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ziotom78

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ziotom78
·il y a 24 jours·discuss
This is relevant for solar irradiance but tells nothing about storage capacity.
ziotom78
·il y a 24 jours·discuss
Exactly
ziotom78
·il y a 24 jours·discuss
> It is absolutely ridiculous: of all countries, Italy has totally the means to rely only on solar and batteries

Do you have any trustable source for this?
ziotom78
·il y a 2 mois·discuss
I believe that what we can reasonably expect in the future is machines that act as if they experience consciousness. But the fact that this is true consciousness is highly debatable, as the thought experiment of the Chinese room [1] explains.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_room
ziotom78
·il y a 2 mois·discuss
I agree, but I would add that they can be very useful even if you do not have clear expectations but have some solid ways to verify their claims. Often in doing this verification I came up with new ideas.
ziotom78
·il y a 2 mois·discuss
I fully understand your rant! I pay ~20€/month for the Pro account, as my university has a deal with Microsoft and only seems to recognize Copilot, so it’s very hard to use one own’s funding for paying something else.
ziotom78
·il y a 2 mois·discuss
I am a physics professor and often use Gemini to check my papers. It is a formidable tool: it was able to find a clerical error (a missing imaginary unit in a complex mathematical expression) I was not able to find for days, and it often underlines connections between concepts and ideas that I overlooked.

However, it often makes conceptual errors that I can spot only because I have good knowledge of the topic I am discussing. For instance, in 3D Clifford algebras it repeatedly confuses exponential of bivectors and of pseudoscalars.

Good to know that ChatGPT 5.5 Pro can produce a publishable paper, but from what I have seen so far with Gemini, it seems to me that it is better to consider LLMs as very efficient students who can read papers and books in no time but still need a lot of mentoring.
ziotom78
·il y a 2 mois·discuss
Initially, I was skeptical and thought that this is the millionth vibe-coded project that will die once the author gets bored.

However, when I checked who the author is, I found he is is Graeme Geldenhuys, the author of the fpGUI library [1]. He surely has a lot of experience with FreePascal and the Pascal language, and in these years he has proven to be a committed worker (fpGUI exists since 2010!). So, this project seems to start on good grounds!

I really hope it will gain traction, as I have often wondered myself why somebody would not create a “clean” Pascal compiler from scratch with no legacy cruft and good defaults (e.g., UTF-8 strings, inline variable declaration).

[1]: https://fpgui.sourceforge.net/
ziotom78
·il y a 2 mois·discuss
Giuseppe Tartini claimed his violin sonata "Il trillo del diavolo" (Devil's trill) was played to him by the devil itself during a dream. However, unlike you, Tartini declared that he had been able to capture only a small part of the music.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Devil%27s_Trill_Sonata
ziotom78
·il y a 3 mois·discuss
> they'll have to run for 25% of their expected life span to get them back

Do you have a Life Cicle Assessment source for this? This paper [1] quantifies the Energy Payback Time for a modern nuclear plant to be roughly 6 years (see Table 18), and EPT is a conservative metric because it accounts for the total embodied energy of construction (steel, concrete…). For a plant running for 60 years, this means that it will be significantly less than 10%, not 25%.

> solar would have made far fewer emissions

Again, do you have a source? Referring to this, it does not seem so [2]: 6 tonCO2/GWh for Nuclear vs 53 tonCO2/GWh for Solar.

> they are big up front money sinks, creating a sunk investment, diminishing the gamma of future options one might have wished to invest in, or take advantage of, something nobody talks about

True, nuclear has a big initial cost, but this is an incomplete metric. It ignores system integration costs, which grow non-linearly as solar penetration increases. Intermittency forces the grid to over-build capacity and storage, and significant investments are needed to fix it.

> They are perfect for government vanity projects, though, where a lot of money can be siphoned off to personal crypto gardens, repeatedly. Money laundering is likely the leitmotiv behind why you see them being built.

I agree, but this is true of any technology. In countries like Italy and Germany the Government provides >10 G€/year for renewables. It is quite likely that money laundering is happening in these cases as well, as corruption is generally a failure of the Government and auditing bodies, not a property of the energy source.

[1] https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S019689040...

[2] https://ourworldindata.org/safest-sources-of-energy
ziotom78
·il y a 4 mois·discuss
True, but what if you need to re-run that command several months later and you can no longer find the message?
ziotom78
·il y a 4 mois·discuss
I too was perplexed, but the main use case seems to be when you want to share a particular configuration or need to be sure that you always use the same set of flags:

> Flags are ephemeral – you have to share the command line or wrap it in a script. Scripts depend on environment, which can break portability. Filenames solve both: the program describes itself, requires zero setup, and any configuration can be shared by simply renaming the file.

[Emphasis added] Although I find a script that wraps the command and calls it more versatile, there might be some value in this idea for some very simple cases, like example #4.
ziotom78
·il y a 4 mois·discuss
Not the OP, but a few weeks ago I posted a comment about my problems with Wayland, which forced me to go back to X11. (I am still using it.)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46001622
ziotom78
·il y a 4 mois·discuss
Thank you! I regularly use Reveal.js to create interactive slide decks for my classes, and your project will be a great tool to have!
ziotom78
·il y a 5 mois·discuss
Correct, but I would add: Julia is better than Python+NumPy/SciPy when you need extreme speed in custom logic that can’t be easily vectorized. As Julia is JIT-compiled, if your code calls most of the functions just once it won’t provide a big advantage, as the time spent compiling functions can be significant (e.g., if you use some library heavily based on macros).

To produce plots out of data files, Python and R are probably the best solutions.
ziotom78
·il y a 5 mois·discuss
It will surely be worse, at least at the beginning. But there is a significant chance that with time they will improve it, and one can hope that one year after the first release the product will actually be better than Teams, given that the developers will improve it based on their own experience.
ziotom78
·il y a 5 mois·discuss
A few weeks ago I decided to test C++ modules, but I had a hard time to figure out how to make them accepted by CMake. After a few days of struggle with `set(CMAKE_EXPERIMENTAL_CXX_IMPORT_STD "d0edc3af-4c50-42ea-a356-e2862fe7a444")` (it was so hard to find the right UUID that worked with my version) and errors on `import std;`, I decided to give XMake a chance.

It took just a couple of minutes to have a working example that fully supported C++ modules and `import std`:

    set_languages("c++23")

    add_rules("mode.debug", "mode.release")

    target("mytest")
        set_kind("static")
        add_files("src/*.cpp")
        add_files("src/*.cppm", {public = true})
        set_policy("build.c++.modules", true)
ziotom78
·il y a 8 mois·discuss
It’s fantastic they were able to find these issues!

That four new CVEs (two high-severity!) were found in a mature and well-tested library like png reminds me how non-trivial and unforgiving software engineering can be.

Security flaws are often just waiting behind the corner: this should be humbling lesson for all of us.
ziotom78
·il y a 8 mois·discuss
A few months have passed and I might not remember everything correctly, but there was a series of problems:

- I use several symbols as Greek letters (α, β, γ…) and mathematical operators (×, −, ·, ∂…), and after much digging I found that the only way I could make keyd work with them was to choose a US keyboard layout. So, I had to write a configuration file for keyd to remap not only the special characters listed above, but every character of the Italian keyboard (è, é, ò, à, ù…). This extensive remapping required then an exception for Espanso to prevent `keyd` from intercepting its virtual keyboard output.

- However, this forced US-layout setup created a conflict with VirtualBox that I was unable to solve. When I installed Windows and selected the Italian layout inside the VM, the guest OS received the raw key codes corresponding to a US physical keyboard (due to the keyd remapping layer). Since the guest OS expected Italian key codes, all the standard Italian keys (like è, à, ò) stopped working correctly. Without keyd enabled, the standard Italian layout worked perfectly in the VM.

- The attempts to create application-specific exceptions (e.g., to disable keyd for the VM window) using tools like keyd-application-mapper did not function correctly in my KDE environment because of known issues in these tools.

- Finally, introducing new hardware like my Corsair keyboard added another layer of complexity, as its Linux driver (ckb-next) was incompatible with the active keyd remapping layer. This was the point when I decided to revert to X11.

I should definitely collect all these details and write a blog post about it…
ziotom78
·il y a 8 mois·discuss
Xdotool and Xmodmap are the two main reasons why, after a few months running Wayland+keyd+dotool I went back to X11. I found really hard to have the following things working at once:

- Italian layout for my keyboard with heavily-customized AltGr keys for mathematical notation (in X11 it's just a matter of having a Xmodmap file)

- Using Espanso for many common shortcuts like :date: (current YYYY-MM-DD date) and :pidigits:

- A reasonable way to run Windows in a VM while using an Italian layout for my keyboard

- The possibility to use automation scripts using something as close as possible to xdotool

- Sometimes I use my home keyboard, sometimes I use my work keyboard, and sometimes I use my laptop keyboard. I expect the system to work in the same way regardless of my input device

It's not that Wayland prevents one from doing all this stuff, but the available solutions were fragile and complicated and took me so long before figuring solutions that only worked partially... For instance, to make keyd work as expected, I was forced to set up my Italian keyboard as an English keyboard and then remap all the keys manually... And every time I plugged a new keyboard, I had to tell keyd to enable my customizations on it, because telling it to use the layout with any keyboard conflicted with VirtualBox.

I understand that X11 is too complicated to be maintained, but from an user's perspective, so far I am far more efficient in X11.