Hacker News Reader

gorgoileron Why the Bronze Age Collapsed

The Uluburun is actually mentioned, but obliquely in passing:

”Tin with trace levels of indium, particular to the Cornish deposits, has been found in shipwrecks near Israel and southern France”

Thanks for the direct link though. It’s very interesting.

gorgoileron Strange Parodies of Atari 2600 Video Game Box Cover Art (2008)

“Rainbow Tennis” was actually pretty good, if it’s a reference to International 3D Tennis! The games back then gave a frisson of the glamorous international world of the professional tour by changing the court ambience as follows:

Solid lime green: Wimbledon!

Hard brick red: Roland Garros!

Deep blue: the hard court ones!

Here’s an example of the, at the time in the mid 1980s, some pretty innovative 3D wire rendering in the game: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=h1JorNBSs4Q

gorgoileron Ask HN: What are you reading?

After my father died last year I’ve started going through his collection of popular-science paperbacks.

Done: QED, Richard Feynman. Lectures on explaining quantum electrodynamics but with no more math than geometry.

Currently: One Good Turn: A natural history of the screwdriver and the screw, Witold Rybczynski. The discourse goes into his references in depth. It has yielded an excellent list of museums to visit.

On deck: Impossibility: The limits science and the science of limits, John Barrow. A re-read for me. Barrow discusses what we can never know in a way that’s like P vs NP but for the physical world.*

gorgoileron AI companies in race to demonstrate their model most threatening to humanity

Doesn’t the “no moat” argument break down when you consider their brand strength, their distribution expertise in running inference at scale, and the future value of being able to train on all their customers’ data?

gorgoileron California is chasing wealth that has feet

Additionally, the state gets to tax you on what they say you’re worth based on the markets. That’s a pretty weird way to assign dollar value to someone instead of, say, looking at how many dollars they have.

While stock markets provide useful liquidity for investors entering and exiting positions, they are also rampant with finbro kids doing nothing more than jumped-up gambling. We don’t know which market trades fall into the serious wheels-of-capitalism bucket, and which are gambling, because we don’t have to know. The real world works in dollars so, to date, the state taxes people on the realized capital gain in dollars.

If a bunch of kids are selling handfuls of leaves to each other for a nickel each is the state now valuing my unkempt forest at $99bn? The state is welcome to pull up a chair and watch me try to sell 5 kilotons of leaves to every kindergarten playground in the country. If I succeed then it will take its cut of the capital gain. If I fail, it will not.

When the state starts looking inside the market black box and guesses, based on little Johnny and Becky’s recent playground trades, that I might be able to get at least $300 a tonne for my damp, rotting leaves, then the state is doing something at best weird and at worst unfair, and states doing unfair things is really bad.

Fix the system properly: when you inherit stock, you inherit the cost basis as well. Rinsing off capital gains liabilities through “buy/borrow/die” is the real villain here.

gorgoileron Feds Target AI Critics as "Foreign Agents"

Local LLMs are a kind of communist dystopia where, by way of analogy, every citizen gets to make their own bread if they want. What?!

If they were true patriots they would respect the restrictions of the congressional FLOUR Act 2028 and (a) exchange their labor for wages from Acme Corporation and then (b) exchange wages for bread made by, depending on your state, either of the big three: Standard Wheat, Union Pacific Bread Corporation, or Trump Agri Inc.

So which are you, friend, a <spits> communist or an American?

gorgoileron UK military jamming other nations' satellites to defend itself, BBC told

Presumably when World War 3 kicks off the very first thing each adversary will do is knock out their opponents satellites? These are like flying lightbulbs that shine down usefulness from above, so step one is to cut the lights.

Presumably-squared there is some kind of military backup to survive once the lights (GPS) go dark? Whatever that technology is, why hasn’t it proliferated into civilian life so that we all benefit from a resilient, non-GPS backup?

Perhaps the answer is that every tank has a 10lb inertial navigation gyro or some other thingy in it as a backup, and the platoon around it uses the tank as a moving trig point? In that case I can see it being infeasible to deploy that for civilians.

Perhaps-squared it’s just economics — GPS is cool and cheap now, so why burn profit margin on developing an alternative?

gorgoileron I don't want to read what you didn't write

Saying the hard part out loud: we give more value to the people with 1000 bit brains than we do to the 300 bit people. There’s a strong incentive to write like you’re the former and not the latter. Freely available LLMs give people the means to match the incentive.

gorgoileron Spymarks, not Watermarks

I feel like there’s some security engineering calculus that would be useful here?

You can’t definitively prove the absence of a watermark. You can only prove the watermark is there. Once you do prove it’s there, the thing that carries the watermark changes in some way — it is “burned” or tainted?

There must be value in having a visible vs an invisible watermark, or in declaring that a work is watermarked without revealing the hidden mark, or having two marks — one that is publicly verifiable and another that is hidden?

If the process itself can be defeated through adding entropy (or more generally by revealing the watermark algorithm) then is that not security through obscurity, which is to say it is a one-shot rather than a general system that is doomed to become obsolete over time?

Something feels off about a technology based on being hidden but whose only value is in being revealed but I feel dumb for not being able to be more specific about what feels wrong! It could simply be that anyone who can verify the presence of the watermark also now has a tool to tell them when they’ve successfully scrubbed the watermark off the work, so the verify tool has to be kept secret which in turn limits its usefulness.

gorgoileron Spymarks, Not Watermarks

(The word is “steganography”.)

gorgoileron San Francisco Onion Futures Company

Hard to take this seriously when it just lists “onion” as the commodity. The onion we extract from the ground is not the same everywhere. Onion can be either light or heavy based on the size and density. Light onion will roll more easily than thicker, "heavy" onion.

The sulfur content also affects the onion quality and price: “sweet” onion has low sulfur content, “sour” onion has high. Sweet onion can be used much more easily than sour onion, which requires more culinary processing to extract the sulfur compounds that make you smelly and your eyes water.

Onion has been shown to have a negative impact on climate, especially on air quality with people in confined spaces after lunch, but despite this it continues to be a valuable resource that is processed into many everyday foodstuffs: white, yellow, red, salad, and for specialist applications the highly refined shallot and pearl compounds as well.

Alas it seems likely that geopolitical upheaval will mean onion trading at ever higher prices. Brest Roscoff Intermediate (light, sweet onion) is trading over $8 a bunch (yes, crude onion is traded in weird units!) since the war began.

There’s also a bright future for synthetic. environmentally friendlier onion! Hydroponically grown scallions — so called “green” onion — have some interesting applications in the aerospace industry e.g. in-flight sandwiches and salads.

gorgoileron The first new cat species discovered in 100 years

It’s funny to hear they are not pack animals. I’m sure that is technically the case, especially in the wild, but my house cats definitely cling to me and follow me around like I am their leader. They groom/fight to try to establish a hierarchy below me, and when my partner comes home from work immediately switch allegiance to her, who they clearly see as the dominant mammal in the house.

They don’t go outside (they can’t really, it’s too busy by the road here and they’d decimate the wildlife, but I live with it because ultimately we’re doing them a huge favor by giving them a home, post-rescue) so I am sure that has something to do with it. Perhaps infantilism is keeping them in this pack headspace? But even then my mother’s cat — rural, murderous, tough tabby tom — treats her like a god and the rest of us as an annoyance.

gorgoileron Wax motor

The music is hilarious!

Thus moved solar-thruster

gorgoileron Landing the Space Shuttle – A Flying Machine and the Thrill of a Lifetime

Wow, I had no idea about the 10,000ft/min descent, or to quote from the end of the video it’s as if a regular airliner was descending from cruise altitude — ”ladies and gentlemen we will shortly begin our initial descent into Philadelphia” — to touchdown in three and a half minutes.

gorgoileron The Beauty of Roundabouts

Roundabouts are the Segway of civil engineering. In theory, a game changing transport innovation. In practice, just a little too mismatched with everyday aesthetics to properly fit in. Dorky and annoying for pedestrians too!

Good old traffic lights have a much better feature of being able to control traffic to allow for pedestrians, give cyclists a head start, give smaller side roads a look in at busy junctions, and giving a platform for traffic monitoring.

gorgoileron US confirms for first time it has deployed space weapons

While armor is indeed much harder in space, it is not impossible:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whipple_shield

Whipple shields use spaced plates to disperse the impact of a projectile on the first plate over a larger area on the second plate, and so on and so forth over four or five plates such that the final plate is not penetrated.

My father worked on high velocity impact ballistics and has some very nice multiple exposure results. The light gas guns used to propel the test cubes are just as interesting as the shields themselves.

gorgoileron P(doom)

”Ideally the regulators would have forced these models to actually benefit the commons if they are from the commons.”

This echoes my feelings entirely. It is galling that we do not at the very least get a bill-of-materials for the models on which we are increasingly dependent.

I hope to soon see the organization of public domain digital libraries of a size suitable for anyone to use.

gorgoileron ElevenLabs Music v2.5

Gosh, the voice singing “unlimited downloads!” but the underlying text saying “400 per day” sure hit hard. As if generative AI needed more publicity for its “we are literally just making stuff up” approach to getting stuff done.

Cool presentation, but who signed off on this?

gorgoileron iPhone Duo

Are smart glasses not the modern, practical implementation of the metaverse. I don’t think Meta were banking on games and low-poly avatars for their next generation of revenue, it was more about building (and then — hold onto your lunch please — monetizing) new forms of social connectivity. The only difference is that your permanent social camera went from being in-game to in-reality.

gorgoileron Coyote v. Acme (1990)

1. Re: complaint (1) the court should be aware of clear video evidence that, contrary to the claimant’s statement that a “rocket sled” was delivered via parcel post, that in fact the delivery was twofold: one 33” acme jet motor and a set of acme handlebars.

2. That the claimant used these to construct their own “rocket sled” is clearly outside any realms of liability for the defendant, who has not ever warranted that these two products be safely combined into a makeshift vehicle on the grounds that it would patently unsafe to use an acme jet engine for anything other than its intended purpose.

3. On this material inaccuracy alone we move that the claim be immediately struck out. See https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=8JuVMoGj6fE&t=180

gorgoileron Muse – Meta’s personal AI agent

That’s really interesting, and you’re right, I had assumed an agent could be instructed to treat all vendor copy as biased to the point of being hostile!

I also don’t think I’d ever hand the credit card over to an agent. I just want a summary of what it has found and what it intends to do before pressing “pay”.

gorgoileron I resigned from Anthropic today

I am not an AI super mind hell bent on consolidating my power by leveraging chaos to take control of humanity’s resources, but if I were then sending one million deepfaked ransom emails to impressionable people would be the best tool for effecting change in meatspace.

We have your daughter / dog / Amazon delivery. If you ever want to see her / him / it again, plug this USB drive into the control panel at your station / let off the parking brake roll your car into this substation / change the meatpacking thermometers to read 8C lower than calibrated / ground your vessel on this sandbank / send an envelope of white powder to these addresses / set fire to the following hospitals / …

gorgoileron Muse – Meta’s personal AI agent

Your example is about helping a consumer navigate a market to get the best product and I think it’s bang on.

Too many sectors of the economy sell the lie that they are operating as a free market when in reality they are confusopolies that inflate their margins by being tricking me into buying the worse product.

I can’t wait to have an agent navigate and summarize my options for me, so I can choose without having to be dragged through deal terms salad.

Choose from $9.99 for 1000 minutes then 12c/min and maximum 400 minute per day, $12.99 for 2000 minutes then 10c/min local only, both with optional NationalTalkXtra add on for $1.99, or $14.99 for unlimited minutes up to 1000 minutes per day, and 2c/min thereafter except on weekends with our $2.99 WeekendPlus addon…

gorgoileron Muse – Meta’s personal AI agent

Do you mean in terms of competence at resisting breaches? I trust Meta’s security team a lot more than anyone else’s in that respect.

They are big enough and pay well to have a competent team. Compared with momandpop.com (willing but too small) or equifax (big but unwilling) and given the kind of data they are guarding, they’re probably the best in the business.

gorgoileron The Helicopter with Radioactive Blades

I don’t have a good intuition for the aerodynamic environment around a helicopter blade in flight. It feels like it ought to be very blustery. Presumably there’s a huge amount of pressure on the underside and a drop in pressure on the top side, maybe even below atmospheric pressure?

The blades are a foot wide and 30’ long, so five of them carrying 25,000lbs is about 1psi of pressure. 3x that for a laden Stallion. I guess I expected it to be a lot more because, from the perspective of the rotor blade, it is in a very windy regime.

The other major open question for me is with the cracks. The system implies there is a non instantaneous progression from unbroken, to having a small crack on the surface, to having a crack large enough for nitrogen to escape, to having a crack so large that the rotor blade fails. I’d love to know what sort of timeframes sit between each of these phases.

gorgoileron We built our house for LAN parties (2024)

I really love the idea of having all the PCs in some place far away from where I, the human am sitting, but I don’t know how to do that. HDMI and USB cables can’t work over more than a few tens of feet can they? Or maybe these are special shielded cables, or sent down shielded cat6 cabling? Would love to have even more details on how to do this.

Also, since saying goodbye to my dad in hospital last year, whenever I hear about people enjoying time with their own fathers I feel really happy. I would have loved to build a house with my dad!

gorgoileron Icy Moons Are Ocean Worlds

https://science.nasa.gov/jupiter/jupiter-moons/io/facts/#h-m...

Jupiter and Io have a very interesting symbiosis. Jupiter melts Io to form dusty volcanos. It then magnetically sweeps Io clean of dust. The dust forms a plasma ring that enhances the same magnetic field.

gorgoileron Watch the 'Eclipse of the Century' Next Year When Spain, Egypt and More Go Dark

I see a few gloomy comments here about pricing and being “sold out”. Cheer up! The great thing about an eclipse is you just need to see the sky! It is an event it is impossible, or at least very difficult, to scalp and extort.

Sure, hotels in popular areas get expensive, but totality is visible from such a large swath of land that you can stay anywhere in a 100 mile radius and get a great cheap view off the back of a few hours driving and a picnic, particularly as August 2027’s path goes through Andalucia.

I flew into Palma for this year’s sunset eclipse, watched it from the roof of the airport parking lot, then flew home. I booked late and didn’t get the best deal and my flight was still only €150.

gorgoileron Meta reaches $17B settlement over social media harms to children

I remember, vaguely*, a British polemicist once tilting at the eco-populist demons-du-jour by saying “it’s not carrier bags that are the problem, it’s supermarkets, and it’s not SUVs destroying the plant, it’s cars.”

In that spirit, it’s not Facebook that’s crippling children’s brains, it is phones and the apps that run on them. OLEDs, Retina, 120+Hz, infinite scroll, algorithmic content, and 10h battery life are all just as much to blame as Instagram stories.

It’s like recognizing over-fishing is a crisis which needs to be tackled and then suing McDonalds because they sell a lot of Filets-o-Fish.

If we were to do something then we could hold our leaders accountable for regulating all of this, but there’s such an enormous conflict of interest there (namely that they’d be regulating the golden goose that gives them so much tax revenue and economic investment) that I long gave up hope they’d play it by the book.

* Rod Liddell? Giles Fraser? Nick Ferrari?

gorgoileron Grand jury declines to indict Ohio man charged with destroying Flock camera

Do we know that to be the case? This could just as likely be an incompetent prosecutor showing up with inadequate or invalidated evidence and the jury throwing the case out on grounds of procedural incompetence rather than sympathy.