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raldi

25,011 karma · joined November 3, 2008

My name's Mike Schiraldi. My Gmail account is my first name followed by my last name.
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raldi··on Magnifica Humanitas (Encyclical Letter)
Priests will read it and then talk to their congregations about it on Sundays throughout the year, if not explicitly, then in how it shapes their homilies.
raldi··on Math Jokes in Alice in Wonderland
Yeah, every US sixth-grader can instantly tell you 12x12=144 but will have to puzzle out 2x13 the long way.
raldi··on Math Jokes in Alice in Wonderland
I agree. She’ll never get to 20 because kids only do the times table up to 12.
raldi··on The map that keeps Burning Man honest
Looks like something that would pop a tire if you drive over one
raldi··on The map that keeps Burning Man honest
The Org should make a deal with a manufacturer to produce some huge bulk quantity of these and just sell them pre-cut to camps.
raldi··on The map that keeps Burning Man honest
The best solution I know of is to get three-link segments of chain and put one on each screw as it goes into the ground. That not only marks the spot, it also gives you a flexible attachment point which is useful in all sorts of situations. (Two links would be pinned in a stationary fashion.)

Biggest problem is it’s a pain in the ass to chop up all that chain, and nobody sells them in pre-cut lengths.

raldi··on How did Banksy erect a statue in Central London?
When I click the actual link I get a paywall.
raldi··on California high-speed rail price tag jumps to $231B, nearly 7x 2008 estimate
Can't blame unions, considering how easily Europe gets it done. Most likely issue is that in the US, every landowner and minor municipality is empowered to delay and obstruct these projects and thus milk them.
raldi··on Can You Find the Comet?
Passing clouds?
raldi··on Virtual Mars Traverse: Every inch of Curiosity rover's path since 2012 landing
Oh wow, no wonder I never found it; I was always zoomed way too far in.
raldi··on Virtual Mars Traverse: Every inch of Curiosity rover's path since 2012 landing
I’m aware of the map but I’m unclear on where the peak/ridge is.
raldi··on System Card: Claude Mythos Preview [pdf]
Could you transcribe the emoji? HN strips them out.
raldi··on Virtual Mars Traverse: Every inch of Curiosity rover's path since 2012 landing
I find it so hard to figure out how close Curiosity is to the peak/ridge of Mt Sharp and whether/when it seems likely to cross over to the other side.
raldi··on Project Glasswing: Securing critical software for the AI era
In what ways is Anthropic different from a hypothetical frontier lab that you would characterize as legitimately safe and ethical?
raldi··on The threat is comfortable drift toward not understanding what you're doing
To me it feels more like learning to cook versus learning how to repair ovens and run a farm. Software engineering isn’t about writing code any more than it’s about writing machine code or designing CPUs. It’s about bringing great software into existence.
raldi··on We hid a free trip to Switzerland in our privacy policy
"This is just a common publicity stunt."

"No, it is an exceptional publicity stunt."

raldi··on How A Spartan Revolutionized Baseball
Clickbait antidote: by inventing the pitch speed radar gun after seeing campus police use one in 1974
raldi··on Tin Can, a 'landline' for kids
https://paulgraham.com/submarine.html
raldi··on Tin Can, a 'landline' for kids
Especially weird in this case since it’s such an over the top case of Submarine Marketing.
raldi··on Theodosian Land Walls of Constantinople (2025)
Supposedly they could fire it seven times a day, and had to soak it in warm oil in between to minimize thermal shock.
raldi··on I love my dumb watches
I don’t understand how you can say a smart watch isn’t, on top of all the smart features, also the best watch there is when it comes to keeping time. It keeps perfect time, always, even over DST changes, even when you change time zones. You never even have to set them!

Also your Apple Watch is defective if you have to charge it all night. I’m up to my third, I always wear it while I sleep, I only charge it when I’m getting ready for bed or getting ready in the morning, and the battery never runs out.

raldi··on 1M context is now generally available for Opus 4.6 and Sonnet 4.6
What evidence would convince you otherwise?
raldi··on Stanford researchers report first recording of a blue whale's heart rate (2019)
Anyone got a direct link to or time index of the recording? I skipped around the video on the linked page but it was all music.
raldi··on Show HN: Web-based ANSI art viewer
This is very cool! And I say that as someone who was in iCE in the early 1990s ;)

The baud scrolling and SAUCE support are nicely done, and "drag a zip here" is top-tier magic, though when I tried dragging in an old iCE pack's zip file, it only showed one ANSI inside there; I was expecting a file picker.

Feature suggestions: "Show invisible text" toggle and an option to switch between 16-color background mode and 8-color background mode with blink support. You're already parsing the SAUCE which has an "iCE colors" boolean; you can use this to control the default for the latter setting.

Details: https://forum.16colo.rs/t/ice-colors-or-blinking-text/27

raldi··on The stagnancy of publishing and the disappearance of the midlist
The clickbait title refers to a day in fall 1995 when a Random House editor was told by his boss that the business could no longer afford to publish modestly-selling books (~10,000-40,000 copies), marking the moment when corporate scale killed the old risk-taking culture of publishing.
raldi··on Where things stand with the Department of War
"Once the rockets are up, who cares where they come down?

That's not my department!" says Wernher von Braun

raldi··on Google workers seek 'red lines' on military A.I., echoing Anthropic
200
raldi··on ai;dr
> Why should I bother to read something someone else couldn't be bothered to write?

You don't; you feed it to an LLM and ask it to read it for you.

raldi··on Surely the crash of the US economy has to be soon
> To be honest I’m glad we are the ones getting out of that market first.

Who is "we" in that sentence?

raldi··on New YC homepage
The “YC/Now” timer starts (and sometimes flips) before the image actually loads.
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