stu2b50's recent activity

  1. Comment on Denmark tests humanoid robots in supermarkets to help to ease staff workload at night in ~tech

    stu2b50
    Link Parent
    They get put into insulated bags with dry ice. You don't need a ton of dry ice for it to last most of the day.

    They get put into insulated bags with dry ice. You don't need a ton of dry ice for it to last most of the day.

    3 votes

  2. Comment on Denmark tests humanoid robots in supermarkets to help to ease staff workload at night in ~tech

    stu2b50
    Link Parent
    For instacart, probably. But Amazon Fresh uses the same delivery system as normal Amazon, that is big trucks with a lot of packages that come in 2 days. And that, like carpooling, is going to be...

    For instacart, probably. But Amazon Fresh uses the same delivery system as normal Amazon, that is big trucks with a lot of packages that come in 2 days. And that, like carpooling, is going to be way more efficient than everyone going to grocery stores on their own.

    I mean, almost certainly the Amazon trucks are going to any given neighborhood every day anyway. An extra Amazon Fresh package's incremental carbon expenditure is just the very small amount it makes said Amazon truck's fuel efficiency go down.

    2 votes

  3. Comment on Those viral claims about plummeting Russian ‘bot’ activity have no basis in fact in ~society

    stu2b50
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    Yeah, I've been pretty skeptical of the "AI bot activity decreasing". There's little to no statistical facts whenever these claims are brought up, when this is exactly the kind of things you'd use...

    Yeah, I've been pretty skeptical of the "AI bot activity decreasing". There's little to no statistical facts whenever these claims are brought up, when this is exactly the kind of things you'd use statistics for.

    It also doesn't really make all that much sense. Why would all Russian political influence be hosted on these specific Yandex servers? For one, we know much of Russian political influence aren't actually "bots", they're just paid humans, and there's no reason to believe these paid humans lived in the Yandex datacenter (they can, in fact, be anywhere).

    For actual LLM bots, it's very easy to move inference around.

    It just doesn't pass occam's razor.

    8 votes

  4. Comment on Solo developer rebuilds Adobe Creative Suite in Rust using Claude, releases it free to all in ~tech

    stu2b50
    Link Parent
    They’re pretty open about it. That was why DeepSeek had such an impact, because they published a paper that said they trained their model for a little over 100k usd, and they described how they...

    Maybe not as much as frontier models but why that is the case is also very much up to debate as these Chinese labs aren't exactly open about the training methods.

    They’re pretty open about it. That was why DeepSeek had such an impact, because they published a paper that said they trained their model for a little over 100k usd, and they described how they did the training.

    2 votes

  5. Comment on Denmark tests humanoid robots in supermarkets to help to ease staff workload at night in ~tech

    stu2b50
    Link Parent
    I mean you can just have a shipping-only supermarket. I wouldn’t be surprised if Amazon fresh is mostly robots. Shipping groceries is also more environmentally friendly, which is a plus.

    I mean you can just have a shipping-only supermarket. I wouldn’t be surprised if Amazon fresh is mostly robots.

    Shipping groceries is also more environmentally friendly, which is a plus.

    3 votes

  6. Comment on Repo for syncing ipods devices on Linux in ~tech

    stu2b50
    Link Parent
    Yep. If you're really concerned about AI and the effect it will have on you, the best thing you can do is to use AI a lot, and use it frequently. Know thy enemy and all. Having less information is...

    Yep. If you're really concerned about AI and the effect it will have on you, the best thing you can do is to use AI a lot, and use it frequently.

    Know thy enemy and all. Having less information is never to your advantage.

    4 votes

  7. Comment on Solo developer rebuilds Adobe Creative Suite in Rust using Claude, releases it free to all in ~tech

    stu2b50
    Link Parent
    Just to clarify, the clean room distinction is mainly about whether or not the developer had access to proprietary code obtained through illegal means. It's relevant when, say, you're developing...

    Just to clarify, the clean room distinction is mainly about whether or not the developer had access to proprietary code obtained through illegal means. It's relevant when, say, you're developing an emulator of a console which had a data-leak that exposed internal details - if none of the developers have ever seen the leak, you're good to go, whereas if you have, it's likely illegal.

    Reverse engineering is completely legal. Decompilation is legal. It's clean room as long as you did not have any leaked source code or documentation you're going off of.

    6 votes

  8. Comment on Solo developer rebuilds Adobe Creative Suite in Rust using Claude, releases it free to all in ~tech

    stu2b50
    Link Parent
    I don't think there's any indication that they reverse engineered anything. Not to mention that reverse engineering is explicitly legal. You can see traces in the repo of how they iterated and...

    I don't think there's any indication that they reverse engineered anything. Not to mention that reverse engineering is explicitly legal.

    You can see traces in the repo of how they iterated and developed the applications (or rather, directed claude to develop the application) and it's pretty clear they were not using any adobe source code, reverse engineered or not, as reference.

    Now, whether or not it's useful is another question - there's already plenty of adobe alternatives that do 95% of what adobe products do - it's just that the 5% is what matters (and also, adobe products are not actually that expensive for a professional, so it's not really worth the hassle).

    17 votes

  9. Comment on Solo developer rebuilds Adobe Creative Suite in Rust using Claude, releases it free to all in ~tech

    stu2b50
    Link Parent
    I'm pretty skeptical of that. For one, the author never stated as such. Second, taking the decompilation and then rewriting it in Rust doesn't really make any sense. Finally, you can just look at...

    I'm pretty skeptical of that. For one, the author never stated as such. Second, taking the decompilation and then rewriting it in Rust doesn't really make any sense.

    Finally, you can just look at the traces left behind in the repo and it does not seem like that's how they worked. For example, in the photoshop like architecture agent markdown file, you see this https://github.com/storytold/photocraft/blob/main/docs/architecture.md

    1.1 Avoiding GIMP's hole
The criticism of GIMP is historically true, and much of it still applies in 2026.

Bit depth.

GIMP's original core hard-coded 8-bit-per-channel tiles.
High bit depth needed a whole new engine, GEGL. GEGL began around 2000, was introduced as optional in 2.6 (2008), and the port only finished in GIMP 2.10 (2018), "the result of six years of work" on that port alone.
Only then did GIMP get 16/32-bit integer and float processing.
Non-destructive editing.

Photoshop has had adjustment layers since about 1994.
GIMP got non-destructive filters in 3.0 (March 2025), about seven years after 2.10 because of the GTK3 port.
It got non-destructive layer types (link layers, vector layers) in 3.2 (March 2026).
CMYK.

GIMP 3.x is still "a 100% RGB editor" internally.
CMYK exists only as export (JPEG/TIFF/PSD) and soft-proofing.
PSD.

Import is still lossy. Photoshop adjustment layers and most layer styles are not carried over faithfully, and text often needs re-typing.
3.2 converts legacy drop and inner shadows into GIMP filters, and added PSB export.

    That isn't really isn't something you'd instruct the agent to if it were actually just does a transpilation. It's not like you can accidentally become GIMP doing that. You'd only need this when you're doing it from scratch and really, really don't want it to accidentally become GIMP.

    15 votes

  10. Comment on Solo developer rebuilds Adobe Creative Suite in Rust using Claude, releases it free to all in ~tech

    stu2b50
    Link Parent
    What adobe IP is being stolen? It's closed source to begin with, and the project isn't using any visual or branding IP. I also don't see any evidence that Adobe is particularly mad.

    What adobe IP is being stolen? It's closed source to begin with, and the project isn't using any visual or branding IP.

    I also don't see any evidence that Adobe is particularly mad.

    14 votes

  11. Comment on US Pentagon says the firing squad execution of Fort Hood shooter Nidal Malik Hasan will be livestreamed in ~society

    stu2b50
    Link Parent
    I mean even that botched job was pretty brief. Sounds like he died within 80 seconds. We just had a string of far more horrific failed executions by lethal injection. One of the women is still...

    I mean even that botched job was pretty brief. Sounds like he died within 80 seconds. We just had a string of far more horrific failed executions by lethal injection. One of the women is still alive right now! She has to live through getting executed at least twice.

    I don’t support the death penalty but firing squad seems to be one of the better ways to do it, if you were going to do it.

    3 votes

  12. Comment on A map of every lighthouse on the planet in ~travel

    stu2b50
    Link Parent
    IMO it's the subtitles. Stuff like "Every charted on the planet, on its real cycle". In fact, I am 90% sure this user specifically used Codex, and not Claude, too. Not a knock. I've seen it myself...

    IMO it's the subtitles. Stuff like "Every charted on the planet, on its real cycle". In fact, I am 90% sure this user specifically used Codex, and not Claude, too.

    Not a knock. I've seen it myself quite often. I had Codex write a dashboard/control panel for my self hosted setup and it added stuff like "The power of change, at your fingertips" all over the place like it was writing royal hieroglyphics on a phairohs tomb

    2 votes

  13. Comment on The return of phones with physical keyboards? in ~tech

    stu2b50
    Link Parent
    Hm, I'm not sure I understand the vocab issue. I'm not saying use the autosuggested next words, I'm saying you just write something vaguely similar to what you want to say phonetically and trust...

    Hm, I'm not sure I understand the vocab issue. I'm not saying use the autosuggested next words, I'm saying you just write something vaguely similar to what you want to say phonetically and trust in autocorrect's ability to guess what word you're actually saying.

    You're still choosing all your own words.

    This is actually how people type Chinese/Japanese in general. Obviously you can't have a key for every character when there's >4000 different characters. So you write the word phonetically (in pinyin in chinese, in hiragana in japanese, or also romanji) and then a list of options (homophones) shows up and you select which one you want. That goes for keyboard typing, too.

    4 votes

  14. Comment on Productivity tools on MacOS in ~tech

    stu2b50
    Link Parent
    IMO macOS window management is great, the issue is that people are trying to fit a square peg through a circular hole. macOS isn’t about tiling. It’s not about full screen. It’s about having lots...

    IMO macOS window management is great, the issue is that people are trying to fit a square peg through a circular hole. macOS isn’t about tiling. It’s not about full screen. It’s about having lots of windows open and using spatial memory to remember what’s where. It aids in doing so by keeping window chrome low (with the toolbar at the top of the screen) and by doing a good job at keeping windows in the same place.

    Don’t time your windows, expect them to overlap, never full screen an app.

    2 votes

  15. Comment on The return of phones with physical keyboards? in ~tech

    stu2b50
    Link
    IMO physical phone sized keyboards are slower than virtual keyboards, for normal English text. The way phone texting works these days is that you just maximize the amount of letters you can vomit...

    IMO physical phone sized keyboards are slower than virtual keyboards, for normal English text.

    The way phone texting works these days is that you just maximize the amount of letters you can vomit and let autocorrect take the wheel. It actually works pretty well. I can type much faster with a virtual keyboard than a physical one of the size of a phone. Obviously full sized keyboard is still faster, but 10 fingers vs 2.

    So unless you’re writing a lot of code or something where autocorrect will not save you, physical keyboards are just a hinderence.

    26 votes

  16. Comment on The mathocalypse in ~science

    stu2b50
    Link Parent
    What they mean by "logic test" is that the LLMs are using formal proof engines like Lean. Maybe a more common example that people use more often is a type checker in a staticly typed programming...

    What they mean by "logic test" is that the LLMs are using formal proof engines like Lean.

    Maybe a more common example that people use more often is a type checker in a staticly typed programming language. The type checker ensures that the types in the program are well defined. Now, in this analogy, do note that the type checker is scoped only to the correctness of the types.

    You can trust that if an LLM produces a program that compiles, that it does, well, compile and have logically consistent types. Now, yes, the program may not be correct, but again we're scoped only to the type correctness in this context.

    10 votes

  17. Comment on OpenAI releases findings on 377 math problems, further roiling field in ~science

    stu2b50
    Link Parent
    Pretty much all of the math work LLMs do make use of formal proof engines. (So does human work, fyi, it's just a useful tool to make sure you're being rigorous) Using a proof engine doesn't mean...

    Pretty much all of the math work LLMs do make use of formal proof engines.

    (So does human work, fyi, it's just a useful tool to make sure you're being rigorous)

    Using a proof engine doesn't mean that a human doesn't have to verify the output, but it means that the surface area of what you have to check is small. You need to check the axioms the LLM was assuming, but from there it all must proceed in a logical and correct manner.

    So

    or if it again acted like a pokemon hit with supersonic halfway through the match.

    is not a problem. Their work is constrained by logical formalisms. The middle will be correct as long as the beginning is.

    2 votes

  18. Comment on Amazon uses its tracking data to guess whether shoppers have a flat butt and no friends in ~tech

    stu2b50
    Link Parent
    They absolutely do. It's just that it's a numbers game, rather than what people think. Amazon knows a very, very shallow amount about any particular individual. People think that Amazon knows a...

    I don't have any evidence to support it, but my guess is that amazon makes a ton of sales due to their profile-based recommendations.

    They absolutely do. It's just that it's a numbers game, rather than what people think.

    Amazon knows a very, very shallow amount about any particular individual. People think that Amazon knows a lot, but it does not (nor does it really care to). But knowing a very shallow amount about you, is a lot more than TV advertisers, which know pretty much nothing about you other than where you live.

    So that very little amount is a definite edge for Amazon. On an individual level, it's on the magnitude of cents. Multiplied by all Amazon customers, it's a large sum.

    You don't need to have as much info on a guy as the CIA does on a target they think is a spy to make money. You don't need to make a lot of money from every customer. You can know a bit, and make a bit of money, over a hundred million customers and it adds up.

    5 votes

  19. Comment on Amazon uses its tracking data to guess whether shoppers have a flat butt and no friends in ~tech

    stu2b50
    Link Parent
    That's just the reality of data science at this scale and with so few data points. People like to think that data science and machine learning is literally wizardry, but it's mostly propped up by...

    That's just the reality of data science at this scale and with so few data points. People like to think that data science and machine learning is literally wizardry, but it's mostly propped up by inaccurate and misleading reporting.

    The famous "Target knew daughter was pregnant before parents did" is just fake, for instance.

    The reality is that it's INCREDIBLY hard to make ANY inferences about someone from their Amazon purchases. That data is inherently sparse and noisy. If you DID manage to make a lot of inferences from it, it would look very suspicious to any data scientist - that looks more like over-fitting than anything.

    It's always funny when people claim that Tinder or Hinge's goal is to selectively match people such that they go on dates but do not become a couple so they spend more time on the app. To anyone that's worked with data, this is the equivalent of telling someone to throw a baseball into a trashcan that's 10 miles away from you. As if, from the shit people put on dating profiles, and swipe information you're going to thread that needle.

    13 votes

  20. Comment on OpenAI releases findings on 377 math problems, further roiling field in ~science

    stu2b50
    (edited )
    Link Parent
    There's a pretty big difference in connotation. If someone went up to you and said, "look at that guy, he's a racial equality booster", you'd probably think that the guy who went up to you is...

    I think "booster" vs "believer" is a distinction without a difference.

    There's a pretty big difference in connotation.

    If someone went up to you and said, "look at that guy, he's a racial equality booster", you'd probably think that the guy who went up to you is racist, because booster is used almost entirely negatively.

    I've seen with a few instances in which Skybrian's demeanor while discussing this subject flirts with disrespect for their interlocutors

    You should report those posts, then. Deimos isn't updating the site, but that doesn't mean he doesn't read the reports. He usually even DMs you if he doesn't choose to act.

    Skybrian is more than welcome to their opinion, which is why I suggested not engaging with them if you are an AI skeptic.

    I mean, you can do whatever you want, it's your life and it's just a online forum, but intellectually it's more beneficial to challenge your beliefs against people who hold the opposite rather than people with the same beliefs. That doesn't mean you need to "win" the conversation, but it's nonetheless a useful exercise in having a more rounded view of the world. So that's the point - it's not to like "win" against skybrian, it's just to challenge your own beliefs.

    In this thread, for instance, while skybrian is just a dude, their point is true that many incredibly intelligent and accomplished mathematicians have the belief that LLMs are strong in their ability to work on mathematical theorems. Terrance Tao, the GOAT, for instance. That's worth stewing on IMO.

    13 votes