kloop's comments

On: Ageless Linux – Software for humans of indeterminate age

[kloop]

You have made a claim with zero rationale to back it up.

Why shouldn't it look like that? Especially with a law this dumb

[charcircuit → kloop]

It doesn't make strategic sense to make open source projects the enemy of the people. Incentivizing legislation that hurts open source software is not helpful for open source software to thrive.

>Especially with a law this dumb

Allow software to know if the user is an adult or a child seems like a useful signal to me and is not dumb.

On: AI is killing B2B SaaS

[kloop]

You're ignoring the biggest part of SaaS as far as management is concerned.

There's a large, stable entity that management can sue if something goes very wrong.

On: Karpathy on Programming: “I've never felt this much behind”

[kloop]

We don't know. We seem to be hitting diminishing returns, but we don't exactly know where it will stop

[aspenmartin → kloop]

Is there a source for this? Scaling laws work and we have about 4 orders of magnitude in the exponential growth before we run into true bottlenecks

On: Cloudflare outage on November 18, 2025 post mortem

[kloop]

I hate that it's a method. That can get lost in a method chain easily enough during a code review.

A function or a keyword would interrupt that and make it less tempting

[pdimitar → kloop]

Well, you can request Clippy to tell you about them. I do that in my hobby projects.

On: Don't blindly trust what AI tells you, says Google's Sundar Pichai

[kloop]

And 4chan has (had? Haven't been there in a while) "only a fool would take the things here as fact"

Doesn't matter, a good chunk of people are going to take everything at face value

On: Analysis indicates that the universe’s expansion is not accelerating

[kloop]

Sure, but they didn't say correctness, they said certainty

[dylan604 → kloop]

There are people certain the earth is flat, the moon landings were fake. That certainty doesn't impress me. So I'm just really not sure what the point is.

[tsimionescu → dylan604]

The point was that science doesn't allow for certainty, by construction. We're not certain the sun will rise tomorrow, we're not certain the speed of light is a limit, we're not certain that F=ma or that E=mc².

Those that want certainty have to look to religion, or to pseudoscience. And they will certainly be wrong.

[cruffle_duffle → tsimionescu]

Bingo. People who think science is fact dont understand science.

The actual fact is, we humans really don’t know much about the universe and indeed there may be truths and knowledge that we’ll never know the answer to. Like… why the fuck are we here? Where did all this stuff come from. Sure we have theories and have logical conclusions but at the end of the day… we are tiny and the universe is mind bogglingly huge. It is peak human arrogance to think we truly know anything at all.

It’s very humbling to realise how little we actually know. What we do know… we know. We are masters of electro-magnetism, chemistry, etc… but when it comes to the big questions it’s all a shot in the dark.

On: Palantir Thinks College Might Be a Waste. So It's Hiring High-School Grads

[kloop]

You can't bank on college making you more moral than MBAs. All of those people went through college

On: They Thought They Were Free (1955)

[kloop]

> When you try to explain to them that their culture has elements actively hostile to personal freedom, you get a syntax error at best.

Alright, I'll bite. Mind elaborating more?

As a follow up question, are you talking more about positive or negative freedoms? I e. freedom-to vs freedom-from?

[Waterluvian → kloop]

I imagine one example is the imposition of their values on LGBTQ/trans/etc. It’s very much a “stop you from having personal freedoms” padded with very, very weak strawman arguments for why they’re protecting themselves or kids from imaginary bogeymen.

[anal_reactor → kloop]

Thank you for illustrating my point. I dedicated entire following paragraph to explaining that you're not free if exercising your lawful freedom costs you your job, but you didn't even read it. It's not that you didn't understand it, you didn't even read it. Literal syntax error.

To answer your follow-up question: I understand "freedom" as "freedom to". This trivially includes "freedom from" through "freedom to choose not to participate in something".

On: Do the simplest thing that could possibly work

[kloop]

You're not wrong, but I'm also constantly surprised at places where devs will inject complexity.

A former project that had a codec system for serializing objects that involved scala implicits comes to mind. It involved a significant amount of internal machinery, just to avoid writing 5 toString methods. And made it so that changing imports could break significant parts of the project in crazy ways.

It's possible nobody at the beginning of the project knew they would only have 5 of these objects (if they had 5 at the beginning, how many would they have later?), but I think that comes back to the article's point. There are often significantly simpler solutions that have fewer layers of indirection, and will work better. You shouldn't reach for complexity until you need it.

On: U.S. government takes 10% stake in Intel

[kloop]

It also means that China can expect the destruction of Taiwan's fabs to hurt the US less than China.

Combine that with the US's ability to unilaterally destroy Taiwan's fabs, and it sways the calculation a bit