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thinkingkong

4,015 karma · joined August 6, 2014

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thinkingkong··on Atlas: A World Model for Spatial Intelligence
What exactly does world model mean? Ive seen it used so many times in so many ways to just describe SOTA anything its lost its meaning.
thinkingkong··on Trump signs order to rename Lake Ontario as 'Lake America'
Ontario is named after the lake. The lake isnt named after the province.
thinkingkong··on How to Abandon Your Climate Commitments and Get Away with It
You quite literally used the word “propaganda” which is an intentional attempt to mislead or hide the truth. If the quality of the paper is in fact purposefully low and youre saying its for a reason just say what the reason is.
thinkingkong··on How to Abandon Your Climate Commitments and Get Away with It
To what end? Either there’s a global conspiracy to destroy the planet or theres’s a global conspiracy to save the environment?
thinkingkong··on CO2 overload, detected in human blood, suggests toxic atmosphere within 50 years
Its not a software problem or a technical issue. At this point, it’s a social issue. Incentives are misaligned and as a result we’ll burn every last molecule of hydrocarbons to generate shareholder value.
thinkingkong··on Show HN: I Built an MCP Server in 200 Lines of Go (and Claude Became 10x Useful)
We’re thinking about these tools all wrong. Who cares which transport mechanism you use? Just transform your repetitive non deterministic work into a predictable tool. Thats the part thats valuable. Build a CLI tool or an API spec thats dead simple and expose systems that way. Nothing is that different than good DX.
thinkingkong··on Who will buy your services if you fire us all?
We already have abundance in some areas and very little of it results in a higher standard of living.

We could make enough insulin to give it away to people for free. Instead people ration with negative consequences. We grow more than enough food but we throw a huge amount of it away. We have everything we need to house people, clothe them, feed them, and provide the basics of medical care. But we wont because theres too much money to be made otherwise.

thinkingkong··on 404 Deno CEO not found
It's easy to be critical in hindsight but honestly when Deno first came out it was pretty incredible. Even the whole idea about URL based imports makes lots of sense but it was incompatible with any of the existing toolchains that were wildly popular. At the same time, companies like Vercel launched a new kind of framework and leveraged that into a hosting business with I would say great success. They captured developers where they were at _today_, including acknowledging the demographics, the tools, the culture, etc.
thinkingkong··on Oracle may slash up to 30k jobs to fund AI data-centers as US banks retreat
This article is over a month old. Why is it being shared now? Its also posted on reddit where it has some lift.
thinkingkong··on Components will kill pages
Theres probably a middle ground where we allow an app to augment / enhance itself using deterministic behaviour but a user based soft request. If I as a user can ask for a feature, and have it work just for me, thats pretty cool.

Instead of progressive enhancement it can be progressive evolution.

thinkingkong··on Something Big Is Happening
Management is going to quickly start bisecting human engineers along lines of maximalists and minimalists. The minimalists will all be let go. A few bad things will happen. A few systems will strain under the pressure but itll be “worth it” in the same way that its cheaper to pay lawsuits than do a recall of a plane.

We arent innovating in other areas that might soften the blow. We dont have good support systems, social security, healthcare, or even demands in other areas. How many engineers are going to be plumbers and construction workers?

thinkingkong··on Why I Joined OpenAI
Brendan can do whatever he wants. Hes that good. If anybody seriously needed to interview him 20+ times to figure it out, then the burden is now on them to not fuck it up.
thinkingkong··on Y Combinator will let founders receive funds in stablecoins
Feels like step 1 to providing liqudity further down the toad. Also opening investment to “unqualified” investors. It never made sense that you could buy crypto, buy multiple homes, but sinking 10k into a friends startup was somehow regulated.
thinkingkong··on Data centers in space makes no sense
You definitely _can_ the question is, can you do it by enough for a reasonable amount of money. There are a few techniques to this but at the end of the day you need to radiate away, the heat otherwise it will just keep growing. You cannot keep pumping energy into the satellite without distributing the same amount back out again.
thinkingkong··on Ask HN: Can systems function correctly without memory?
Well… if you look at pure functions without ant state then thats a whole class of computing you can refer to. The problem is that its not efficient to calculate state from arguments for everything. We end up saving to disk, writing packets over the network, etc. In a purely theoretical environment you could avoid state, but the real world imposes constraints that you need to operate within or between.

Additionally, depending how deep down you go, theres state stored somewhere to calculate against. Vues are stored in some kind of register and theyre passed into operations with a target register as an additional argument.

thinkingkong··on Canada loses its measles-free status, with US on track to follow
The vaccination rates in some parts of Alberta are less than 30%. Per capita, Alberta has the highest incident rate. The rhetoric around vaccinations, social media, a perhaps complacency towards distant threats have all contributed to this situation.

The challenge is that solving this is easier but only if people are willing to get vaccinated.

thinkingkong··on Canadian bill would strip internet access from 'specified persons', no warrant
Agree that its not the most effective. What would you suggest? What works better?
thinkingkong··on Canadian bill would strip internet access from 'specified persons', no warrant
The argument made here seems to be that the power to prevent unlawful access or threats is somehow required to keep us all safe. But if someone was an actual threat, do we really think they’d be using the internet with their own identity? Like if someone is willing to hack into a power station or some other critical infrastructure, they’ll be simultaneously stupid enough to use their own credit card?

Illegal things are already illegal. Safety and security mechanisms already exist. We dont need additional, punitive, and opaque laws that can be abused.

thinkingkong··on Starship's Tenth Flight Test
The shuttle itself was reusable but the two solid rocket boosters and the external fuel tank were all disposable components.
thinkingkong··on Fast (2019)
We’re good at moving fast when we do things for the first time or the externalities / consequences of speed are either underrepresented or hidden.

As soon as something is done a few times, the barrier of entry goes up. We get the ability to measure and evaluate consequences. We have regulations based on safety or environmental isues. We have additional groups of people with specific concerns that must be consulted. Other nations may participate and we coerce then into increasing or decreasing their involvement. Its a wild big dynamic system.

To me this doesnt mean we shouldnt be able to move quickly. Just that the innovation requires tools that can navigate between these other constraints - or - that we only innovate in areas that have never been done before and we do so at a blistering pace.

thinkingkong··on SSH Keys Don't Scale. SSH Certificates Do
If you need easy distributed key management, modern SSH makes this fairly straightforward with some config values. It supports executing a program to get the SSH key at login time, dynamically. This way you can still maintain local certificates for fallback, and you can plug into anything. For example in the past I wrote a simple golang based app that loaded all of the SSH pubkeys from my organizations github, for users in a specific team.
thinkingkong··on The F-35 as a Subscription Service
The part I thought was interesting was how Israel “secured rights to modify” their F35 deliveries. Like… what kind of airplane that costs 100s of millions requires additional contracts for “replace component” rights? How insane is this contract? Its so unreasonable to assume that the value of the fighter to the manifacturers is only in the maintenance. Its like the BMW heater subscription, only for national defence.
thinkingkong··on For climate and livelihoods, Africa bets big on solar mini-grids
Youre also forgetting another component which is that the instrastructure gets torn down or stolen because it has market value. The replacement, maintenance, and security of wired grids is likely higher.
thinkingkong··on Brain Hyperconnectivity in Children with Autism and Its Links to Social Deficits (2013)
The fitness function that would govern that evolution would be new though. We’d be intentionally optimizing for brains that work that way with some new social or technical construct. Like if we said “autism is the new exposed ankles” and suddenly had many more babies who also demonstrated that trait. Or if we had access to technology that would select for that outcome, gattaca style.
thinkingkong··on Facebook is removing stories about pornographic ads
Now immediately flagged off the front page.
thinkingkong··on Bitcoin is over $100k
On the contrary. Your way better hedge was polymarket not hitting 100k prior to the election.
thinkingkong··on Netflix buffering issues: Boxing fans complain about Jake Paul vs. Mike Tyson
They arent clowns at all. Ita a totally different engineering problem and you cant just spin up live streaming capacity on demand. The entire system end to end isnt optimized for live streams yet.
thinkingkong··on Mom jailed for letting 10-year-old walk alone to town
There are a few components to this that I can see being frustrating. One is that many people here likely had a more free roam childhood and this kind of behaviour from law enforcement and society in general is quite peculiar and off-putting. Being socially outcast because I let my child walk to the store is one thing. Being actually arrested and threatening to remove the parent of a child in the name of their safety is another.

Another part is the data / justification for this behaviour. From 1999 to 2010 at least, it seems that motor vehicle accidents are the number one cause of teenagers dying. Then it's homicide and suicide. Homicides are mostly committed by people the person knows. I don't have a full complete data set here but ~85% of homicides against youth are committed by family members or people that know the family. Not strangers. It's not to say you should't protect your kids from strangers, just that... walking to the store isn't that.

thinkingkong··on Light-based technique shows 90% accuracy in early prostate cancer detection
Such as?
thinkingkong··on The Little Tech Agenda
A16Z seems to do a little more 'investor branding' than other firms and this is part of that strategy. I would call this piece more of a backstop to explain their donations to the Trump campaign more than anything else. Their existing portfolio contains companies that have high private market valuations but are sort of getting big enough to be noticed by regulators.

It shouldn't be surprising that anyone would play with all of the levers and dials they have at their disposal and they're wealthy enough to play the "don't like the rules: change them" game. All that being said, the piece is sort of tone deaf and just written poorly, but I cannot say I can argue with a VC firm going to bat for its portfolio companies, little tech or otherwise.

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