HNHacker News
TopNewBestAskShowJobs

rob74

17,295 karma · joined April 18, 2016

submissionscomments
rob74··on Nvidia boss says there is '0% chance' AI destroys the world by 2030
I'm surprised this hasn't gained more traction! Anyway, it's interesting how the narratives align with the incentives here: The "incumbents" (Anthropic, OpenAI et al) want regulation that protects them from competition, so they predict doom if development is allowed to continue unchecked. Nvidia wants to continue selling hardware to whoever is leading the AI race, so Huang is more optimistic.
rob74··on Replacing Pull Requests with Delta
Yeah, JetBrains IDEs are Java-based, so rather heavyweight. Then again, VS Code (and Cursor) have a browser engine running in the background, so not really better in my book. Sublime and Zed are more efficient of course. OTOH, JetBrains IDEs might be memory intensive, but don't actually feel sluggish on my 5 year old Core i7 laptop with 16 GB RAM.
rob74··on How GLM built its own inference infrastructure
Maybe my post sounded harsher than I intended, and yeah, it's probably on me that I'm not familiar with GLM. Actually the other major Chinese LLM Kimi does ring a bell, maybe it's because three-letter acronyms are a dime a dozen and annoy me because I'm confronted with them regularly at work too (people at my company seem to love acronyms), but that's obviously on me too...
rob74··on How GLM built its own inference infrastructure
This article left me with one immediate question: "WTF is GLM?".

Honestly, I have no idea what z.ai is either (I'm aware of an AI-enabled editor called Zed, but that's under zed.dev), so it's a bit presumptuous from them to assume that everyone is familiar with their product...

rob74··on The Return of Sail Power: Cargo Ships Are Turning Back to the Wind
If you had bothered to at least skim TFA, this is addressed in the third paragraph:

> The idea is not to turn modern cargo ships back into sailing vessels. Instead, these systems are designed to work alongside conventional engines, using the wind to reduce fuel consumption whenever conditions allow.

rob74··on AWS says it can't restore some data from mideast facilities struck by Iran
You just have to take a look at the Rube Goldberg-esque abomination that is the AWS web interface for a few minutes to realize that it's not that simple. Granted, most executives won't do that...
rob74··on AWS says it can't restore some data from mideast facilities struck by Iran
Especially with Amazon, who are well known for squeezing every last bit of profit from their employees, contractors etc., it doesn't really sound surprising. "Offsite backups?! Sure, you could have had that if you had found the right page in the AWS console and if you would have paid 50% extra!"
rob74··on The Beauty of Roundabouts
I think that's overly negative. Roundabouts have their place, mostly for low traffic intersections, but I agree that they tend to be overused, also here in Europe. Two examples where roundabouts are not the right solution:

- when there is too much traffic: if there is a constant stream of cars in the roundabout so you have to wait for a long time before being able to enter it, or force your way in (risking a fender bender), that's

- when you actually want traffic to flow. My small city has built a bypass road which is however IMHO completely botched: it starts with a roundabout, and the first exit leads to the route going through the center, only the second one goes to the bypass, so people are more likely to drive through the town. And it has three more roundabouts along the route, further making the option unattractive (in addition to a relatively low speed limit of 60 km/h and several tight curves).

rob74··on Most people prefer traditional architecture
Well, it doesn't have to be mutually exclusive, does it? An old building doesn't have to be run down, and a new one can be both expensive and shoddily built.
rob74··on Chopping up books when they're physically too big
If you think this book is too big, I'd like to remind you that there are one-volume paperback editions of The Lord Of The Rings (I have this one: https://www.worthpoint.com/worthopedia/r-tolkien-lord-rings-...) with 1100+ pages.
rob74··on Global bond yields hit 2008 highs, raising stakes for big borrowers
One contributing factor might be that AI companies are raising money via (amongst other methods) also issuing bonds, which might compete with government bonds.
rob74··on Suspected sabotage causes major Netherlands rail disruption
Civilian targets heavily involved in handling "dual-use" items that the Russian army isn't providing to its soldiers, so they have to buy it by themselves (https://factually.co/fact-checks/business/wildberries-milita...).

...this after Russia has been targeting civilian targets in Ukraine from the first days of the invasion.

rob74··on XCancel service is suspended until further notice
Actually you can write "Xitter" ("x" is pronounced "sh" in the standard transliteration of Chinese and many other languages, although most of them are not really widespread, like Basque https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Basque_alphabet and Maltese https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maltese_alphabet).
rob74··on XCancel suspended "due to a new development in the ongoing legal proceedings"
So they can try to nag you into signing up and installing the app? Which doesn't work in 99.9% of cases, but try telling that to your boss if his name is Elon Musk...
rob74··on XCancel service is suspended until further notice
Maybe instead of trying to get rid of services that provide a more convenient access to X to non-logged-in users, they should realize that there is a real market behind these services - users that will likely never sign up to X, but who want to read/watch some content without the incessant nagging and limitations that X subjects non-logged-in users to?
rob74··on The GDR and Vietnam: From Fake Coffee to Coffee Empire
The explanation for that (according to Wikipedia, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mitteldeutscher_Rundfunk#Histo...) is tradition: there was a Mitteldeutscher Rundfunk from 1924 to 1934, when the geographic designation was correct, and the post-1990 MDR just continues that name.

Actually, if you look at the map of German regional public broadcasters (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ARD_(broadcaster)#/media/File:...) and squint a bit, the MDR is more or less in the middle: more on the north-south axis and less on the east-west axis (with only the RBB partly more east), but still...

rob74··on The GDR and Vietnam: From Fake Coffee to Coffee Empire
The funniest thing about the GDR was that its railways were still called "Deutsche Reichsbahn" ("German Imperial Railways" - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deutsche_Reichsbahn_(East_Germ...). Apparently they needed to keep the name in order to be able to still operate trains in West Berlin.
rob74··on Diesel prices in U.S. top $6 a gallon for first time
Lockheed would still agree that it's good for them - replacing all those $4 million Patriot rockets expended in the Middle East to shoot down Shahed drones that are one or two orders of magnitude cheaper is going to fill their order books for years to come...
rob74··on Diesel prices in U.S. top $6 a gallon for first time
Supply and demand? Over here in Germany, Diesel was cheaper than (any kind of) gasoline for a long time, but that has also changed recently (Gemini says since Russia attacked Ukraine in 2022, so another thing to blame Putin for), now it's about 5% more expensive...
rob74··on Recursion into madness
Thanks, that's more like it! Even includes an Art Deco mirror...
rob74··on Recursion into madness
In the case of the movie poster, it probably doesn't help that the image was apparently stored in a lossy format. So after a few iterations the LLM can't tell the JPEG artifacts from the relevant image details and starts adding wrinkles to the faces and texture to the clothes etc. until it all goes to hell...
rob74··on Recursion into madness
Those are both very 2020s versions of Mrs. Regan, I would be more interested in the 1930s version...
rob74··on NTSB issues investigative update on B-767 runway excursion accident in Miami
I don't think there's a law mandating it, but CRM (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crew_resource_management) has been used and trained by all major airlines since the 1980s. The reason is simple: it doesn't really help to have two people in the cockpit if only one of them is making all the decisions.
rob74··on NTSB issues investigative update on B-767 runway excursion accident in Miami
One more thing worth noting is that they flew through bad weather on the approach, which led to the deviation from the glideslope. But the actual issue IMHO is not going around when they noticed that the approach was wildly unstable, or at the latest when they noticed that they were going to touch down with very little runway left.
rob74··on NTSB issues investigative update on B-767 runway excursion accident in Miami
If any of the two pilots feel uncomfortable about the approach, they are actually drilled to just order a go-around, not politely ask and hint that they would prefer to do it like this FO did (wastes time). Ideally the pilot flying should then do it, but if they don't, the pilot monitoring can also take control (while clearly stating "my controls, going around") and do it. One major issue that I bet the NTSB will note in the final report is that both pilots were relatively new to the aircraft and to the airline, usually it's preferable to pair an inexperienced FO with more experienced captains.

(not an aviation expert, just summarizing various bits and pieces I gathered from various YouTubers over the last days)

rob74··on Google will buy half the electricity from one of Finland's nuclear power plants
You'd be surprised how many European power plants (not only with Russian/Soviet designs) relied and still rely on fuel from Russia (https://www.voiceofemirates.com/en/politics/reports-and-inve...).
rob74··on Google will buy half the electricity from one of Finland's nuclear power plants
The plant mentioned in the article is by no means new, its two reactors began operation in 1977 and 1981, respectively (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loviisa_Nuclear_Power_Plant).

Nuclear power plants are notorious for their long planning, approval and build times (and cost overruns). Then again, I wouldn't want to live near a nuclear power plant built as fast as a data center either...

rob74··on Google will buy half the electricity from one of Finland's nuclear power plants
3a. AI companies make hyperbolic projections on the future use of AI and plan building and powering data centers according to that.

5. when the AI bubble bursts, we'll be left with huge amounts of unused/half-built data center capacity and unused power (with complications such as the data centers belonging to creditors and not being worth nearly as much as the inflated prices paid for building them).

rob74··on I resigned from Anthropic today
Don't mention the Jihad!
rob74··on I resigned from Anthropic today
Doesn't this just move the need to be smarter from the model to the harness - if a human sometimes can't tell whether a model has produced something correct or just mostly correct-looking BS, how can an automated harness do it?

OTOH, if the goal is simple ("break into a protected system") rather than more complex ("write an application that satisfies all requirements on all supported devices/screen resolutions etc."), that's of course more suitable for a harness.

← PreviousPage 4 of 34Next →