<rss version="2.0" xmlns:dc="http://purl.org/dc/elements/1.1/" xmlns:atom="http://www.w3.org/2005/Atom"><channel><title>Hacker News: KK7NIL</title><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=KK7NIL</link><description>Hacker News RSS</description><docs>https://hnrss.org/</docs><generator>hnrss v2.1.1</generator><lastBuildDate>Sat, 22 Aug 2026 01:48:26 +0000</lastBuildDate><atom:link href="https://hnrss.org/user?id=KK7NIL" rel="self" type="application/rss+xml"></atom:link><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by KK7NIL in "What happens when a GPU reads memory"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>a.k.a. VRAM</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Fri, 21 Aug 2026 18:28:00 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49392090</link><dc:creator>KK7NIL</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49392090</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49392090</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by KK7NIL in "A joke domain purchase turned in geopolitical warfare"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>The difference is that the US didn't start that war.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Wed, 19 Aug 2026 20:45:33 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49366992</link><dc:creator>KK7NIL</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49366992</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49366992</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by KK7NIL in "The Indo-European Family Tree"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>Basque is not an Indo-European language:)</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Thu, 13 Aug 2026 18:27:00 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49290053</link><dc:creator>KK7NIL</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49290053</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49290053</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by KK7NIL in "Students boo commencement speaker after she calls AI next industrial revolution"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>> In the past, "labor saving technology" has always spawned alternate jobs that people could take with some retraining.<p>Labor saving technology does not create enough alternative jobs to employ all those that it displaced, otherwise it wouldn't be labor saving.<p>Instead, the surplus created by these technologies allows that society to deploy labor on less immediately necessary jobs. These jobs weren't created by the technology, they were always there, but society did not have the resources to staff them (think education, research, academia, merchants, etc.)<p>This dynamic has been true since pre-historic times, so you'll need some extraordinary evidence if you want us to believe this time is different.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Mon, 11 May 2026 18:40:48 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48098939</link><dc:creator>KK7NIL</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48098939</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48098939</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by KK7NIL in "Students boo commencement speaker after she calls AI next industrial revolution"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>He's pointing out that labor has always opposed labor saving technology, despite that being the basis of our modern quality of life.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Mon, 11 May 2026 17:52:00 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48098241</link><dc:creator>KK7NIL</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48098241</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48098241</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by KK7NIL in "AMÁLIA and the future of European Portuguese LLMs"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>> I'm not sure how many languages you speak or encountered in the wild before, but some languages are VERY different from each other, some are a bit different and others are basically the same with some differences.<p>I'm a dual citizen of Portugal and Brazil and I live in the US now, so that's my linguistic background. (Also studied bits of French, Russian, Latin and Greek.)<p>> Doing what I describe for languages that are similar is easier than languages that are very different, for what I hope are obvious reasons.<p>Not only are your reasons not obvious, your conclusion is actually wrong.<p>If the goal is to create an LLM with minimal Brazilian Portuguese bias (which was one of their main goals), it might actually make more sense to train it in any other language BUT Brazilian Portuguese (say, English), then fine-tune it for European Portuguese.<p>LLM's have shown to be very good at generalizing across languages (the transformer architecture literally comes from work on translators IIRC).</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Mon, 11 May 2026 17:10:26 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48097704</link><dc:creator>KK7NIL</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48097704</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48097704</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by KK7NIL in "AMÁLIA and the future of European Portuguese LLMs"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>What's your evidence for that?<p>And if the first 80% doesn't bias the language after post-training (which I think is what you're claiming) why not go for English or a mixture of languages, which is essentially what they did by starting with EuroLLM?</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Mon, 11 May 2026 16:29:38 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48097188</link><dc:creator>KK7NIL</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48097188</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48097188</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by KK7NIL in "AMÁLIA and the future of European Portuguese LLMs"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>The whole point of this project is to have an LLM that speaks European Portuguese, not Brazilian Portuguese.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Mon, 11 May 2026 16:22:13 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48097074</link><dc:creator>KK7NIL</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48097074</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48097074</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by KK7NIL in "Brazil's Pix payment system faces pressure from Visa and Mastercard"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>> Why would you let America take 2-3% of your transaction volumes?<p>I don't think VISA/Mastercard takes such a fee? (They'd be some of the biggest companies in the world if they did.)<p>The fees they charge are actually fractions of a percent, the rest are charged by the card issuer, which is usually your bank.<p>You could, in theory, use the VISA network and not pay those fees to a card issuer.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Thu, 07 May 2026 18:38:29 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48053103</link><dc:creator>KK7NIL</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48053103</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48053103</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by KK7NIL in "Researchers print structural colour with an inkjet printer"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>Presumably they're making the leap that this printing technology can be leveraged to develop an alternative display technology that would change the structure in real time, kind of like color e-ink displays.<p>It's quite the leap, but that's science communication for you!</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Wed, 06 May 2026 00:26:32 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48030611</link><dc:creator>KK7NIL</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48030611</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48030611</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by KK7NIL in "Welcome to Gas City"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>I'd say Skyrim was just around the border where you started to get engines which uncoupled physics from FPS.<p>This only really matters for competitive games though, so it's not surprising it wasn't prioritized.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Tue, 05 May 2026 17:45:27 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48025936</link><dc:creator>KK7NIL</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48025936</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48025936</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by KK7NIL in "Welcome to Gas City"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>Are the quake, goldsource, source, etc engines jank? Because they all did this, to some extent.<p>It might be harder to find an engine from the early 2010's that <i>didn't</i> tie at least some physics to FPS.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Mon, 04 May 2026 22:16:03 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48015694</link><dc:creator>KK7NIL</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48015694</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48015694</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by KK7NIL in "How Semiconductors Were Made in America"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>> If you have a diode, then the transistor is only a small step away.<p>It is not. We've had semiconductor diodes since 1874, but it took many decades to develop the solid state physics to understand how they worked and how to extend them. 
Crucially, you need some understanding of quantum theory (energy levels, Fermi distributions, etc), which was not developed until the 20s and 30s.<p>Even after they had the physics down, Shockley still spent over a decade unsuccessfully trying to get a FET to work (due to trapped charges which were not understood until the 50s).
This is partially why the experimentalists, Bardeen and Brattain, are quoted alongside Shockley as the inventors of the transistor, even though Shockley had come up with a lot of the theory years before.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Fri, 01 May 2026 00:21:03 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47970027</link><dc:creator>KK7NIL</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47970027</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47970027</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by KK7NIL in "How Semiconductors Were Made in America"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>Considering two Germans in Paris independently discovered the transistor just a few months after Shockley's team, this seems like a self-serving fantasy: <a href="https://www.computerhistory.org/siliconengine/the-european-transistor-invention/" rel="nofollow">https://www.computerhistory.org/siliconengine/the-european-t...</a><p>There's no question in my mind that American industry and capital markets were far better at pivoting to this new industry though.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Thu, 30 Apr 2026 19:55:18 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47967428</link><dc:creator>KK7NIL</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47967428</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47967428</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by KK7NIL in "U.S. Debt Tops 100% of GDP"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>And the other side would say that if we cut welfare spending we'd have a reasonable debt to GDP ratio.<p>It's very much political and it's a joke to pretend otherwise.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Thu, 30 Apr 2026 13:36:21 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47962235</link><dc:creator>KK7NIL</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47962235</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47962235</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by KK7NIL in "ASML became the chokepoint for cutting-edge chips"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>Nvidia subsidized machine learning research for years (both with CUDA, hardware donations and developing what was a very niche product line just for them) before deep learning became big, much less the advent of LLMs.<p>Certainly Jensen seemed to have an extremely long view on this burgeoning machine learning market in the early 2010's.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Tue, 28 Apr 2026 18:49:05 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47938789</link><dc:creator>KK7NIL</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47938789</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47938789</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by KK7NIL in "NIST scientists create 'any wavelength' lasers"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>The velocity factor is usually 0.6-0.7, never seen it as low as 0.5.<p>And it's set by the dielectric, not the conducting material.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Sun, 19 Apr 2026 11:16:42 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47823455</link><dc:creator>KK7NIL</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47823455</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47823455</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by KK7NIL in "NIST scientists create 'any wavelength' lasers"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>No, the problem is getting a high power (hundreds of watts) and high uptime EUV source, there's no reason to think this is a step towards that at the moment.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Sun, 19 Apr 2026 11:12:23 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47823434</link><dc:creator>KK7NIL</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47823434</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47823434</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by KK7NIL in "NYC to open municipal grocery store in 2027"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>> If someone is stealing your only $20 out of your pocket and I stop them and you now have $20 in your pocket, I've just created conditions for commerce on the part of you taking that $20 and spending it someplace else in the market than on the thief.<p>Grocery stores aren't thieves, they're largely pretty terrible businesses with extremely thin margins.<p>But, to engage with your ridiculous bait and switch: whether I or the thief have $20 is irrelevant to the commerce as he'll presumably spend it at the market too, so even this ridiculously contrived example falls flat on its face.<p>> rich person bids up Tesla stock and makes Elon into a billionaire off a PE of 317 now, thin air pumped into the balloon in other words with all this money tied up in overpriced TSLA stock than empowering real work in the economy.<p>Here you go again with some ridiculously biased example, but I'll engage with it for your own sake: money that's invested doesn't just disappear, it goes into the pockets of employees and suppliers or gets reinvested in some other way, continuing the cycle.<p>> What do you believe the role of government is?<p>Limited.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Tue, 14 Apr 2026 20:53:17 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47771366</link><dc:creator>KK7NIL</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47771366</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47771366</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by KK7NIL in "NYC to open municipal grocery store in 2027"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>That post was not at all worth my time, it just cherry picked data without ever putting it together to show intentional price manipulation or monopolistic behavior (no, showing concentration isn't enough).<p>> They can't do anything about cartel behavior.<p>Incorrect, several states have passed their own antitrust laws, there's nothing that limits it to the federal government.<p>> The government engages in commerce all the time. If we took that argument to its logical conclusion there would be no libraries as they compete with book stores. There would be no armies as they compete with Blackrock mercenaries. No public transit as it competes with private transit. No public events as that competes with ticketmaster. No public schools. No public universities. No scientific research grants. No sheltering or feeding the poor. No treating the sick. No treating veterans. No bridges. No roads. No harbors....<p>I do think the government should get out of many of those, so your argument doesn't really land for me.<p>> No, it seems a big role in this country for government is facilitating conditions for commerce.<p>I don't see how the government driving out competition by running its own grocery stores, presumably at a loss, is "facilitating conditions for commerce".</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Tue, 14 Apr 2026 20:16:13 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47770896</link><dc:creator>KK7NIL</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47770896</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47770896</guid></item></channel></rss>