<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: SideQuark</title><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=SideQuark</link><description>Hacker News RSS</description><docs>https://hnrss.org/</docs><generator>hnrss v2.1.1</generator><lastBuildDate>Wed, 19 Aug 2026 06:44:14 +0000</lastBuildDate><atom:link href="https://hnrss.org/user?id=SideQuark" rel="self" type="application/rss+xml"></atom:link><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by SideQuark in "A U.S. Strategy to Prevent the Creation of Mirror Life"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>Those were leading capital letters words. This is ALL CAPITAL LETTERS, which is different. As others pointed out, it’s used extensively in the click bait arena.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Mon, 17 Aug 2026 01:14:43 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49325542</link><dc:creator>SideQuark</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49325542</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49325542</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by SideQuark in "U of Michigan drops first-semester grades to ‘curb mental health crisis’"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>> The UC system and many other of the top universities in the country have also stopped looking at SAT scores.<p>Which led to a spectacular failure of incoming students to do basic math, lead to massive increases in failures in first year math courses.<p>Maybe removing signal loses knowledge about who is ready for standard classes?</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Wed, 12 Aug 2026 12:28:34 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49271347</link><dc:creator>SideQuark</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49271347</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49271347</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by SideQuark in "Slap ROM Patcher"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>Courts have ruled many things besides encryption count as anti-copying measures, and that the laws apply retroactively, so it’s not so clear such patches even on 360 are legal. Try selling such patches and test it.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Tue, 11 Aug 2026 05:00:13 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49253567</link><dc:creator>SideQuark</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49253567</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49253567</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by SideQuark in "LLMs won't break symmetric crypto"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>When you conflate an 8-bit xor cipher with AES and a 10 line python NN with the complexity of trying to break AES with a NN by having "the model ... predict the key", I can see how you think such a thing is possible. It's nonsense.<p>For any NN to learn, the function it is approximating must structured enough to admit small set of parameters (i.e., not exponential), otherwise it will take exponentially many nodes to do anything. AES is not differentiable, as are all secure hash and encryption functions. This is a basic test that is used to attack everything.<p>So you'd get a NN that must be big enough to simply memorize all plaintext, key, output triplets, which is simply a lookup table. With around 2^768 nodes. Good luck.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Mon, 10 Aug 2026 11:52:48 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49242484</link><dc:creator>SideQuark</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49242484</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49242484</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by SideQuark in "Slap ROM Patcher"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>Employing anti-protection methods to do to has been illegal since 1996 WIPO treaties, and then much more strongly in the 2002 DMCA.<p>So around 30 years now.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Mon, 10 Aug 2026 11:46:32 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49242417</link><dc:creator>SideQuark</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49242417</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49242417</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by SideQuark in "LLMs won't break symmetric crypto"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>Have you ever built a NN model? Have you ever broken a crypto system, even a small one?</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Fri, 07 Aug 2026 00:59:21 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49204678</link><dc:creator>SideQuark</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49204678</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49204678</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by SideQuark in "LLMs won't break symmetric crypto"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>There are plenty of algorithms that quantum algorithms give no benefit to. Quantum is NOT a free for all making everything faster. It’s only faster at two very,very restricted things: hidden subgroup problem (which is used for RSA, but most problems do not rely on HSP), and Grover search, which reduces a specific search problem from O(N) to O(sqrtN).</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Fri, 07 Aug 2026 00:56:30 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49204658</link><dc:creator>SideQuark</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49204658</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49204658</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by SideQuark in "AI financial advice is surprisingly good, especially if you ask right questions"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>You’re not giving it to a banker, you’re trading risk for return and flexibility. One can access savings at any time, any amount. Not true with bonds, maybe if you fiddle with indices.<p>Also bond returns have averaged 5% over decades, not 7.<p>Not taking all this into account, and simply claiming bogey men took your money, is misleading.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Sun, 02 Aug 2026 02:12:57 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49140429</link><dc:creator>SideQuark</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49140429</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49140429</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by SideQuark in "Demystifying DRAM Read Disturbance: RowHammer and RowPress Phenomena"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>Single event upsets are forced on you by physics. There is no possible way to stop them all.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Sat, 01 Aug 2026 07:22:28 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49131954</link><dc:creator>SideQuark</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49131954</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49131954</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by SideQuark in "China’s open-weights AI strategy is winning"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>> Put all of these trends together, and I think that in 10-15 years, we are going to have consumer PCs (and phones!) running models doing pretty much anything that frontier models can do right now.<p>Not likely. The last 50 years had Moore’s law growth in compute. That’s over. Frontier models are roughly compressed all written text and a large part of images. Those don’t compress forever, and likely not a ton more than now.<p>Inference requires touching a significant of that per token.<p>All of these are up against fundamental limits, more or less.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Mon, 20 Jul 2026 21:27:14 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48985093</link><dc:creator>SideQuark</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48985093</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48985093</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by SideQuark in "Mathematicians still don't know the fastest way to multiply numbers"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>That's not recursion. And reversing arrows on this category turns base cases into co-base, or start cases, (and these are still often called base cases in the literature), so it is still required.<p>Reversing arrows again, back to recursion, you have exactly the standard labeled bases case (well, cases in your code), and reversing arrows doesn't magically change algorithms or invent new structure, so it completely equivalent in the category.<p>For that code, the 1:1:... is exactly the terminating/starting point, reversing arrows in the category does nothing to change the requirements.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Mon, 20 Jul 2026 15:59:08 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48980672</link><dc:creator>SideQuark</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48980672</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48980672</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by SideQuark in "Mathematicians still don't know the fastest way to multiply numbers"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>… which needs a terminating case, which cannot be not defined as the same recursion.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Sun, 19 Jul 2026 10:51:55 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48966812</link><dc:creator>SideQuark</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48966812</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48966812</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by SideQuark in "Show HN: Richest people in the world by wealth creation instead of ownership"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>> What is it doing to feed my family in burundi?<p>That it has not solved everyone's problems on the planet is no argument it against what it has provided more than any other system.<p>It's surprising how many of your comments place you in the US, and not one in Burundi. I'm guessing based on your past comments you're not too consistent on your claims.<p>> Nobody said this, asshole<p>You claimed they provide little value against obvious reality. We're done.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Sat, 11 Jul 2026 21:15:52 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48875953</link><dc:creator>SideQuark</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48875953</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48875953</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by SideQuark in "The mask that compiles to nothing: how HotSpots JIT learned to reason about bits"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>It's because the underlying optimizer follows patterns in LLVM, which is used for a lot of languages, most applicable here is C/C++, and bit things like this are used a lot for performance.<p>The particular patterns were added to C2 just recently, being copied from the implementations in LLVM and GCC.<p>Also it's unlikely the compiler looks for this in particular, but this falls out of a set of optimizations that do matter and it collapses into the output assembly on relevant architectures.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Sat, 11 Jul 2026 15:27:49 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48872869</link><dc:creator>SideQuark</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48872869</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48872869</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by SideQuark in "Show HN: Richest people in the world by wealth creation instead of ownership"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>Yeah, it only pays pensions, retirement accounts, provides liquidity for new industries, which then grow and provide jobs, and has been demonstrably one of the best inventions for pulling billions out of poverty and increasing standard of living generation after generation for hundreds of years over hundreds of countries on the planet.<p>We should outlaw all markets, right?</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Sat, 11 Jul 2026 15:24:37 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48872840</link><dc:creator>SideQuark</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48872840</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48872840</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by SideQuark in "John Deere owners will get the right to repair equipment under FTC settlement"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>And then you summarized<p>> 4% of ~40B times 12 years = $19B.<p>as if this might be close to reasonable estimate of the profit off these farm repair contracts.<p>But you pulled that reasoning right out of nowhere. It's simply ignorant.<p>Multiplying 4% times revenue? Why pick revenue? Why not profit before taxes? Why not profit after taxes? Why not any of a ton of more relevant variables?<p>Because you have a belief in search of some numbers to make it sound smart.<p>Their net profit is around 10% of revenue, not at all out of line for companies in this sector. If you're going to magically claim that 40% of this profit is from farm contracts, that is massively ignorant of what they sell.<p>Since you seem unable to look at their financials, there's no need for me to show you how little of their overall revenue is farm equipment (which if course makes your number voodoo even more out of touch).</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Sat, 11 Jul 2026 15:19:34 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48872794</link><dc:creator>SideQuark</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48872794</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48872794</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by SideQuark in "Computation as a universal and fundamental concept"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>> … so there's a physical process that's undecidable.<p>No, since you cannot physically build a Turing Machine. A Turing machine requires infinite tape. Any physically realizable machine doesn’t have that, so has finite states, so is decidable: enumerate the states in finite time - it halts or repeats, so all programs on a finite state machine are decidable.<p>Your example is not an undecudable physical process.<p>Godel things also don’t apply: Godel theorems are about proof of this or that from within the same system. In logic one can prove such things from an outside system, then construct towers, avoiding Godel theorems. Godel theorems also require a model of integers including multiplication (without multiplication, such systems were proven complete and decidable). However the universe does not contain a model of integers, as the physical universe is not unbounded: relativity places a finite limit in spacetime on what can interact.<p>Mixing math as reality fails at these requirements.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Sat, 11 Jul 2026 08:46:54 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48870115</link><dc:creator>SideQuark</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48870115</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48870115</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by SideQuark in "John Deere owners will get the right to repair equipment under FTC settlement"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>Go pull their financials, stop pulling nonsense out of thin air.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Thu, 09 Jul 2026 23:37:18 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48853888</link><dc:creator>SideQuark</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48853888</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48853888</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by SideQuark in "John Deere owners will get the right to repair equipment under FTC settlement"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>I looked over their financials. You conjectured out of feelings and ignorance. Calling my evidence naive, when you are simply making things up, is ludicrous.<p>Go do some legwork, get some actual data, not make believe feel good fairy dust.<p>The fed suit had exact numbers, which they blacked out for public. The fed suit settled for a dollar amount. If they thought they’d get a better amount, they’d go to trial. So likely the proceeds are on order of the settlement, else they’d likely win more by trial. The feds are not idiots.<p>But some people are.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Thu, 09 Jul 2026 23:35:16 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48853862</link><dc:creator>SideQuark</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48853862</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48853862</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by SideQuark in "John Deere owners will get the right to repair equipment under FTC settlement"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>Last year was 5b net profit on 44b revenue. Attributing more than a tiny fraction of profit to the right to repair stuff is wild dreams, given the amount of physical goods they sell.<p>Nothing in their SEC filings shows anything mentionable about such claims. It does break out actual profit by company sectors.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Thu, 09 Jul 2026 01:29:47 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48839803</link><dc:creator>SideQuark</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48839803</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48839803</guid></item></channel></rss>