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stormfather

390 karma · joined June 6, 2022

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stormfather··on Ultrathin business card runs a fluid simulation
Just go to Perplexity or something like that, its well trodden ground. And essentially, what you're doing is discretizing the relevant differential equations and getting that to run in a 2D or 3D cellular automaton.

I'll give you a simple example. For diffusion of heat between 2 points, the rate of change (first derivative) is proportional to the difference in temp between them. So you make an update rule for points on a grid that says "calc the average difference of a cell's temp with that of its neighbors, multiply by some constant, and that is the amount to update this cell at this time. Run that for every cell in parallel, many times." Then you tack on a visualization and you can watch the heat diffuse. A fun example would be the cooling of the proto-Earth. You can watch the crust form.

Heat diffusion is a good starter problem. So is gravitational interaction.

stormfather··on Why U.S. dominance at sea is shrinking
The entire model of sea-borne power projection has changed. What does it mean when hypersonic missiles can be fitted with optical sensors to autonomously target ships? It means carriers now are about as useful as battleships in WW2. Nobody knows who can dominate which parts of the world ocean anymore.
stormfather··on Ask HN: What are your thoughts on the impact of AI on programming careers?
I am in denial.
stormfather··on Grok 4 Launch [video]
I find for auto turn detection, models work better if you put in the system prompt "if it seems the user hasnt completed their thought yet, output silence". This hack works around their compulsive need to output something.
stormfather··on When the digital nomad dream turns sour
I lived with a host family in Lima for 9 months on their roof. They treated me like a son. Extreme tourism.
stormfather··on Ask HN: What's the 2025 stack for a self-hosted photo library with local AI?
I would try the Qwen models before LLaVa

Do you need the embeddings to be private? Or just the photos?

stormfather··on IDF officers ordered to fire at unarmed crowds near Gaza food distribution sites
The point is to colonize Gaza, they won't irradiate it first.
stormfather··on IDF officers ordered to fire at unarmed crowds near Gaza food distribution sites
Netanyahu, when addressing the troops, even said "Do not forget what Amalek has done to you", invoking the memory of the biblical commandment to genocide the Amalekites.
stormfather··on New US visa rules will force foreign students to unlock social media profiles
Does anyone think this is about anything other than stamping out criticism of Israel?
stormfather··on Chatbots are replacing Google's search, devastating traffic for some publishers
Is this really that bad for Google? Do Perplexity and OpenAI use paid SERP API under the hood? Google doesn't have to make money from ads on search, if its paid search.
stormfather··on Defiant loyalists paid dearly for choosing wrong side in the American Revolution
Ghislaine Maxwell, for instance, was a mod on /r/worldnews and one of the most prolific posters.
stormfather··on The child-like role of dogs in Western societies
No, I (the child) am the dog that would die if it weren't fed in this situation. Sorry that was confusing.
stormfather··on The child-like role of dogs in Western societies
Idk, my dad was my best friend growing up and I never fed him.
stormfather··on What if you could do it all over? (2020)
Please say more
stormfather··on OpenAI featured chatbot is pushing extreme surgeries to "subhuman" men
I'm curious what your viewpoint is here. Is human extinction a bad thing? And if not, do you care if it's your own descendants thriving, versus the descendants of an immigrant?
stormfather··on Starship Flight 9 booster explodes on impact [video]
Electric cars are mainstream now. Reusable rockets are real. Twitter won an election and spawned XAI. Elon is the richest man in the world. Yeah bro, he's a moron. Sure.
stormfather··on People who believe that AI might become conscious
If you had a robot doing all the computations of a LLM on pencil and paper instead of GPUs, would anyone think it was conscious?
stormfather··on Death of Michael Ledeen, maker of the phony case for the invasion of Iraq
I've never understood what the real reason we invaded was. I just know it wasn't what we said, or oil.
stormfather··on Qwen3 Technical Report [pdf]
This makes me think the first to make a really successful model will be the ones to pony up to get human feedback at scale from the smartest humans instead of what they do now.
stormfather··on Sea snail teeth top Kevlar, titanium as strongest material (2015)
I think his point is that things very rarely experience purely compressive forces. Just being compressed induces tension in other directions, like water being squished out between your clapping hands. So even though water has great compressive strength, in practice this isn't very useful.
stormfather··on Show HN: AgenticSeek – Self-hosted alternative to cloud-based AI tools
What are the requirements to run this?
stormfather··on Chain of Recursive Thoughts: Make AI think harder by making it argue with itself
I made a trading bot that ingested news. The prompt to assess impact was to simulate a debate between Charlie Munger and Warren Buffet on whether to invest.
stormfather··on World Emulation via Neural Network
Its a time capsule, among other things. I want to take many, many videos of my grandpa's farm, and be able to walk around in it in VR using something like this in the future.
stormfather··on OpenAI releases image generation in the API
What you're saying just isn't true.

I can get an AI to generate an image of a bear wearing a sombrero. There are no images of this in its training data, but there are bears, and there are images of sombreros, and other things wearing sombreros. It can combine the distributions in a plausible way.

If I am trying to train a small model to fit into the optical sensor of a warhead to target bears wearing sombreros, this synthetic training set would be very useful.

Same thing with artillery in bushes. Or artillery in different lighting conditions. This stuff is useful to saturate the input space with synthetic examples.

stormfather··on Geocoding APIs compared: Pricing, free tiers and terms of use
I am trying Geocod.io right now and its been a very smooth experience so far. Generous free tier, no credit card required, good docs and a dedicated node library. And I can store results.
stormfather··on Smart People Can Stop Being Miserable
If you're of a mind to, ask for the Holy Spirit. Maybe its placebo, maybe its not. Doesn't hurt to try.
stormfather··on Peru's ancient irrigation systems turned deserts into farms because of culture
Yeah Ollantaytambo was Inca. They say it was constructed as a vacation estate for Pachacutec (?) after he conquered the Sacred Valley.
stormfather··on Oda Ujiharu: Why the ‘weakest Samurai warlord’ is admired
I don't see how anyone can look at the generation that survived the great depression, and look at boomers/millenials/gen Z and not see the truth of it
stormfather··on NoProp: Training neural networks without back-propagation or forward-propagation
Didn't they get neurons in a petri dish to fly a flight simulator?
stormfather··on Ask HN: Does any one know if Firebase is a successful from Google's perspective?
Supabase does. It has a spending cap, so you won't wake up to a 100k bill if you get hacked. An app I recently consulted for used fireabase SMS auth. Someone spammed their sign-in page and they were hit with multiple 4-figure charges. Firebase refuses to refund of course. Its a great model until it really, really isn't.
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