest-quality, most expensive product it can manage to). Companies that don't behave like that get out-competed by companies that do. This dynamic is the root of our economic system, as was very clearly explained by Adam Smith and Karl Marx two centuries ago (in slightly different tones of voice).

The particular case you mention is nothing special. The exact same thing happens for all the products that people buy. This is just the stable state of our (some would say "rotten", some would say "healthy") society.

No mention whatsoever of the $TERM environment variable. sigh

I have mixed feelings about this... Sometimes I feel young and reckless and want to just output whatever I need without checking $TERM. In practice, all modern terminal emulators are essentially xterm-256color compatible. If something breaks, the worse you get is some funny characters. Is that such a big deal? Much better than propagate the silly termcap/terminfo complexity.

By the way, xterm supports sixels since forever.

the app my electricity utility provides for viewing and paying my account DISABLES ITSELF FOREVER if you so much as enable USB debugging on your phone (even after you've disabled it again).

These are self-inflicted problems by these apps. Nothing to do with the OS. These apps simply don't work. Complain to the companies that push these broken apps to you.

Would you buy a microwave oven that kills itself if you play the wrong kind of music in your kitchen?

Layoffs at Block 5 months ago

we divide everyone into two groups: the cost centers and the profit centers.

This would make some sort of sense if it was honest. For a start, the owners and shareholders are plainly cost centers (they are literally useless sinks of revenue).

These wavelength-indexed spectra always seem a bit weird... the blue is so cramped! When you plot them by frequency they feel just right. We say "ultraviolet" and "infrared" for a reason; never "infraviolet" or "ultrared".

It's like a piano that had the high notes to the left.

good answer if the job is in a big and very expensive city:

"I like this job and would do it for free if I was rich. But I'm not: I'll need to live with this salary. The absolute minimum I require is food and shelter for my family (single dad of 3). Look at the rent of a comfortable 4 bedroom apartment within 10 minutes on foot to the lab, and multiply it by three. That number is the least that I'm able to take. But of course if you pay me more I'll be happier."

because of the stochastic nature of LLMs.

But is this "stochastic nature" inherent to the LLM? Can't you make the outputs deterministic by specifying a version of the weights and a seed for the random number generator?

Your vibe coding log (i.e. your source code) may start like this:

    fix weights as of 18-1-2026
    set rng seed to 42

    write a program that prints hello world
Notice that the first two lines may be added automatically by the system and you don't need to write or even see them.
What is Plan 9? 6 months ago

can you give a few examples of this "lot of things"? What operations do not map naturally to file access?

This steering is the main "source code" of the program that you wrote, isn't it? Why throw it away. It's like deleting the .c once you have obtained the .exe

What is Plan 9? 6 months ago

can be tricky and limiting for the developer. It is pretty great for the end user however.

This seems to be a great general principle of api design! The best apis are those that are hated by the developer and loved by the end users.

Go away Python 7 months ago

hate trying to install other people’s scripts.

This phrasing sounds contradictory to me. The whole idea of scripts is that there's nothing to install (besides one standard interpreter). You just run them.