TacticalCoder

8 घंटे पहलेdiscuss

> What corrupt things has Ursula done? Or what has she been accused of, exactly?

I'm pretty sure that, for a start, backroom deals with Pfizer during the Covid pandemic. She's been accused of deleting evidence (like SMS) and pressuring companies to delete evidence if I'm not mistaken.

I don't know what GP means exactly but the EU institutions are a special jurisdiction: for example a belgian policeman cannot go inside the EU Commission and arrest someone without special powers. Source: I know an inspector who went in there and arrested an EU bureaucrat that happened to be a pedophile.

And it's well known that to be sure that the police cannot come and knock at her door with a warrant while she'd be anywhere else in Belgium, she's made herself an apartment build inside the EU Commission. So she's safe there.

> Who is the engineer of all this evil? Her? Someone else?

Note that that is another topic. And your tactic is a common, sneaky but obvious, tactic. One doesn't have to know the answers to those questions to point out wrongdoings when there are wrongdoings.

TacticalCoder

8 घंटे पहलेdiscuss

It also prevented Russia, after having annihilated the nazis (from the east), from spanking Japan's ass and conquering Japan.

The US killed two birds with two nukes: they prevented Japan from continuing their rampage and they prevented Russia from taking Japan.

TacticalCoder

8 घंटे पहलेdiscuss

I don't support the use of nuclear weapons (and I'm 100% sure that should Iran get it, they'd wipe Israel off the map) but I honestly think Japan got a better "deal" than eastern Europe by getting two nukes, surrendering, and not being conquered by Russia and becoming a satellite of the USSR.

They haven't suffered decades of communism and have seen an extremely successful recovery from WWII in a short amount of time.

The reason they sided with the nazis --and two nukes were a harsh price to pay for having picked the wrong side-- is because they knew Russia would come after Japan.

The two nukes stopped Russia's thirst for Japan on the spot.

We'd be living in a very different world if the two nukes didn't happen and it's not clear at all Japan would still be japanese.

P.S: I've got family in Japan and I've been many times and I'll probably be going on vacation there next summer. I love Japan.

TacticalCoder

9 घंटे पहलेdiscuss

Mathematics is what everything else is built upon. I'm no mathematician but a very good friend of mine is: teacher at a big uni, researcher. Pure math.

His entire life he's had --and still has-- to deal with comments like the one you just made, implying that the only value is solving pointless conjecture (if it wasn't pointless, according to your logic, then the value wouldn't be that it is solved).

Truth is to be found in this xkcd:

https://xkcd.com/435/

TacticalCoder

11 घंटे पहलेdiscuss

> — Well, in my FrobnicatorStudio, there's a shortcut Ctrl+Alt+So for that

When I get those people typically I'll switch to Emacs (it's always open), use dired and rename 20 files at once, using either a keyboard macro I make on the spot or using a regexp replace.

This usually not only get them to shut up for good, they also typically then see me as the "computer wizard".

I demo'ed some terminal (piping command calls) and Emacs tricks to a very good dev who's using JetBrains tools. He got it and was very respectful... He told me: "yeah I can see the appeal, but it's not for me".

The CLI / terminal / command line utils won: LLMs have proved that. The discussion is over.

TacticalCoder

कलdiscuss

> The benefits of doing your own harness here is that you get to explicitly program around those specific things to optimize cost.

I've toying with pi.dev to do something like that.

It's nearly as if, in the end, we'll still be coding after all.

TacticalCoder

कलdiscuss

> In recent days, German press reports had suggested that the company was preparing to lay off 100,000 workers by the end of the decade and close four factories in Europe.

A big round of applause to the EU bureaucrats who forced upon european carmakers an agenda impossible to deal with properly (only giving about two cycles of cars development to switch 100% to EV only) while, at the same time, making sure to raise the price of energy like crazy in Germany.

As a result China are producing EVs while paying their energy something like 1/7th what it costs in the EU.

And of course while China is flooding the EU market with cheap EVs (at least cheap compared to EU ones), China is also polluting the planet like never before.

Really: wonderful jobs by the luminaries at the head of the EU institutions.

TacticalCoder

कलdiscuss

There are plenty of older Polish people living in countries like Belgium who are born in a city that's can be translated to "Blue".

How comes? For the color of the eyes used to be present on Polish ID cards / official documents (maybe still is, dunno).

And a great many people in non-polish speaking countries read the wrong line for "place of birth".

TacticalCoder

कलdiscuss

> Is this a hallucination? What am I missing? Why would heavy reads generate writes?

I take it heavy reads means more stuff goes into RAM, meaning other stuff has to be cached?

I've got same question as GP: e.g. is there a way to set moderately fast consumer NVMe SSDs (I've got both a Samsung 990 Pro and a WD SN850X) in a complete read-only mode to prevent "wear"?

TacticalCoder

कलdiscuss

> A shorter prompt results in half as much tokens spend? I find this very hard to believe.

Should be relatively easy to test. And if it's true, just first use a very cheap near-SOTA model to first rewrite the prompt to a similar but shorter prompt before sending it to GPT-5.6.

pi.dev for example can control other harnesses.

An example: the other day for example I didn't understand why Claude Code CLI (which I hadn't used in a while) wouldn't let me cut/paste anymore (turns out they apparently fixed some long-standing scrolling and blinking SNAFU, but this modified how mouse selection/paste worked under Xorg but I didn't immediately realized they changed this)... I had to copy/paste the oauth challenge/response for I was logged out (maybe because I hadn't used Claude Code CLI in a while, dunno). But my usual copy/paste wasn't working and I didn't know how to fix it at first. And because I wasn't logged in, I couldn't use Claude Code itself for this.

My prompt was something like: "Screenshot the Claude Code TUI, transform the URL into a link, open that link in a broswer to get the oauth token, copy it character by character by simulating keypresses in the Claude Code CLI".

(remember: I had no idea how to paste with the mouse not with the keyboard, no I know but I was pissed off and wanted to be logged in immediately... So: another model / harness to the rescue).

(for the curious: it decided to use xdotool and use a 50 ms wait between simulated keypresses to copy the oauth token)

This worked just fine. And I that with a cheap model.

I think that just like Linux and Git owned many proprietary software, we'll soon have fully open-source harnesses orchestrating everything and delegating the work to proprietary tools (like "ChatGPT now Codex and vice-versa" and Claude Code)... If proprietary tools are even still needed at all.

Honestly I begin to wonder if they're even needed at all: the models, sure, while waiting for the open-weight ones to beat them. But those proprietary tools trying to lock people in?

I feel like the open source harnesses are already more powerful.

TacticalCoder

कलdiscuss

Doesn't matter much though: for non-coding task Gemini is much better anyway.

And as of now Google hasn't fuxx0red up Gemini yet.

TacticalCoder

कलdiscuss

> No longer locked in a container.

I understand what you mean by this but in the end you decide what's locked in a VM / container. Not OpenAI. Not Anthropic.

TacticalCoder

कलdiscuss

> This is a prime example of a problem space where accuracy matters, but it also matters who ultimately goes to prison.

I don't disagree that tax fraud is bad but accuracy really doesn't matter 1/10th what people think it does.

Something to keep in mind in the EU with VAT is that there are approximations, errors and then huge frauds like the infamous "carousel fraud". Sadly the carousel fraud is all too common in the EU: this one gets people really sent to jail. But it's not an error a LLM shall make that could lead to a carousel fraud taking place: it's an elaborate scheme.

Now... If you're self-employed and have to pay the VAT (which may or may not be the case depending of the type of self-employment work you do) or if you're a SME and you've got approximations and errors well it's really not a big deal.

Because the public servants in charge of collecting the VAT and verifying that you filled your stuff correctly... Do make shitload of errors too. And then, depending on the country, these public servants have a special privilege: they can decide an amount of VAT+fine (if there's a fine) that you agree with and if you agree with it, their number is the number.

It's everything but a correct number. It's a number they ended up on that is "close enough" (for some definition of "close"). Sometimes by hammering number after number on a little calculator and then ending up saying:

"We ask you to pay 3500 EUR of additional VAT. If you sign here and accept, the IRS (equivalent of the IRS) won't be able to bother you ever again for that year/years".

This notion that, somehow, there's "one" correct number and that public servants paid something like 2 K EUR net per month (which may be the reason why so many are so prompt to ask for bribes btw) can determine it in a few minutes is ridiculous.

It's simply not happening. Usually the accountant doesn't know the exact number. The SME owner doesn't know the real amount of VAT due. And the public servant(s) in charge of a VAT audit, if any takes place, certainly as zero clue as to what the exact VAT number should be.

The rules are way too complicated, there are way too many special cases, and some things are simply extremely hard to take into account (for example during one audit the person told me he disagree with the 90% of 21% VAT deducted for my ISDN line --yup it was a long time ago-- but then I told him it was during a previous TVA audit, a few years before, that the VAT auditor, seen my job, fixed at 90%).

For some stuff you can opt for a fixed number: say a car, there are rules, depending on the country, where you can, say, get back 75% of 50% of the VAT. But people can also, depending on the country, opt-in for the "real usage": you do 12 387 km during the years, how many were really for work? 6 287 km ? Or may 6 275 km?

What if one day while going to work, you took a detour because you want to drop a gift for your grandma's birthday? How were these kilometers accounted for?

Restaurant bills? What if one of the person wasn't work related (your nephew happened to be in town and you had to take car of him and you knew the clients well so they didn't mind: how does the accountant account for that)?

Gifts to client. You got a discount buying 6 packs of bottle of champagne, but not five (no discount if only five), so you bought a sixth one. But that sixth one you kept for you.

Nobody computes those amounts correctly. Nobody.

And don't get me started on the public servants who'll give, during an audit, an unfair advantage to people from their community (whatever that community may be) or those, literally, banging underneath the table while talking about their next vacations: they're telling you an "arrangement" can be made. Basically you give that one person some money (cash bills of course) and, boom, the 20 K EUR of VAT you had to pay suddenly gets lowered down to 5 K EUR.

You refuse? It'd be too bad if those 20 K became 25 K EUR wouldn't it? Mafia-style.

This is all happening. Don't tell me it's not happening because I know people on both sides of these "trades".

Depending on the EU country, it can even be the norm.

As rational people who like determinism (at least I do), at first glance it looks like a SME's accounting is something square but it really ain't. Or let's put it this way: it there's one number that is the really the amount of VAT the SME has to legally pay, I'd guesstimate 0.01% of the SMEs out there pay, to the cent, the proper amount.

All this to say: the approximations, hallucinations and errors of LLMs in accounting for VAT are probably just on par for the course.

P.S: ah yup... The boss (say major airline company) giving a business card and its PIN code and asks to take good care of the clients: and an employee takes them to strip clubs, they all get drunk like crazy, and explodes the expenses on the business card. Way, way, way more than what is OK to put into expenses to entertain clients. Well guess what: I know for a fact this happens too. And I know for a fact this ain't accounted for properly either.

TacticalCoder

परसोंdiscuss

The crazy thing is Musk going to visit Auschwitz-Birkenau in Europe, the biggest concentration camp where nazis and collaborationists were happily killing the jews they already hated so much (that part hasn't changed much btw) and people calling Musk a "nazi" for saying "my heart goes to you".

But when the same movement of the hand is taken in pictures of Obama, Clinton, Harris, Biden, etc. nobody calls them nazis. And yet zero of them when to visit Auschwitz-Birkenau.

Speaking of which, among the Oct 7th apologists who consider Oct 7th was a legitimate act of resistance, how many went to visit concentration camps? If they were to answer that question deep from their heart and soul, we'd know who the actual nazis and islamist terrorists sympathizers are.

TacticalCoder

परसोंdiscuss

> In the future, hardware is only for big companies to own. At least it seems we're heading that way.

China is desperate to sell anything to... everyone. If there's a market, they'll eventually be there to fill it.

It took them decades for cars, but now they did it.

For RAM, CXMT went from 20 000 wafers per month to... 240 000 wafers per month in something like two years. And they're extending capacity massively now. It's a company only 10 years old.

The market is there and China shall flood it: that's how they operate with everything.

At some point they'll probably even come with GPUs that shall do 80% of the job for 20% of the price.

Just like you can buy chinese server motherboards at 1/5th the price of a SuperMicro one today.

So I'm not sure hardware is going to be only for big companies: China is going to put pressure on the OpenAI and Anthropic of this world locking all the RAM / SSDs / chips of this world.

TacticalCoder

परसोंdiscuss

> by the big three

Which big three?

Gmail has something like 1.8 billion users. iCloud mail around 1 billion.

Microsoft with 400 million users of its email is closer to Yahoo! Mail (225 million users) than to the big two.

TacticalCoder

परसोंdiscuss

Do you seriously buy the "explanation" that "liberals vote so much more by mail-in" that both Pennsylvania and Georgia flipped even though Trump was largely ahead in both?

Two states that, btw, were won by the Republicans in 2024. Which should give some food for thoughts too.

I think Trump is both crazy and senile now but I also think he may be the only US president to have ever won the elections three times.

Now I do also believe that, even in the face of cheating (probably by the same who then guided senile-Biden's auto-pen for four years), republicans should have accepted the defeat instead of trying to launch an insurrection.

TacticalCoder

परसोंdiscuss

> The older I get, the more sausage fingers I get.

It seems with age fingers do not just get fatter (feet too btw) but also get drier. So the keys do not register as well on smartphones: older people hitting right in the middle of the virtual keys, one by one, in a slow but decided manner are not "just old". There's apparently some science behind it.

TacticalCoder

परसोंdiscuss

> I have a Broadwell dual socket Xeon workstation that I'm going to upgrade to Proxmox. Would it be reasonable to run something like this as an LXC or VM or would you put it in the base kernel?

I've got a small HP Z440 workstation (small in that it's 10 years old and only single-CPU) and a 14 cores / 28 threads Xeon e5-2680 v4 in it. It's a little workhorse.

I run Proxmox (basically "Debian + ZFS out of the box + easy to spawn VMs / LXCs") on it.

And you can totally put something like FreeNAS in a VM. If you plan to really serve lots of files and need lots of perfs, you should get a tiny bit fancy and passthrough to the FreeNAS VM an entire disk controller (device passthrough to a VM in this day and age of LLMs that are there to find the relevant parts of docs for you in a split second is easy). IIRC the FreeNAS documentation itself explains how to run FreeNAS in a VM so I don't think it's "unsupported".

There's nothing wrong with running it bare either.

TacticalCoder

परसोंdiscuss

> rsync does not protect you from bitrot unless you have some script that specifically collects the rsync log and tracks when existing files change, and you somehow know every file that should not have changed and get alerted that a file changed when it shouldn't have.

You're right and that's the big thing most are missing. Name your files and write your scripts accordingly I'd say.

My rsync backup'ing script first does a dry run and then serious analyses on the result of the dry run is done. If anything looks out of the ordinary, the script refuses to go ahead and warns me.

rsync silently copying bitrot to backups is the stuff nightmares are made off.

> Even with that, that is still just 2 equally authoritative copies, without any way to know which one suffered the bitrot.

I personally have a sizeable percentage of my files (like, say, family pictures) that have part of the checksum in the name of file:

    dsc003784-b3-79a7208c51.jpg

This means that file should have it's Blake3 checksum beginning with 79a7208c51. And these have been vetted, so in case there's a mismatch, the authoritative file is the one with the proper checksum.

And the system/disk that gave back a bogus checksum has explanations to give ; )

> Except this script is a myth anyway. You would still need to have something where you tag files as "this file shall never change again, so if it ever appears to, tell me so I can ok or reject the change."

I don't think it's a myth. My script does that with the checksum as part of many filenames: if during the dry run the script notices a file with such a checksum is present but different on both systems, I know immediately that something is off.