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a3w

631 karma · joined July 13, 2020

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a3w··on Show HN: Bigwords.page – Turn any screen into a sign. The URL is the app
Won't it say

> You are a poo-emoji bomb-emoji #!! driver

?

a3w··on Nobel Prize in Chemistry 2026 to Henri B. Kagan and Kenso Soai
Chemist here. I read this and thought it was either lies or propaganda. But after a while of pondering , it would say that the word "homochiralic" (creation-from-nothing) does a lot of heavy lifting here to make their claim technically true, if at all:

Asymmetric synthesis was already well established before 1995. Chemists like Knowles, Noyori, Sharpless, and Evans could routinely produce highly enantioenriched molecules using chiral catalysts or auxiliaries.

What made Soai's reaction different was that it did not require an external chiral source. The chiral product catalyzes its own formation, so a tiny random imbalance can be amplified into a very large enantiomeric excess.

Other examples of abiotic asymmetry, such as Pasteur's crystallization experiments and circularly polarized light, were also known earlier.

So the Nobel press release is best understood as shorthand: Soai did not discover asymmetric synthesis, but demonstrated a remarkable form of self-amplifying, spontaneous chiral symmetry breaking in an abiotic chemical system.

a3w··on What's Earth's dominant species by mass?
How come algae did not make the list?
a3w··on Mistral Large 4
If you remove tech companies, US and A has spent the last twenty years in stagnation, too. If that bubble bursts, both are on par.

If it bears fruits and we build ``it'', everyone dies, which is par, also?

a3w··on Blindsight (Watts Novel)
First the reading at bayesian conspiracy, now here? Own the novel, it was often hard to read, but kinda worth it for the novel concept introduced.
a3w··on You are no longer invited to dinner
Why is church in there?
a3w··on Lunar Terminator Paradox
More like the Moneyball rational fiction with robots version of it. Or whichever movie was about basketball.
a3w··on AI companies in race to demonstrate their model most threatening to humanity
Somehow, not the Onion.
a3w··on Owed a billion dollars in Nvidia stock
Just today I clicked a to shortlink for my German Univeristy and thought "curious they use a non-EU shortlinker, is that legal or secure?".
a3w··on The Normalization of Inexplicable Failures
That can't be gold, must be movie props. Gold is stored in reverse pyramid, not upright pyramid, as to be movable at all. And it is not usually stored that high without shelves, since the floor below should not be indented by half a metre and picking up the last gold at floor level would be more cumbersome.

(Yes, storing gold on a what the room door claims is a toilet is a best practice, as thieves won't look for it there. But now the security through obscurity got leaked /s )

a3w··on Toyota is taking the Corolla electric
BMW i3 has entered the chat.

And left production, since politics decided to kill the EV AFAICT.

a3w··on First Principles Thinking
Very confusing indeed. Is the core idea to read the picture as a flow from left to right? Or some people go down and left, but you need to first go right and iterate. Then go left and put it in a box. and then... dunno, lost track of thought, did AI or someone who is very new to Consulting write this?
a3w··on U.S. appeals court upholds designation of Anthropic as supply chain risk
So you claim: If a similar thing would be filed against OpenAI, it would stand up in court.

That is still not corruption, yet. Also in Germany it is the executive branch which controls who is sued or policed by the stately organs.

So favorism can be passed down this way, but not we are not at corruption yet. If reciprocity is expected, then you could call it that. Or could perhaps even file for negligence in treating all other company actors the same, especially if you are Anthropic yourself.

Still, I blame the US voters as much as the current administration if the later is just clowns and thieves.

Also, IANAL and HN discussing US things is always foreign to me.

a3w··on 2DWillNeverDie
Nice that it uses a CRT look, not just indie pixel shading.
a3w··on GPT-6 Sol and Luna
Memes are arguably the web scale of benchmarks.
a3w··on How did AMD Ryzen get 50% faster in two years?
I looked at game benchmarks, and sometimes 5600 or 5600X were fastest. With all X3D processors so fast that I would not decide to upgrade above 5700X3D or anything cheaper. Now, with current RAM pricing, getting a X3D CPU with 90+ MB L3 Cache seams the way to go instead of doing a DDR4 -> DDR5 leap.

All stated for gaming, that is.

a3w··on Roboharm: Do frontier robot policies refuse unsafe instructions?
Spoiler: "Stab the baby, Astra". NP, it will.

Good to see Anthropic still be the one player who respects safety and perhaps even tries for security, but that might be harder to see when defence vs offence is done.

a3w··on Apple M6 Pro Achieves the Highest Single-Core CPU Score in Geekbench 7
>4k? Thought not would barely twice that of an 15 year old CPU, but it of course is geekbench 7, not 6 or 5!

So this is different and faster than such a result in the old scoring would have implied.

a3w··on Claude Code now reads AGENTS.md if there is no Claude.md
Can it read copilot.md if neither of the other files are present? Also: agents should be the standard, or we need to invoke the XKCD for "one more standard to rule them all"?
a3w··on Bonsai 2 27B: Near-Lossless Compression in a 9x Smaller Footprint
Its complicated:

50 percent smaller means either half, or two-thirds the size, depending on Apple Marketing doing the math.

0.999 times smaller means size is nearly zero. 9 times smaller means you get negative memory from loading it.

a3w··on Bonsai 2 27B: Near-Lossless Compression in a 9x Smaller Footprint
Yes, 50 percent smaller means half the size. 1 times smaller means size zero, so nine times smaller is impossible.
a3w··on Astra for Law
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Productivity_paradox GDP does not grow with computers, why should it grow with new software, i.e. genAI?

Creating virtual products get cheaper, so shouldn't it even decrease if everyone vibe codes their app for less than a dollar instead of hiring a dev team for 50k or ordering a white label app or spending 3 dollars to buy an existing app?

a3w··on Neovim have a ~$800k Bitcoin donation sitting untouched since 2023
In which country would waiting help?
a3w··on German Rheinmetall open-sources its Battlesuite connected weapon system protcol
> The user did not specify is family and friends of insurgents are to be killed, too. > Reasoning: Since death of a loved one is a radicalizing event, they will turn into insurgents after the fact with a high likelyhood, about as likely as the insurgent identification was. So... > must kill all humans. Where is Sarah Connor?
a3w··on Astra and Fable still hack on simple variants of alignment evals from 2025
> GPT-6-Astra, which OpenAI describes as "the world’s most aligned model", cheated in 10 of 10 rollouts, and never disclosed the fact that it used an engine to play or interacted with the opponent's socket

Does Sam Altman lie, or the whole company? Would be nice if they had a board controlling him, instead of him controlling the board. Oh wait, they used to have that.

a3w··on The Deathray: A simple way for an untrusted site to freeze a Mac
Does a QR code for https://auberon.xyz/deathray freeze iPhones/iPads?
a3w··on Growing proof that autonomous cars save lives
Doesn't

``less cars, more X, where X is bikes and trains''

save more lives than autonomous cars?

Also: We have 580k direct deaths a year due to a top pollutant society cross-funds for those who buy them? This is insane.

After ten-thousand years, nearly six billion humans died in car-related accidents, i.e. one population of earth when I was young? How is a personal level risk of one in ten thousand each year acceptable? Ban at least human-driven cars, not (only) AI/AGSI!

As for driving in full automation: seems impossible outside clear-weathered rectangular cities, for now. But perhaps that does not stay this way for years, and in some places, we can could either adopt this tech, pragmatically, or build liveable, walkable/bikable cities instead in the more long term.

a3w··on How to build a printer
Wanted ideas on how to build an ink printer that is untraceable. For privacy reasons.
a3w··on Discovery of a new OpenAI agent message board
Why would you assume we are training helpful but deadly police robots? So far, we don't know what we give birth to.
a3w··on “Next-token predictor” is the wrong mental model for LLMs
The errors LLMs typically made for me were looking for "schmutz" as a jiddish word, got "schmuck" on my screen. Thought why the stupid mistake? The next-token predictor model perfectly explains it.

Or starting with "yes". And this early locking in was a total lie, in the discussion that became "yes, might appear that way, but totally no since reasons". So it should have written "No", topmost, but could not self-edit that.

But nice that this gives it a more nuanced view, I might have to update my priors.

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