Hacker News: TGower

New comment by TGower in "OpenSCAD the Programmers Solid 3D CAD Modeller"

TGower — Sat, 10 Oct 2026 18:04:29 +0000

Yeah, that's what I meant by "immediate result", if you need to edit the generated model by hand it will be hard to beat having the model and timeline available in Fusion after using Fusion MCP.

If you just need to tweak the dimensions in the script, or are satisfied with describing the changes to the LLM and having it modify the script, there isn't much difference in practice between a generated OpenSCAD script and a Blender python script.

New comment by TGower in "OpenSCAD the Programmers Solid 3D CAD Modeller"

TGower — Sat, 10 Oct 2026 17:48:17 +0000

It would be interesting to see a head to head comparison of frontier LLMs building models with OpenSCAD, Blender scripting, and Fusion MCP. My intuition would be that blender winds up the best for the immediate result due to training data prevalence and RL tuning, but the concise nature of OpenSCAD could help.

I'll have to add this to my backlog of experiments to try when I have unused tokens near a reset...

New comment by TGower in "Show HN: TerrainSR – fast, realistic heightmap upscaling model"

TGower — Fri, 09 Oct 2026 16:35:25 +0000

Really cool! I did my master's thesis on this same problem, upscaling low resolution DEM, though my approach used a high resolution color image to guide the process.

New comment by TGower in "Integer multiplication below n log n"

TGower — Wed, 07 Oct 2026 01:14:40 +0000

We shaved a whole: 1/6129982163463555433433388108601236734474956488734408704 off the nlogn

New comment by TGower in "Unsealed Briefs in Authors’ Case v. Microsoft/OpenAI"

TGower — Sun, 27 Sep 2026 14:27:49 +0000

I'm all for intellectual property reform, I'm still not a fan of the current rules being ignored for large companies directly competing with authors and artists, while ordinary people pirating are getting fined 220k for 24 songs [1].

[1]: https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/woman-fine...

New comment by TGower in "Vacate a drone restriction that criminalized recording immigration agents"

TGower — Tue, 22 Sep 2026 22:46:48 +0000

To me it's more like the sign saying "No guns in the bank". It's not going to stop someone who intends on doing harm, but that's not it's real purpose. If it was normal to be able to openly carry a gun into the bank, that makes the security guards job much harder.

New comment by TGower in "Vacate a drone restriction that criminalized recording immigration agents"

TGower — Tue, 22 Sep 2026 15:41:57 +0000

The article doesn't mention the safety angle at all. It's reasonable to argue that even though the Ukraine conflict has popularized drones as weapons, given that we haven't had a major incident yet this temporary flight restriction was premature, but not mentioning it at all makes the bias pretty clear.

The TFR (which made it illegal to fly a drone within a bubble 1000 feet high and 3000 feet radius of a mobile asset) has been replaced by a NOTAM that basically says flying near them in a way that poses a credible safety or security threat means they can sieze or destroy your drone. I'd say this is the better resolution, and to me represents a "genuine change of heart" by the FAA, finding a way to serve the safety purpose of the TFR without overstepping.

New comment by TGower in "Steam Frame starts at $1059"

TGower — Tue, 15 Sep 2026 05:00:29 +0000

The framebuffer that you are filling out is still at native resolution, but while computing that frame buffer you can do many of the steps at reduced resolution. For example, instead of evaluating the pixel shader code for every pixel, it could evaluate once for a block of four pixels in the reduced resolution region and use the result for all four.

New comment by TGower in "Steam Frame starts at $1059"

TGower — Mon, 14 Sep 2026 18:08:55 +0000

2x GPU performance[1] and RAM, along with it being your machine instead of a locked down Meta android device is worth 2x the price for many. Eye tracking is also huge, both as an additional input device, and lifting GPU performance even more with foveated rendering.

[1] https://shattered.io/steam-frame-vs-quest-3/

New comment by TGower in "OpenAI bots knew about the RubyGems caching vulnerability"

TGower — Mon, 14 Sep 2026 17:39:00 +0000

Kimi / open models or jailbreaking frontier models. Your recollection of the Anthropic refusal isn't quite accurate, cyber hacking wasn't a sticking point, just domestic drag net surveillance and fully automated weaponry.

New comment by TGower in "Benchmarking Pocket-Scale Inference"

TGower — Sun, 30 Aug 2026 15:33:13 +0000

Note that the Model Intelligence score shown here is not the same as the Artificial Analysis Intelligence Index score they use for full size models, the top models on this Pocket-Scale chart have a score of 63, but that translates to just an 11 on the normal scale.

New comment by TGower in "Pixel 11 Pro Fold"

TGower — Thu, 13 Aug 2026 02:13:31 +0000

I love mine, but I used to try and stuff a Kindle into my jeans pocket because reading on a large screen is so much more enjoyable for me.

New comment by TGower in "ESP32-C3 SuperMini antenna modification"

TGower — Sun, 09 Aug 2026 14:42:02 +0000

Combat robots are more like RC cars than autonomous robots, the driver stays in control of the bot over a radio link. I use ESP-NOW, and get about 6000 packets per second from the transmitter to the ESP32 in the box, and each comes with radio link stats, signal strength and Channel State Information. Using autocorrelation on the signal strength gives you the rotation period, and using that you can establish a Phase Locked Loop to remove the drift of integrating rotation speed to get absolute rotation angle.

New comment by TGower in "Making difficulty curves in games"

TGower — Sun, 09 Aug 2026 14:32:02 +0000

Difficulty scaling is done to such an extent that even common enemies scale right along with you. In the opening scene, there is a bear you come across and at level 1 or 2, you are able to one shot it. Then the story takes you on a grand quest where ostensibly you go from a nobody to the savior of the world. However, due to difficulty scaling, if you run into the same bear halfway through the game, it will be harder to kill than when you were level 1.

New comment by TGower in "ESP32-C3 SuperMini antenna modification"

TGower — Sun, 02 Aug 2026 16:34:57 +0000

I'm doing something similar, using the directionality of the antenna to turn an ESP32 into a high RPM gyroscope for use in a combat robot. Standard gyro chips top out well under 1000 RPM, and are much more expensive than an ESP32 board, plus the ESP can serve as the radio control link and brain of the bot at the same time.

New comment by TGower in "Is AI reasoning right for the wrong reasons?"

TGower — Fri, 31 Jul 2026 16:06:32 +0000

An intuitive explanation for why reasoning tokens help is to remember that LLMs are just mathmatical functions f() that take in an input sequence x and produces the next token f(x). Without reasoning tokens, you require the function f() to immediately take you from x to the start of an output sequence that is a correct answer. With reasoning tokens, this is much relaxed, allowing for many repeated applications of f() to gradually steer you from the input sequence to the start of the correct output sequence.

It seems intuitive that continuing a correct output sequence is easier than the "discontinuity" of jumping from the input prompt to the output sequence.

New comment by TGower in "Our position on open-weights models"

TGower — Mon, 27 Jul 2026 22:47:29 +0000

More of a "Everyone knows what CCP references and I'd have to include a distracting explanation if I want to use the more technically correct acronym"

New comment by TGower in "Open-weight AI is having its Kubernetes moment"

TGower — Sun, 26 Jul 2026 18:13:11 +0000

Are you saying that cloud models are not verifying the draft model predictions? The way draft models are used in something like llama.cpp results in exactly zero degredation of output quality, with the larger model verifying each draft model token and discarding it if it does not match.

New comment by TGower in "Your phone is about to stop being yours"

TGower — Tue, 28 Apr 2026 17:12:00 +0000

> I can't see where one can opt-out of this new behavior and into the existing behavior, only a description of the new behavior's bypass (which is not the same thing at all)

I don't understand this, the ability to bypass new behavior in settings menus is basically the defenition of a new feature having an opt-out. Can you elaborate?

New comment by TGower in "Your phone is about to stop being yours"

TGower — Tue, 28 Apr 2026 16:33:32 +0000

This is a wild misrepresentation of the situation. Saying there is no opt-out is just false, they even provide the information on how users can opt-out. The "mandatory 24 hour cooling-off period" is also misleading, it's easy to bypass the cooling-off period with ADB.