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blindriver

3,633 karma · joined October 30, 2022

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blindriver··on Beyond All Reason (Free Total Annihilation Inspired RTS)
I got the largest metal map and created a basically impenetrable base, and then left the game running overnight.

It turned into a huge battle between the highest level of units and it was so much fun, but even then the AI wasn't extremely challenging.

blindriver··on Beyond All Reason (Free Total Annihilation Inspired RTS)
TA is my most favorite game of all time. I bought it on Steam and got all the modern Escalation mods. I will spin it up every 6 months or so and play a new game just for fun, I just with the AI were more challenging.
blindriver··on There is minimal downside to switching to open models
As someone that has pretty powerful desktop that I've been using with local open weight models, people are far exaggerating the quality of them. Some of them are now useful. They don't compare yet to the online models of ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, etc. They are still about 18 months behind. I have accomplished useful work with them, like image classification on Gemma4, but they are much much slower, much much more expensive and they don't scale at all.

A $10,000 RTX 6000 Blackwell card will pay for 500 months of Claude or Codex, which is 40 years worth of compute. Obviously they are going to raise their prices, my prediction being to $200-500/month, but that still makes them at least years of compute and they scale very well with more traffic. Single GPUs do not, they are pegged at 100% and good luck getting it to answer multiple queries at the same time.

blindriver··on U.S. science is in chaos
Cutting military should be done, yes. But everything needs to get cut.
blindriver··on U.S. science is in chaos
Starting wars was stupid and dumb and I hope the next administration cuts military just as severely but cutting spending severely isn't wrong.
blindriver··on U.S. science is in chaos
This is what happens when we are $40 Trillion in debt.

I'm sorry that scientific projects are being cut but are we supposed to keep funding everything ad infinitum regardless of how our economy and our future is going to be crippled by debt?

EVERYONE is going to be crying about their projects being cut and there's no good way to do it where everyone is going to be happy. Some people are going to lose their jobs, and that sucks but there is no other way except having the courage to cut funding. We have to cut everything and then reorganize at a lower budget number and the reallocate funds to the most important projects.

We can't keep funding everything. You may not care about our debt but I certainly do and there's more than enough of us around that care. Our descendants are going to be fucked and that's not fair. I'm sorry you're losing your job but soon over half our budget is going to be used to pay off interest on our debt. Just the interest and not the principal. This is an economic crisis.

blindriver··on Calvin and Hobbes and the price of integrity
He didn't license his characters, he's not worth a hundred million dollars.
blindriver··on Calvin and Hobbes and the price of integrity
If I were a trillionaire like Elon Musk, Bill Watterson would be one of those people I would anonymous gift enough money so that the rest of their lives would be comfortable. We need more people like him, and he should be rewarded for it.
blindriver··on A backdoor in a LinkedIn job offer
LinkedIn is a cesspool of scams now.

They know there's a high degree of fraud and they don't do anything about it. They don't care.

I've gotten tricked into sending my resume and talking on the phone with legitimate looking recruiters from Google, Netflix, Meta, OpenAI, Anthropic, etc, but LinkedIn does nothing about it.

blindriver··on A 'cold blob' in the Atlantic could be a sign of AMOC shutdown
A cartoon purporting to know the localized temperatures around the world going back 20,000 years is not science.
blindriver··on A 'cold blob' in the Atlantic could be a sign of AMOC shutdown
Nothing you wrote refutes anything that I said. Comparing actual historical temperatures to speculative temperatures where no models have been accurate isn't science.
blindriver··on A 'cold blob' in the Atlantic could be a sign of AMOC shutdown
My source of climate skepticisms is based on the following:

1) We know that the Earth was much warmer in the past, including the Medieval Warming Period. We know that the Alps were warm enough so that the Iceman could pass through them without protection from the cold, and yet he was found encased in ice.

2) We know that the Earth is cooler now than in the past. And it's also hotter than it was in the past.

3) We know that previous historical temperatures had nothing to do with human-produced CO2.

Until someone can reconcile these facts, and they can say distinctively that the rise in temperature we see right now isn't the same reason as before, I'm going to believe that temperature will moderate and cool, just like it did in the past.

I live in California, where we were experienced a ~10 year drought. These same scientists claimed this was the "new normal" and everyone was in a panic. Then we had 2 years of rain and everything was back to normal for the last 4 years. In fact, it's better than normal. We are almost in summer, and there isn't a single area of California that is in drought conditions.

More importantly, no one is mentioning the "new normal" anymore. No one declared "we were wrong, sorry!" instead everyone is acting as if it never happened or that it's going to go back to drought conditions. The reaction is not scientific. It appears that climate science is driven by science fiction and ideology rather than actual science. And I'm quite sure there will be many people who comment "Just you wait and see!" but that's driven by ideology and not science. I prefer to follow actual science, and science to me suggests that climate will always continue to oscillate, on geological timeframes.

blindriver··on xAI is looking more like a datacentre REIT than a frontier lab
There is a lawsuit against xAI about those datacenters. They have a strong case that Musk is clearly flouting environmental laws. If they are able to get a preliminary injunction against the datacenters, then they are dead in the water. That's the only reason why they build them so quickly.
blindriver··on I don't want my search engine to think for me
"Search" is a ridiculous thing to be doing post-2022. Imagine going to a doctor and asking them a question, and they give you 5 printouts for your to read through to synthesize your own answer. Imagine you asked your spouse a question and they responded "Here's 10 links for you to check out!"

We have AI now and it's doing a mostly incredible job getting us ANSWERS, not SEARCH LINKS. Trying to pretend that links are better is just trying to copy with rapid change.

Quite honestly I'm shocked that Google keeps making more money with search ads because I don't search anymore, I get answers directly from it or ChatGPT without clicking on any links.

blindriver··on Ask HN: Who is hiring? (June 2026)
I have gotten so many fake recruiter contacts, it's not funny. At this point I don't know who is real and who is fake. I talked to real recruiters at Big Tech companies and they said their entire profiles have been fraudulently copied to steal candidate information or to get them to pay to get "favorable attention" during the interview process.

LinkedIn is doing nothing to stop the fraud at this point. There's almost no way to tell if you're talking to a real person unless you meet with them personally at their office.

blindriver··on The four programming questions from my 1994 Microsoft internship interview (2023)
I interviewed at Microsoft in Redmond in 1997 and got zero programming questions. They were all knowledge-based or brain-teaser questions so I don't know if I believe that they gave 4 programming questions in 1994.
blindriver··on SF startup is testing robots in Airbnbs, and trashing them, lawsuit claims
Why should this be criminal and not civil?
blindriver··on Private equity bought America's essential services
That's where the scam is. They sell to their pension fund and mutual fund buddies, and in return when they get a really good deal, those funds will be first in line. It's a scratch-my-back-scratch-yours kind of deal that is utterly corrupt but no one seems to care because the losses are papered over by these huge funds.
blindriver··on Canada losing top talent as workers head to the U.S.
My point was that someone I've known for my entire life, I earn more than them through my bonus than they make working an entire year. This is a personal connection. The amount of money I make in Silicon Valley is enormous compared to people I know very well. It should be the same way in Canada and maybe having a solid layer of well-off tech workers will raise everyone's salaries. Experienced teachers in private schools in Silicon Valley make well over $100k, unlike my friend in Toronto so there is something to be said about the trickle down effect (even though I mostly don't believe it).
blindriver··on Canada losing top talent as workers head to the U.S.
I don't understand your injection of your own morality into my statement, it is completely orthogonal to my point.
blindriver··on Canada losing top talent as workers head to the U.S.
I'm sorry but is this an article from the late 1990s?

I'm also from Canada and I know tons of Canadians that have come here since the 90s. I even known immigrants to Canada from other countries (mainly China and India) that came to the US via Canada, using the TN1 or H1B visas after getting their Canadian citizenships.

The biggest problem Canada has is that any moderately successful tech worker is going to be dead-set on trying to get into the US because the Canadian tech scene can't compare based on base pay, annual bonus, starting equity or refreshers, etc. I make more money than all my friends combined. One of my friends is a teacher in Toronto and my annual bonus is more than his entire yearly salary.

I'm sure a lot of Canadian tech workers would repatriate and foreign workers would immigrate to Canada if they could lower taxes across the board and make life easier for tech companies and workers. There's literally trillions of dollars in tech ideas that could have been created in Canada but all of the founders left for the US.

blindriver··on Memory has grown to nearly two-thirds of AI chip component costs
Since January, I've been lucky and picking up various used DDR4 memory sticks for cheap-ish. I got a total of 64 GB for $180. I feel like I hit the jackpot!
blindriver··on Green card seekers must leave U.S. to apply, Trump administration says
F-1/OPT are not eligible for Green Card in the first place so it doesn't matter.
blindriver··on Green card seekers must leave U.S. to apply, Trump administration says
You can apply for GC from within the US. The only time you need to leave for Consular Processing is for the interview, after which you immediately receive your GC. Everyone is saying that the entire GC process needs to be done outside the US but that's wrong. You can have an H1B and apply for GC from within the US without leaving and you only need to leave for the CP interview which is a couple of days max.
blindriver··on Green card seekers must leave U.S. to apply, Trump administration says
You do realize that the overwhelming majority of countries in the world at not predominantly white, do you?
blindriver··on Green card seekers must leave U.S. to apply, Trump administration says
No, you're wrong. You can lose their Green Card.

If you leave the country for more than 6 months, you need to seek prior approval, and you definitely can lose it. I was on Green Card and when I crossed the border, I was questioned by the customs officer as to why I didn't get my citizenship yet because it was 15 years I was on GC and the point of the GC wasn't to be literally permanent. I quickly got my citizenship after that just in case the same thing happened again.

If you get arrested for a major crime, you can lose your GC but you can only lose your citizenship if you lied or committed fraud at the time of your application, or if you committed treason against the government.

blindriver··on Green card seekers must leave U.S. to apply, Trump administration says
Your experience wasn't nonsense. Your expectations are nonsense. If you think immigrating to another country should be straightforward and easy, then it's your expectations that are wrong. I also immigrated to the US and it was just as tough, even though I came well before Trump and from Canada.
blindriver··on Is AI Profitable Yet?
Anthropic is going to be profitable in the June quarter

https://www.cnbc.com/2026/05/20/anthropic-revenue-explosive-...

blindriver··on TikTok disproportionately served anti-Democratic videos during the 2024 election
Given the fact that the Republicans won, doesn't that actually make sense? More people consumed the pro-Republican content because they intended to vote Republican.
blindriver··on High dimensional geometry is transforming the MRI industry (2017) [pdf]
Our universe is multi-dimensional and we are only 3 dimensional. The only way to understand more about our universe is to try to understand multi-dimensions.
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