Hacker News Reader

joakon Firefox Browser Blocks Anti-Censorship Add-Ons at Russia's Request

"removed but only in Russia" the only place where the extension is relevant is in Russia. The extension is intended to circumvent Russian censorship.

You conveniently leave this part out. Do you work for Russia censors?

joakon Anthropic Chief of Staff: These next 3 years might be the last few that I work

Maybe we need a different approach or maybe more is different.

More training, more data, more parameters, more compute power... and voilà.

Hard to say... but we've been surprised more than once in machine learning history.

joakon Google Chrome's plan to limit ad blocking extensions kicks off next week

What about chromium alternatives like Arc and Kiwi? Will they keep manifest V2?

joakon Upcoming launch: Starship's fourth flight test

It's June 5, 2024, 12:30 UTC | 07:30 CDT

joakon We need 70% less coders as the AI handles most of the coding

AI makes coding cheaper, easier.

With an elastic demand there will be more code not less coders.

joakon Could I use the iPad as my only computer?

I use my iPad pro mostly to read pdfs. Neither my laptop nor my phone are practical for that. Otherwise I didn't find many things the iPad was better at.

joakon The solar industrial revolution is the biggest investment opportunity in history

This is why it makes sense to synthesize methane in summer, when electricity is super abundant, to use it in winter when energy is most needed.

joakon The solar industrial revolution is the biggest investment opportunity in history

A typical example is cooking fire in Africa. This is a major cause of deforestation. The introduction of cheap e-methane is the best solution in sight. When off-grid, cooking with electricity does not make sense.

joakon The Collapse Is Coming? Will Humanity Adapt?

«we are unlikely to come up with a magical technological fix to compensate for our bad behavior»

Bad behaviour... We have sinned, apocalypse is coming for us...

Wondering which magical technological fix they are talking about. Using bicycles instead of cars seems to me like replacing a technology by another. Home insulation and heat pump vs chimney. The choice of technology does matter I think... But I don't understand where is the 'magical'.

joakon GPT-4o

Voice input makes sense, voicing is a lot faster than typing. But I prefer my output as text, reading is a lot faster than listening for text read out loud.

I'm not sure that computers mimicking humans makes sense, you want your computer to be the best possible, best than humans when possible. Writing output is clearly superior, faking emotions does not add much in most contexts.

joakon Small reactors don't add up as a viable energy source

Remember that nuclear is not that 'dispatchable': you need several hours/days to switch off or ramp up production.

Switch off (curtailment) is almost instantaneous for wind and PV.

And otherwise, batteries, hydropower and gas turbines are dispatchable on the second/minute scale.

joakon Small reactors don't add up as a viable energy source

An alternative solution to hydrogen could be methane synthesis from captured CO2 and green hydrogen. The infrastructure to transport, store and use methane (aka 'natural gas') is already there.

joakon Small reactors don't add up as a viable energy source

Quote from where?

Could you please indicate sources?

BTW: you count a lot of "proposed" reactors. Proposing is easy, building is harder.

joakon mRNA Cancer Vaccine Reprograms Immune System to Tackle Glioblastoma in 48 Hours

Super traumatic for his girlfriend though...

joakon Insects and other animals have consciousness

"consciousness" is often an alias for soul with a scientific flavor. That's why "machines cannot be conscious" despite the fact that humans obey to the same physical rules.

Once you define consciousness it might be easy to implement. If I use the definition "perception of our own thoughts" it's already implemented with ps or activity monitor. The mystery is how this is done biologically and how evolution had led to it. But the implementation with computers is trivial.

joakon mRNA Cancer Vaccine Reprograms Immune System to Tackle Glioblastoma in 48 Hours

A friend of mine 23 years died of glioblastoma. Completely undetected, he went to bed with a mild headache and died during his sleep.

If we find a cure for glioblastoma the challenge would be detection before it's too late.

joakon The Arc browser arrives on Windows to take on Chrome and Edge

I like it because:

- I can handle many many tabs in a clean, efficient and organized way

- web pages show by default full screen, without: window bar, tool bar, url box, status bar, ...

- integration with AI tools

- it can handle several identities (work, home, hobby, ...) meaning that you be logged simultaneously on an app (gmail, notion, WhatsApp, ...) with different identities

- ...

What is missing: I cannot sync with Android

joakon The Arc browser arrives on Windows to take on Chrome and Edge

Still waiting for Android

joakon Booming AI demand threatens global electricity supply

«the AI industry is forecast to expand “exponentially” and consume at least 10 times its 2023 demand by 2026, said the IEA»

10x in 3 years!

If it keeps growing at this rate AI will soon account for most of energy needs.

joakon The Pirate Bay's Oldest Torrent Is Now 20 Years Old

Oral history: First torrent was uploaded circa 2002 by Bram Cohen's brother. It was a video of his metal band playing live.

But BitTorrent really took off when redhat played this dirty trick: their distro was free to distribute but you had to pay to download it. (free as in free speech, not as in free beer). Bram paid to download it and made it available with BitTorrent. The torrent of the iso kept running for more than a year with thousands of downloads. BitTorrent was alive.

Soon BitTorrent represented 30% of all internet traffic and was the primary reason to get xDSL internet access.

Before writing BitTorrent, Bram worked on a project named mojonation, when released it was slashdotted and didn't stand the load. Bram learned from this experiment and wrote BitTorrent in ~6 months.

(source: I met Bram Cohen + p2phackers mailing list)

joakon Engineers find a new way to convert carbon dioxide into useful products

I prefer this one https://terraformindustries.com/

Less PR and more doing.

joakon Engineers find a new way to convert carbon dioxide into useful products

Photosynthesis is at least an order of magnitude less efficient than photovoltaics in converting light into chemical energy.

joakon Engineers find a new way to convert carbon dioxide into useful products

I cannot agree more. Having a better energy efficiency can only improve opex but capex makes probably most of the cost.

And energy is probably free. Let me explain: if we install solar panels at scale only a fraction of the energy produced can be sold because in the sunny hours of the day there is overproduction.

So why would you want to have a better efficiency in energy use?

What matters is to build the cheapest possible machine, to make use of the energy in excess. At whatever efficiency, otherwise the energy is simply curtailed.

joakon EU requires devs to include mailing address and phone nr on app store listings

A lot of "companies" start as individual developers that don't want to have their personal address and phone number made public.

joakon EU requires devs to include mailing address and phone nr on app store listings

I just found this clause but I don't even know if I'm "trader" or not.

But I'm not going to publish my personal address and phone number.

joakon How the biggest plane would supersize wind energy

They cannot land when it's windy

joakon Giant anaconda species in the Amazon of Ecuador is the largest to be documented

Thanks, super interesting.

Actually the Amazon basin and the Orinoco basin are connected by the Casiquiare river (that flows in either directions depending on the rain).

That's why the newly identified Anaconda species is in both basins.

joakon Giant anaconda species in the Amazon of Ecuador is the largest to be documented

The whole thing is confusing, where did they find it? In Ecuador or in the Orinoco basin? There no overlap between the two...

joakon Giant anaconda species in the Amazon of Ecuador is the largest to be documented

I don't know, the geographic mess is everywhere:

«A giant anaconda species captured recently in the Amazon of Ecuador»

The Orinoco basin doesn't reach Ecuador... The Orinoco basin is within Colombia and Venezuela (and touches Brazil).

joakon Giant anaconda species in the Amazon of Ecuador is the largest to be documented

«The Orinoco basin of the Amazon» ?!

This is a geographic mistake, the Orinoco river is not a tributary of the Amazon, it's an independent river and one of the biggest. According to wikipedia it is the third or fourth largest river in the world by discharge volume of water.

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

«Its discharge is the third largest of any river worldwide, after the Amazon and the Congo»

Edit: change my wording about the journalist