HNHacker News
TopNewBestAskShowJobs

ActorNightly

2,279 karma · joined April 8, 2019

submissionscomments
ActorNightly··on Our chance to take down the Epstein class
Sure, when voting for Kamala, people would be voting for keeping the status quo, which is 100x better alternative than whatever the fuck is going on now.

And not voting is basically saying that you rate either candidate equivalent to each other, and in the context of Trump vs Kamala, thats insane.

ActorNightly··on Our chance to take down the Epstein class
Not sure why you chose to type all that, literally nobody cares about what conservatives like you think anymore.
ActorNightly··on I can't stop thinking about Papua New Guinea
Spare me the psycho analysis please, its pretty cringe.

Explain to me how is this different from safari hunting trips where you can get attacked by a wild animal (often an agressive one thatvattacks villagers) and have to shoot it to defend yourself? And the argument of them being human versus safari trip featuring an animal is not something that is given, you have to show that their lives are worth more than the animal life

ActorNightly··on I can't stop thinking about Papua New Guinea
Not at all. But the world we live in is pretty fucked up from that perspective. There are ex military contractor guys on youtube talking about their weapons and how they used a certain rifle to fight off invaders in the middle east. Nobody seems to care that the people on the other end of those bullets may have families.

My interest in this is purely philosophical. If you have a what is effectively a lawless country, where native populace has the desire to kill you, to what extent could you engage with that in a moral framework?

ActorNightly··on Steam Frame starts at $1059
There needs to be a premium club around vr gaming, like there is for other activities like car/driving enthusiasm.
ActorNightly··on I can't stop thinking about Papua New Guinea
Im fully on the spectrum, but my first thought when I hear about stuff like this is what would be the moral implication of "recreational gang war" experience. I.e you pay a lot of money, you get guns and armor, you go into gang territory, they shoot arrows at you, you defend yourself. Seems like you would have the right to use deadly force, but you would obviously be at a big advantage.
ActorNightly··on Patients Who Fight Health Insurance Denials Often Win
They don't count the claims that are never fought in the first place. Which i would wager is the majority.
ActorNightly··on Apple's Dimensional Drawings
CAD is not just drawing. CAD packages are often integrated with other software that does things like stress analysis, BOM, thermal simulation, and so on.

Its an entire ecosystem that streamlines a lot of things, so it makes sense to invest in it.

The reason for Windowsis because a lot of the CAD software utilizes gfx drivers heavily for rendering. You can do things like raytracing to simulate how the product will look.

ActorNightly··on Things That Annoy Me About Cars
Most people don't utilize them fully.

- In the winter, if there is sun, and you have like black leather interior, it actually helps warm the car up.

-For trucks, having a glass roof is almost essential for seeing if you will fit into a parking garage. Having lived in Seattle, Im glad my truck had one.

- Opening the roof and setting AC to use outside air is the fastest way to vent the car. It doesn't create as many vorticies as opening the windows.

ActorNightly··on Apple's Siri AI Can Be Swapped Out for Claude, ChatGPT, Code Shows
> Turns out that all of the things you listed as examples are stuff that most consumers don’t actually want or will use.

The thing that nobody really realized is that setup is a big factor that isn't worth to a lot of people. For example, to turn off lights with Alexa, you have to do a whole bunch of setup that involves installing special lights, installing app, connecting the app to Alexa. Even though relatively this is simple, its just not worth the effort to a lot of people.

Amazon or Apple could easily overcome this by offering Alexa or Siri connected devices as incentive to builders building houses or apartments. That way, when you plug in Alexa in your new apartment, it can auto detect everything it can control including lights, thermostat appliances, e.t.c.

ActorNightly··on iPhone Duo
Most commonly, media. Having a larger screen means you don't need a separate iPad.

More niche use case is typing. Im on zfold 7 because I use Termux quite a bit.

ActorNightly··on Controversy over OpenAI's Maths Breakthrough
Essentially, every task that AGI can do is the same as the traveling salesman problem - you have some system with dynamics where you can make decisions and to get to the right outcome, you are trying to find an optimal path. The best it can do at this moment is to create parallel simulations (i.e AlphaZero/MuZero MCTS - the tree represents the dynamics and evolution of the game board and it effectively does a simulation of the game prior to making a move). To do this with something as complex as the world, including all the humans within it, most likely means that you have to have more compute than reality allows - otherwise you are taking a hit in accuracy, which given chaotic effects creates problems where you can be way off on the predictions.

On the flip side if P=NP, that means that instead of dedicating compute to running branching simulations, An AGI can dedicate compute to just solving directly the actions it needs to do for any given outcome. This is a shortcut to reality, which means that reality in itself is compressible.

ActorNightly··on Controversy over OpenAI's Maths Breakthrough
Again, context matters.

P vs NP is a more fundamental problem that if proven, will have insane consequences, perhaps more than anything else out there. For starters, you would be insantly able to design an an actuall all knowing AGI.

The NS equations are far,far,far less meaningful. Like I mentioned earlier, if you actually want accurate CFD, you dont even use them.

ActorNightly··on Defining AI Psychosis. Part 2: "Prolific AI Psychosis"
Its not that they cant, its that they are not motivated to.
ActorNightly··on iPhone 18 Pro and iPhone 18 Pro Max
There are endless posts on HN about how Macs are good for LLMs. Somoene is running some model on their Mac for local inference.

What the posts dont mention is how unusable that experience is with dogshit slow tokens/second. To make a local model usefull you need to run the highest parameter models at 100+ tok/sec, otherwise you are just better off paying for cloud inference. So either all those people are dumb as hell, or Apple is doing clever advertising. And I personally have more faith in the tech sector.

ActorNightly··on iPhone 18 Pro and iPhone 18 Pro Max
- Top 4/6 links on HN are currently Apple news.

Yeah Apple TOTALLY doesn't astroturf HN.

ActorNightly··on Defining AI Psychosis. Part 2: "Prolific AI Psychosis"
Back in the 2010s, the best, most efficient software engineers were characterized by 3 things

* end to end rough map of the entire space of compute in their head

* ability to search the internet for the right things

* ability to quickly experiment and try things to figure out how to do things

AI hasn't change that, it just made 2 and 3 into a very efficient thing.

The characterization of psychosis is best described by believing AI can do the first thing. No modern LLM can "reason" - otherwise you could give it a task like "make me money", it would ask you all the questions it needs about information that it doesn't know about and needs to know to make you money, then it would set whatever it needs to set up to make you money.

As such, you still need to know the domain entirely to be effective. When you do that, AI is fantastic at getting you to the right solution. Furthermore, its still in large part actually cheaper to higher a developer who then can use AI to build you the product that you need long term.

ActorNightly··on Controversy over OpenAI's Maths Breakthrough
There still has to be some logic behind what is the meaning of a proof. Generally, its pointless to explore random equations of numbers and try to prove that this equation holds for every value. That equation needs to have some use, whether its cryptography, or description of a physical process.

For example, look at Poincare conjecture proof. As cool as it is, can you name one area where the derivation of that proof or the proof itself has been used (without asking an LLM)?. Note that the core concept, Ricci flow, is used in lots of places, but the application of the proof is largely irrelevant - the homeomorphism of any 3d shape (say like a surface in Blender) to a sphere can be determined in other ways, more efficiently than what Pointcare conjecture states (i.e that every loop can be tightened to a point).

ActorNightly··on The largest electric aircraft just flew [video]
A plane needs to be able to takeoff in a given runway length, with a given payload, and climb at that power to a safe altitude for an option of an aborted landing. And just Tesla set to a high power mode, if when starting to drive it you do max acceleration for 1-2 minute you drain a significant portion of your battery very quickly.

The overall point that Im trying to make is that slight battery specific energy density improvements don't matter when compared against the power losses which are proportional to square root of the current.

ActorNightly··on Controversy over OpenAI's Maths Breakthrough
Generally, the proofs that are in the form of "here is a single contradiction to an established statement that proves that its not always true", are generally useless. We can prove that newtons laws don't apply when you start considering relativity, but because they still apply for a large domain, they are still used.

Same with NS equations. Who cares if you can find a singularity.

And if you want an example of something novel that is worth pursuing - Its highly likely that the modern transformer architecture is sub optimal, you probably don't need to do full matrix multiplies in the transformers. There potentially could be a higher level mathematical formulation of minimal math operations that are needed without having to do trial and error - especially because all of the math involves linear combination passed through smooth activation functions.

But coincidentally, there hasn't been any research in terms of point LLMS to self optimize in this way, because there isn't enough human math literature on the LLMs to train on.

ActorNightly··on Controversy over OpenAI's Maths Breakthrough
There is plenty of work that goes on in the math field that is super important. But any field has research that is irrelevant. So far, all the proofs done by ai have been largely irrelevant.
ActorNightly··on Controversy over OpenAI's Maths Breakthrough
The thing about these math proofs is that they really add nothing of value. Its a cool tech demonstration on how LLMS can search the trained space, but fundamentally, LLMS haven't "discovered" anything groundbreaking.

For NS equations, they are trying to model something that is discrete (i.e molecules colliding) in a continuous manner. You can easily think of a condition where they fail - imagine a vaccum where there is sufficient space between air molecules, so that collisions aren't always possible. NS won't be able to predict the state of the fluid in every single point in space.

In practice, when you do CFD, no package uses direct differential simulation of NS equations, you usually have simpler approximations that are good enough for the space you are working for. And if you want accuracy, you usually do something like LBM which simulates particle collisions using probability distributions.

ActorNightly··on DHS 'Predictive Policing' Unit Is Analyzing Americans' Financial Habits
The problem is, people who are the most spoken about personal freedom are the ones also voting conservative all the time. The libertarian square is still on the right.

By the time the government overreach starts being used on them, its gonna be too late.

Age old story in human history.

ActorNightly··on The largest electric aircraft just flew [video]
You misunderstand what Im saying

The full power system for a prop looks like this: you have a battery of a specific voltage, which then runs a motor, which then runs a gearbox, which then turns a prop.

The motor and the gearbox can be considered as one unit - an electric motor has two factors, KV(RPM/volt) and KT(torque/amp). The higher the KV, the lower the KT. A high KV motor spins fast, but draws a lot of current for the same torque - putting it through a reduction gearbox turns it into a low KV, high KT motor. Naturally, low KV motors or (low KV setups) are more efficient because they draw less current for a given torque, and the heating power loss varies with current^2.

The prop needs to spin at certain RPM for max aerodynamic efficiency. Given the slider for motor/gearbox selection between high KV/low KT and the opposites, you generally want to have as high voltage as possible, so that you can run a low KV/high KT setup, which means that for the given torque, the current is minimal. I.e you have a motor spinning really fast, through a large reduction gear, driving a prop at the necessary speed and torque without much load on the motor.

So lets say you determine that you want a certain voltage, which requires a stack of cells in series. The only way to get more capacity is to duplicate that stack and put them in parallel. So your weight becomes quantized by the number of stacks you have in parallel. And the more stacks you have in series, the higher the weight jumps between parallel stacks counts.

Subtracting cells from stacks doesn't work well. Lets say you have a single stack of 10 cells 10s1p. If you do something like 8s1p, you lower the output voltage, which means you need to have slightly higher gear ratio to spin the prop at the same efficient rpm, which means you draw more current, which means the extra capacity in the cells doesn't really matter if you are drawing more current.

ActorNightly··on The largest electric aircraft just flew [video]
yes, but current battery energy density is nowhere near fuel ATM, and evs operate differently. Gas engines use fuel/hour as a function of RPMS, independant on the load on the engine. EVs use battery juice as a function of the load.

When you size a gas engine for a plane, you design around the power needed to takeoff on a given runway, which is fine because in cruise, you will throttle down and use less fuel.

When you design an electric vehicle, if you design it the same way, you end up carrying effectively dead battery weight, which also affects power consumption during cruise (you either go faster, or use use more wing, which creates more induced drag).

IF you design it for cruise, you end up being horribly inefficient at takeoff.

The only 2 solutions are

1. 10 mile long runway where you can take your time accelerating, to reduce the torque requirement on the motor. You would basically limit the current draw and the plane would accelerate slowly, and eventually you get to cruise speed

2. Changing your flight profile, where you get to high altitude ASAP where you can be more efficient,

ActorNightly··on The largest electric aircraft just flew [video]
To get high voltage, you need batteries in series, which means all the batteries see the same current.

The only way to reduce current is to put batteries in parallel, which for a given voltage doubles the weight of the battery pack.

You could go with lower voltage, but that means for a given, power, you need more current, which drops your efficiency.

ActorNightly··on The largest electric aircraft just flew [video]
Electric planes can in theory get longer flights, provided they change the flight profile - you spend a lot of energy going up to higher altitude, and the essentially glide down.
ActorNightly··on The largest electric aircraft just flew [video]
Batteries aren't rapidly improving. Every single battery that has proposed higher energy density also has downsides in max discharge current. We may get at best like 10% improvement over what it is today.
ActorNightly··on Reasons robotics is hard
>Yes the problem is very hard. Mainly because high DOF generalization is very difficult.

>We have self driving cars because what are the control inputs? Pedal, brake, steering wheel. This already took many many years.

Its actually amazing to me that this hasn't been solved yet. Its really not that hard of a problem.

Modern robotics, including self driving, are famously all about end-to-end training. We are trying to replicate what humans do through muscle memory. But muscle memory is not what makes us good at operating in the physical world. The thing that matters the most is our ability to simulate the world around us in a compressed form into the future, which lets us predict how our inputs will affect the world.

A similar system in a self driving car should be able to drive perfectly without self inflicted accidents 100% of the time, especially with basic lidar to serve as an error correction mechanism to the camera 3d scene reconstruction.

ActorNightly··on Sony makes bold claim about game ownership
It will be fine.

Gaming as a whole is a shadow of what it used to be, specifically because it has been tailored to the masses who have no real opinion on any of this other then they want to play what their friends play.

← PreviousPage 3 of 34Next →