Hacker News: OJFord

New comment by OJFord in "Anthropic Risk August 2026 [pdf]"

OJFord — Fri, 14 Aug 2026 21:26:14 +0000

R&D productivity. Pretty sure they claim more for e.g. Claude Code.

New comment by OJFord in "Count Binface receives over a quarter of votes in Clacton by-election"

OJFord — Fri, 14 Aug 2026 19:01:30 +0000

Because the PM technically isn't anything but the leader the majority party has chosen for itself, they don't even have to be an MP.

This is muddied a bit in modern times with press and overseas engagements and higher salaries for PMs than MPs.

New comment by OJFord in "Thanks to social media, canned sardines are a scarcity on the supermarket shelf"

OJFord — Thu, 13 Aug 2026 16:32:38 +0000

I'm also in the UK, and yes, around 4 whole where no one of them cut up would fit in the tin.

(49p is a cheap tin though, and I'm not sure Aldi has a fish counter? Observation conducted at Waitrose with £1 tins and 3 by weight for 80p.)

New comment by OJFord in "Thanks to social media, canned sardines are a scarcity on the supermarket shelf"

OJFord — Thu, 13 Aug 2026 07:37:30 +0000

Tinned sardines are convenient for toast, but if you want to cook with them it's crazy how much more you get your money from the fish counter.

New comment by OJFord in "London Underground begins scanning passengers' faces"

OJFord — Wed, 12 Aug 2026 20:16:44 +0000

> You describe mobile handheld scanners

Aka 'my phone', but yes. It's the same self-checkout machine (just only need to pay if you already scanned). Widespread in the UK at least.

New comment by OJFord in "London Underground begins scanning passengers' faces"

OJFord — Wed, 12 Aug 2026 06:43:17 +0000

I scan and bag while I shop, so self-checkout is just paying. It's barely a shift of work from cashier to me, because I have to pick things up and place them in my bag/basket/trolley anyway, scanning them as I do is barely an increase in work.

New comment by OJFord in "Andrew Wiles on proving Fermat’s Last Theorem (1995) [video]"

OJFord — Sun, 09 Aug 2026 23:01:02 +0000

Do you mean Atish Joygobin, for the background music?

New comment by OJFord in "My server is a phone now"

OJFord — Sun, 09 Aug 2026 18:34:23 +0000

I doubt it was OP's goal. Commenter I responded to on the other hand said that the original was more 'attention grabbing' than my clarifying amendment, and that's what I said ought not be the goal.

New comment by OJFord in "My server is a phone now"

OJFord — Sun, 09 Aug 2026 14:30:44 +0000

The goal as a blog author should not be to grab attention and mislead readers into starting your article only to realise it's not what they expected and were interested in.

New comment by OJFord in "My server is a phone now"

OJFord — Sun, 09 Aug 2026 10:52:23 +0000

I actually think it's just a poor title, "my server runs on a phone now" would be better.

As it is, I expected the server to now have a modem, to be operating as a phone.

New comment by OJFord in "Fastmail offers EU data region"

OJFord — Sat, 08 Aug 2026 17:57:20 +0000

But whose cloud infrastructure do they use? (I don't know, but it might likely be AWS, GCP, or Azure.)

New comment by OJFord in "Framework discloses data breach via Metabase 0-day"

OJFord — Sat, 08 Aug 2026 15:02:04 +0000

I'd have expected an email too, but surely 'preorder accepted' acknowledges the payment?

New comment by OJFord in "2027 memory capacity is reportedly sold out"

OJFord — Sat, 08 Aug 2026 12:31:23 +0000

I didn't say anything about USB? If you're referring to upthread wanting RAM to be standardised like USB (not standardised on something like USB), I took that to mean backwards compatible slots. (And maybe handicapped forwards compatibility, though why would you.) M.2/PCIe is this way.

New comment by OJFord in "The Golden Age of British Ice Cream"

OJFord — Fri, 07 Aug 2026 23:55:10 +0000

Sure, but it's not the only reason to use them, you can improve mouth feel and prevent melting even if the fat content's higher.

I'm struggling to prove a point because Waitrose doesn't seem to have any as high as 18% (the highest at 15-16% being own label & YeoValley, notably both using egg) – the more expensive brands like are lower fat and do have LBG/guar.

Also bear in mind low-fat can be a goal itself, or vegan compatibility.

New comment by OJFord in "2027 memory capacity is reportedly sold out"

OJFord — Fri, 07 Aug 2026 23:35:11 +0000

Yeah but DDR3 was faster then and still is now - I can't imagine my M4 Mac having a slightly older version RAM would meaningfully affect me, but another 24GB of it (or whatever I have) would certainly be an improvement.

CPUs have L1, L2, L3+ caches too after all.

New comment by OJFord in "Software development with AI is starting to feel like cooking steak"

OJFord — Thu, 06 Aug 2026 18:05:19 +0000

It's not wrong for all food, surface temperature measurement has its place, you just have to understand it is surface measurement.

New comment by OJFord in "I'm switching my phone from Android to Linux"

OJFord — Thu, 06 Aug 2026 02:47:28 +0000

..sure? I don't personally care what either enforces, since I'm in neither jurisdiction. I wouldn't have thought the US is any more (or even as) likely to personally, but sure. I said Brussels because comment I replied to said EU.

New comment by OJFord in "I'll be stepping back from leading product for X"

OJFord — Thu, 06 Aug 2026 02:44:13 +0000

Ime those people don't want to see the content at all; xcancel is used mainly by people annoyed by login walls (I even have an account! It's just annoying.).

(By 'those people' I mean those who tie their app experience to its CEO's politics or whatever. I'm no supporter, nor in the US so don't feel particularly affected anyway, but mainly I just don't care about the CEO one way or another when I use a website.)

New comment by OJFord in "LLMs won't break symmetric crypto"

OJFord — Thu, 06 Aug 2026 02:33:39 +0000

I think the thing most of us missed in dismissing GPT 2-3 as 'next word in sentence predictors' was that recursively this allows something resembling thinking, 'reasoning'.

LLMs are capable not just of calculating the most likely next word from a prompt according to a corpus of training text, but of doing so & feeding back into themselves, the most likely word now based not only on the corpus but on the basic prediction, a second (nth) stage of thought.

Yes it's all still token prediction, but it's predicting conversation between let's say not experts but capable speakers with all the information at hand. Undergraduates if you like. And such conversation can yield real results.

New comment by OJFord in "I'm switching my phone from Android to Linux"

OJFord — Wed, 05 Aug 2026 22:12:38 +0000

I expect everyone who can conceive of something other than Android or iOS* on a phone is on HN, and not a bureaucrat in Brussels.

*(or BB, webOS, Windows Phone 7 Phone OS Phone Microsoft, Symbian, etc. if old enough)