Hacker News: 7952

New comment by 7952 in "The largest electric aircraft just flew [video]"

7952 — Mon, 07 Sep 2026 18:18:39 +0000

But possibly closer to where a lot of people live (towns and suburbs) and able to be more flexible to where they might want to go. Such as having direct flights to a coastal holiday destination rather than needing to connect through a city centre.

New comment by 7952 in "US refuses payout for soldiers who died in Iran 'because it isn't a war'"

7952 — Mon, 07 Sep 2026 11:52:43 +0000

The dynamic is completely different though. Russian has a culture and acceptance of sacrifice, sometimes in huge number. America is far more transactional and has increasingly treated sacrifice as unacceptable or even contemptable. There is an element of machismo in the way that the politicians talk and behave, but more in terms of executing on a transaction. But in general both sets of leadership are very protected from consequences of war (very unlikely to suffer violence to themselves or their family) so it must all be a bit abstract.

New comment by 7952 in "The largest electric aircraft just flew [video]"

7952 — Thu, 03 Sep 2026 21:21:30 +0000

Those facilities can be much more modest and can scale up and down depending on location. Particularly for smaller short haul aircraft.

New comment by 7952 in "The largest electric aircraft just flew [video]"

7952 — Thu, 03 Sep 2026 21:20:37 +0000

But politically and financially it is very challenging to build new capacity in a lot of places.

New comment by 7952 in "The largest electric aircraft just flew [video]"

7952 — Thu, 03 Sep 2026 21:10:51 +0000

Generally all the weight of the fusaage has to go through the wings anyway so it is structurally more efficient to put weight on the wings in the first place.

New comment by 7952 in "Mayor says 'large chunks' of Wellington council Deloitte report written by AI"

7952 — Thu, 03 Sep 2026 10:58:23 +0000

Yes that is a good point and AI also gives us tools to make traditional systems more quickly. It could actually deliver on some of the original benefit promised by computing.

New comment by 7952 in "Mayor says 'large chunks' of Wellington council Deloitte report written by AI"

7952 — Wed, 02 Sep 2026 12:10:06 +0000

With many bureaucratic systems AI seems to be used to build a better horse when cars and tractors already exist. Everything was built for a paper based world and was never designed with data or automation in mind.

New comment by 7952 in "Children's stunted lungs show recovery in ultra low emission zone"

7952 — Wed, 19 Aug 2026 11:25:26 +0000

Particulate pollutant levels decay exponentially and have a substantial drop off with distance. So levels across a large area (like London) are not the whole story.

New comment by 7952 in "Working with AI Feels More Like Leadership Than Coding"

7952 — Sat, 15 Aug 2026 16:06:21 +0000

I think at some level that "following" bit requires a certain sacrifice or loss of autonomy that people don't strictly have to suffer. And good leaders tend to be able to get people to accept that willingly without needing to invoke authority. An LLM is making no sacrifice, they don't value autonomy so there is no leadership.

New comment by 7952 in "Crime Pays but Botany Doesn't"

7952 — Thu, 06 Aug 2026 10:18:38 +0000

It is clearly a very useful skill to have as it helps us find food we know is safe. I think in the modern world this tends to be something most kids don't have an oppurtunity to develop. When in a more natural environment it would be expressed much earlier.

New comment by 7952 in "Meta Ran Ads That Contained AI-Generated Child Sexual Abuse Imagery"

7952 — Wed, 05 Aug 2026 21:45:50 +0000

I think AI should the point where companies take some responsibility for the content produced with their tools. When the entire purpose of a machine is a form of thinking there should be some responsibility for what it thinks. It is nothing like a general purpose tool that the user just invokes.

New comment by 7952 in "Meta Ran Ads That Contained AI-Generated Child Sexual Abuse Imagery"

7952 — Wed, 05 Aug 2026 21:41:11 +0000

They have the resources to hire a vast number of people. So yes they probably could manually review every ad. And either way it is their problem to solve. They are not entitled to be hugely profitable or free from the obligations that smaller organisations have.

New comment by 7952 in "Park by Robot at London Gatwick Airport"

7952 — Sun, 26 Jul 2026 16:16:01 +0000

Most of the long term parking is surface rather than multi storey.

New comment by 7952 in "If coding has been solved, why does software keep getting worse?"

7952 — Fri, 24 Jul 2026 10:50:24 +0000

But that could just mean you are a more profitable customer. And that could be influencing how amenable the AI/agents are and how much money they are willing to write off to retain you.

New comment by 7952 in "Judge approves $1.5B Anthropic settlement for pirated books used to train Claude"

7952 — Wed, 22 Jul 2026 11:25:29 +0000

I think this posture is hugely beneficial to China if they can commoditise the hardware.

New comment by 7952 in "China’s open-weights AI strategy is winning"

7952 — Tue, 21 Jul 2026 11:25:06 +0000

The cloud era seemed to start out being about availability of storage and slowly switched in big corporates to be about security and governance. The first seems stupid now considering how much local storage we have. The later might depend on what security issues crop up.

New comment by 7952 in "AWS: Inaccurate Estimated Billing Data – $1.7 billion"

7952 — Fri, 17 Jul 2026 13:52:51 +0000

Far less scary than a smaller amount

New comment by 7952 in "Anthropic flies staff to D.C. to clean up White House fight"

7952 — Mon, 15 Jun 2026 12:07:23 +0000

Being angry about one thing does not mean someone is ok with another.

And the context is quite different. The complaint about Trump relates more to what he is doing. Your complaint about Biden relates to something a party invitee did.

I guess a similarity is an element of virtue signalling. But if that is something you have a problem with then you must really hate Donald Trump because that seems to be his entire presidency. And the fight against homophobia is a legitimately virtuous activity. Right and wrong do exist.

New comment by 7952 in "Police officer investigated for using AI to 'create evidence' in multiple cases"

7952 — Sun, 14 Jun 2026 15:43:14 +0000

And it is possible that resulting image is a better match to reality than the raw data coming out of the camera .

New comment by 7952 in "Magnetoelectric antennas could transform how underwater robots talk"

7952 — Wed, 10 Jun 2026 11:46:06 +0000

Navies are known to use low frequency radio to send messages to submerged subs.