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nico_h

639 karma · joined December 4, 2009

My web 'home' is at http://www.niconomicon.net .

I put some of my source code there https://github.com/nicolash

submissionscomments
nico_h··on Suspected sabotage causes major Netherlands rail disruption
The windows are entirely blameless. If a window gets near you, it’s already too late, you’re now just a message “pour encourager les autres”.
nico_h··on New Mac Studio with M5 Max and M5 Ultra
Just insane RAM price. Can’t wait for the bubble to pop. AI is useful but not at the currently unsustainable price (too expensive for the provided value to corporate customers at too cheap per token vs the actual cost of creating it)
nico_h··on How Europe is killing makers and micro-entrepreneurs
It passed on a technicality of present reps voted against in majority but not enough total votes because the president had triggered a special vote for the last session before recess when less reps are present.
nico_h··on In Australia, a home battery boom has helped cut wholesale power prices
Porque no los dos? Given the number of billionaires in China, it can both be true that workers are exploited, meaning they could earning more for less hours, and that the living conditions are better on average and possibly medianely than the local minima of 1966.
nico_h··on Why is everyone trying to build a solid-state battery?
Electric long distance passenger planes. Possibly requiring the help of EMALs.

Electric long distance container ships.

Useful portable laser, coil- and rail- guns.

Even longer range drones.

nico_h··on Advertise in ChatGPT
The downside of hydratation, with its kidney saving, headache preventing benefits is that the more hydrated you are, the sooner and more frequently you need to leave the workstation…
nico_h··on REO Trucks I4 4WD Pickup Truck Starts at $21,500
Is there anything special in making a $21k gas truck in 2026? I’m guessing you could get a second hand gas truck for this price?
nico_h··on I Like Small Keyboards
They are nice but please also look into the atreus, it uses a column stagger and has least some angling for your wrists. It’s both a finished product and also a set of instruction for DIY. Otherwise r/ergoMechKeyboards has a plethora of unibody and split small keyboards
nico_h··on Ask HN: Why is the HN crowd so anti-AI?
The current AI tech (LLM and other Gen image stuff) is impressive as heck, but it has flawed origins (facebook torrenting the books, everyone scraping the web and anything they can without attribution) and downright evil boosters advocating for the elimination of humans livelihood (they are talking to CEO). The “hyperscalers” moving fast and breaking things (their local environment mostly) don’t help.
nico_h··on Who will buy your services if you fire us all?
The rich already have control over the government, as exemplified by the fact that it’s impossible to tax them. Amd also over large part of the media (as they own it and are concentrating the outlets). The poor (all of us HN reader) have some control over small to mid sized towns and somehow new york, except where someone wants a data center constructed and the city can’t afford the lawyer to defend against it.
nico_h··on What happens when US economic data becomes unreliable
The very plot of rainbow 6, a 1998 Tom Clancy novel, except the preppers are actually helping the catastrophes along.

And, if I’m not misremembering, of Silo as well.

nico_h··on DjVu and its connection to Deep Learning (2023)
I don’t know how relevant the samples are, but while the details are lost, the essence seems well preserved. It seems it would be really useful for performing OCR on.
nico_h··on AI Doesn't Reduce Work–It Intensifies It
Oh you sweet summer child. Under capitalism money is a function of how low you can pay your fungible organic units before they look for other opportunities or worse, unionize (but that can be dealt with relatively easily nowadays). Except for a few exceptional locations and occupations, the scale is tilted waaay against the individual, especially in the land of the free (see H-1B visas, medical debt and workers on food stamps). (See also the record profits or big companies since Covid).
nico_h··on AI Doesn't Reduce Work–It Intensifies It
What about coops? Or partnerships?
nico_h··on France Aiming to Replace Zoom, Google Meet, Microsoft Teams, etc.
Maybe the high sea will become less policed by the Canadian IP police
nico_h··on Show HN: Ferrite – Markdown editor in Rust with native Mermaid diagram rendering
It’s a cool name but there is already another project called ferrite, related to audio recording. https://www.wooji-juice.com/products/ferrite/
nico_h··on Allow me to introduce, the Citroen C15
I’ve been a passenger in the front and the back of a C15 and they are pure utility vehicule. You get heating in winter and ventilation in summer. The windows are manual, front seat are okay, and I don’t know if they have updated models with aircon before stopping the production.
nico_h··on How the UK lost its shipbuilding industry
If it’s sourced from abroad it has to be shipped (blockades anyone ?)

If your usual trading partner is inaccessible for reason X , what are the odds your alternate trading partner is also affected by reason X? Are there geopolitical or national political reasons that partner B might become unavailable or unpalatable at the same time?

nico_h··on Mini smartphones from Japan [video]
Same! I want a small and not too expensive phone for typing and using on the go, fits in my hand and in my pocket.

And a (small) tablet for drawing and videos, it has less constraints in term of size, and can live in my bag.

nico_h··on Mini smartphones from Japan [video]
iPhone 4 was a beautiful piece of hardware, but it felt indulgent. Just too heavy (it’s still my second favorite iPhone design). The iPhone 5 and 5S were a better compromise in terms of performance and design per gram. I contend they were the peak of utilitarian industrial design. Plus lightning port, and touchid on the 5S. Maybe the finest example of the “naked robotic core” that you stuff in the case of your choice.
nico_h··on High-power microwave defeats drone swarm
Probably not enough margin in microwaves ovens to justify putting GaN stuff in it yet. Maybe for premium products. Bigger volume! Silent operation! More efficient!
nico_h··on I feel Apple has lost its alignment with me and other long-time customers
I mean if we were talking about Cheetos or Coca, I’d agree with you, but we live in a Duopoly on both Mobile, Desktop and the web. If you’re an adult, you’ve been living in their ecosystem for years. It’s kind if hard to not be emotionally invested in something you use all day for your work and/or personal life.
nico_h··on Texas Instruments’ new plants where Apple will make iPhone chips
While that sounds like a solution it’s of the “simple but wrong” kind. Just like you, they are product of propaganda, though theirs is less based in reality than yours. If you don’t counteract the source strategy (like the lack of education, biased fox “news” and adjacent media), nothing prevents it from being repeated in the resulting halves of your solution, Zeno style.
nico_h··on Show HN: Ten years of running every day, visualized
There’s a movement called “barefoot shoes” / “barefoot running”. Very different gait from usual running and all the cushioning is in the muscles/ tendons. You can find some brands that have coton + rubber shoes (rubber is from a plant whereas plastic is from petroleum, don’t know if that works for you). And hemp or wool insoles. Probably not very durable but softer and more flexible than leather.
nico_h··on Show HN: Ten years of running every day, visualized
Zoom way out, the usual area is a bit “south”.
nico_h··on Underwater turbine spinning for 6 years off Scotland's coast is a breakthrough
Yes.

The side effects of solar panels is indeed a cooler ground underneath. Plants have difficulty growing in the shade.

Panels have a darker shade than most ground they are covering, so they might actually absorb more heat than the typical ground they are covering. They are distorting the local albedo.

I think for geocooling by solar panels shade, the effect is completely local and only surface deep. After all stone/ground is an insulator, and geothermal energy is considered renewable.

nico_h··on Underwater turbine spinning for 6 years off Scotland's coast is a breakthrough
At this point i think removing any heat from ground is a net win.

Solar is just transforming light into electricity, i don’t think it’s removing any heat from the system unfortunately, unlike radiative cooling paint.

Now that we should be painting any tropical building we can with.

nico_h··on AI Is Dehumanization Technology
I think except for rock music and comic books and 3d printing the naysayers are proven to be right? The luddites went at it wrong , but the externalities are definitely terrible for all your examples.
nico_h··on AI Is Dehumanization Technology
All those LLMs are trained on stolen data, is pushed by ultra capitalist tech bro and billionaires, and eliminating jobs in creative industries.

It’s heralded as a tool for increasing efficiency (a western capitalism favorite euphemism for cancerous exploitation of the environment and humans) while neglecting it’s externalities, which includes destroying the jobs of the very people it stole the work from, and making you more reliant upon it, possibly to the point you forget how to do the things you use it for.

It’s a pretty devilish poisoned fruit.

nico_h··on Environmental Impacts of Artificial Intelligence
Sadly we’re already in the long term impact of the previous energy revolution, so we’d better get starting now instead of when we’ll feel the impact of this next compute evolution.
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