Hacker News: Rattled

New comment by Rattled in "Meta Superintelligence Labs' first paper is about RAG"

Rattled — Sun, 12 Oct 2025 10:40:57 +0000

Olmo by AllenAI and Pythia by EleutherAI.

New comment by Rattled in "Research suggests Big Bang may have taken place inside a black hole"

Rattled — Thu, 12 Jun 2025 09:17:26 +0000

I find it more useful to anchor the concept of "real" in what one has direct access to. Beyond that there are many ways to describe our shared reality and the space of possible realities, including the past and future, some of which are more real than others, and go far beyond what we can imagine. Quantum physics gives us a language to expand what we can describe and imagine.

New comment by Rattled in "Analysis of economic and productivity losses caused by cookie banners in Europe"

Rattled — Fri, 15 Nov 2024 15:58:23 +0000

Some of the most intrusive cookie banners I've seen are on EU institutional websites. If they can't find a way to provide access to information without pages of consent boxes what hope have the rest of us. The law came ten years too late and focused on a narrow technical step rather than the privacy goals directly.

New comment by Rattled in "What sank the Bayesian superyacht in Italy?"

Rattled — Fri, 01 Nov 2024 11:10:20 +0000

No sarcasm intended, from the details of both incidents they seem unrelated and not meant to send a message. Whatever the motives it seems unlikely anyone could arrange a storm to target the yacht.

New comment by Rattled in "What sank the Bayesian superyacht in Italy?"

Rattled — Fri, 01 Nov 2024 09:48:18 +0000

It's not mentioned in this article but it seems Michael Lynch's codefendant in the HP trial Stephen Chamberlain died a few days earlier - https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/article/2024/sep/05/mike.... Seems to be a genuine coincidence though.

New comment by Rattled in "Was the Internet created to survive a nuclear strike? (2022)"

Rattled — Wed, 31 Jul 2024 10:56:29 +0000

When was this? I would have thought the internet was well established before fiber optic cabling was widely used.

New comment by Rattled in "I Received an AI Email"

Rattled — Wed, 03 Jul 2024 09:07:20 +0000

Well said, too many people conflate AI and crypto, and dismiss both without understanding either. Crypto has demonstrated very limited benefit compared to its cost, exchanging value has been a solved problem for millenia. We're only beginning to understand what can be done with LLMs but we can see some limits. Although it causes some harm to say it doesn't create any value is ridiculous. We can't yet see if the benefits outweigh the cost but it looks to me like they will.

New comment by Rattled in "Humans began to rapidly accumulate technological knowledge 600k years ago"

Rattled — Tue, 18 Jun 2024 08:19:21 +0000

Why is it so hard to accept that different people can have a different internal experience of our shared reality? Perhaps different people have conscious awareness of different aspects of their own cognition pipelines though the pipeline is similar for most people, or perhaps there is a more fundamental diversity in how different people think. I find it interesting though how strong an aversion some have to being told what's going on in their own heads.

New comment by Rattled in "The Linux kernel has been accidentally hardcoded to a maximum of 8 cores"

Rattled — Tue, 14 Nov 2023 10:03:03 +0000

Can the title in the HN post be changed? I agree it's totally misleading after reading the article.

New comment by Rattled in "In 2017, developers competed for who could create worst volume control interface"

Rattled — Sun, 02 Apr 2023 22:35:02 +0000

It is, until you get to all the Musk and Tate posts under the thread.

New comment by Rattled in "Our reality may be a sum of all possible realities"

Rattled — Mon, 20 Feb 2023 09:01:35 +0000

This is the third formulation I've come across that sounds like this with space and time emerging from particle interactions. The other two are from Stephen Wolfram and Carlo Rovelli. Are the formulations related do you know?

I've struggled to get beyond their popular science descriptions to the actual theories, I find descriptions like the amplituhedron being 'a multidimensional jewel' distracting, if you have any suggestions where to start for a deeper understanding of this one I'd be interested.

New comment by Rattled in "Ask HN: Is anyone else getting AI fatigue?"

Rattled — Thu, 09 Feb 2023 14:56:13 +0000

Yes, PoW crypto is now a much more concrete example of the potential damage from poorly aligned utility functions, as well as the challenges in containing a system once it is released.

I'm finding the current hype cycle very frustrating from both sides. On one side there is frequent overplaying current capabilities, and cherry picked examples given as it they're representative. On the other side there is an over simplistic "AI is evil" reaction. It's hard to deny that progress in the past few years greatly exceeds expectations and could make a significant improvement to individual creativity and learning, as well as how we cooperate but so much of the discussions are fear based.

New comment by Rattled in "Human speech may have a universal transmission rate: 39 bits per second"

Rattled — Thu, 05 Sep 2019 08:48:09 +0000

I think some audio books are slightly slowed down by default, many I've listened to sound more natural at about 1.2x

New comment by Rattled in "Arabic Mathematics: Forgotten Brilliance? (1999)"

Rattled — Tue, 06 Aug 2019 22:07:40 +0000

I was told of Algebra coming from Al-Jabr meaning "number games". I was surprised I didn't see this mentioned in the article, until I found the book mentioned in Al-Khwarizmi's biography [1]. The book's title is "Hisab al-jabr w'al-muqabala" but no translation is given and Google's translation "Al Jaber account and interview" is not helpful. Can anyone confirm or deny the explanation I was given?

[1] http://www-history.mcs.st-andrews.ac.uk/Mathematicians/Al-Kh...

New comment by Rattled in "Negotiations Failed: How Oracle Killed Java EE"

Rattled — Sat, 04 May 2019 23:14:04 +0000

> Oracle has just open sourced the entire JDK.

Last time I had to download a JDK I got a warning about having to pay a license for commercial use. I think most enterprises care more about the licensing arrangement than access to the source.

New comment by Rattled in "The Scots Language"

Rattled — Sun, 07 Oct 2018 07:43:59 +0000

More like Wexford English (Yola), which was a remnant of old English.

New comment by Rattled in "Google is discontinuing Inbox"

Rattled — Thu, 13 Sep 2018 07:35:30 +0000

Threading in email clients has been around for decades. Actually I must check if there are mobile versions of mutt or elm.

New comment by Rattled in "Are we alone? Tiny spacecraft will head to Alpha Centauri to find out"

Rattled — Thu, 23 Aug 2018 17:37:35 +0000

I didn't have the concept of the eschaton until today, looks like an interesting rabbit hole to explore.

New comment by Rattled in "Craft: A simple Minecraft clone written in C using OpenGL shaders"

Rattled — Thu, 23 Aug 2018 17:24:59 +0000

I don't know how old your kids are, but if they're younger than 3 it gets easier. Never is extreme, you will surely have time for side projects at some point, but if you really care about it make it a goal to be part of your working day. That could be by expanding the scope of your current role, or cutting your working week to work for yourself a few days a month.

New comment by Rattled in "Are we alone? Tiny spacecraft will head to Alpha Centauri to find out"

Rattled — Thu, 23 Aug 2018 14:06:51 +0000

A cell has no way to conceive of a worm, and worms probably can't conceive of humans. But they probably have some conception of birds, and birds can perceive humans. Where are our birds? As you go up the intelligence chain the ability to see beyond seems to increase, but we don't see anything beyond us.