Viewing profile — MountDoom

I find it weird that you single out Bush. After 9/11, a military conflict was pretty much politically inevitable. The decision to expand to Iraq was stupid, but did it really shake…

Oh come on. Quanta Magazine basically writes for HN. They have very little online footprint elsewhere, but they feature here multiple times a week and I'm sure they know it. The ti…

> One can make a similar and likely more factual claim about the US , where largely every innovation in many different disciplines is dictated and targeted for use by the war indus…

Yes, and many German scientists went to great lengths to surrender to Western forces. I think von Braun was one of them.

> It reminds me of stories I've heard about the Cold War and how Soviet scientists and engineers had very little exchange or trade with the West, but made wristwatches and cameras …

Did this article travel forward in time from the year 1999? In the early days of the internet, there was definitely a good number of techies who were in control of the infrastructu…

The honest answer that applies to almost everyone here is that as a kid, they liked playing computer games and heard that the job pays well. It's interesting, because to become a p…

The regulatory landscape here is pretty funny. In all likelihood, the worst RFI offenders in your home are LED lights, followed by major appliances. Both of these are regulated les…

> I hope I've demonstrated that it takes almost no effort to perform a basic fact check. It isn't a professional skill. First, it takes effort when you're paid a pittance per every…

People say that, but the sales didn't really change anything. The site still looks pretty much the way it did back in the day. I think the main thing is just that Slashdot "belonge…

I get your joke, but the thesis here isn't that Neanderthals were exposed to more lead. Instead, the claim is that we might have evolved a mutation that protects our brain against …

HN as an aggregator of geek news is exceptional. It's not the first of its kind - Slashdot was quite similar - but perhaps because it's associated with the SF Bay Area, it managed …

> I think you could make AGI right now tbh. Seems like you figured out a simple method. Why not go for it? It's a free Nobel prize at the very least.

> TV stations are out to make money, not to inform society. Inform about what? Would you tune in to hear a daily report about how many old people people died of cardiac issues toda…

> These are cheap, relatively fast, and not particularly good. While they sport impressive-sounding 12- and 16-bit readouts, the effective number of bits (ENOB) is usually around 8…

> Nothing new to see here. Eh, I don't think that's a productive thing to say. There's an immense business pressure to deploy LLMs in such decision-making contexts, from customer s…

I remember people making the exact same argument about asking LLMs math questions back when they couldn't figure out the answer to 18 times 7. "They are text token predictors, they…

It would seem so. Looking at their website, they're not made out of graphene. For example, their flagship jacket is described as nylon + polyurethane underneath. It looks like they…

I always felt that I'm spending too much time in front of a computer, but it was at least somewhat meaningful because I had opportunities to create: write code, blog, and so on. Wh…

Google market cap has grown over 50% in the past six months. Nvidia was up nearly 70%. Tesla was in the same ballpark, I can't imagine why. Heck, Meta was up 35%, for no conceivabl…

Sort of. There are many confounding factors here. For one, they're harder to find because the number of personal websites doesn't scale as quickly as commercial content and SEO spa…

This article is almost certainly AI-generated.

The idea of not clicking on links is frankly preposterous. The company pays you to click on links in emails; it's the nature of your job! And it's also core to how we use the inter…

> At least it's not Musk's forever "next year". The problem with the principled approach to high-uncertainty projects is that if you slowly execute on a sequential multi-year plan,…