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mattmcal

85 karma · joined April 7, 2022

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mattmcal··on Moving our warehouse off DuckDB
I actually love this design but I nevertheless agree it's atrocious.
mattmcal··on Show HN: I Turned DOOM into a Transformer
I think it might be more interesting to target Boom/Boom-compatible, if possible, rather than ZDoom. ZDoom already has so many advanced features, you could implement the entire thing trivially in ACS. At least a table of required engine features would be nice to see; some are likely already supported in other source ports.
mattmcal··on Simons Foundation launches $15M effort to help mathematicians navigate AI era
> It's not even clear if the human race can survive until then nor is it justified to spend that resource researching that far ahead instead of just when we need it.

"Climate change is going to kill everyone in 50 years so we'd better work fast if we want to burn all this coal by then"

mattmcal··on Nvidia wants to put a watchdog chip next to every AI agent
This is like using "protect the children" as an argument for dragnet surveillance.
mattmcal··on Classified Estimates Show the NSA Is Paying Billions to Test AI Models
I ask myself this a lot. It took decades of sustained malfeasance, real-world case studies, and lobbying for the EPA and OSHA to be established, largely against the wishes of the businesses they regulate. Today, it is primarily the AI businesses themselves asking for regulation on the basis of as-of-yet largely hypothetical risks, rather than ordinary citizens seeking protection from tangible negligence---and the government is eager to accommodate. I think few, if any, authentic anti-AI activists have a taxpayer-funded "safety testing" regime as their end goal.
mattmcal··on Women Who Sold Books Door to Door
It sounds like a believable line from a spouse abuser, actually. Surely even male door-to-door sellers put up with their share of rank abuse, in any era; it would only have been worse for a woman.
mattmcal··on What California is learning from solar panels built over irrigation canals
I'm really confused by this whole thread. How is this project fundamentally different from the solar shades used in parking lots, or even rooftop solar? You have existing land that's already productive, and you're making it more productive by installing solar panels. Building a new solar plant on new land is a completely orthogonal project.
mattmcal··on A succession crisis that tore England apart (2023)
Haven't seen any sources citing that as a rationale.
mattmcal··on A succession crisis that tore England apart (2023)
> [H]ad Henry left the crown to a 33-year-old, intelligent, well-educated, politically experienced son, such a situation would not have arisen.

> However, even such a decisive military victory was not enough to overturn a genuinely deep-seated prejudice against a female monarch.

Clearly prejudice, and lack of precedent, materially hampered Matilda's attempt at the throne, but speculative and reductive statements like these carry a whiff of dubious history. It gives the impression that Matilda's failed succession hinged uniquely on her gender, when her own father Henry I only gained power after a long and violent succession struggle involving both of his siblings. I assume the author's book goes into much greater detail on the many reasons Matilda's succession never achieved critical mass in England, but I think this short an article is probably worse for giving so much emphasis to this particular detail.

mattmcal··on Stabilizing Rust's Never Type
> (Note: Rust also uses exclamation marks to indicate calls to macros. The way the syntax is constructed, a place where it is valid to use the never type is not a valid place to put a macro invocation and vice versa.

Yeah this statement is incorrect as well. Weird to have these minor technical inaccuracies in a relatively detailed article.

mattmcal··on I fixed a tractor using John Deere's self-repair service. Farmers aren't sold
> the least efficient healthcare system in the world

> the more free you make those markets, the better they'll get.

How can you concede the first point and argue the second in the same breath? Are you about to tell me European healthcare is cheaper because its some bastiom of deregulation?

mattmcal··on DeepSeek launching v4.1 flash cheaper and more capable than v4 pro
OpenCode but I variously use DeepSeek API/OpenRouter/Vercel AI gateway. I'm sure it's the combo of model + inference provider that is the issue and not the model alone. DeepSeek API also has far better inference speed and reliability than the cheapest providers. That said I never seem to have these issues when using GLM 5.3 flash served by OpenRouter/Vercel.
mattmcal··on Coyote v. Acme (1990)
If you buy tickets online from AMC, they now show a disclaimer that tells you the movie starts around 25 minutes after the listed show time, though usually it starts 30+ minutes after.
mattmcal··on DeepSeek launching v4.1 flash cheaper and more capable than v4 pro
It's not just web chat, V4 Flash 7/31 suffers from a lot of pathological behavior in coding harnesses as well, e.g. infinite loops, hallucinations, premature termination, and invalid tool calls.
mattmcal··on Caltech Mathathon – first hackathon ever devoted to research level mathematics
If you're interested in the topic enough to comment on it, you'll probably find it worthwhile reading a mathematician's perspective. Here's the prolific Terry Tao: https://mathstodon.xyz/@tao/117219548485446992
mattmcal··on Caltech Mathathon – first hackathon ever devoted to research level mathematics
Well, for one, most math proofs don't have any practical applications, so a proof that no one reads is basically a digital paperweight. You might as well suggest AI write novels for other AI to read.
mattmcal··on GPT-6 Astra
A lot of movies gave the impression that making phone calls and balancing checkbooks would be the easiest tasks for consumer AI to solve, while math and science might require exceedingly advanced AI. Turns out to be the opposite: computers are great at math and bad at conversation.
mattmcal··on Hang on to Your Firefox
Who complains about sync thought? What tilts me is Pocket, AI features, integrated ads, and a plethora of other random acquisitions and side projects that constitute outsized expenses yet do zilch to drive adoption.

I also used to be a Thunderbird lover, but I was forced to ditch it due to crippling freezes, crashes, and slowdown when you have a lot of emails. Mozilla just feels like an awful steward of their projects at times.

EDIT: I also subscribed to Mozilla VPN for almost two years and was forced to ditch that too, due to... solvable technical issues, again. Mullvad was just a greatly superior product for the same price. I still use Firefox for all my browsing on desktop and Android at least.

mattmcal··on METR and Redwood Offer Holy %^ Postmortem of the HuggingFace Hack
As interesting as all this is, I still feel like the threat model for "unconstrained black hat AI agent cluster" is probably weaker than that of "highly infections network virus" because it is much harder for an AI agent to hide or replicate itself at this time. Maybe the day comes that it takes less than an 8x GPU node to run a state-of-the-art LLM and the risk of SkyNet increases. For now the potential for intentional cyber attacks feels like a much bigger threat than accidental hacks. (That said I have little cybersecurity background.)
mattmcal··on Creepy Crawlies
There is a section in the article answering your question if you read it.

> Suddenly, the crawlers were coming from millions of random residential or mobile IPs, all pretending to be random modern browsers. An IP like that would make 4-5 requests and then never show up in the logs again. There was no point in banning them, because by the time you figured out that they were bots, they were already done with you.

mattmcal··on AI boosted homework scores, then exam scores dropped: study
Not doubting this one bit but is there actually any research linking AI use to Alzheimer's? I think that takes long-term studies.
mattmcal··on Turns are Better than Radians (2022)
I argued this idea to a couple of my classmates when I was a physics undergrad, and they agreed. However, I later changed opinions because of what this does to the derivatives/integrals of your trig functions.

For general periodic functions, [0, 1) is a good domain. But circles and spheres are geometric objects, and radians/steradians are geometrically significant units that are well suited for general purposes.

I do remember that Doom uses an interesting alternative representation where an angle is a u16 multiple of `(2 * pi) / 65536`. Fixed point is sometimes a good choice in games and simulations due to having uniform precision.

mattmcal··on The TEMU-Fication of Software, Digital Goods and Services
I've seen many accusations and exposes of clothing brands secretly sourcing sweat shop labor, but this is the first time I've seen anyone allege that sellers are secretly hiding the fact their clothing is made in high-tech ethical factories.
mattmcal··on Orion Browser by Kagi
The particular choice of the marketing phrase "from the ground up" sort of invites this kind of commentary on HN. This is hardly the first WebKit-based browser, so any commenter specifically holding their breath for a new, independent rendering and layout engine or JS engine might feel inclined to roll their eyes and snark.
mattmcal··on The Kimi K3 Moment
I can see the economics of open vs. frontier models turning out similarly to pharmaceuticals, where generic drugs cost a fraction what the name brands do and Americans end up paying the highest prices in the world partly as a consequence of propping up drug discovery research.
mattmcal··on Kagi Small Web
DuckDuckGo allows you to blacklist websites for free
mattmcal··on Richard Feynman Side Hustles
I had to read this twice to understand it. Stated succinctly, it sounds like the company's sensor measured the rate of flow of oxygen through the sensor, which would give a reduced reading if the cross section is obstructed.

Feynman's sensor, by contrast, directly measured the concentration of oxygen in the sensor, which gives the same result every time once the sensor is at equilibrium with the environment.

mattmcal··on Ask HN: Anti-AI Open Source License?
Depending on how the courts weigh in on the role of fair use in AI training, it's possible that a "copyleft for AI" clause would end up either redundant with the existing GPL, or legally void. It would be crazy complicated to enforce if it does hold water though.
mattmcal··on Is Mozilla trying hard to kill itself?
I've been using Linux on my desktop for ten years and I definitely experience bugs and performance issues with Firefox from time to time that don't occur in Chrome. It's rare but common enough to keep Chrome around as a fallback.

A few: Developer tools are quite slow; Airline websites often break during checkout; JS games and video players sometimes stutter or use a lot of CPU

mattmcal··on How elites could shape mass preferences as AI reduces persuasion costs
You're not wrong, I edited my comment. That said, I think it is important to use clear terminology that doesn't blur the lines between spending that can theoretically be reduced, versus spending that requires an act of Congress to modify. DOGE and the executive have already flouted that line with their attempts to shutter programs and spending already approved by Congress.
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