Hacker News Reader

briansmon Fingers wrinkle the same way every time they’re in the water too long

Maybe my memory is failing me but I could swear that somebody has already won an Ig Nobel prize for similar research to this?

briansmon Sycophancy in GPT-4o

Douglas Adams predicted this in 1990:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cyAQgK7BkA8&t=222s

briansmon Show HN: New world record – verified Goldbach Conjecture up to 4*10^18+7*10^13

Interesting that the verified 4-quintillion range is well within 64-bit integer math range (18 quintillion or 9 quintillion signed), no need to go beyond regular 64-bit computing any time soon.

briansmon Australian man survives 100 days with artificial heart

I would assume the kind of people who need a replacement heart are already on beta-blocker drugs, which clamp the peak heart-rate down significantly, so their body would already be used to a very limited heart-rate range.

briansmon Younger cannabis users have reduced brain function, finds largest study yet

And in another drug-parable 'The Matrix', Cypher is actually the hero, advocating the acceptance of the blue-pill retreat into synthetic chemical fantasy as opposed to the harsh depressing truth of reality.

His failure ultimately leads to 'system failure' and the deaths of billions of adults unable to mentally deal with their expulsion from the dream-world.

briansmon Assisted dying now accounts for one in 20 Canada deaths

'pain-free' and 'organized' perhaps, but don't fool yourself, it's never 'dignified'.

Makes me think of this:

https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0606035/quotes/?ref_=tt_dyk_qu

briansmon MIT Aluminum Bicycle Project 1974 (2016)

In evolutionary terms, being taller, fatter and more muscular is advantageous, but in practical terms it's just a lot of extra weight to drag around for a lifetime, along with all the extra calories of energy needed to do so.

briansmon MIT Aluminum Bicycle Project 1974 (2016)

I find the obsession minimizing bicycle weight funny. It's not the bicycle weight that matters, it's the combined weight of bicycle and rider that counts.

Rider weight massively outweighs the relevance of bike frame material, especially in the West where obesity epidemic has biased BMI upwards over the last half century.

briansmon Netflix buffering issues: Boxing fans complain about Jake Paul vs. Mike Tyson

... or a world where grown adults pay millions of dollars to watch grown adults fighting like school children.

In fact, what am I even doing in this thread? - close-tab.

briansmon Netflix buffering issues: Boxing fans complain about Jake Paul vs. Mike Tyson

White-Knighting for 'fucking morons' is not a good look though. You'll end up in a world where packets of peanuts have a label on saying 'may contain nuts'.

briansmon Hertz-dev, the first open-source base model for conversational audio

The codec parameters remind me of the ~300bps NRV military speech codec from 2010. It also uses 120ms (8hz) frames, vbr encoded using 16KHz audio (closed source though).

https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/5680311

briansmon US probes Tesla's Full Self-Driving software after fatal crash

I think you missed the 'EV' part of the post.

briansmon Depth Pro: Sharp monocular metric depth in less than a second

Just for reference, the model is ~2GB.

briansmon NASA spacecraft to probe possibility of life in Europa's salty ocean

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radioisotope_heater_unit

briansmon Data center emissions probably 662% higher than big tech claims

Acceptance is the road to inner peace. Accepting the mortality of the species is no different to accepting personal mortality - you know you're going to be dead before the end of the century, right? You enjoy the time you have, as we all collectively should. To expect even one person, ever mind a whole country to give up living like Royalty is unreasonable. (despite its inevitability). Big fast cars, abundance of food, instant satiation, nobody's going to give that up voluntarily.

Asking for taxes to go up is fine, but nobody wants to pay more taxes.

briansmon Data center emissions probably 662% higher than big tech claims

Even simpler answer - acceptance of humanity's addiction to fossil energy and the inevitable outcome. We started an anthropic fire a million years ago and it's only going to be extinguished when we are.

briansmon Learning to Reason with LLMs

Imagine if this tech was available in the middle ages and it was asked to 'solve' alchemy or perpetual motion, and responded that it was an impossible problem... people would (irrationally from our perspective) go Luddite on it I suspect. Now apply to the 'fusion power' problem.

briansmon Ask HN: What are you working on (August 2024)?

(if they're using PTC themistors between the parallel cells to prevent over-current, it's all good though I suppose)

briansmon Ask HN: What are you working on (August 2024)?

Prevention is better than cure though. plus you've got to consider cell gassing/venting/explosion risk/toxic fumes as well as fire prevention.

If they were doing per-cell protection, fair enough (cheap 18650's don't have cell protection usually), but I think they are still connecting 4 cells in parallel, with only serial-bank MOSFET's like in usual sealed packs.

briansmon Ask HN: What are you working on (August 2024)?

I thought the reason the packs are sealed is to stop amateurs from swapping in cells of differing voltages, which short each other out and cause sparking/fire hazards. There's a reason li-ion battery charging is current-limited, they have no internal resistance.

briansmon Ask HN: What are you working on (August 2024)?

God no, the internet SNR is low enough as it is without all my failed experiments, lol.

briansmon Ask HN: What are you working on (August 2024)?

Experiments with speech compression/processing. The modern approach to this (and pretty much everything else) is to transform the input data into a high-dimensional space, throw it into a neural net and cross your fingers. (the 'Whisper' STT runs in 512-dimensional space!). It works, but it's hardly elegant or compute-efficient. There's a certain art in doing things the 'old way', even if a million years of evolution decided neural-nets were the one true path.

briansmon 40 out of 60 German climate greening endavours fraudulent

and their capita is 4x that of the US.

briansmon How do our brains adapt to control an extra body part?

I'm wondering if you could get so used to it over time you would develop a 'ghost limb' syndrome, i.e. some discomfort/itching/confusion when the appendage is taken off.

briansmon AI headphones let wearer listen to a single person in a crowd by looking at them

Bit annoying that they added ambient music over the demo youtube video, spoiling the one thing you want to demonstrate.

briansmon City in a Bottle – A 256 Byte Raycasting System

'Spongy' does something similar in 128 bytes, half the size.

https://www.pouet.net/prod.php?which=53871

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=36BPql6Nl_U

The name comes from the 'Menger Sponge' fractal it's based on:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Menger_sponge

briansmon TSAC: Low Bitrate Audio Compression

Addendum, playing with it at the 'low quality' end, it generates recognizable speech even down to 200bps and in some cases 100bps. crazy.

briansmon TSAC: Low Bitrate Audio Compression

Reminds me of the old IBM 'RECOVC' codec from around 2000 where they compressed Mel-bank speech.

https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/7075313

All the patents around that are long-dead so good time to do an updated version I guess.

If you wanted to do something similar but with way lower bitrates (e.g. 300bps), then look at the NRV codec:

https://www.researchgate.net/publication/224209493_300_bps_n...

briansmon BBC BASIC raytracer in 432 characters

https://www.pouet.net/prod.php?which=53871

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=36BPql6Nl_U

Incredible raytraced demo in 128 bytes. (An underwater journey through a Menger-sponge fractal)

briansmon Nestflix

Lots of Simpsons stuff, but needs 'Worker and Parasite'.