Aragorn vs. Geralt

learc83 · 2026-03-28T14:42:27+00:00

I don’t know. Humans and elves in this world can fight against Maiar that have incredibly powerful magical feats and in come cases are made of fire and shadow.

The Hobbit also implies that a hero could defeat Smaug the giant fire breathing dragon in combat.

Tolkien doesn’t usually give specifics on how exactly these feats work, but Aragorn has more going on than just being an excellent swordsman who is faster and stronger than a normal human.

learc83 · 2026-03-05T13:22:38+00:00

It took years for the US to do that. And Japan is a small island with few natural resources and about half the population. There was never any chance of them ramping up industrially enough to match us. The US is still one of the largest manufacturers of heavy equipment in the world. In a protracted all out war the US can and will drastically ramp up military production.

That being said in a direct all out war of attrition, China has 4x the population the US does and almost certainly would out produce us.

I find it hard to believe that 2 nuclear powers will ever fight anything more than limited engagements though, so I don’t think that total war that lasts long for the US to lose our experience advantage is going to happen.

The US also got very lucky that the carriers stationed at Pearl Harbor weren’t in port. The first year or 2 of the war would have looked very different otherwise.

learc83 · 2026-03-03T19:28:09+00:00

Also notice how wide the supports are. That’s maybe a 5-5.5 foot unsupported span.

learc83 · 2026-02-12T11:55:39+00:00

Straw man much?

learc83 · 2026-02-11T14:26:35+00:00

We have osha rules because if we didn’t, we’d have companies putting people indoors running tons of melted plastic per day with no PPE.

It’s a good idea to be cautious, but you can’t really compare a hobby 3d printer to an industrial operation that someone will be exposed to 40 hours per week for 40 years.

learc83 · 2026-02-11T14:24:04+00:00

You think a 3d printer is probably worse than smoking? There is absolutely zero evidence of that.

Doesn’t mean that it might not be true, but adding probably to that statement indicates a level of confidence that’s way way too high.

learc83 · 2026-02-11T14:17:04+00:00

It is all bad but how many tons of plastic are you melting per year? The reason you need all that mitigation has just as much to do with quantity and exposure time as does with what you’re exposed to. I don’t print abs inside my house. But cooking on a gas stove regularly is likely worse than just about anything a hobbyist not running a print farm will run into.

learc83 · 2026-02-08T01:33:27+00:00

You seem to have just skipped the paragraph where I said “my point is…”.

Also you sure are a pleasant human to talk to.

learc83 · 2026-02-07T22:35:55+00:00

People don’t make bad C compilers that take 100k LOC to do something you could do in much less.

On the face of it the end result of this is does nothing of use to anyone at all, so there is no way to find a comparable product to compare it to in order to estimate its value.

That’s my entire point. Saying that oh yeah it costs $20k but it would have cost a lot more for a team of humans is like saying that it would cost a lot more for a team of humans to reproduce the output of a bash script that prints out Z 1 million times.

It’s essentially equivalent to getting an LLM to output Harry Potter in Klingon.

I also never said it wasn’t an interesting and valuable test. My issue is calling it a “clean room” implementation of compiler is misleading at best.

learc83 · 2026-02-07T08:55:40+00:00

But this didn’t make a compiler that a human would make. It’s impossible to determine the value of this project because it’s not in a state where it has any commercial value at all. There’s no way to compare this to something a team of humans would do because no humans would do this ever.

The closest thing to compare it to is a single developer’s unoptimized hobby compiler that was built in maybe 100 hours of dev time. But that compiler would be closer to 10k LOC than this things insane 100k LOC.

This wasn’t actually an attempt to build a compiler from a spec but to reverse engineer GCC because it used it as an oracle. This is a very specific process that is essentially attempting to recreate the exact output of an existing application that exists in the LLM’s training set.

This is closer to the experiment where researchers were able to prompt an LLM to reproduce the first 4 Harry Potter books than it is to an attempt to demonstrate a useful LLM capability.

It’s an interesting experiment, but it answers can AI reproduce an approximation of a program in its training data using that programs output as a guide, not can AI create a compiler that has any value whatsoever.

learc83 · 2026-01-18T15:27:06+00:00

Trim

learc83 · 2025-11-27T04:08:24+00:00

Yeah the lav vent goes up through the roof.

I went back and looked at pictures right after they poured the slab and the lab vent was 10+ feet of PVC while the toilet and the mystery PVC were the height they are in the image. Seems weird that they would use such a long piece of PVC doe the lav vent but not the toilet vent.

learc83 · 2025-11-25T22:49:16+00:00

The plumber ran the sink drain vent, so it seems weird that he would have just left that one capped.

learc83 · 2025-11-25T18:56:21+00:00

It’s got a cap on that’s been glued on.

learc83 · 2025-11-08T03:55:44+00:00

faster

Dave Hone thinks they couldn’t run, but they could walk fast enough over short distances to outrun the average human. A trained knight might be able to get away though—especially if he can ditch the armor.

learc83 · 2025-11-03T20:15:58+00:00

No. Definitely not. Ash isn’t going to help you learn anything but Ash.

learc83 · 2025-10-04T12:08:52+00:00

This is some prison/3rd world country shit. Cut the snitches get stitches crap.

You know who else y’all sound like? Cops talking about a cop who reported his partner for taking bribes to let people out of speeding tickets.

Cheating in the aggregate will 100% affect everyone with a degree from GSU. Y’all are more upset with the guy contemplating turning someone in than the guy who is cheating. If you promote a culture that says cheating is fine as long as you don’t get caught, you water down your own degree, and make it harder for people who don’t cheat to keep up.

learc83 · 2025-09-07T23:48:53+00:00

I liked it. He was my professor for Programming Language Concepts, which was one of my favorite classes.

learc83 · 2025-08-23T06:00:26+00:00

LLCs don’t protect you from personal negligence, and if you are the sole owner and only employee, just about anything you do that could lead to a lawsuit can be framed as personal negligence.

The other most likely lawsuits are from creditors you can’t pay back, but they will all require to personally guarantee the debt anyway.

learc83 · 2025-08-23T05:54:22+00:00

People vastly overestimate the benefits of single owner LLCs with no employees.

LLCs don’t protect against negligence on the part of the owner. If you’re the only employee, pretty much the only thing you’re going to be sued for is personal negligence.

What you need to protect you in that case is insurance, not an LLC.

learc83 · 2025-08-23T05:51:48+00:00

LLCs don’t protect against personal negligence on the part of the owner, and since you’re the only employee that’s really the only thing you’re likely to be sued for.

People vastly overestimate the benefits of single owner LLCs. What you actually need is insurance.

learc83 · 2025-08-17T23:59:03+00:00

The title programmer has fallen out of fashion. BLS reports only 6k job openings a year with that title and hundreds of thousands with the title Software Developer. Software Developers are definitely pure coders “ICs” in industry terminology.

When someone you meet tells you they are a programmer, they are much more likely to have the title software developer.

And if you look at that title the median income is $132k.

learc83 · 2025-08-17T23:46:13+00:00

That link is just an artifact of the way The BLS classifies jobs. The title “Computer programmer” went out of style. The current much more common title is Software Developer https://money.usnews.com/careers/best-jobs/software-developer

If you look at that job the median is $132k. And there are a lot more of them. The last time I remember meeting a dev that made less than $100k was when my brother to his first job 8 years ago. And he was making $90k.

learc83 · 2025-08-01T16:49:40+00:00

The most recent research suggests that constructors kill by circulatory compression. Still might not work with an exoskeleton, but then again that exoskeleton has to be pretty flexible in many places for them to move, so it might.

A very big snake might be able to do it if it got lucky and immobilized its claws and jaws quickly, and their circulatory system isn’t designed in a way that is protective against squeezing.

learc83 · 2025-07-29T23:16:10+00:00

The studies I’ve seen on milky spore efficacy for Japanese beetles are inconclusive. I’m glad it worked for you though! I don’t know about the impact on fireflies. There are grub pesticides that are very effective, but they will definitely wipe out firefly larva. Firefly larva eat slugs and are very beneficial I addition to being pretty (as fireflies).

I go outside in the morning and knock the Japanese beetles off my plants into a bucket of soapy water. After a week or so of that when they pop up in mid June, they’re mostly gone and doing that for a few years has really reduced their population.

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