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jml7c5

2,409 karma · joined October 7, 2014

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jml7c5··on IKEA made a mod for Skyrim [video]
I was wondering what compelled Bethesda to update the game a few weeks ago, the first time in two years. On PC, any update to the game breaks mods that rely on DLL modification, so you'd expect them to be wary of doing it for no reason. Maybe improving support for this was the impetus.
jml7c5··on US sanctions Italian hosting provider Autistici Inventati
To be clear, I mostly mean attention and PR from the administration.
jml7c5··on US sanctions Italian hosting provider Autistici Inventati
The total attention given to this is a little bit goofy given the small sums involved. According to Autistici Invenati's costs page[1], the total they spend every year is €20,300. It's strange to see it trumped up as anything like a major entity.

https://www.autistici.org/who/costs

jml7c5··on NIST is selling Peanut Butter for $415.33 per jar
Though it's worth noting that Peanut Butter lost out to Radioactive Human Lung in the 2026 NIST Materials Mayhem tournament.

https://www.instagram.com/p/DWzaoS5EfJa/

jml7c5··on Applying a photosynthetic process to treat “dry eye”
I often get sore eyes when I'm sick. Perhaps you have some mild infection? It would certainly explain the fatigue. It could be an odd one, like one of the herpesviruses. An alternative possibility is mold exposure.

Task glasses might give temporary relief of the discomfort. They're just regular prescription glasses that put optical infinity at screen distance. This allows the ciliary muscle to remain fully relaxed.

Consider getting an opthalmologist to look at them, just in case.

jml7c5··on DARPA heavy lift challenge ends with winner at a 3.84:1 payload to weight ratio
Your assumption is correct, they were prohibited:

>3.7 Heavier than air: The UAS must be a heavier-than-air aircraft. The use of any lighter-than-air gases to provide buoyant lift is strictly prohibited. Teams may use chemically inert gases for subsystem actuation, safety inerting, and component rigidity, provided that there is no buoyant advantage and the gas is contained in components operating at pressures indicative of mechanical function.

https://www.darpa.mil/research/challenges/lift/rules

jml7c5··on US hires over 2k video gamers as air traffic controllers
Uneducated guesses:

My impression is that it's at least partially down to how brittle a fully automated system could be. You want as much of a "manual" backup as possible, and that only be achieved by doing things manually all the time to keep up practice. With the current system, even with enormous degradation (massive power outages, cyberattack, software flaw, etc.) it's possible to get planes out of the sky without much risk. If a fully automated system fails, it's an enormous disaster.

The other problem is that the "worse is better" arrangement where ~everything is done via voice over radio makes automation difficult. Voice is simple, universal, and enormously flexible, but hard for computers to handle systematically. Some two-way protocol and associated pilot UI would be useful... but then you have to decide on that protocol and UI, every manufacturer has to implement it, every airline has to buy it, and every pilot has to be trained. Unless it's very, very clear what the optimal solution is and that the benefit outweighs the cost, that sort of coordination is difficult.

(And remember, the ultimate result of such a change would be a rigid system that is difficult to change, more fragile, and does not save much money relative to the total cost of the airline industry.)

jml7c5··on A Fed official is asking whether AI is becoming 'too big to fail'
I don't think consolidation is the issue here, so anti-trust doesn't make a lot of sense. There are at least five major US companies strongly competing with each other. The issue is that total investment has gone far beyond expected revenue because no one is far ahead, everyone is bidding against each other for chips/power, and competition is driving down token price. Ironically, consolidation would fix this because a single winner would be able to charge monopoly prices. Anti-anti-trust. :-)
jml7c5··on AI's debt binge can't last, hidden borrowing reaches $1.65T
This is a bit of a "broken clock is right eventually" sort of thing, though. I could say without any evidentiary basis "there will be a financial crisis" for years and eventually be right, but I don't think it would be fair to say that I predicted it in a meaningful way. The details matter.
jml7c5··on Show HN: I simulated closing the Strait of Hormuz on real oil trade data
No, the two interventions are unrelated. Every indication is that they thought Iran would be a quick war with minimal impact on oil markets. Even if they did think the Strait of Hormuz would be closed for a long time, controlling Venezuela's oil does not help — it takes much longer than two months for Venezuela to meaningfully increase oil production. (And oil is ~fungible, so it doesn't really matter if the US is involved with production and sale. All that matters is that it's produced and sold by anyone.)
jml7c5··on An old patent inspired the new "Y-zipper", a three-sided fastener
Extremely similar to a rigid chain actuator: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rigid_chain_actuator
jml7c5··on My falling-out with the rationalist community
>This is a label applied from outside

I don't think this is accurate. Most rationalists seem to self-describe as rationalists, and talk about rationalism as a "thing".

There is some dogma, sort of, in the form of The Sequences. (An extraordinarily goofy name that belies some of the mysticism-adjacent LARP that sought to treat the ideas as revolutionary. I suspect a 20 year old was behind it.) I say "sort of" dogma because people are aware that the studies referenced in there turned out not to replicate and have generally abandoned them. But you still see some references to them and vague reverence of them.

jml7c5··on Texas wins court order to suspend domain name for violating age-verification law
They're not arguing for American-run websites to not exist.
jml7c5··on Gallery of Soft Matter 2026
I found the winning video entry (Photoelastic Particles in a Rolling Drum) absolutely fascinating.
jml7c5··on Aluminum foil (2021)
No, there should be no PFAS. The surface will be covered in trace amounts of oil from production, but other than that it should be entirely aluminum alloy.

https://www.epa.gov/system/files/documents/2025-04/foil-stud...

jml7c5··on Performance per dollar is getting faster and cheaper
>The people having glass literally break from the vibrations would probably disagree with your opinion

Can you cite a source for this? It's not in the video, as far as I can tell.

I would be wary of Benn Jordan's videos. They are full of mistakes and misrepresentations, as Andy Masley has convincingly demonstrated: https://blog.andymasley.com/p/contra-benn-jordan-data-center...

I recall seeing Benn Jordan's responses on Bluesky and thinking they were quite poor. He was unwilling to admit to mistakes, and kept trying to grasp at newly searched papers that didn't actually support his arguments.

jml7c5··on Steam Controller Auto-Charge – pilot to magnetic charging puck using CV
For those who can't decipher what this is, a video might be helpful. It literally crawls the controller along a tabletop using the haptic feedback motors: https://x.com/FossPrime/status/2070013003752251660
jml7c5··on Is sunscreen the new margarine? (2019)
It was published early 2019, maybe late 2018.

Searching for the title of the article ("Is sunscreen the new margarine?") makes it easy to pinpoint: there is a open letter responding to the article, dated January 15, 2019. https://www.asds.net/Portals/0/PDF/LetterToTheEditor-Outside...

jml7c5··on Is sunscreen the new margarine? (2019)
(2019)
jml7c5··on Ask HN: What was your "oh shit" moment with GenAI?
It looks like I misremembered a bit. The first iteration that blew up was AI Dungeon 2 (probably this link: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21717022 ), which he apparently had to shut down after a day or two because it ended up costing $20,000 for weird GCS reasons.

It was briefly an easy way to access GPT-3 before the public release, but that was later and apparently not as important as I thought.

jml7c5··on Ask HN: What was your "oh shit" moment with GenAI?
Was this AI Dungeon? If I recall correctly, it was popular as a way to access GPT-3 which wasn't available publicly.
jml7c5··on ESP32-S31
Oh, I wouldn't worry about posting a dupe. Announcement vs release is different enough, and people are clearly interested in it. I didn't link it as any sort of admonition; there was just some good discussion there.
jml7c5··on Rsync and outrage
>If there had been no major regressions, do you think anyone would have complained?

If there had been the same regressions but no AI, do you think there would be a 300 post issue full of people complaining? People are holding the update to a higher standard just because they used AI.

jml7c5··on ESP32-S31
Previous discussion from two months ago, when this was announced: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47561678
jml7c5··on Webcam head tracking, webcam to control in‑game FOV
I loved that demo, but the problem with "monitor as a window into the world" is that monitors are relatively small and people don't sit very close to them. The FOV you obtain with most setups is disappointingly small. You need to be relatively close to a large display for it to work well. It's one of the reasons why the idea never took off in the first place, I think.
jml7c5··on Do turmeric and curcumin have any actual health benefits?
The problem is that this is either unsupported by evidence or a meaninglessly shallow claim. After all, almost every herbal remedy does something, but it doesn't mean it's actually therapeutic for some given condition.
jml7c5··on What are locusts and what happened to them?
Ah, my mistake! I saw the references to writing style and assumed. I'm sorry. Unfortunately I can't delete or edit my comment any more.
jml7c5··on Re: [PATCH] OOM_pardon, a.k.a. don't kill my xlock (2004)
Thanks. I was confused for a bit, given these days you can do

    echo "-1000" > /proc/<pid>/oom_score_adj
to disable OOM killing for a process.

https://github.com/torvalds/linux/blob/master/include/uapi/l...

jml7c5··on Testing the WWI concrete ships and WWII concrete barges
Probably a copy-paste mistake while quoting the source. If anything, it makes me less inclined to believe it's AI generated.
jml7c5··on What are locusts and what happened to them?
>that doesn't smell like AI

Note that it is AI-generated. It appears to be based on a human-written outline: https://github.com/Explosion-Scratch/locusts/blob/main/artic...

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