Hacker News: GhostVII

New comment by GhostVII in "The Valjoux 7750 chronograph movement"

GhostVII — Fri, 28 Jun 2024 23:57:01 +0000

If you are interested in more about how mechanical watches work in general this is a pretty amazing set of animations: https://ciechanow.ski/mechanical-watch/

New comment by GhostVII in "Tesla recalls all cybertrucks for faulty accelerator pedals"

GhostVII — Fri, 19 Apr 2024 22:09:49 +0000

Putting shifting controls on the screen was dumb for many reasons, but doesn't really cause a problem in this case - the cybertruck will disable the accelerator when you hit the brakes, accomplishing the same thing as putting it into neutral.

New comment by GhostVII in "Nine US states are teaming up to accelerate the adoption of heat pumps"

GhostVII — Sat, 10 Feb 2024 16:05:20 +0000

Instead of artificially boosting adoption, why not just price gas and electricity to match the negative externalities, and then people will just naturally choose the most efficient option. If heat pumps are cheaper, people will use them

New comment by GhostVII in "Crypto Mining Consumes a Mind-Boggling 2% of U.S. Electricity"

GhostVII — Sat, 03 Feb 2024 02:59:34 +0000

How are those relevant to this discussion?

New comment by GhostVII in "Half of recent US inflation due to high corporate profits, report finds"

GhostVII — Fri, 19 Jan 2024 17:39:42 +0000

It's only been ~one year since input prices have fallen, according to the article - seems like thats not enough time for prices to stabilize. If margins stay higher than they have been historically, I'm sure some new competitors will enter the market and undercut the high margins - but it takes more than a year for that to happen. Could be a good thing in the long term though, more competition

New comment by GhostVII in "95% of container ships are now going around the Southern Tip of Africa"

GhostVII — Tue, 09 Jan 2024 03:39:08 +0000

Id imagine the marginal cost is a lot lower than that though

New comment by GhostVII in "An underground delivery train comes to the Atlanta suburbs"

GhostVII — Wed, 20 Dec 2023 18:31:02 +0000

How is this related to the transit in any way? It's solving for speed of delivery, not congestion...

New comment by GhostVII in ""I just bought a 2024 Chevy Tahoe for $1""

GhostVII — Mon, 18 Dec 2023 14:32:42 +0000

I also found it fun to ask it to write a python script to determine what car brand I should buy - it ended up telling me to buy a Chevrolet if my budget is between 25k and 30k, but not in any other case

New comment by GhostVII in ""I just bought a 2024 Chevy Tahoe for $1""

GhostVII — Mon, 18 Dec 2023 14:29:10 +0000

It's also useful if you restrict it to only providing information verbatim (ex. A link to a cars specifications) vs actually trying to generatively answer questions. Then it becomes more of a search tool than actually generating information. The Chevrolet bot tries to do this, but doesn't have strict enough guardrails.

New comment by GhostVII in "I don't know why so many devs avoid a GUI for Git"

GhostVII — Thu, 30 Nov 2023 03:51:15 +0000

For me at least I do all of my development on the command line, so it's just much easier to use the git CLI instead of switching between applications. And regardless, basically all the commands I run (moving between commits and rebasing, mainly) can be done just as fast or faster with the CLI, with the added benefit of being able to see and retrieve your command history to easily redo actions.

I kind of have the opposite question - what benefit does a GUI have for git? If your tree gets super complex I get how a GUI makes it easier to navigate, but if you only have a couple branches it seems easy enough to just view in terminal.

New comment by GhostVII in "Rumours of SR-71 Blackbird Successor from Lockheed's Skunkworks"

GhostVII — Thu, 23 Nov 2023 13:52:31 +0000

Having a person in the plane does make shooting it down (or not shooting it down) much more meaningful, which can be important. For example in the South China sea, flying a manned aircraft around is a much stronger statement than flying a drone around.

And to me it still seems possible that someone could come up with some jamming technology that prevents drones from communicating with satellites or base stations - and if someone does, you don't want your entire air force to be disabled.

New comment by GhostVII in "World's largest aircraft breaks cover in Silicon Valley"

GhostVII — Thu, 09 Nov 2023 23:30:33 +0000

> only low-carbon in a marginal sense

What's the issue with this? Cargo will always need to be shipped around so as long as the marginal impact is low that seems fine?

New comment by GhostVII in "Cruise recalls all self-driving cars after grisly accident and California ban"

GhostVII — Thu, 09 Nov 2023 14:04:11 +0000

> In a statement on Wednesday, the GM unit said that it did the recall even though it determined that a similar crash with a risk of serious injury could happen again every 10m to 100m miles without the update.

This kind of misses the point though (probably intentionally). Sure the odds of this exact same type of crash happening again are quite low. But the question is how many of these "one in 10 million mile" crashes are there? Fixing just this type of crash doesn't solve the broader problem.

New comment by GhostVII in "DRM-free e-books are a big deal (2019)"

GhostVII — Thu, 19 Oct 2023 12:38:10 +0000

If there is no limitation, why would anyone pay for the ebook though when they can just get it for free from the library indefinitely? I just don't get how this works from the authors side, are they supposed to just give away their book to everyone for free? Or is the idea that the library compensates them enough to cover the costs of them writing the book.

New comment by GhostVII in "DRM-free e-books are a big deal (2019)"

GhostVII — Thu, 19 Oct 2023 03:07:52 +0000

I don't really get how a DRM free library works. Based on the article at least it seems like being DRM-free means people can keep the book as long as they want? What's the difference between that, and just letting anyone download the book for free online?

DRM for books will of course always be easily bypassible - it's just text and images, not exactly hard to copy. But I don't see how a "library" can work without some limit on how long you can be using a piece of content.

New comment by GhostVII in "The WordPress 100 Year Plan"

GhostVII — Sat, 26 Aug 2023 12:28:38 +0000

I think the Internet is more like electricity vs vinyl. In the US at least, how we transmit electricity has been fairly consistent for around 100 years - a toaster from the 20s will still work today in the same outlets. I think the Internet, and html, will be the same - small changes over time but fundamentally the same.

New comment by GhostVII in "The False Promises of Tesla’s Full Self Driving"

GhostVII — Thu, 24 Aug 2023 02:46:48 +0000

But they still aren't anywhere close to level three self driving (let alone level 5, which Elon promised). What's the point of self driving if you have to constantly monitor it?

New comment by GhostVII in "Australia Urged to Extend TikTok Ban to WeChat"

GhostVII — Sat, 12 Aug 2023 14:08:12 +0000

Seems like this would just be a ban on having it on government owned devices? I feel like they should just have a blanket policy of not allowing any software that isn't explicitly approved and required for your job, if government employees want to get a personal device they are free to do so. Seems so strange that that's not the case already.

New comment by GhostVII in "Twitter has officially changed its logo to ‘X’"

GhostVII — Mon, 24 Jul 2023 13:19:19 +0000

I don't think he really had special talent for business, he had strong beliefs that happened to line up with what was profitable at the time. I don't think when he invested in Tesla or started SpaceX he was thinking about whether it made business sense - he just wanted to build futuristic technology, and he was one of the few people willing to spend a lot of money on a new company to actually make it happen.

That doesn't really mean he is a genius at business, just that he is really good at pitching his vision and getting people excited about it.

New comment by GhostVII in "Why don't we get our drinking water by taking salt out seawater? (2008)"

GhostVII — Sun, 23 Jul 2023 23:06:26 +0000

That wouldn't work because the system relies on having a pressure differential across the membrane in order to function.