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londons_explore

40,164 karma · joined September 5, 2016

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londons_explore··on Engineered yeast for converting plastic and biomass compounds to food additives
Someone needs to figure out how to convert mineral oil into food.

If it could be done, we solve world hunger overnight.

Oddly many countries explicitly have a law that such a thing is forbidden. I wonder it it was preemptively protecting farmers?

londons_explore··on Nvidia agrees to acquire Hugging Face for $13B
I don't understand the CUDA lockin in 2026...

Surely anyone can take any piece of CUDA code and tell some LLM to port it to another platform and keep grinding till performance is identical?

londons_explore··on Nitter and XCancel receive cease and desist notices
Presumably you also need a billion dollar team of lawyers to use that card...
londons_explore··on MS Paint and Photos inivisibly watermark even locally generated output with GUID
The fact that local ai image generation uses an online moderation API is a bit worrying too....

Why not just mod the app to not call this API?

londons_explore··on Why aren't smart people happier? (2022)
Likewise, rich people don't seem to be happier - sampling the few thousand people I have spoken to in my life.
londons_explore··on Supersonic Trebuchet [video]
All the energy is lost to air resistance and left in the machine in the form of parts still moving when the projectile detaches.

Both of those can be modelled - rather precisely if you have the compute power. By modelling the derivative of all of those things with respect to every parameter of a parametric design, losses can be minimised with gradient descent and a huge Jacobian matrix.

A few parameters are obvious (string length, arm length, etc), but there is no need to keep the set small - you could model the exact shape of the projectile latch as a spline with 100 parameters for example, and let gradient descent find the best shape to minimize losses.

AI can set up and run all those simulations, and all you have to do is pay the AWS bill for all the open foam instances you'll be running.

londons_explore··on Supersonic Trebuchet [video]
I have had Claude run fluid simulations for me to check machines work. Seems to manage fine.
londons_explore··on Supersonic Trebuchet [video]
Interesting that his spool goes bigger at the end...?

I would think you want it decreasing to near zero to extract all the kinetic energy from the mass, leaving the mass stationary as it hits the ground.

londons_explore··on Meta's blockbuster trial draws parallels to big tobacco
A trial is also the wrong venue. It isn't illegal to make an addictive website.

Instead lawmakers should be making new laws.

londons_explore··on A 3D fruit fly on macOS desktop powered by the real FlyWire connectome
If the connectome could be wired to individual muscles, and then demonstrate the ability to walk and fly that would be amazing
londons_explore··on Supersonic Trebuchet [video]
I suspect that with a little iterative modelling of the whole system with derivatives, efficiency could be bought from ~40% to ~80%, giving you an extra few hundred mph...
londons_explore··on Linux 7.3 improves performance when running out of vRAM
I'm mostly excited for the VRAM savings from apps and games which have loads of unused or super rarely used textures.

Game developers often aren't super careful with this stuff, and there could be literal gigabytes of data which isn't used at all.

londons_explore··on GPT-5.6 Sol Pricing Cut by 50% on OpenRouter
Doesn't seem like a smart business move.

You're literally encouraging someone else to come in and steal your customer base,

londons_explore··on Low-Tech Ceramic Water Filter
For far less money than that you can buy a regular particle filter...
londons_explore··on Semaglutide linked to lower predicted dementia risk
Perhaps they need a bigger drum. Maybe they make a set of health guidelines, and for those who choose to follow them you get a $1000 tax rebate.

If the benefits are as big as some estimate, the added longevity and productivity will lead to more than that much economic benefit to the nation.

londons_explore··on Semaglutide linked to lower predicted dementia risk
So has anyone managed to separate the effects of semaglutide from the effects of weight loss?

If this is caused by the weight loss, it is a little disappointing that public health didn't act quicker - lots of people have been overweight for a century now, so literally 10's of millions of people could have been saved from dementia had action been taken 100 years ago.

londons_explore··on Donkey.bas is 45 Years Old – 131 line of Glory
It runs fairly well in dosbox in a browser though right? Why port directly?
londons_explore··on DeepSeek API Pricing Update
> don't think we're allowed to run Chinese models even locally.

That sounds like a policy written by someone who doesn't understand how LLM's work...

londons_explore··on Let’s take apart your phone
You're absolutely right.

I guess this website isn't ready for primetime yet.

Let me rewrite it all only to still have most of the same issues it used to have, and a few extra ones too.

londons_explore··on Show HN: Needle2: 14MB agentic LLM for phones, wearables, smart home and robots
It also seems to have far more tokens per second than needed for general "close the blinds" "tool_call(blinds, CLOSED)".

I do wonder if more smartness could be had by using sparser experts.... And possibly even having some kind of expert switching penalty to try to reduce the amount of data read from read only flash memory by encouraging subsequent tokens to use already loaded experts.

londons_explore··on France to ban unsolicited telemarketing calls
Phones could be set to "allow incoming calls from contacts only" by default.

Then a spammer has to persuade you to add them to contacts before they spam you

londons_explore··on How Claude marks AI-generated content
The bias has to be small enough that if you ask an LLM to repeat some passage of text like the national anthem, either from the training data or from the prompt it doesn't change random words.

Gotta be hard to tune that.

londons_explore··on Recycle – Floppydisks
I had a huge stack of ancient mixed floppies and sold them for a dollar each on eBay.

Interestingly most buyers didn't care about HD, DD etc. I suspect they went into art projects.

londons_explore··on Exploiting System Management Mode with a very long interrupt
Unclear why there is a 1 second timeout at all.

Presumably the patch for that will be to make it an infinity timeout.

londons_explore··on Show HN: Voice driven murder mystery, Interview AI suspects with your voice
It was working great... But now it says it can't connect.

Did the server go down or did I hit one of your limits?

londons_explore··on Microsoft Edge is about to lock out older ad blockers, just like Chrome did
I don't think this is the case.

Having worked on Chromium, the codebase is very modular and internal API's change pretty slowly.

I can stop work on my project (which does fairly serious surgery to the internals of the rendering system) and come back a month later and typically spend less than a day to merge head back in.

londons_explore··on US strikes $1.2B deal to pay German firm to halt offshore wind projects
These guys had already signed a deal to build - giving them permission and probably an agreed price - the money was to persuade them to give that up.
londons_explore··on 2027 memory capacity is reportedly sold out
Fail to deliver, and they get bankrupted because a court would not simply unwind the deal - a court would demand compensation of the market price of the goods not delivered on delivery day - which will probably be very high.
londons_explore··on 2027 memory capacity is reportedly sold out
Fail to deliver, and they get bankrupted...

Do deliver and they don't get paid because the buyer purchased with money that doesn't exist.

Lose-lose situation!

londons_explore··on Qwen3.8 Max now ranked as the best overall model by agentic index
I just don't think you can combine speed, latency, price and intelligence into a single useful metric.

Clearly the weighting of those things depends on the usecase

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