HNHacker News
TopNewBestAskShowJobs

rtkwe

13,277 karma · joined May 2, 2012

[ my public key: https://keybase.io/tswaugh; my proof: https://keybase.io/tswaugh/sigs/r8gvFEWW4PGsNVwDzVbL9XF8kfIL3wRD41oq7k48q24 ]
submissionscomments
rtkwe··on Google determines the names for bodies of water in Google Earth (2008)
That seems to be the pattern, US visitors get only the stupid new name while visitors outside the US get the Old Name (New/US Name). It's consistent across Gulf of Mexico and Lake Ontario.
rtkwe··on Survival LLM: AI assistant and emergency library that runs on your own computer
Yeah that's where it comes down to what kind of disaster scenario you're actually thinking about preparing for. Though there's no amount of post disaster perusing of those Army manuals summarized by an LLM that's going to help you actually implement anything in them. The skill to use the info in those books without being a liability to yourself and others requires actual practice.

Also the way groups actually survive scenarios is rarely around actual fighting and is vastly more dependent on actual survival skills, cooperation, and organizing. The lone (or small group) survivalist fantasy is mostly an American larp.

rtkwe··on Survival LLM: AI assistant and emergency library that runs on your own computer
> - no FM 7-8 or ATP 3-21.8

Those are more militia LARP relevant than actual survival relevant in fairness but the other gaps are pretty bad. You can definitely have a useful too without that info and for disaster situations most people don't have to go into the level of hunting their own food so I guess it's more of a question of how long and how deep the disaster you're looking at info on is expected to go.

rtkwe··on Start Doing Graph Theory
> the concern here is that the content is accurate and correct, right?

> In this sense AI does not actually detract from that [...] that author can build a reputation for thoroughly reviewed and high quality textbooks.

The issue is a lot of the AI generated books out there aren't carefully reviewed and it being AI written is an early sign it's crap at the moment, and it's expensive cognitively to build a list of "trusted authors" or to know when searching if you're finding true reviews by people who can meaningfully evaluate the content of the book or if you hit an AstroTurf post fluffing the author.

The other indicator and thing that puts at least myself off is that if the author used AI significantly in the process they didn't care enough about writing it before to put the real human effort into writing it so the chances it's worth spending my real human time reading is low.

rtkwe··on Evidence of a spying operation by ICE against left-wing social movements
I do hope a congress soon has the spine to fix the courts and some of their recent missteps, the list is getting very very long though.
rtkwe··on MacBook Pro with PROLED XDR Display and Touch
Sometimes tapping a button is easier or faster than grabbing my mouse and navigating over to it but it is pretty infrequent.
rtkwe··on US agency approves Amazon Leo’s $11.5B acquisition of Globalstar
Before Falcon came in and drove down launch costs significantly putting lots of satellites in low orbit you need to replace constantly was a bad way to design a satellite network. It still has some issues like the continuous ongoing cost where the traditional providers' satellites would last for many years before needing to be replaced.
rtkwe··on Evidence of a spying operation by ICE against left-wing social movements
We're not talking about slaves here... and someone does need to pick the food from the vine, big ag has tried for decades to automate picking of various fruits to little success. It turns out recognizing and handling ripe fruit is a difficult task for both vision and effectors.
rtkwe··on Evidence of a spying operation by ICE against left-wing social movements
Somewhat, the other side of the coin is if they can even find labor at a price that has a chance of competing with growers who have local access to cheaper labor because they're in poorer countries. The price they'd have to pay to get legal pickers is more likely to fully drive those farms out of business or at least out of those crops into more machine harvestable crops.

The main point though is that the "problem" of seasonal farm workers staying in the US illegally is to some extent artificially created by attempting to strictly enforce the border. Before that they were able to come work freely and would happily return to their home country because the process of getting into the US for the harvesting seasons was (relative to the modern process) easy, safe and cheap so there was no reason to stay in the US. Why would they, their wages would go farther in their home countries and that's where their families were and they would be able to cross back for the next major harvest they wanted to participate in.

rtkwe··on Evidence of a spying operation by ICE against left-wing social movements
> Funny how democrats always care so much about "the law" and "due process" until it relates to immigration.

Funny how often the very problems republicans are so adamant about are caused by their own policies. Before the change the population flowed seasonally and had little reason to stay long term. Suddenly it's an issue but by shutting off the flow without a way to do it legally it screwed both parties. Farms still need the crops picked and the work is difficult and the pay is only good relative to the opportunities in other countries so there's no replacement domestic workforce.

rtkwe··on Evidence of a spying operation by ICE against left-wing social movements
Even worse the Supreme Court has actively made it quite difficult to pursue bribery cases recently basically requiring the parties to be stupid enough to put in writing "I will pay you X to vote Y on Z" and then "This is the payment for your vote that would not have happened if you had not voted Y on Z".
rtkwe··on Microsoft offers mass buyouts for roughly a quarter of its workforce
I'm not sure the rep damage actually spreads that far and given a hard enough push the business will be more than willing to spend a little bit of reputation for survival.
rtkwe··on US Government is hiding a secret court ruling about how it spies on Americans
Really what it is is they had a lawyer say, "We can justify massive spying on citizens via [long long list of arguments and precedents]", the security apparatus would like to keep the veneer of legality that provides and knows if what they were doing was known there would be massive backlash and the law would be changed to make it more clearly illegal so they keep that interpretation secret. Basically going on the logic that they don't have to tell Congress or the Courts how they screwed up the 4th Amendment and it's not their job to fix it.
rtkwe··on AI promised less work. I've never worked more
This tool will reduce your work has always been a lie in the corporate world, at best it's shifted your time from one pool to another. The only time it really works is if you secretly bring in the tool and don't tell your bosses you're getting things done in less time. When your bosses know you just get rewarded with more work to do.
rtkwe··on CorridorKey 2.0
I wonder when an eggcorn has been around long enough it just becomes an alternative version of the phrase.
rtkwe··on CorridorKey 2.0
Movies are absolutely full of background replacement and other things that require keying.
rtkwe··on Solar power is becoming bigger than nuclear
I'm thinking more of the cycles of community approval that can drag on and delay the project rather than individual ongoing regulations.
rtkwe··on PhysicsForums and the Dead Internet Theory (2025)
Maybe with time we'll accomplish the same thing that's happened with pre 45 steel and the instruments will need less of it. I guess in this analogy it'd be better quality filters that can detect and remove LLM-spam.
rtkwe··on PhysicsForums and the Dead Internet Theory (2025)
I wonder if someone has redone the experiment of retraining LLMs on LLM output that was conducted a few years back that showed a pretty drastic degradation in quality. I imagine it's hard to perform on the closed source frontier models and the ballooning cost of training doesn't help.

In theory as the models improve their ability to ape human writing the effect should diminish, though iterative reingestion of their own output is probably still detrimental long term.

rtkwe··on Microsoft offers mass buyouts for roughly a quarter of its workforce
Also just from raw corporate penny pinching. Why would they make payouts like that if they're not forced to, yes there's reputational risks of making that promise and then not following through with it but faced with a choice between that and a few lawsuits (with the usual corporate advantages of arbitration clauses and vastly more resources they're likely to win too) a corporation looking to shed people is likely to take the win of reducing their severance payouts.
rtkwe··on Solar power is becoming bigger than nuclear
That's also true, partially driven by a lot of hurdles and time spent fighting for approval due to the anti-nuclear push due to the things I mentioned, but it is also just expensive to build in the US because our labor and land is pretty expensive too.
rtkwe··on 'It's offensively cheap': Solar power is quietly becoming bigger than nuclear
Depends on many factors. If installers are able to fully fill their available time and crews with jobs at the current price and expanding is limited by the availability of new crews high prices could be a stable equilibrium until a) more crews become available/techniques improve to speed up install times or b) demand relaxes and they need to drop their price to find sufficient customers.

There's also other factors like the overall cost being beyond people's willingness to save for when financing is available or the extra value that financed installs can provide the underwriters when they're bundled and sold as a stable income stream like houses were in the mid 00s.

"If it can be done cheaper someone will" is based on a lot of simplifications and assumptions about the market in question.

rtkwe··on Solar power is becoming bigger than nuclear
Nuclear /could/ have solved this years ago but the spectacular and scary nature of failures like TMI or Chernobyl [0] really sunk any chance of that happening. Plus you had all the traditional nonrenewable energy providers intensely interested in stoking fears of that and the question of nuclear fuel storage.

[0] Yes pollution from normal everyday fossil fuel power generation causes more damage and deaths in the aggregate but it's a diffuse hard to attribute kind of damage which makes it far less, for lack of a better way to say it, real to people. eg: Did living downwind of that unupgraded coal plant really kill them or is their death because of something else.

rtkwe··on The Lucrative World of Literary Scams
A deep dive into a different literary world scam from Dan Olsen (aka Folding Ideas) covers the world of con artists pushing done for you audio books [0]. It's probably only accelerated since genAI and LLMs became accessible, now you don't even need to low ball audiobook talent to get it made now. I wonder how amazon has tried, if they have at all to avoid being flooded with spam.

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=biYciU1uiUw

rtkwe··on Tesla Roadster
The per 1k car figure makes it look like Waymo has 50% more cars or they're 50% more active than the Tesla robotaxis.
rtkwe··on Tesla Roadster
Not the base model, the base was supposed to be more generally available for regular rich people not just hypercar people.
rtkwe··on Tesla Roadster
It's unclear what they'll be classified as and probably comes down to some negotiation and lawyering to decide how restricted they are. You can sell a lot of restricted hardware to US citizens that you can't sell internationally due to ITAR.
rtkwe··on Tesla Roadster
CF can make a fine pressure vessel it's just difficult to build and they require constant inspection that OceanGate didn't perform (and ignored evidence from their own monitoring system that the PV was responding differently to pressure after a hard bang it suffered when docking in one of the last few dives). SpaceX already has experience building the COPVs that Tesla is probably using and knows their limits pretty well though I don't want to be standing near one in a major crash either.
rtkwe··on Tesla Roadster
People with lambo money generally also want a car that doesn't fall apart constantly AND rapidly lose its value.
rtkwe··on Tesla Roadster
But you'd expect if this were being treated as a likely success for Tesla the announcement would have caused a price bump or at least a reversal of the trend.

Also 2 years ago is a pretty specific time point where it was near the lowest it's been looking back a less random 5d, 1M, 6M, 1Y and 5Y it's only up on the 5Y chart and that's a relatively meager 25%.

Page 1 of 34Next →