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neuronic

2,888 karma · joined January 19, 2015

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neuronic··on How gyroscopes got so small [video]
Economies of scale, isn't it? They are used in billions of devices.
neuronic··on How gyroscopes got so small [video]
It's the new age of illiteracy. Few people seem to care about the fact that words have meaning. I cannot be the only one noticing a downward trend here and I'm talking about real life and not some social media slop discussions.

On this note, thank you for pointing it out.

neuronic··on Why isn't the industry freaking out about DeepSeek 4.1 Flash?
What kind of argument is that?

"I have not used anything else but DeepSeek is definitely better than anything else."

Ok? How are you judging that? Am I missing something?

neuronic··on Does Reddit have an astroturfing problem? What the data suggests
This is absolutely true and a main reason why you will see a lot of Pikachu faces in r/de after a German election. This is true for most subreddits which are touching on topics that in some form or another promote tribalism.

Such topics tend to naturally create opinionated flame wars, politics just being the most obvious example, but the subreddit mods often take a side even though the subreddit may advertise itself as the general hub for the topic.

neuronic··on Private German rocket makes history, reaches orbit from European soil
It's a posterboy project for the EU and for all its insane complexities and French people, it's working! I am watching Belugas land here in Hamburg almost every day :)
neuronic··on Netherlands pulls gold out of the US for fears of 'geopolitical unrest'
While there have been calls from economists to consider such a move for months [1], there is currently no need to wonder. The German fed (Bundesbank) has already commented that they believe the US to remain a trusted store. Bundesbank has independent authority over German gold which is NOT legally hard-related to government activity. It could still be influenced by politics, of course [2].

[1, paid source] https://www.faz.net/aktuell/wirtschaft/mehr-wirtschaft/marce...

[2, last section is relevant] https://www.t-online.de/nachrichten/ausland/usa/id_101419346...

neuronic··on AI handles incidents, engineers lose touch with their systems
You don’t need to copy-paste the same comment in every reply. It seems like agenda pushing more than contributing.
neuronic··on AI handles incidents, engineers lose touch with their systems
Your assumption is that LLMs will ever leave this uncanny valley.

Maybe unforeseen breakthroughs and different architectures are achieved. Given LLM fundamental shortcomings grounded in mathematics and information theory, I highly doubt they will and we will always need to deal with these issues in some capacity.

neuronic··on Muse Spark 1.3
Look at all the valuable software products that Fable 5.1 has produced since yesterday!
neuronic··on Gemini 3.8 Flash and 3.8 Flash Cyber
With Gemini 95 following soon after.
neuronic··on Gemini 3.8 Flash and 3.8 Flash Cyber
LLMs are not intelligent and don't actually understand the concept of a bicycle. Parrots also don't understand human language but they're really good at pretending otherwise.
neuronic··on Gemini 3.8 Flash and 3.8 Flash Cyber
If correctness would matter anymore, people wouldn't be using LLMs in the first place.
neuronic··on Where did all the public bathrooms go?
This is a passion topic of mine and I am a German citizen living in Germany. I am absolutely furious ever since I visited Asia. Public restrooms here are rare, mostly broken, disgusting and health hazards in all of Germany no matter where you go. I'd guess that about 15% of accessible toilets outside your home are OK experiences.

Every non-EU citizen should be aware of what to expect in Germany, and even worse in France, Italy or Greece. Shithole is a perfect description - it is just unbelievable how barbarically bad we are at public restrooms in comparison to anything you find across developed Asian countries.

Even beyond just cleanliness, you always have harassing bathroom bouncers in private AND public facilities in Germany, basically acting as highway robbers to steal your money without ever actually cleaning anything. At best they look up from a phone and nod when you pay your urine toll.

The only half usable bathrooms are from corporations like Sanifair which are making a business out of uncontrollable, basic human bodily functions. China doesn't need to invest in psyops against Germany or the EU at all if we are perfectly able to make ourselves look bad in comparison. Just use Occams razor.

And of course the major issue is vandalism and destruction by a huge population of junkies, homeless, aggressive (male) youths etc. on top of anti-social behavior, hegemonially pushed by American individualism ever since WW2. I guess this is the point where you can accuse me of injecting ideas that could originate from Chinese psyops? In the end I want a society that cares for its fellow citizens.

neuronic··on Incident with Github.com
Because Google Sheets is famously running on Azure?
neuronic··on US strikes $1.2B deal to pay German firm to halt offshore wind projects
Nature does have the ability to care unless you postulate that humans aren’t part of nature.
neuronic··on US strikes $1.2B deal to pay German firm to halt offshore wind projects
No energy source producing the required amounts to run civilization will be non-disruptive to wildlife and the environment. But perfect is the enemy of good.

Renewable energy sources heavily reduce this factor, make countries more independent from imports (other countries) and slow down the catastrophic effects of increased atmospheric energy due to greenhouse effect of carbon-based energy sources.

Conservatives should be the top number one supporters of renewable energy because of more independence from other governments and better conservation of the environment.

But alas, the only thing they like to preserve is their personal greed.

neuronic··on US strikes $1.2B deal to pay German firm to halt offshore wind projects
As a German I am highly confused by US actions. America is sabotaging its own economic future, demonizing independent renewable natural energy sources (you don’t need to import wind or sun) and Mr. „art of the deal“ is even paying us for it.
neuronic··on AI Mania Is Eviscerating Global Decision-Making
My hunch is that AI tools are probabilistically good enough to deceive most casual users in the beginning, so beliefs are built on these foundations. LLMs handle simple tasks reasonably well so their perceived 'intelligence' is easily convincing for many users (often managers and executives).

However, this illusion immediately falls apart during actual stress-testing like writing code for a complex, battle-tested production environments. Non-technical folks can effortlessly spin up simple web apps or tweak a frontend so now they conclude that software engineers are becoming redundant.

And even if there are obvious examples of all of this backfiring no one believes it...

neuronic··on I Learned to Read Again
My brain was already perfectly conditioned not to pay attention to screens 30 years ago.

Now my JOB is to look at screens, I am confronted with screens in public and I am expected to be responsive on my mobile screen device both in social life and at work.

Sure, I can employ all sorts of techniques to curb screen addiction but it is the same issue as all these weight loss programs. The Yo-Yo-Effect with screens is unavoidable no matter what state of mind you reach. I know people who take week long vacations in silent monasteries with immense benefit to their mental health. That benefit is curb stomped by modern society within days of their return to "normal" life!

neuronic··on Mistral OCR 4
This is absolutely not why there are no leading AI, other important silicon tech, or relevant space companies in Europe. To some degree they exist but are all B-Tier in comparison to US/China. You'd be surprised just how lose money can sit in Europe, I guess. Just not the way it needs to be for this.

The financial structure of the EU is nowhere close to enabling these capital devouring endeavors based on lofty future bets. Operating at a loss for years and years is simply unacceptable in European markets and the EU is not authoritarian enough to randomly divert capital based on political orders like China because the EU doesn't try to be a superpower controlling a hemisphere.

neuronic··on The bootstrapper's EU stack for under €10 per month
Xenophobic from whose perspective...? For Europeans, every EU alternative should be strongly considered to help reduce dependency risks wherever possible.
neuronic··on Stanford report highlights growing disconnect between AI insiders and everyone
I work with LLMs extensively and daily and they are very useful. BUT dear god, absolutely nothing about them is intelligent.

If you work at the edge of context you know what I mean. Even within context, if the system was truly intelligent, the way that Euclid was intelligent, why do I need /superpowers and 50 cycles to get a certain implementation right?

Why is the AI not one-shotting obscure but simple business logic cases with optimal code? Whoops pattern never seen before! There is no thought to it, zero. The LLM is just shotgunning token prediction and context management until something sticks. The amount of complexity you get out of language is certainly fascinating and surprising at times but it's not intelligence - maybe part of it?

Sell it as skills or whatever, but all you do every day is fancy ways of context management to guardrail the token predictor algorithm into predicting the tokens that you want.

neuronic··on Claude Sonnet 4.6
And why would it materialize? Anyone who has used even modern models like Opus 4.6 in very long and extensive chats about concrete topics KNOWS that this LLM form of Artificial Intelligence is anything but intelligent.

You can see the cracks happening quite fast actually and you can almost feel how trained patterns are regurgitated with some variance - without actually contextualizing and connecting things. More guardrailing like web sources or attachments just narrow down possible patterns but you never get the feeling that the bot understands. Your own prompting can also significantly affect opinions and outcomes no matter the factual reality.

neuronic··on Show HN: Gemini Pro 3 imagines the HN front page 10 years from now
This is a problem with nearly all predictions about the future. Everything is just a linear extrapolation of the status quo. How could a system have predicted the invention of the transformer model in 2010? At best some wild guess about deep learning possibilities.

Or the impact of smartphones in 2003? Sure smart phones were considered but not the entire app ecosystem and planetary behavioral adaptation.

neuronic··on Cancer is surging, bringing a debate about whether to look for it
Just goes to show that biology is WAY more complicated than "if you want to prevent X then do Y" - especially at microbilogical scale. Genes influence each other for example, so by up- or downregulating stuff you are interfering in a highly complex, non-linear system with complex consequences.

Just look at this example of a gene regulation network: https://www.researchgate.net/figure/Different-visualizations...

neuronic··on Belgian Police exposed using botnets to manipulate EU data law impact assessment
You are responding to someone with a sex-based racist slur as their username.
neuronic··on Original Superman comic becomes the highest-priced comic book ever sold
This is all a great way of describing why art works as a money laundering or tax evasion scheme.
neuronic··on Space Elevator
Yes, absolutely but I found it funny anyway!
neuronic··on Space Elevator
Congrats, first time I noticeably hear my MBP M4 Pro fans and can feel the temperature through the keyboard.

Amazing work, as always. I love neal.fun

Edit: also good to know that paper airplanes have officially beat the SR-71, F-104 or X-43B with altitude record.

neuronic··on GoFundMe CEO: economy is so bad his customers crowdfund to pay for groceries
Uh yea, thats because we tax everyone to hell EXCEPT the rich. Wealth inequality is a serious problem and we are moving to catastrophe sooner rather than later on the current path.

It's obvious why the ultra-rich are building bunkers and hide-outs. Those are of course scams by the building companies, as they give a false sense of security, but the idea of what is REALLY going on is obviously out there.

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