Hacker News Reader

greesilon East Germany balloon escape

It's like, a metaphor man. A work of fiction. Not to be taken literally, yet conveys themes and ideas which can become a short hand for conveying these ideas. Tons of folks read Atlas Shrugged and thought "hey this is how the world actually is" too. Or worse, The Fountainhead. Shudder.

greesilon Finland detains ship and its crew after critical undersea cable damaged

Mine the Gulf of Finland, problem solved. This may create other problems but hey Finland is part of NATO now.

greesilon Geology of the Gulf of the Farallones National Marine Sanctuary

That atomic test is the reason Hunters Point is radioactive. If they were just going to sink the boats why did the spray them off first? Ugh. I wish there was accountability but all involved are long dead now.

greesilon Geology of the Gulf of the Farallones National Marine Sanctuary

greesilon As AI gobbles up chips, prices for devices may rise

Diabolical

greesilon As AI gobbles up chips, prices for devices may rise

Apparently Google fucked up

https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.indiatoday.in/amp/technolog...

greesilon C++ says “We have try... finally at home”

Who needs finally when we have goto?

greesilon We pwned X, Vercel, Cursor, and Discord through a supply-chain attack

Everything is Swiss cheese. Let's just go back to paper and pen and one time pads.

greesilon Rust in the kernel is no longer experimental

Shitloads of already existing libraries. For example I'm not going to start using it for Arduino-y things until all the peripherals I want have drivers written in Rust.

greesilon The Reverse Centaur's Guide to Criticizing AI

This is another key to understanding – and thus deflating – the AI bubble. The AI can't do your job, but an AI salesman can convince your boss to fire you and replace you with an AI that can't do your job

you need to understand and stress how the products of the AI will be substandard

Delightful insight given the present state of this technology.

I'd be curious to hear his take on driverless cars though. It's literally going to replace jobs, seems competent enough at what it does.

greesilon Meshtastic

First I've heard of this. My initial reaction is why oh god why this name. I liked Anathem, but seriously you're not going to using this as the Internet 3000 years from now.

Meshtastic at first glance seems silly. No routing, one spammer could mess up the whole thing. Hopefully this is better.

greesilon Ford can't find mechanics for $120K: It takes math to learn a trade

I mean that's what a reasonable person might write but that's not what the parent comment actually wrote.

greesilon Ford can't find mechanics for $120K: It takes math to learn a trade

Does going to college and learning say, compilers or differential equations not have value? Your employer won't teach you. Please don't tell me the heat equation is fake.

greesilon Bitcoin's big secret: How cryptocurrency became law enforcement's secret weapon

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

Ethereum has entered the chat

greesilon Waymo robotaxis are now giving rides on freeways in LA, SF and Phoenix

I think it made a calculation that it could do it, and did it. I think it was absolutely correct with respect to the physics and timing. What was not factored in to it was how surprising it would be to other drivers, and what would happen if a pedestrian or cyclist or some other surprise showed up, and it would just have no margin whatsoever so it would be straight to the trolley problem.

greesilon Waymo robotaxis are now giving rides on freeways in LA, SF and Phoenix

I have seen a Waymo do a very stupid thing where it darted across a busy street, and it left very little margin of error for the oncoming traffic, which happened to be a loaded dump truck that could not have stopped. The dump truck driver was clearly surprised. It was a move that I never would have made as a driver. Did they dial the aggression up? I'm sure they're safer than humans in aggregate as there are some dumb humans out there but it's not infallible.

greesilon I Am Mark Zuckerberg

John Jacob Jingleheimer cfeb6ddc-43a5-4ba9-8a28-b71d93407c78, that's my name too. Whenever I go out, the people always shout, cfeb6ddc-43a5-4ba9-8a28-b71d93407c78

greesilon I Am Mark Zuckerberg

That would make parties a bit awkward, but it would avoid collisions.

greesilon The Basic Laws of Human Stupidity (1987) [pdf]

It's not?

greesilon The Basic Laws of Human Stupidity (1987) [pdf]

There are four kinds of people, those that put things into categories, and those that like matrices.

There's at least two meanings for stupid. One is someone who is not intelligent, and it's just kind of an intrinsic thing. The other is someone who does something stupid, irrespective of their intelligence. This is a conditional attribute that depends on available information / motivation / laziness.

Point being a 2x2 matrix is just an oversimplification of real life and also wtf are the axes here???

greesilon Border Patrol agent testifies sandwich thrown at him "exploded all over,"

This trial puts them in quite a pickle.

greesilon NASA chief suggests SpaceX may be booted from moon mission

No of course not. Helium 3 is a joke. I mean, it'd be nice not to make nuclear waste of the reactor walls. But maybe not billion dollar nice.

greesilon Our LLM-controlled office robot can't pass butter

No you're now a technology manager. Managing means pep talks, sometimes.

greesilon NASA chief suggests SpaceX may be booted from moon mission

Boots on the moon! Maybe we will want that helium 3 since it looks like fusion has a shot.

greesilon Diamond Thermal Conductivity: A New Era in Chip Cooling

Fun fact, diamond has 4x the thermal conductivity of copper.

greesilon The macOS LC_COLLATE hunt: Or why does sort order differently on macOS and Linux (2020)

It's not a stable sort?

greesilon Nightmare Fuel: Skibidi Toilet and the Monstrous Digital

Marketing dollars were focused in other cultural areas at the time.

greesilon Nightmare Fuel: Skibidi Toilet and the Monstrous Digital

It makes as much sense as All Your Base, no one predicted a non-narrative future based on that.

greesilon Everything you need to know about California’s SB 79

literally any attention on this problem would be a tremendous improvement.

greesilon Everything you need to know about California’s SB 79

I bought some furniture from a guy in Ben Lomond and he told me that after the CZU fires, permitting was the bottleneck for most folks, to the point that even four years after the fires some people still were waiting. It's insane. IMO the bottleneck here is likely staffing. If someone wanted to streamline this they'd actually allocate some emergency funds statewide for this.