Hacker News: Robotbeat

New comment by Robotbeat in "Minnesota becomes first state to ban prediction markets"

Robotbeat — Wed, 20 May 2026 05:13:27 +0000

Just for love of the game.

New comment by Robotbeat in "Google changes its search box"

Robotbeat — Wed, 20 May 2026 05:12:42 +0000

LLMs are not a site. They are a clever person that can point you to sites. They, like humans, are fallible.

New comment by Robotbeat in "Google changes its search box"

Robotbeat — Wed, 20 May 2026 02:40:03 +0000

Or… the default LLM Google uses for search has been quantized to s**. Ask a proper Thinking model, with browsing enabled, and odds of a correct answer are much higher. There’s been substantial improvement in AI in even the last year.

Ask a human a question like this, and they also have a chance of getting it wrong, even when confident.

New comment by Robotbeat in "Google changes its search box"

Robotbeat — Wed, 20 May 2026 02:06:24 +0000

I think we’re getting what we deserve by snarkily telling people to Google stuff instead of answering accurately. Google results have never ever been pure accuracy

New comment by Robotbeat in "Colonization of Venus"

Robotbeat — Tue, 19 May 2026 23:05:38 +0000

I don’t understand this. Elon thought of a way to virtually eliminate the land, heat, water, and energy impacts of datacenters, and because it makes his companies money instead of being non-profit, this is bad?

Maybe I do get it. It’s not about the actual impact. It’s entirely about performing. Profit (which is literally just a measure of whether the return on something is greater than the inputs) is somehow evil, but losing money on something (ie it costs more in inputs than its outputs) is good.

New comment by Robotbeat in "Minnesota becomes first state to ban prediction markets"

Robotbeat — Tue, 19 May 2026 21:35:20 +0000

Does this ban the prediction markets that don’t use real money but instead tokens that are worthless?

New comment by Robotbeat in "Colonization of Venus"

Robotbeat — Tue, 19 May 2026 21:28:08 +0000

Yes, Elon Musk, famous for not being interested in solar electrification projects.

New comment by Robotbeat in "Colonization of Venus"

Robotbeat — Tue, 19 May 2026 16:22:58 +0000

What do you call Phoenix?

New comment by Robotbeat in "Colonization of Venus"

Robotbeat — Tue, 19 May 2026 16:21:46 +0000

I really doubt your veracity about this. It’s literally illegal for billionaires to geoengineer the Earth to stop global warming (at least in several states). Doubtless you would also object to that as well. In which case it’s not actually about solving Earth’s problems but about not liking those who are doing it.

New comment by Robotbeat in "Colonization of Venus"

Robotbeat — Tue, 19 May 2026 16:19:49 +0000

Geoengineering of Earth is remarkably easy. The reason it’s not already being done is political, not technical or even necessarily economic. For less than NASA’s budget, it’s possible to do things like stratospheric solar radiation management. See: Mount Pinatubo. Some places (Florida, etc) have already made laws prohibiting it.

As far as being science fiction… obviously? Terraforming Venus is a very long term project. It’s scientifically possible but hasn’t already been done. I guess I don’t understand what “science fiction” is supposed to mean. Like, Jules Verne writing about long distance underwater submarines? Trips to the Moon launched from Florida?

New comment by Robotbeat in "Colonization of Venus"

Robotbeat — Tue, 19 May 2026 13:15:15 +0000

Yes, geologic times, so like 100 million years or more, not relevant to human life timescales. But even Venus has substantial atmosphere still, including substantial amounts of hydrogen still (with enhanced deuterium concentration due to the atmospheric loss… which could actually be worth mining for nuclear power export).

Making a magnetic field on those timescales is easy, tho, compared to the other challenges. If you cool Venus down, you can place superconducting wires around the equator to generate a magnetic field. This is much easier than the terraforming you had to do.

New comment by Robotbeat in "Colonization of Venus"

Robotbeat — Tue, 19 May 2026 13:12:11 +0000

Untrue. You can actually mine the Venusian surface for metals. Carbon, hydrogen, oxygen, and nitrogen (the vast majority of the elements used by life) can be extracted from the atmosphere, as well as sulfur. So from an elemental standpoint, it actually could be self-sufficient. Not that you’d WANT to avoid trade with other planets, but it is possible.

It is also possible to terraform Venus, although much more difficult than for Mars.

New comment by Robotbeat in "The 1944 Warsaw Uprising, in Color"

Robotbeat — Sun, 26 Apr 2026 21:26:19 +0000

Intentionally. Allowed the Soviets to administer the place when the Nazis finally left, as the Polish resistance had been crushed. Unforgiveable.

New comment by Robotbeat in "The 1944 Warsaw Uprising, in Color"

Robotbeat — Sun, 26 Apr 2026 21:25:10 +0000

Incredible to see just so many smiling, cheerful faces surrounded by utter destruction and death. The power of comradery, I suppose.

New comment by Robotbeat in "AI overly affirms users asking for personal advice"

Robotbeat — Sat, 28 Mar 2026 21:21:35 +0000

Someone has a chart somewhere that shows responses in that subreddit getting more and more anti-conciliatory over time. I think it’s online misanthropy (measured by Reddit responses) increasing over time rather than it being objectively never the correct choice.

New comment by Robotbeat in "Discontinuation and reinitiation of dual-labeled GLP-1 receptor agonists"

Robotbeat — Fri, 20 Mar 2026 22:34:39 +0000

Kind of makes sense that stopping taking a drug that reduces heart attack and stroke risk leads to a return to the higher risk of before.

New comment by Robotbeat in "AI coding is gambling"

Robotbeat — Thu, 19 Mar 2026 02:56:57 +0000

I dunno, browsing McMaster-Carr feels like both shopping and creating at the same time.

Typing is just choosing from the latent space something special, too. Could just be random words, or, even fewer, random grammatically correct sentences.

New comment by Robotbeat in "Honda is killing its EVs"

Robotbeat — Wed, 18 Mar 2026 11:14:05 +0000

In my experience, it does actually work. Tesla model s had an issue with the flash memory endurance, and the NHTSA made them replace it. Which they did, and upgraded the 3G modem to LTE while they were at it. My 2013 Model S is still going strong, still gets software updates.

New comment by Robotbeat in "Electric motor scaling laws and inertia in robot actuators"

Robotbeat — Mon, 16 Mar 2026 04:57:20 +0000

Even copper has vastly lower resistance when cryogenically cooled. It's not a bad idea for some applications, and water cooling is already a good way to increase power density.

New comment by Robotbeat in "Qatar helium shutdown puts chip supply chain on a two-week clock"

Robotbeat — Sat, 14 Mar 2026 04:56:17 +0000

I feel like people in these comments and commentators in general are just kind of ignoring the fact that the US produces more helium than Qatar, and in fact more helium than the entire Middle East combined, nearly 50% of the global total. The sale of the "helium reserve" is (mostly) irrelevant as well, because there's massive domestic helium production. https://www.wmi.badw.de/the-institute/helium-liquefaction-pl...

I get that the current situation is stupid, but can we at least be accurate? Qatar is FAR from the only source of helium. (And yes, helium of any type can be purified to high levels. That's also not just a Qatar thing.)