Viewing profile — sourdoughness

Using Opus 4.5 through VScode/CoPilot gives so much better results than anything else I’ve tried that I kept paying when they briefly made it 3x token rate. I really like the inter…

Interesting. I treat VScode Copilot as a junior-ish pair programmer, and get really good results for function implementations. Walking it through the plan in smaller steps, noting …

We have a low-tech version of something like this in South Australia: we pay the wholesale rate for electricity, which updates at 5 minute intervals. During the day when there’s ov…

We’re not talking about AI writing books about the systems, though. We’re talking about going from an undocumented codebase to a decently documented one, or one with 50% coverage g…

I don’t think entropy ever moves from high to low overall, it only ever distills some local low out of an higher entropy area, and in doing so, the overall entropy increases. It wo…

My understanding of this idea is that once the universe reaches a state of maximum entropy (this is the “heath death” of the universe, where everything is a uniform, undifferentiat…

The “resetable” aspect seems to be a crucial part of true “time-lock” encryption… rather than what feels like a “proof of work” mode where an amount of computation stands in as a p…

You can turn watch history off, and then you don’t get any recommendations at all - just the channels you subscribe to. YouTube doesn’t like it - and goes out of its way to make th…

Yeah, that’s true - it’s integral because an EV retains all of its components throughout its lifespan. If we consider an ICE car’s fuel as a “component”, then it’s an interesting c…

Driving any car like that will result in increased stress on components and wear. A lot of EVs have high-end sports-car levels of acceleration, and those aren’t known for being low…

I don’t agree that they’re just props: they’re analog controllers and so the form factor and manner of their use directly affects the music being played. Even the controllers that …

Vacuum clamping would get tricky when the surface you’re trying to slurp onto is also the thing you’re actively cutting holes in, right?

Turning CO2 into a stable feed-stock seems to be an important part of it, given that as the article says, we need to be processing gigatons per year. If we’re just using our captur…

That is an extremely interesting and potent way of phrasing it - thank you!

Is adding side-panels to skyscrapers a solved problem? It doesn’t seem nearly as easy or mature as rooftop or grid-scale PV.

I know what you mean, but not strictly true. I cook everything from scratch - the most processed ingredient I use is probably a can of whole tomatoes or occasionally a pack of past…

Agreed! This stood out: > The laws of physics definitely allow for functional subluminal warp drives “Definitely”? That feels like an exceedingly bold claim, given the nature of th…

The new material is an extremely thin film that sits on top of a traditional glass substrate: it doesn’t replace the window, and it doesn’t dim light or reduce the spectrum in the …

This is the question I come back to: a crucial advantage of plastic is that nothing eats it. What’s the missing step that allows things to eat it, but only when we’re ready for the…

Start at noon? That’s the exact opposite of the approach people take when it’s hot around here (I live in southern Australia where it regularly breaks 40C in summer). Start early -…

I can vouch for this. You can tell how much YouTube doesn’t want you to do this by the way the app shows you a big, error-looking message on boot: “Your watch history is off - upda…

The way this is implemented, it’s polish over a checkbox, with a fallback to the checkbox where it’s not supported. The semantics has therefore got to be the same as a checkbox - t…

For what it’s worth, I have the same expectation and have been applying it to forms since IOS 3 or 4. If we’re going to have a switch-looking thing, it’s because it brings some ske…

He’s got a deliberately obnoxious delivery, but by all accounts his research is solid. The politician in question was the deputy premier of NSW (one of the highest state-level posi…

It’s funny - the test rig in the article shows wraparound LED displays, which are already replacing a lot of green screen applications: the scene is rendered in real-time on those …