HNHacker News
TopNewBestAskShowJobs

InfinityByTen

158 karma · joined July 5, 2019

submissionscomments
InfinityByTen··on Three new discoveries in mathematics, computer science, and physics
It's fascinating how we start bringing in printing press, saddle makers and weavers into these discussions.

But since you bring that up, to recap, the then colonial powers, systemically invalidated the hand weavers of India (where I happen to be from) with the industrial revolution. What followed was famine, mass deaths and cultural collapse. So yes, I truly realize the catastrophe what a group of resource controlling groups can cause on the ones who don't have the chance to have say in how tech moves forward.

Also saddle makers and weavers weren't like a sizable part of world economy. The effects were "far away from home". The "inevitable" is people in tech, all sorts of knowledge workers and possibly even manual labour.

Jobs being invalidated has been happening for a long while. This is not that discussion.

InfinityByTen··on Three new discoveries in mathematics, computer science, and physics
What assumption do you think I make? I'm curious.

I just find it uncertain what lies ahead. I just don't see the sustainability in this. I have degrees in Mechanical Engineering, Applied Mathematics and Scientific Computing. If the "inevitable" is that I do manual labour till we can augment the robots to do that as well, I don't see how me or millions others similar to me have any agency.

Right now, a bunch of stuff is blurted out every month or quarter and people in notable positions are given a chance to "tidy it up". Let's assume that you have even the open weight models at your disposal, the hardware to run any of this in the kind of scale needed, requires capital of Governmental level funding.

Where I see this heading is that there'd be a divide of who controls the resources to produce and who gets delegated to do the menial work. If that's what you mean by my tenous assumption, please do share what you see differently.

InfinityByTen··on Three new discoveries in mathematics, computer science, and physics
The hubris in the framing is astonishing, amusing and sad all at the same time. Many say, that's what HN attracts. Anyone who talks about inevitability except of death in these times is just someone who considers they'd be in the "have" rather the "have not" category.

I still can't see what this means for human understanding and how open would this knowledge be. Who'd ultimately get access to this stuff going forward and what kind of power games would ensue hereon.

InfinityByTen··on An ad-free Android TV
I needed a good screen, but I hate google. So I've just turn off internet and use my PC as the source. Thankfully, I don't nitpick on browser vs native app quality (and thank god for Kodi), else I'd be fuming and cussing at Google everyday. Or doing exactly this.
InfinityByTen··on “Math 2.0” will need to value mathematical progress more holistically
To have someone stop you in your tracks and ask you to "define" frontier of humanity.

In case you missed, Mathematics isn't about numbers and equations.

InfinityByTen··on “Math 2.0” will need to value mathematical progress more holistically
No, you're right. I clearly missed reading the room :D But I'm glad how Terence Tao sees it. I was relying him to do that for the NS results as well.

I didn't follow through to the PhD, but I spent few years building up to understanding of Fluid Dynamics and Functional Analysis to come close to NS. It's intriguing that it's "solved", but what interests me is then "what do we learn from it" and what lies beyond in non-linearity.

In the 10 years I've spent away from academia, I still cherish what Math taught me best: looking at equivalences and I still feel the kick that I surely wouldn't want an Agent to do on my behalf. NS was never the point. And who can't see that I can only feel that they missed out.

InfinityByTen··on “Math 2.0” will need to value mathematical progress more holistically
Maybe they should, you know. Maybe OpenAI is exactly working towards so that we need to do that :)

It's fascinating how people like to push any statement to its limits, because it circles around to absurdity and they believe they've made a point. Moderation seems to be chasing you, but you clearly are faster!

InfinityByTen··on “Math 2.0” will need to value mathematical progress more holistically
When you mechanise, you take the "meaning" out of the effort and that, in of itself, is death of human pursuit of the venture.

The industrial revolution did that to battles and wars and it inspired Tolkein's lores to a considerable degree. He loathed what mechanisation had done.

I feel something similar is happening to Mathematics. I shudder to think what would come of other human pursuit this mechanisation targets next.

InfinityByTen··on How Delhi cut electricity loss from 50 to 5 percent
Oh boy, those Honda maniacs would fire up the entire market area. I can still smell the diesel as I type this.
InfinityByTen··on Ask HN: Who is using MCP in production?
I'm really curious how you're dealing with lazy loading. Is the MCP then more like a tool-helper instead of the tools themselves?

I was trying to find out if the MCP has some sort of lazy loading feature/primitive in the works, but there seem to be a lot of disagreements about it.

Intuitively, lazy loading seems to be somewhere between a CLI and vanilla MCP. In the end, it sounds very similar to tiered/ progressive loading similar to images on low bandwidth connections.

InfinityByTen··on What happens if an entire class of workers loses faith in their careers
I went through the whole article, agreeing to most of it and I was baffled by how skeptical people were in the comments here, with remarks of "follow the money". I didn't read all of it in one shot, but in breaks over the course of 2 days and when I finally got to the last paragraph I understood what people in the comments were on about.

I grew up in a culture where hustle and work was the way out of a terrible life. I've spent several years unlearning that work is not everything while living in Europe. But then, work is not everything and not all that important because some AI agents can do all* of it...

Nice try, but work is still a lot of what I derive meaning from and taking meaning from a person might not have a positive outcome: for the person and for the society.

InfinityByTen··on Why skilled workers come to Germany and then leave again
Complaining about the bureaucracy is sure everyone's favourite trauma bonding exercise, but I never hear about the solution to it. It's in the political agenda, but the solution is almost always, let's form a committee to decide the agenda of the report about it that would be 1500 pages long and be done in 72 weeks from the day of conclusion of committee's proposal. I feel the issue is the mentality towards problem solving.

Taxes are fine till Herr Merz isn't busy proposing a rug-pull on half of the things you learnt were supported here. Many of our "expat" friends faced this first hand when they lost their Kindergeld unplanned. There was a sudden hue and cry about dependents' insurance being scrapped, not sure of what's latest on it. And the English speaking, tech and finance working expats are not in poorer regions.

I don't know all Germans and maybe it is my circle, but in general I felt if I didn't mirror their hobbies, opinions, and preferences, I wasn't going to have a chance to be on the same table as them or have a heart to heart conversation with them. It's almost like it's too inefficient use of their social time and I'm pretty sure I ain't alone.

InfinityByTen··on Why skilled workers come to Germany and then leave again
It's interesting how quickly any discussion about immigrant/expat life in Germany becomes about language. That has to account for something.

After my tenure of 11 years in the country, my impression is that there is a deeper sense of "us" v/s "them"; the language is the most PC way to express it.

If you're in the category of "us" you don't complain about the taxes or things being closed on Sundays, because you're supposed to "understand" that there's a welfare state (which has been a myth for a while now and cracks are showing up since covid). If you're in the "us", you don't claim bureaucracy is treacherous, because the language should have equipped you to fight it. You might be in the "us", if you believe with every bit of your being that rules and regulations is the best way to ensure everyone behaves properly and everything works efficiently.

If you dare challenge (m)any of these and you don't speak German good enough, it's the language. If you speak the language, then you're not "integrated". Maybe that's immigration everywhere, but I feel in Germany, there is a rather narrow band you get to be in "acceptably".

InfinityByTen··on Software is made between commits
Oh, I *love* those kind of people who take the time to _simplify_ and draw meaningful insights from their first draft. They take the time to ensure that they are not just putting out thoughts for the heck of it. They have gone through a learning journey and they are letting you step on it. They might even make the effort to actually articulate their intuition: "it seemed like a good idea to toy with this, because such and such usually have some connection".

Maybe this is the mathematician's lament rejigged. And I have held it for probably 20 years of my life. I try to do things differently when I write, but I have to say there are enough people who find it sub-standard. It's too imprecise or ambiguous or not clear enough for their taste. They aren't wrong. But I'm not done learning and I start building my thoughts as I go along.

InfinityByTen··on Software is made between commits
I shared my thoughts in the context of someone saying that one should be able to share your line of thinking when asked to. Whether "when one asked to" applies to keystroke by keystroke blockhained versioning isn't my point of discussion.

I get it, that the overall discussion is about DeltaDB. I'd say interesting concept to toy with. I'd pay more attention to "micro commits" as the idea more than the keylogger.

InfinityByTen··on Software is made between commits
One of my professors in undergrad said: the most dangerous mathematicians are the ones that begin the proof with "Consider a case ...". He said that these mathematicians are the ones who don't share anything about how they got the case and they end up projecting this sort of "magician aura". I don't know how accurate that assessment it, but I think it captures something that never sat well with me.

In my life, I've never liked people who deliberately polish up their articulation to the level that it obfuscates how they arrived at that understanding (whether it's academics or engineers). They might not do it for attention and they might not be doing it knowingly. IMO, they are taking away the opportunity of learning from the people they are talking to. For me the conversation is one sided. I'm there to listen, but rarely can I ask questions, give feedback or grow from where they have possibly reached.

InfinityByTen··on Today I've made the difficult decision to reduce the size of Coinbase by ~14%
I'm still baffled how crypto is still around.

How long would it be that people realise that they are playing "passing the parcel" with a ticking explosive?

InfinityByTen··on Async Rust never left the MVP state
I like this article already because it took me to the goals of Rust for 2026. We use the language in our team, but we haven't needed to go very deep to do the stuff we need. Yet, I really enjoy witnessing the development of a language from ground up with so much community feedback.

I somehow miss noticing that in C++ and I have no idea how it is working in other domains.

My only gripe is that a lot of it is feeling a bit kick-starter-y, with each of the goals needing specific funding. Is that the best model we've found so far?

InfinityByTen··on Removable batteries in smartphones will be mandatory in the EU starting in 2027
I'm not sure I have a way to fact-check this, but the link claims

> That is significantly more than many batteries on the market today can achieve (often around 500–800 cycles).

InfinityByTen··on Brave Origin
I've never understood how their Brave Credits were supposed to work, but I liked the idea that someone wanted to try out a different model to ads how we know them for about a century.

Ads made magazines, newspaper, news, radio, tv and now internet terrible to be with and I'm honestly curious what can be done to improve the situation.

InfinityByTen··on DaVinci Resolve – Photo
I'll be honest that it was *long ago* that I made that attempt. Plus with the new AI denoise, it seemed even harder to move away from it.

But, if there's a battle-tested, mature UI, I'm up for giving it a shot. I have done no video editing, so no clue how my experience with DaVinci Resolve is going to go. I might give Darktable another go while I'm at it. Just tend to have a bad gut feeling about it.

Some people love tinkering. I do that as my job, so I don't often have the urge to do it when I just want to get shit done.

InfinityByTen··on DaVinci Resolve – Photo
I'm so eager to try this out today after work. I heard a lot of things about Darktable, but then it didn't really feel like the alternative to Lightroom I'd hope for.
InfinityByTen··on DaVinci Resolve – Photo
I'm in a similar camp where I'm stucking to windows for that one software: lightroom classic (or CC as they call it). I'm happy to pay for a legitimate replacement that lets me go Linux native on a laptop. I'm fine even paying for the Adobe Cancellation tax from the money I save not buying Windows.

On that note, is this supported on Linux?

InfinityByTen··on The economics of software teams: Why most engineering orgs are flying blind
When I see someone just throwing a lot of numbers and graphs at me, I see that there are in to win an argument, and not propose an idea.

Of late, I've come across a lot of ideas from Rory Sutherland and my conclusion from listening to his ideas is that there are some people, who're obsessed with numbers, because to them it's a way to find certainty and win arguments. He calls them "Finance People" (him being a Marketing one). Here's an example

"Finance people don’t really want to make the company money over time. They just thrive on certainty and predictability. They try to make the world resemble their fantasy of perfect certainty, perfect quantification, perfect measurement.

Here’s the problem. A cost is really quantifiable and really visible. And if you cut a cost, it delivers predictable gains almost instantaneously."

> Choosing to spend three weeks on a feature that serves 2% of users is a €60,000 decision.

I'd really want to hire the Oracle of a PM/ Analyst that can give me that 2% accurately even 75% of the time, and promise nothing non-linear can come from an exercise.

InfinityByTen··on A Faster Alternative to Jq
You don't know something is slow until you encounter a use case where the speed becomes noticeable. Then you see the slowness across the board. If you can notice that a command hasn't completed and you are able to fully process a thought about it, it's slow(er than your mind, ergo slow!).

Usually, a perceptive user/technical mind is able to tweak their usage of the tools around their limitations, but if you can find a tool that doesn't have those limitations, it feels far more superior.

The only place where ripgrep hasn't seeped into my workflow for example, is after the pipe and that's just out of (bad?) habit. So much so, sometimes I'll do this foolishly rg "<term>" | grep <second filter>; then proceed to do a metaphoric facepalm on my mind. Let's see if jg can make me go jg <term> | jq <transformation> :)

InfinityByTen··on Sony-Honda JV Scraps Afeela EV Plans
I was personally hoping the The JV would be spared Honda's strategy shift, but apparently not.
InfinityByTen··on White-collar AI apocalypse narrative is just another bullshit
Spot on! I hate being sucked into an "accountability sink", where delay/bad treatment/ tangential answers are ok (somehow acceptable) and justified because it's not personal, "it's just the process".
InfinityByTen··on Bet on German Train Delays
I was considering trains for a Berlin-Frankfurt trip, and after looking at the performance of the preferred train, I'm not sure I want to still go that way: 25% cancellations :/
InfinityByTen··on Bet on German Train Delays
You surely haven't read the whole of it. There's more!

> Sinderella She has to leave the ball by midnight — but her last train was cancelled. Now she roams the platform in glass slippers, waiting for a replacement bus.

InfinityByTen··on Tech companies shouldn't be bullied into doing surveillance
This is an underrated observation. The companies built surveillance as a competitive advantage. The "system" rewards bolstering this advantage.
Page 1 of 4Next →