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vitally3643

1,162 karma · joined May 17, 2026

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vitally3643··on The Graph That Should Be Front-Page News
People also won't read 14 paragraphs of prose about a graph before you show them the graph
vitally3643··on Lost city discovered beneath Egypt's desert with ancient church
We put humans on the moon and we've seen the first galaxies ever born
vitally3643··on Transparency efforts behind the Helium Browser
Because the capitalists want you to
vitally3643··on Late Bronze Age Collapse
That's just the Sea Peoples hypothesis
vitally3643··on Building a real-time AI tutor for 5-year-olds
You are not making the world a better place. You've made the world worse with this project.
vitally3643··on What's slowing down the AI buildout
Ads
vitally3643··on What's slowing down the AI buildout
Sure, but then multiply that by several million buckets. Tidal flows can represent a lot of water volume, way more than you'd expect
vitally3643··on Transparency efforts behind the Helium Browser
The internet is literally just a pipe. There's no limitation binding us to HTTP. You can use any protocol you want over the internet, anything at all.
vitally3643··on Postgres rewritten in Rust, now passing 100% of the Postgres regression tests
If that's your concern, then your argument becomes "software should never change". Why dare patch any bug ever? It might be load-bearing in some unknown, undocumented, unsupported workflow somewhere in the world. No test imaginable can catch that apart from the scream test.

There are reasonable arguments against language ports, but this is not one. You're making an argument against code changing at all ever.

vitally3643··on Most slopcode projects are abandoned and deleted within months of release
Every programmer does this. Absolutely every last one of us.

What is apparently noteworthy now is that anyone can now have the ability to build and abandon a project just like Real Programmers do

vitally3643··on What Do We Know About the Microplastics Inside Us?
I'm not an expert but I'm going to condescend about an expert's "results" anyway.

Very informative, thank you for your comment. You have truly contributed to the conversation. Good job.

vitally3643··on Fable turned reMarkable into Tom Riddle's diary from Harry Potter
Because it plain and simple does not work that way. LLMs don't know anything at all, and there literally is no mechanism that informs the model that it's hallucinating or that it doesn't "know" something.

Open your phone keyboard and just keep mashing the next predicted word until it stops predicting words. It will eventually collapse into a loop of predicting the same words in a nonsense sentence. Does it ever stop predicting "wrong" words?

That's literally how an LLM works. It predicts the next most likely word and that's it.

vitally3643··on Treasury Has an Internal Report Warning About the Dangers of an AI Bubble
Authoritarianism requires a boogeyman to point and shriek at. It is required to have a big bad scary evil (and RED) enemy to justify the constant erosion of democracy and civil rights.

That's pretty much it. The reasons don't really go much deeper. There are deeper threads you can pull at and more well reasoned and thought out objections to China, but those are academic. The people in power don't care/can't comprehend anything more sophisticated than "communism bad".

vitally3643··on Every new car sold in the European Union must include a driver monitoring camera
A shocking fraction of people will simply ignore the seatbelt beeping for the entire drive
vitally3643··on OpenWrt One – Open Hardware Router
Let's also not forget that there are multiple governments lining up to "politely request" firmware backdoors.
vitally3643··on OpenWrt One – Open Hardware Router
The "trash can Mac" made this phrase permanent
vitally3643··on Solar rail could become common in Europe after successful trial in Switzerland
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Population_density_o...

Or are you talking about a different Poland?

People don't take up that much space and there is a strong tendency for populations to collapse into concentrated cities. In general, across the entire human species. All cultures and countries behave this way.

I think you've got plenty of free land.

vitally3643··on China sentences official to death for taking $325M in bribes
Or you use your single digit millions of currency to buy an island and retire for a decade or two while everyone forgets you exist
vitally3643··on AI: The ROI Runway Could Be Long Outside the Tech Sector
Labor, obviously. That's where all the money in a business goes: paying pesky human employees.

If your employees can suddenly magically do more work with the same pay, that's free money (for you). You can pay fewer employees, or pay them less by threatening to replace them with the magic robot.

The magical thinking version of this is that your productivity gains magically translate into more customers and more sales for the same input cost and labor. The free money is really free because you're a magical special snowflake company and every consumer will want your brand of magic machine outputs and not the other guy's. Where does all this money come from? Do those extra customers even exist? Who cares!

vitally3643··on Flock Defense "No Expectation of Privacy in Public" Is Wrong
Yeah except flock is literally photographing children on playgrounds and inside gyms and showing those photos to random people in exactly the way being described.

But sure, "word games". Sure.

vitally3643··on Amazon will stop accepting new customers for Mechanical Turk
yes, this site can do a lot better than nitpicking acronyms
vitally3643··on Big Tech Has Suddenly Flipped on the AI Jobs Wipeout Scenario
The same way you and I do: vibes

Welcome to the postmodern internet. It's vibes all the way down.

vitally3643··on Nintendo announces new product revisions in Europe with replaceable batteries
Batteries are chemical devices and have a finite lifespan. There's enough confounding variables involved that some people get real superstitious about it.

Through a combination of internal and external factors, lithium batteries go through irreversible chemical changes on every charge cycle. Total charge capacity always trends down. Depending on a large number of variables, this might happen quickly or it might happen so slow you might never notice at all. It's all down to how and where the battery is used because temperature is mostly what drives the chemical reactions.

The other thing is that lithium batteries which have been deeply discharged below safe levels are permanently damaged. Just like charge cycle wear, this can be immediately apparent, or something that goes unnoticed forever, but the cell is damaged and will never be the same. Recharging such a battery can cause physical damage inside the cell.

Point is, batteries are chemical cells. They don't last forever because most chemical reactions are not perfectly reversible. Their specific application and environment strongly affects how long they last. But we do know conclusively that when lithium batteries are kept hot and charged and discharged at high current (such as in a handheld gaming device), they degrade faster. Cells which are kept at a stable temperature and low currents (such as headphones) degrade very slowly and can last a long time.

If you look past superstition, there's an entire industry that's been rigorously studying this problem for decades. There's a lot of literature and evidence.

Lithium cells do degrade. How fast they degrade depends on cell quality and environmental factors. It is, unequivocally, a question of when a battery will fail. It might well be a decade or two, but it will fail eventually.

vitally3643··on How working memory could give rise to consciousness
> How do you create that which is not definable or measurable?

Through engineering.

This isn't new by any stretch of the imagination. Throughout our entire history as a species, we've been building things long, long before we had the tools to understand them. We built bridges and massive cathedrals before we invented geometry. We built and optimized steam engines for a century before we developed the language of fluid dynamics to understand why those designs were optimal.

Engineering very frequently is far ahead of the science needed to explain it.

As far as consciousness goes, personally I think it's an emergent property that will arise on its own when conditions are right. It will take a lot of experimentation to establish the right conditions, and then generations of study to figure out why those conditions were ideal for consciousness to emerge.

Because realistically we can't learn about consciousness with a sample size of one (us). We need to study other consciousnesses to understand the why and hows.

vitally3643··on FreeBSD ate my RAM
Silicon valley happened
vitally3643··on FreeBSD ate my RAM
That's why the current crop of authoritarian "think of the children" propaganda is so unreasonably effective
vitally3643··on Ask HN: Is anyone experimenting with different ways of using LLMs for coding?
Nope, honestly it's about three weekends worth of vibe coded python slop. Far, far below my personal standards for publication. Maybe one day when I get a useful result I'll publish a blog.
vitally3643··on Ask HN: Is anyone experimenting with different ways of using LLMs for coding?
I, like many nerds of the same stripe, have a dragon's hoard of every PC component I've owned in the last 20 years. I've attached as much of it to my homelab as is practical, but there's still a pile of GPUs from the last decade plus.

So I decided to load up everything with more then 3GB of VRAM into various machines on the network. Anything that could conceivably run an LLM of any utility. I've been experimenting with driving a swarm of heterogenous LLMs into coding tasks. I have models as small as llama3.2:3b up to Qwen3.6:27b dense. Over 10 unique models in the swarm.

So far, the results are... interesting. Coding isn't great, but what has worked shockingly well is polling the swarm for opinions. Getting ten unique perspectives synthesized into a single summary has been astonishingly useful. When I gave the swarm the ability to debate with itself, the results got even more interesting.

The end goal here is an autonomous routing network that learns which models excel at which tasks, which machines can fit which models, and intelligently routes requests and models to where they're most effective.

I can't afford an RTX 6000, but I can run smaller models on the pile of GPUs I do have. So far it hasn't worked out the way I'd hoped, but it did turn out to be very useful in other ways. Hopefully soon I can get coding worked out and the swarm can drive itself into self-improvement

vitally3643··on America, 1926: A forgotten 100-year-old report
English is a very context dependent language, so the phrases "surprised by how much" and "surprised by how little" actually have opposite denotations. Mechanically, sure, they're interchangeable, but using the "incorrect" form carries extra connotations. You've used the counterintuitive form, demanding the reader more carefully consider your meaning, which heavily implies you're making a point beyond what appears in the text.

If the second half of that reader engagement doesn't pay off, the sentence reads as clunky or incorrect, likely a mistake from a second language speaker.

Natural languages are not code and words can't be swapped arbitrarily. Word choice and construction carries meaning in and of itself, totally divorced from the actual words used.

vitally3643··on Alibaba to ban Claude Code in workplace over alleged backdoor risks, source says
I mean, we all also still do manufacturing in China with a 100% guarantee that your widget will be copied and cloned. It's so much cheaper though....
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