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rjtavares

2,142 karma · joined May 25, 2012

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rjtavares··on What happened to TheNumbers.com
I think the toxicology proverb applies here perfectly: The dose makes the poison.
rjtavares··on An entire Herculaneum scroll has been read for the first time
There's a sponsors and partners list on their webpage: https://scrollprize.org/#sponsors
rjtavares··on European AI. A playbook to own it
It's important to note that these efforts aren't nationalistic - they're multilateral. In fact, European nationalists are consistently trying to sabotage European efforts.

On the bright side: people seem to be moving away from such nationalistic ideas. Here's to Orban being the first of many defeats for them in the near future.

rjtavares··on Tesla Is Sitting on a Record 50k Unsold EVs
He supports Trump now, so I really doubt free speech is important to him.
rjtavares··on What major works of literature were written after age of 85? 75? 65?
Opened it just to check if Saramago was there, and indeed, he is.

For most of his professional life he was a journalist. He published his second novel at 55, only found his narrative style at almost 60, then wrote 15 novels (and won a Nobel) after that. What an amazing career.

rjtavares··on Show HN: Joonote – A note-taking app on your lock screen and notification panel
As a non native speaker, it never crossed my mind and I was quite confused at the first comments...
rjtavares··on The behavioral cost of personalized pricing
Why isn't making it illegal a solution?
rjtavares··on First impressions of Claude Cowork
Skills may have have code attached to them, so in this case the formatting and converting is all code.

The value of skills is that they are attached to the context of an LLM for few tokens, and the LLM activates one when it feels that it relevant (and brings it into context). It's a chepear alternative to having a huge CLAUDE.md (or equivalent) file.

rjtavares··on First impressions of Claude Cowork
You made the right call. Skills were added to Antigravity and I immediately started creating and using them. I never used custom MCP servers, but skills were immediately obvious to me.

An example: I made a report_polisher skill that cleans some markdown formatting, check image links, and then uses pandoc to convert it to HTML. I ask the tool itself created the skill, then I just tweaked it.

rjtavares··on First impressions of Claude Cowork
I've been using Google's Antigravity (which has a similar UI) to do data analysis and making reports. Skills are really useful for that.
rjtavares··on The U.S. Government Just Followed Through on Its Ban of DJI Drones
I guess you haven't read how the government reacted to the incident. Let's put it mildly and say: is wasn't treated as a mistake or bad-apple cop.

Just an example: "Vance said the ICE officer was clearly justified in shooting Good. The officer was clearly acting in self-defense, Vance said. He framed Good as "a victim of left-wing ideology" who was spurred by an alleged network of politically motivated groups to interfere with law enforcement."

https://www.pbs.org/newshour/politics/watch-live-vance-joins...

rjtavares··on U.S. Emissions Jumped in 2025 as Coal Power Rebounded
No, it's because of renewables. Share of oil in total energy consumption hasn't increased since the sanctions, while wind and solar have been consistently increasing. Coal is down (again, as a share of total energy consumption).

Source: https://ourworldindata.org/profile/energy/china

rjtavares··on Google Antigravity
Antigravity's agent manager tries do to that. For example, it has an inbox for agent updates and requests for user decisions.
rjtavares··on Gemini 3 Pro Model Card [pdf]
Gemini CLI
rjtavares··on I bought the cheapest EV, a used Nissan Leaf
Also, leasing does not prevent you from paying for the depreciation. It's just included in the fee.
rjtavares··on The Stock Market Is Selling the Fed's Independence Because ZIRP Broke the World
> President Donald Trump could only be birthed from a distorted world where borrowing is free and future cash flows are infinite.

I don't really understand this causal link. Can someone enlighten me?

rjtavares··on Idiocracy
Or why it was flagged...
rjtavares··on Trump's Trade War Escalates as China Retaliates with 34% Tariffs
Wikipedia also calls Putin's war "Russo-Ukrainian War". I have no problem with either name. That's the point.
rjtavares··on Trump's Trade War Escalates as China Retaliates with 34% Tariffs
You can't be serious...

It's like arguing against the expression "Putin's war in Ukraine" because Ukraine retaliated with drones.

rjtavares··on Trump's Trade War Escalates as China Retaliates with 34% Tariffs
You can't be bullied and not respond - that's an invite for future bullying.

Besides, this isn't at all the same. China isn't adding tariffs on the whole world like the US are.

rjtavares··on Marine Le Pen banned from running in 2027 and given four-year sentence
Not a fan of the immediate effect on part of the sentence (everything should be contingent on the result of the appeal process).
rjtavares··on [dead]
Freedom of speech and authoritarianism were always topics of interest for this community. I always thought it was an honest interest, but apparently it wasn't.
rjtavares··on [dead]
With how these articles are immediately flagged, HN is failing us too.
rjtavares··on French researcher denied entry for a personal opinion on Trump administration
The article is in French, but easily auto-translated (and it's the best non-biased source I found).

> "I learned with concern that a French researcher" on assignment for the French National Center for Scientific Research (CNRS) "who was traveling to a conference near Houston was denied entry to the United States before being expelled ," said the Minister of Higher Education and Research, Philippe Baptiste, in a statement sent to Agence France-Presse (AFP). "This measure was apparently taken by the American authorities because the researcher's phone contained exchanges with colleagues and friends in which he expressed a personal opinion on the Trump administration's research policy ," he added.

At some point we're going to have to debate where to run "western" scientific conferences. I can see Europe/Canada and US/Russia blocs emerging, I'm curious with whom other countries will align.

rjtavares··on French researcher denied entry for a personal opinion on Trump administration
For full reference, here's the US list (mostly prior to Trump): https://en.m.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=List_of_people_...
rjtavares··on Byte Latent Transformer: Patches Scale Better Than Tokens
Goodbye tokenization problems, hello encoding problems!
rjtavares··on OpenAI: Sora
One of the highlights of any model release for me is checking your "pelican riding a bicycle" test.
rjtavares··on The Iberian lynx doubles its population in just three years
Evaluation of the genetic viability of metapopulation scenarios for the Iberian lynx (2023): https://zslpublications.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/...
rjtavares··on Israel shuts down local Al Jazeera offices
Russia Today was banned in Ukraine in 2014 and in some (most?) EU countries in 2022.
rjtavares··on Scientists put Jared Diamond's continental axis hypothesis to the test
The interesting question really is "why did Europe conquered the Americans instead of China conquering the Americas"?

And I'm pretty sure that's just the way it turned out.

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