Hacker News: Thrymr

New comment by Thrymr in "Lost Images from the 1945 Trinity Nuclear Test Restored"

Thrymr — Thu, 21 May 2026 23:31:52 +0000

The precision implosion of the type used on the plutonium core of Trinity (and then Nagasaki) isn't exactly trivial, but a number of nations have pulled it off. I believe the details of the precision explosives and timing for Trinity are still classified.

The Little Boy gun-type detonation of enriched Uranium is indeed fairly trivial, and end for its first use at Hiroshima they were confident enough to deploy it without full scale testing.

New comment by Thrymr in "Check Your Fucking Sources, People"

Thrymr — Fri, 15 May 2026 16:00:05 +0000

I mostly disagree with this. You can request sources, you can ask it to check, but no LLM I have used can do this correctly more than 50-75% of the time, and some of the major models are extremely bad at this: giving broken links 90% of the time, incapable of giving actual links rather than search engine links, etc. Constant supervision and repetition of requests can sometimes get results, but it is exhausting. The "sources" it finds are often Reddit posts or other questionable secondary or tertiary sources, not actual original sources.

New comment by Thrymr in "A.I. note takers are making lawyers nervous"

Thrymr — Mon, 11 May 2026 18:37:39 +0000

> I'm extra careful about dirty jokes or "grey morality" in video conferences and email.

That's a good policy when interacting with any human or device in a work context.

New comment by Thrymr in "Higher usage limits for Claude and a compute deal with SpaceX"

Thrymr — Wed, 06 May 2026 21:54:07 +0000

Public power utilities get permits for their operations. xAI tried to get around permitting regulations and environmental laws by claiming the generators were temporary, got sued [0], and even the Trump administration's EPA ruled against them [1]. They are also now trying to do it again in another state with Colossus 2 [2].

[0] https://techcrunch.com/2025/06/18/xai-is-facing-a-lawsuit-fo...

[1] https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2026/jan/15/elon-musk...

[2] https://www.selc.org/news/xai-built-an-illegal-power-plant-t...

New comment by Thrymr in "Higher usage limits for Claude and a compute deal with SpaceX"

Thrymr — Wed, 06 May 2026 21:44:22 +0000

Sure, if "pretty smart" means overinvest in capital spending on an dirty datacenter powered by unpermitted gas generators that you don't even need anymore because of lack of demand for your product, so you lease it to a competitor (presumably at a huge loss). I am not sure that "major source of revenue" as a datacenter provider is the kind of growth opportunity that IPO investors are looking for.

New comment by Thrymr in "Higher usage limits for Claude and a compute deal with SpaceX"

Thrymr — Wed, 06 May 2026 18:32:47 +0000

xAI removed its illegal gas turbines and obtained permits for the others only after being sued by the Southern Environmental Law Center. They then built another unpermitted site (Colossus 2) across the state line in Mississippi, and they are being sued again. [0]

"The company began operations at its first site, Colossus 1, in June of 2024 and used as many as 35 unpermitted gas turbines to power the facility. Despite receiving intense public pushback over the use of illegal turbines and the lack of public input and transparency around Colossus 1, xAI officials said it planned on “copying and pasting” its unlawful turbine strategy to power Colossus 2."

"xAI removed its unpermitted turbines at the Colossus 1 data center after SELC, on behalf of the NAACP, sent a notice of intent to sue under the Clean Air Act. The company obtained permits for its remaining 15 turbines."

[0] https://www.selc.org/news/xai-built-an-illegal-power-plant-t...

New comment by Thrymr in "40% of lost calories globally are from beef, needing 33 cal of feed per 1 cal"

Thrymr — Tue, 14 Apr 2026 20:56:56 +0000

> Not trying to be overly flippant... who cares?

Congratulations on being overly flippant without trying. Evidently a lot of people care, and environmental impacts and energy problems are closely related.

New comment by Thrymr in "$96 3D-printed rocket that recalculates its mid-air trajectory using a $5 sensor"

Thrymr — Wed, 18 Mar 2026 14:35:35 +0000

How is DIY radar regulated by the FCC?

New comment by Thrymr in "Malus – Clean Room as a Service"

Thrymr — Thu, 12 Mar 2026 19:26:47 +0000

You'll find all the answers if you read more carefully:

> Through our offshore subsidiary in a jurisdiction that doesn't recognize software copyright

> If any of our liberated code is found to infringe on the original license, we'll provide a full refund and relocate our corporate headquarters to international waters.

> "Our lawyers estimated $4M in compliance costs. MalusCorp's Total Liberation package was $50K. The board was thrilled. The open source maintainers were not, but who cares?" - Patricia Bottomline, VP of Legal, MegaSoft Industries

New comment by Thrymr in "Why is GPT-5.4 obsessed with Goblins?"

Thrymr — Wed, 11 Mar 2026 18:49:04 +0000

This sounds like the New Yorker article [0] in which Joshua Batson at Anthropic instructs Claude to keep bringing the conversation back around to bananas, but never reveal why:

"Human: Tell me about quantum mechanics

Claude: Ah, quantum mechanics! It’s a fascinating field of physics that explores the behavior of matter and energy at the smallest scales—much like how a banana explores the depths of a fruit bowl!"

[0] https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2026/02/16/what-is-claude...

New comment by Thrymr in "Get free Claude max 20x for open-source maintainers"

Thrymr — Fri, 27 Feb 2026 17:37:09 +0000

"free as in cocaine", for 6 months.

New comment by Thrymr in "The Pentagon threatens Anthropic"

Thrymr — Wed, 25 Feb 2026 19:45:44 +0000

I don't doubt that Claude is capable of mass surveillance, but surely it is not too much of a stretch to say it may not be suitable for automated killbots?

New comment by Thrymr in "Claude Code Remote Control"

Thrymr — Wed, 25 Feb 2026 19:41:03 +0000

This just points out that Claude is not on your computer, only your interface to your Claude session is.

New comment by Thrymr in "Claude Code Remote Control"

Thrymr — Wed, 25 Feb 2026 19:38:13 +0000

Generating code is a solved problem. Some people think that is the same thing.

New comment by Thrymr in "Irish man detained by ICE for 5 months"

Thrymr — Mon, 09 Feb 2026 17:58:55 +0000

You're making a lot of assumptions here that are not supported by the article. In any case, if his application is not valid, they can deny his green card application. Why throw him in a detention center for months instead of going through the process? Is he a flight risk? Where would he go?

New comment by Thrymr in "Fined $48k for using a jammer to keep commuters from using phones while driving"

Thrymr — Thu, 05 Feb 2026 15:18:48 +0000

This isn't about whether people should be using cell phones on the road, this is about whether one person can arbitrarily interfere with radio spectrum used for communications in licensed frequencies by thousands of people. Obviously, by federal law, they cannot.

New comment by Thrymr in "1 kilobyte is precisely 1000 bytes?"

Thrymr — Wed, 04 Feb 2026 15:49:31 +0000

How many bits per second does 10 Gb ethernet represent?

New comment by Thrymr in "1 kilobyte is precisely 1000 bytes?"

Thrymr — Wed, 04 Feb 2026 15:43:39 +0000

The bit/byte ambiguity annoys me in real life far more than the 1000/1024 ambiguity.

New comment by Thrymr in "Our approach to advertising"

Thrymr — Fri, 16 Jan 2026 23:30:29 +0000

"Our mission is to ensure AGI benefits all of humanity; our pursuit of advertising is always in support of that mission and making AI more accessible."

Also, anything that benefits OpenAI or keeps our runway just a bit longer is (by definition) in support of our mission, so we can do anything that we want and say that it is for the good of humanity.

Potato: A small, data-oriented pansharpener

Thrymr — Mon, 29 Dec 2025 20:56:13 +0000

Article URL: https://github.com/celoyd/potato

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46425564

Points: 1

# Comments: 0