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robviren

1,002 karma · joined January 16, 2018

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robviren··on Apple Watch Series 12
On what legal footing does this recap feature stand? In fairly certain there are a non-zero amount of laws prohibiting audio recording without consent. And this wrist mounted always listening thing is likely to end up in a lot of places it should not. Probably burried in the end user agreement that it is 100% the users fault.
robviren··on ZX Spectrum: Experimenting with 1-Bit Sound
It's just Pictionary Tim! He got even crazier when they gave him more than a single system beeper.

Silver Surfer (https://m.youtube.com/results?sp=mAEA&search_query=silver+su...) Pictionary (https://m.youtube.com/results?sp=mAEA&search_query=pictionar...)

robviren··on Porting my 1993 Amiga game to Godot, with an LLM reading the 68000 assembly
I'm actually glad to see it stumbled in a few areas. Always surprised to see how much it gets right though. I had always hoped the rather obscure parts of computer history and games would be this incredibly difficult area for Agents to mine.

The amount of non standard hackish and obtuse things that had to be done to implement things in the past feel impossibly complicated to touch today. Lots of people made it up as they went along and used the hardware in ways no one expected. Reminds me of Tim Follin doing the audio for Plock on SNES and Miamoto being shocked the audio was real. It would be so interesting to see what we could learn about development of the past from agentic insights into how code was constructed. I love stuff like this an appreciate the in depth post.

robviren··on The shrinking landscape of linguistic diversity in the age of LLMs
Embrace the esoteric! Grammar and sentence structure are but mear suggestions when everything I author can be claimed free form written poetry. The counter culture is humanity, we can be the embodiment.

I do agree though. Finding actual strung together words by humans is not easy these days.

robviren··on Queryable Executables
Between this and actually portable executable I'm not convinced someone hasn't made a PNG thats a spreadsheet, or an audio file the somehow renders DOOM across the room. HN amazes me with the absolutely cursed ideas of implementing a minecraft in pure css (or showing whatever other nightmares one can do with CSS). It shows the most incredible creativity in what one can do with the freedom of arranging bits however one wants. I'm in love with all these cursed projects and hope they never stop.
robviren··on Felony charges for citizen deleting phone data at US Border
But the bar for hauling someone to court and defacto punishing them financially and smearing them in the eyes of the public is so low. And the path to getting compensation for wrongful prosecution so fraught. What an easy tool the justice system is to punish uppity citizens thinking they don't have a king.
robviren··on Anime User Interfaces
I'm partial to anything that looks like a nuclear control room (saw one in this list). It's like a while different generation of UX but derived from totally different parts, goals, users, and of course a lot of the people who designed these had been military. Not a lot of room for fluff, lots of room for clarity.

Love to see the dizzying array of ways people imagined data can be shown. Everything these days feels so flat. Appreciate the share.

robviren··on Our position on open-weights models
Regulatory capture and lobbies will keep you safe and you'll like it! The sudden surge is Washington dollars makes great sense with this context. Only way to keep the kids safe is attested compute all the way down. Don't you care for children???
robviren··on Are AI Labs Pelicanmaxxing?
Why let your dreams be dreams? This is a perfect example of following a hypothesis. I love when people dive into an esoteric subject and just go full swing. Reminds me a CGP Grey and the name Tiffany. Sometimes you just need to know.
robviren··on Historic Photos of NASA's Cavernous Wind Tunnels
Reminds me of the old construction photos for nuclear reactors in the US. Astoundingly complex machines at a massive scale getting out together at what now feels like impossible speed. I can't help but feel like a Roman 100 years after the fall staring up at aqueducts wondering how anyone every built such a thing.

I'm positive someone could show me an impressive thing we built recently. I don't feel like that is my point. Im just astounded those people in that time could build what they built with the tools they had as fast as they did.

robviren··on The best thing that's ever happened for multiplayer games?
Give me self host code any day. This feels like the bait and switch AWS likes to pull. Would rather rely on the server in my dresser drawer than AWS for as much as I possibly can.
robviren··on AI learns the “dark art” of RFIC design
That is my favorite part of GA. Gradient free optimization but it turns out making a good fitness function is hard and like 70% of the time it just exploits some assumptions or gap you have in your theories. Really reveals the problem in different ways that traditional ML.
robviren··on AI learns the “dark art” of RFIC design
Reminds me of good ol genetic algorithm search. Guess and check can be quite powerful, especially if you can toss in agent in the loop guidance.

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

robviren··on Beer CSS – Build material design in record time
Extended FAB not rendering correctly for Firefox on mobile from what I can see.
robviren··on Reading for pleasure is sharply down among schoolkids, report shows
Idk, since letting my son stay up as late as he wants reading trips to the library have been weekly, even as he transitions to actual no image chapter books. As others have said we try to time box tech best we can. I may have to physically lift him from the bed some days but it is worth it to find him passed out with a book in his hand at 10pm.
robviren··on Ask HN: What are tools you have made for yourself since the advent of AI?
Automatic self hosted transcription service. So nice to be able to get my thoughts all down as context for projects. Really accelrates things.
robviren··on Ask HN: Who wants to be hired? (June 2026)
Location: St. Paul Minnesota

Remote: Yes

Willing to relocate: No

Technologies: Gen AI, Healthcare, VLM, Document Parsing, Integrations FHIR, SMART, RPA, OCR, Computer Vision, Audio Agents, Data Processing, AI Model Training

Resume/CV: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1TrFOAvpNJloO77H_wL8FxIuXiXy...

Email: robviren@gmail.com

robviren··on Human Bottlenecks
As a product manager I have found people's understanding of what they want to be tenuous at best. They know they want it to be easier, less frustrating, and do the darn thing they want. But collecting the input of all the people with the power to make choices, boiling that all down, and actually figuring out what will work is a total bottle neck. Technology and programming have hardly ever actually been a blocker. Legacy systems, conflicting requirements, and ever shifting choices represent a much harder problem.
robviren··on Valve raises Steam Deck prices
Like high gas prices leading to sudden releases of fuel efficient vehicles in the 70s during the embargo. I love that most indie games I can find will run on a toaster.
robviren··on The Forgotten Art of the LAN Party (2023)
I'd say the primary benefit of LAN parties now is how capable "old" hardware is. I have several laptops I configure with Linux and several games and environments loaded up. Smoke test the whole thing before anybody gets here. This year we played UT2004 with custom maps and characters. That game ran flawlessly on a 10 year old laptop with no dGPU. Emulation as well, but I actually still have most of those systems still.
robviren··on Minnesota becomes first state to ban prediction markets
Long story short it is a compromise between the Mdewakanton Sioux, the state, and Canterbury to keep gambling exclusive to Mystic Lake Casino and Caterbury. The State flirted with the idea of expanding gambling and started moving in that direction, but Mystic basically now props up Canterbury, lets them have some amount of gambling on site, and the State did not expand gambling and generally is protective of Mystic. It's like a pressure release valve on gambling with some small kickbacks to the nearby legacy horse racing track. It's a strange local arrangement. Grew up in Prior Lake and had a few tribe members in school so this is just my bias on the arrangement.
robviren··on Gaining control of every projector and camera on campus
Ex Vaddio PM here. Like 5 years ago all our firmware defaulted to requiring non-default passwords on setup. We also created a free windows application that can mass upgrade firmware and change auth if defaults were used. We tried!

Saw the Vaddio logo and had to chime in. Gotta stick up for my Minnesota devs.

robviren··on Appearing productive in the workplace
So artificially productive you que up the crap you do and slowly release it?
robviren··on Ask HN: Who wants to be hired? (May 2026)
Location: St. Paul Minnesota

Remote: Yes

Willing to relocate: No

Technologies: Gen AI, Healthcare, VLM, Document Parsing, Integrations FHIR, SMART, RPA, OCR, Computer Vision, Audio Agents, Data Processing, AI Model Training

Resume/CV: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1TrFOAvpNJloO77H_wL8FxIuXiXy...

Email: robviren@gmail.com

robviren··on Vera: a programming language designed for machines to write
I too have found the models do well with Go. I will say despite the backwards compatibility guarantee library API changes, what counts as "good" patterns, and new language additions do add some friction to the experience. Almost always works but it can be a bit inconsistent in how the code shows up.
robviren··on Show HN: Auto-Architecture: Karpathy's Loop, pointed at a CPU
I love genetic algorithms and find using LLMs as part of them super compelling. I always find the fitness functions to be the most difficult part. The algorithm naturally tries to exploit any little gap you leave it in cheating. Best part is not needing back propagation in solving a problem. However that is also the worst part in all the solutions just being one level above a random walk. The LLM augmentation really helps to give it a gradient and intelligence beyond random chaos. Love the idea of it being applied to hardware.
robviren··on Wi-Fi That Can Withstand a Nuclear Reactor: This receiver chip can take it
It was literally a guy's job on the floor to just replace modules and other electronics. The equipment itself would not become contaminated so it was safe to handle afterwards. It just got bombarded by radiation and became useless as a camera. Being hit by ionizing radiation does not mean you become radioactive. The main issue is if bits of contamination would stick to our fancy duct tape we had around the cameras.

As for why we needed them it's for a bunch of reasons. This is 30 meters down. You gotta inspect welds, replace jet pumps, pick crap up that people drop in, pull plugs, help guide CRD maintenance. Tons of stuff. You gotta see it all. Camera handlers are magical and learn to swim the cameras around using puppet like movements. You manipulate these duct taped to rope cameras using either the cable or the rope. Sometimes we would attach them to stupendously long poles we assemble which were also duct taped (this changed eventually). The issue is such a long pole is basically a pool noodle in terms of handling. Keeping stuff from getting stuck and having confidence in where you were was an art. I wish I could tell you nuclear inspection used fancy drones and super high tech robotics but a ton of the visual side is duct taped cameras and talented handlers. Ultrasonic inspection is where the robotics took over and where they earn their keep. Encoding the position is worth the effort. But for visual you can't really get a sub to do much better than a guy with a long pole. Haha

robviren··on Wi-Fi That Can Withstand a Nuclear Reactor: This receiver chip can take it
For comparison the lifespan of a camera module was about 24-48 hours for work inside the water of the reactor near the "hot" fuel of the reactor. Fields around there were I believe on the order of 1000-5000 Rad/hr. Looked like the biggest confetti party you ever saw on the image. It was difficult for the encoder modules to keep up as well because they compressed so poorly and the reactor floors were usually hot and humid with the reactors open. I tried to make de-noising algorithms back in the day to help smooth out the noise in the reactor. Really hard to make electronics work in those places. Turns out constant bit flips and ionizing radiation is bad for hardware.
robviren··on Claude Code users hitting usage limits 'way faster than expected'
I find Claude code to be a token hog. No matter how confidently the papers say context rot is not an issue I find curating context to be highly important to output quality. Manually managing this in the Claude Webui has helped with my use cases more than freely tossing Claude code at it. Likely I am using both "wrong" but the way I use it is easier for me to reason about and minimize context rot.
robviren··on The Little Book of C
I wish someone spoon fed me how to add path for C compilers in Windows back in the day. We lose a good 90% of people to installing C from ever learning C. Feel like godbolt or an online compiler might be a reasonable starting place these days. C is amazing but can be so punishing early on compared to stupid opening up any text editor on earth and writing an HTML file. Not advocating for more JS learning but it's hard to beat the getting started on that.
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