Loic

5,922 karmajoined 17 năm trước

Chemical engineer having fun here and there.

https://www.chemeo.com https://www.ceondo.com

comments

10 phút trướcdiscuss

I love to model and simulate. As the dead economy theory[0] (discussion [1]) was submitted here, I decided to simulate it. It was really hard to figure out a path "good for the humanity", in the sense of a balanced system, not a winner take all situation, etc.

I think this is the reason why you have the tendency to propose some freeze-all policies, full control or similar. If you want to find the equilibrium, you need to accept that it will be a controlled equilibrium, most likely on a saddle point, with underlying process changing all the time, requiring fast changes in regulations. Our democratic systems, laws, etc. are not built to do that, they are built on the idea of intrinsic stability of our world where incremental improvements do not need cutting through what was decided before.

[0]: https://www.owenmcgrann.com/p/the-dead-economy-theory

[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48324712

2 giờ trướcdiscuss

Proof of work, even "custom", where the user does not need a particular interaction with the page, does not work. The scrapers are running headless Chrome and solving the work. They do not care, they do not pay the bill, the compromised system's owner pays the bill.

I have such system for the registration form on one of my website to prevent the double validation of emails to be used to spam emails of victims. The PoW challenge prevents less than 10% of the bots.

5 ngày trướcdiscuss

Yes, but this is not the one where I wrote about politics, life and society... still, the writing style is not that different, so, I suppose an AI system would be able to easily associate my crappy personal blog to me (not sure if they are respecting the noindex stuff the way Google does) and build a profile of my personality out of it.

Note: Interestingly, seeing my full name here is not something I expected.

6 ngày trướcdiscuss

Just knowing that people could read my blog is forcing me to take better care of my writing. This is the most important reason. And only my friends and family know the address, it is not indexed :-D

6 ngày trướcdiscuss

You know what? I cannot care less if people are not reading blogs anymore. I reactivated my blog because it is a lot of fun to write, a lot of fun to take the time to put down my ideas, try to correctly formulate them, fighting with my crappy English or German (and the loss of my French).

So, you can move on, you can go fully away from the blogosphere (it was a word, 20 years ago), this will not change that I am happy writing my ideas/thoughts down, for me.

12 ngày trướcdiscuss

Of course, but the same way, you need to learn to use your head before using a pocket calculator.

14 ngày trướcdiscuss

My mother worked in this field and collaborated with IBM at that time. So yes, this is why I find these pictures even more impressive...

15 ngày trướcdiscuss

Looking at this picture: https://filecache.mediaroom.com/mr5mr_ibmnewsroom/201436/IBM...

I am just astonished at the quality of the structure. Not only that, but the quality of the "cut" to then be able to take this picture. I was closely involved in EM imaging more than 30 years ago, this is just wonderful to see such pictures now.

20 ngày trướcdiscuss

Confirmed. The second industry with such redistribution is oil and gas, 5-15%.

My figures are from ~2005.

21 ngày trướcdiscuss

Here in Europe (I guess you are US based), we still have quite a lot of long tenures. This from my experience in France, Germany, Switzerland and Denmark. The bigger the company, the longer the average tenure.

But it is also true that I do not work in tech, I work and am exposed mostly to industrial companies. I have very little experience with "tech" companies.

tháng trướcdiscuss

Sometimes the harness can only be a human.

And this is fine. Developing new software with a really smart intern is the same, you, as an expert, need to bring your experience/expertise on the table to have everything right. Because experience needs time.

tháng trướcdiscuss

pandoc is my "document converter" go-to tool.

Quarto is my documentation tool.

For me, they are both massively used, but cover different usages.

tháng trướcdiscuss

I like the name[0][1].

[0]: https://www.britannica.com/place/Le-Creusot

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

2 tháng trướcdiscuss

For once, we may be "saved" thanks to Trump. Because of the brutal change in geopolitics he triggered, the EU is now actively looking at all the hard dependencies on US controlled systems. Android and iOS are two of them.

I cannot tell if the alternative solution will be better, but I do think we will develop alternatives.

2 tháng trướcdiscuss

Asking: As gpugreg remarked[0], this is AI slop to the point that it is impossible to trust anything from this article/blog post. As such, I flagged the submission.

- I wonder, is it possible to give a reason to the flag?

- Is flagging the submission without comments the right way to go?

For me, it is important that slowly but surely it goes through that AI slop is not what is accepted here on HN. Yes to have whatever LLM helping with grammar, spelling, etc. but the content should not be the output of a one shot "write me a blog post about humanoid robot actuators" prompt.

[0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48005917

3 tháng trướcdiscuss

Becaus ln(A*B) = ln(A)+ln(B), you need 2 sliding elements and you work in logarithmic scale. Look at "slide rule"[0], this is really nice stuff.

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slide_rule

3 tháng trướcdiscuss

You are at one edge of the gaussian curve of the sleep requirements of the human species. The problem is that many think they belong there, but are not. Enjoy what you have and let the haters hate.

3 tháng trướcdiscuss

I am spending about 10h per day solving chemical engineering problems (dynamic simulation, model predictive control, etc.). The programming is hard on top of hard science. Even after 25 years of experience, it is still hard to find the right abstraction to implement everything.

Still, one thing I really like with LLM/AI, is that now, I can allow myself to test different abstractions a bit faster. I can allow myself to "try" more complex refactoring on a feature branch, because if I describe correctly the abstraction I want, the LLM/AI tool will be normally good at producing it. But to describe my abstraction, I need to pull all my programming and engineering years of experience.

But at the end of the day, I always tell my wife, that with these new tools, which I could not imagine so powerful 3 years ago, I live in the future :-)

3 tháng trướcdiscuss

Interestingly, I used Thunderbird for years, it was really the best client for some times on Linux. But as the development stalled, I moved to Gnome Evolution, the nice integration with the general Gnome desktop made the switch less painful (at the start, it was hard, Evolution was not that good). But Evolution improved nicely, less bugs, faster, still well integrated into the desktop and I see no reasons to switch back to another tool.

The only change in my workflow is that now, I am also using in parallel a stupid command line tool "vibe coded" in Python to read my emails. It allows me to quickly check my emails out of VS Code in a Claude Code session, a bit like when I was doing my emails directly in Emacs :-)

5 tháng trướcdiscuss

They put no limits on the API usage, as long as you pay.

Here, they put limits on the "under-cover" use of the subscription. If they can provide a relatively cheap subscription against the direct API use, this is because they can control the stuff end-to-end, the application running on your system (Claude Code, Claude Desktop) and their systems.

As you subscribe to these plans, this is the "contract", you can use only through their tools. If you want full freedom, use the API, with a per token pricing.

For me, this is fair.