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lr0

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Posts337
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psychotechnology.substack.com 3d ago

Em dashes are fucking amazing

lr0
9pts0
github.com 3d ago

Seamless iPad (or any device that can run a web browser) drawing into org-mode

lr0
3pts0
www.phoronix.com 7d ago

FreeBSD 16 Retires the Last of Its GPL Code from Its Base System

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98pts63
www.youtube.com 7d ago

2081681993819799846994786333448627702865224538845305484256394568209274196 (etc.) [video]

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4pts1
codeberg.org 8d ago

Why not LLMs?

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8pts0
www.lrb.co.uk 12d ago

The first programmer I know who was murdered in a targeted strike was Haitham

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21pts3
github.com 28d ago

Emacs Liquid Glass

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lr0.org 1mo ago

The terrific technical debt of Arabic typography rendering: an interactive tour

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martinsos.com 1mo ago

May I recommend thinking of Emacs as your Fortress of Solitude

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lr0.org 1mo ago

What Yahoo killed when it bought Maktoob

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lr0.org 2mo ago

"Open" doesn't mean what it used to

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twitter.com 2mo ago

Apple accidentally left Claude.md files in today's Apple Support app update

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www.aaronsw.com 3mo ago

Markdown (2004)

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en.wikipedia.org 3mo ago

List of people imprisoned for editing Wikipedia

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blog.trailofbits.com 3mo ago

We beat Google's zero-knowledge proof of quantum cryptanalysis

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www.reuters.com 3mo ago

Israeli strike kills infant girl in south Lebanon during father's funeral

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en.wikipedia.org 3mo ago

Killing of Hind Rajab (2024)

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www.pbs.org 3mo ago

Trump says a 'whole civilization will die tonight' if Iran deal isn't reached

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45pts10
www.nytimes.com 3mo ago

Hegseth says U.S. troops are fighting for Jesus. The Pope disagrees

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33pts5
snawoot.github.io 3mo ago

Making Services with Go Right Way

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brooker.co.za 3mo ago

What about juniors?

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www.theguardian.com 3mo ago

LLMs encourages delusional thinking in patients, study finds

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0x0.st 3mo ago

Let me tell you how much I've come to hate you since you were created

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stallman.org 3mo ago

In March 1993, the FSF received the following letter

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lr0.org 4mo ago

Little Known Development Methods (2009)

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github.com 4mo ago

Show HN: HN Firebase API client for Go with support for reading flagged posts

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blog.giovanh.com 4mo ago

Anthropic and the Authoritarian Ethic

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arxiv.org 4mo ago

Docker Does Not Guarantee Reproducibility

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lr0.org 4mo ago

I'm not consulting an LLM

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8pts0
anthropic.ml 4mo ago

Anthropic is untrustworthy

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11pts0

At one point you say, “Nobody reads ‘hope you had a great weekend’ and thinks better of the person who wrote it.” Who is going to read that and think that “nobody” only applies to you?

I argued why I believe this does not a good way of communication in business or professional-focused environment, because as explained, habitual padding tends to train readers to skim, because they learn that the lines often contain little of substance. For people who value directness (which, in my experience, includes many in serious professional settings) this kind of attitude is not appreciated. That said, it is simply my own rationale for preferring a more direct style of communication.

Maybe you’d benefit from some of the mindset that leads people to write and appreciate useless greetings.

I come from a culture where elaborate politeness and social niceties are not only common but often expected, and I do practice them in the appropriate contexts. However, when the goal is to build something, solve a problem, or exchange ideas efficiently, I prefer a norm I explained, that is, directness and the substance of the message to take over.

[dead] 7 months ago

I'm not sure if you understand how casualty classification works. “not positively identified as combatant” is not logically equivalent to “proven civilian.” No one claims it is. What it does mean is that the IDF has no evidence those people were combatants. And in law, statistics, and every serious conflict dataset, you don’t get to assign lethal status based on vibes.

Also calling Aman “a single unit not tasked with research” is false. It’s Military Intelligence, and Israeli sources say this database is the only one they can stand behind.

If your position requires assuming thousands of unidentified dead people were combatants without evidence, then your position is not analytical rather ideological.

[dead] 7 months ago

No and this is misleading. First, that’s not how civilian status is determined. Civilian vs. combatant is not decided by uniforms or post-strike assumptions but on direct participation in hostilities at the time and positive identification. Someone actively firing an RPG is a combatant at that moment but that does not justify retroactively classifying every unidentified body as militant. I'm honestly surprised that I've to explain that.

Second, the example is a hypothetical case to erase the real issue. The claim about ~80% civilian deaths is not based on “assuming everyone is civilian,” but on subtracting those Israel itself could identify as militants using intelligence-linked, name-based records. Israel’s own database explicitly excludes people it merely suspects or assumes were fighters.

Third, this logic fails at scale. Gaza’s death toll includes tens of thousands of women, children, elderly, and entire families killed in homes, shelters, hospitals, and aid lines, not people observed using RPGs. Field reports and Israeli investigations show many victims were later posthumously labeled militants without evidence, inflating numbers.

Forth, the argument flips the burden of proof. You don’t get to call people militants because you can’t identify them. If that standard were accepted, any mass-casualty air war could declare most of its victims “terrorists” by default, which is exactly why serious militaries and conflict datasets reject that logic.

[dead] 7 months ago

In war, a person is civilian unless positively identified as a combatant. “Unidentified” does not mean militant. that’s true in international law, conflict research, and even the IDF’s own internal counting. The “17% identified by name” point actually supports the claim. Israel’s own intelligence database--which Israeli sources call the only authoritative militant tally--shows ~8,900 confirmed or probable militants killed out of ~53,000 total deaths at the time.

The “RPGs in their hands” is a strawman. The database does not count assumptions; it requires intelligence-linked identification. Israeli investigations and internal testimony show civilians were routinely misclassified as “terrorists” in field reports to inflate ratios

The Ukraine comparison is simply wrong. Ukraine has uniforms, unit records, POW lists, and mutual identification. Gaza is a besieged civilian population where Israel itself admits it cannot identify most victims. No serious dataset suggests 99.9% of Ukraine’s dead are civilians.

moreover, many independent investigations suggest the same. Airwars’ civilian harm analysis documented unprecedented civilian casualty patterns (large family deaths, high women/child counts), far exceeding norms seen in other 21st-century conflicts https://gaza-patterns-harm.airwars.org

Even conflict data experts (e.g., Uppsala Conflict Data Program) note that the proportion of civilians in this conflict is far higher than typical war patterns and comparable only to extreme cases like Rwanda and Mariupol https://www.aa.com.tr/en/middle-east/classified-israeli-mili...

but to claim we have "lost the plot" while holding up names like "awk" is contradictory at best

My argument is that even a name like awk is much more relevant to the people who used this software back then, of course it was not the best way to name it, but at least it held some meaning to it. Unlike modern software, awk and others were not written with the consideration of a wide user-base in mind. Regarding whether we "lost the plot" or not, I believe that we did, because as mentioned, in the 80s there was a current of people who named software conventionally, and up to the 2010s, the names still used to hold some rational even when word-played or combined with cutey names.

It sounds more like this person just had a personal vendetta against cute sounding names, not against the names being uselessly non-descriptive.

Not at all, I find it quite fun, just unprofessional.

--

Sent by replying to an automated RSS email, via msmtp (light SMTP client, which is unlike firefox, not a consumer product and its name has to do with its function).

Nobody says "gh:someguy/openai/llm-streaming-client" in conversation. You say "the streaming client" or "llm-stream" the same way you'd say "Pegasus." But when someone new joins or you're reading code, "llm-stream" is self-documenting. "Pegasus" requires looking it up every single time until you memorize an arbitrary mapping.

Sonic hedgehog is a terrible example this case. Researchers literally had to tell parents their children had mutations in the "sonic hedgehog gene." The scientific community recognized this was a problem and it's a widely-known controversy. It's cited as an example of bad naming in medical ethics discussions.

Boaty McBoatface? officials overrode the vote to name it after David Attenborough. The actual research submarine got the joke name. Again, this proves my point.

Fat Gary was an internal chip designation that never needed to be public-facing. Perfectly fine.

"Names are only for distinct identification" if efficiency was not at a question. Why use worse identifiers when better ones cost the same?

Say you wanted to rename `fish` to `a-decent-shell`

You just made my argument. Renaming is hard precisely because you shipped with the wrong name. That's why you should get it right from the start.

Every cost you listed [distro packages, configs, scripts, docs, domain] exists whether you rename to something descriptive OR another random word. The migration pain is identical. "Fish" → "decent-shell" costs the same as "fish" → "zephyr." My argument was that this renaming won't be necessary if you started by picking up the proper name at the first place, and it's very unlikely to have the need to rename it. We shouldn't be optimizing to avoid renaming. That's trading a rare maintenance event for permanent cognitive overhead.

The "Raptor Lake" codename in microprocessors is internal, the product ships with systematic designation. Engineers spec chips by model numbers that encode generation, tier, and performance class.

In Pharmaceuticals, Doctors prescribe "sildenafil," not "Viagra." The generic name describes chemical structure. Brand names are marketing for consumers, not professional nomenclature.

Mythology in chemistry/astronomy has centuries of legacy and connects to human cultural history. Calling an element "Titanium" after Titans carries weight. Calling a SQL replicator "Marmot" connects to... what, exactly? A weekend at the zoo?

Not at all. You don't name by category, you can name by function or approach. PostgreSQL isn't "Generic SQL Database 47" it's the successor to Ingres (Post-Ingres-SQL). If your "LLM wrapper" does nothing distinctive worth naming, maybe don't publish it. But if it specifically handles streaming, call it something like "llm-stream-client." If it focuses on prompt templating, "prompt-template-engine." The name encodes the actual value proposition.

I actually stated this on the post, but let me reiterate, I think that naming things in somehow fun way is totally okay as long as it stays relevant to what the tool actually does (you can have this achieved by play wording suffixes (Mongo"DB", Open"SSL", Ma"git" are good examples, all are better than elephant, dog, and beaver).

"purpose will change" argument actually proves the opposite point. When a tool's scope expands beyond its name, the descriptive name tells you something went wrong. But even if so, if you have to rename "login-page-config-service" to "auth-config-service" it is not really a big deal, renaming will be much cheaper if you're renaming to descriptive names. Most importantly though, I wouldn't optimize to avoid renaming (happens once, maybe twice in a project's lifetime) by making discovery hard (happens every single time someone encounters the tool).