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Blahah

5,713 karma · joined December 12, 2012

CTO at Upward Spiral (https://upward.earth)

Formerly: - CTO @ at LabDAO - CTO @ Resurgo Genetics - Core team at Coko Foundation - Core team at ContentMine - Mozilla Fellow for Science - PhD Student in Plant Sciences @ University of Cambridge [engineering photosynthesis] - Made http://solvers.io (now retired) with davedx (we met on HN <3) - Developer of AnkiMobile

Email: rik [at] blahah.fyi http://github.com/blahah @blahah404

submissionscomments
Blahah··on My psychophysics as a bilateral cochlear implant user
They remember the narrative of the order of events but not the subjective experience of normal hearing. Quite common for all kinds of experiences, because stories are culturally held.
Blahah··on You could have invented transformers from memory
Not sure if this was a joke or a timeline glitch, but the year was 1976 and the volume was 7 ;)

> Glanville, R. (1976). What is memory, that it can remember what it is? In R. Trappl et al. (Eds.), Recent Progress in Cybernetics & Systems Research, Volume 7 (Proceedings 3rd European Meeting on Cybernetics and Systems Research). Washington, DC: Hemisphere Press.

See https://ranulphglanville.org.za/publications/

Blahah··on The lost joy of music piracy
Soundcloud is great for this
Blahah··on Professor denounces mass AI fraud on an exam at Brown
The system design questions are (at least):

1. What is this education intended to optimise for?

2. What are the various participants (including students) optimising for?

3. What aligns 1 and 2?

Blahah··on Trains halted across Germany because of communication system problem
Not a stretch to imagine that it is though. Germany has some very effective radical vandals who make statements by interrupting infrastructure.
Blahah··on AI Engineer Claims to Have Cracked Linear A
lineara.xyz is your friend
Blahah··on Agentic Coding Is a Trap
Right. Like anywhere the conceptual problems haven't been all figured out yet, or where higher order effects happen with scale or particular shapes of data/substrate and you don't know them in advance.

Sometimes hard like interesting and you get to do really novel thinking. A load of p2p/decentralised things are hard like this.

Also sometimes hard like you get to a particular challenge and it turns out to be a notoriously unsolved mathematical thing, or you push against subtle boundaries of core libraries, runtimes, systems etc. Working with metagenome assemblies is this kind of hard.

Honestly the hard code I've done made such a difference to my brain. There's plenty of trivial stuff I'm happy to have automated, but of I can't work on the hard problems I may as well not be involved at all.

Blahah··on Show HN: Site Mogging
Nah you just know a young person or have found your way into an incel information stream. It doesn't mean you represent a large population.
Blahah··on QVAC – Modular AI Agents for Privacy, Performance and Control
QVAC is Tether’s answer to centralized AI. An entirely new paradigm where intelligence runs privately, locally, and without permission.

No clouds. No gatekeepers. Just you, your machines, and unstoppable intelligence.

Blahah··on Launch HN: Airweave (YC X25) – Let agents search any app
This is pretty cool and I could see myself recommending this to our team for some applications. Congrats on the launch!

A couple of bits of feedback:

1. Code samples on the site have broken whitespace on mobile (Android/Brave) so look a bit intense.

2. The pricing is complex to reason about - I have to consider the technical aspects and the number of users? Why don't I just get an API key?

Blahah··on Imgur pulls out of UK as data watchdog threatens fine
*past (in both cases)
Blahah··on Ask HN: What are you working on? (September 2025)
What's your website?
Blahah··on A WebGL game where you deliver messages on a tiny planet
Absolutely - I love those. I wonder if there are any other simple web games like this that run on mobile with more nuanced interplayer comms as you suggest.
Blahah··on A WebGL game where you deliver messages on a tiny planet
The game is wonderful and I'm so glad it doesn't have chat! My 9yo niece and I played it through side by side and if it had chat or consistent remote player presence that wouldn't have been appropriate.
Blahah··on LLMs are still surprisingly bad at some simple tasks
The work. It intelligently provides the labor, it doesn't replace your brain. It runs the script itself.
Blahah··on LLMs are still surprisingly bad at some simple tasks
Not really. This works great in Claude Sonnet 4.1: 'Please could you research a list of valid TLDs and a list of valid HTML5 elements, then cross reference them to produce a list of HTML5 elements which are also valid TLDs. Use search to find URLs to the lists, then use the analysis tool to write a script that downloads the lists, normalises and intersects them.'

Ask a stupid question, get a stupid answer.

Blahah··on Clear Thinking beats deep thinking in LLM models
Same again
Blahah··on Clear Thinking beats deep thinking in LLM models
Cloudflare tunnel error at the moment.
Blahah··on Betty Crocker broke recipes by shrinking boxes
What a beautiful story. This - generally, a journey through the drift of recipe fidelity over time, and specifically grounded in your story - would make a great book. Mark Kurlansly has some lovely books that weave the history of recipes with history generally. His history of Salt is truly captivating.
Blahah··on Repetitive negative thinking associated with cognitive decline in older adults
Loss, humility, service. And the most important: community.
Blahah··on Chatbox app is back on the US app store
The app doesn't label itself as GPL licensed... The terms of the installed Android app are clear that it's closed source [0].

There's a community edition that's GPL, and it does say they're 'going open source' but clearly it's not the exact same app as the official distribution:

  This is the repository for the Chatbox Community Edition, open-sourced under the GPLv3 license.
  
  Chatbox is going open-source Again!
  
  We regularly sync code from the pro repo to this repo, and vice versa.

0: https://chatboxai.app/en/terms
Blahah··on Why release notes important for your product?
The title should be "why are release notes important for your product?". The current version parses as "why leak product information".
Blahah··on Bulletproof host Stark Industries evades EU sanctions
Which word did you think was new?
Blahah··on AI Darwin Awards 2025
This doesn't have the juice of the actual Darwin awards. Show me the AI equivalent of the couple who had sex during a lightning storm and were struck - the woman died, the man's penis wss fused inside her, and he had to watch while a bear ate her face. Or the group who went dynamite ice fishing and their spaniel retrieved a lit stick of dynamite and hid under their truck.

Having bad security or engineering and losing a bit of money does not compare.

Blahah··on Deploying DeepSeek on 96 H100 GPUs
Why? Open source isn't in the original title
Blahah··on Claude for Chrome
Lots of people really prefer watching videos. I'm very grateful that tools exist for those of us who don't.
Blahah··on Show HN: I built this to talk Danish to my girlfriend – works with any language
In British english at least, 'going shopping' is a normal way to say 'getting groceries for the week'.
Blahah··on Japan's govt launches Minecraft map to educate about flood disaster prevention
I saw Minecraft being used to teach people about wildlife and landscape conservation at Mozfest in 2015 — it was utterly amazing to me to see 20 or so kids (between 6-10 years old I'd guess) just easily navigating all these conservation scenarios. Several of them actually showed the devs running the workshop how to do new things or work around problems.

I'm surprised this isn't a more popular thing now.

Blahah··on Show HN: I rewrote my Mac Electron app in Rust
Tauri is the thing being implicitly compared with electron. Well worth checking out.
Blahah··on Show HN: Agents.json – OpenAPI Specification for LLMs
Having said that... I think OpenAPI is exactly the right direction - it comes free with most ways of building an API or easily can, and once you have it interfaces are just a transform away.

And reflecting on your approach, perhaps it's quite a good way to on-board lots of organisations that might have been hesitant or left behind otherwise.

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