Hacker News: abecedarius

New comment by abecedarius in "Mistral Patent for “Code implemented tool calls”"

abecedarius — Mon, 10 Aug 2026 13:42:37 +0000

I didn't carefully read either of these, but it reminds me of https://blog.cloudflare.com/code-mode-mcp/ (note it predates the filing).

New comment by abecedarius in "When random.bytes() runs but doesn't work"

abecedarius — Sun, 02 Aug 2026 13:24:39 +0000

If your source is not open that's barely a speedbump, given a binary. At least that's my impression of the current state.

New comment by abecedarius in "Pacing the frontier"

abecedarius — Wed, 29 Jul 2026 01:36:07 +0000

Some of us considered seeking one of these jobs and decided not to. Some have quit (e.g. Hinton, OpenAI people after OpenAI reneged on safety commitments). Now you're getting this message from people who passed the previous filters. If you think a brake is indicated and not just easing up on the accelerator, you need collective action as the statement said.

New comment by abecedarius in "A metallurgist's doubts about self-replicating probes"

abecedarius — Tue, 14 Jul 2026 18:52:40 +0000

Mainly my point there is that it doesn't seem reasonable to anchor advanced nanotechnology on the doubling times we're used to for industry. I don't want to guess just what to expect for early construction from a starseed arriving at e.g. an outer-solar-system carbon-rich moon -- but nothing like a human generation.

New comment by abecedarius in "A metallurgist's doubts about self-replicating probes"

abecedarius — Tue, 14 Jul 2026 18:47:08 +0000

All our structural carbon is low tech by the relevant standards (civilization that can send star-seeds). https://dspace.mit.edu/entities/publication/49f95196-2ddf-48...

New comment by abecedarius in "A metallurgist's doubts about self-replicating probes"

abecedarius — Tue, 14 Jul 2026 17:01:47 +0000

> complex and interdependent ecosystem

That's why my other comment pointed to the autotrophs with the simplest requirements, and the (unknown but complexity-bounded) origin of life.

> pace of biological activity is a lot slower than industrial ones

Bacterial replication times can be under an hour.

New comment by abecedarius in "A metallurgist's doubts about self-replicating probes"

abecedarius — Tue, 14 Jul 2026 16:44:59 +0000

In the outer solar system organics and water are abundant (and in the inner there are plenty of carbonaceous chondrites, admittedly not the most generic inner-system bodies).

Agreed that metals should unlock wider opportunities in the inner system where solar energy is more abundant. I just don't think it matters much, you need a good place to plant your seed; once you've built up to scale you can then build wherever.

(False that life dies in minutes in space; plus the engineers can invest in even greater error correction than radiodurans.)

New comment by abecedarius in "A metallurgist's doubts about self-replicating probes"

abecedarius — Tue, 14 Jul 2026 16:38:31 +0000

If physics were to forbid closure at small scale, how could life begin? And how does a micron-scale autotroph reproduce?

New comment by abecedarius in "A metallurgist's doubts about self-replicating probes"

abecedarius — Tue, 14 Jul 2026 16:35:00 +0000

Yes, I was wondering why the focus on metals. (Admittedly they might be needed in trace amounts for catalysis, or convenient for conductors, etc., or for structural material if you're on a carbon-poor asteroid. Most metals are worse than carbon for the latter if you have reasonably high tech.)

New comment by abecedarius in "Australian energy retailers must offer three hours of free daytime electricity"

abecedarius — Tue, 14 Jul 2026 15:43:20 +0000

To target the "poor people need more money" problem, the most direct answer is give them money. If someone's answer is a variety of politically-allocated narrow subsidies, you should wonder what interest they're really aiming to satisfy.

When you get money, you can choose to spend it on what's worth the most to you. Thus "strings attached" on the opposite.

New comment by abecedarius in "I love LLMs, I hate hype"

abecedarius — Mon, 13 Jul 2026 00:32:41 +0000

This assumes the best models continue to be publicly available. There's some level of capability where it makes more sense to go in business for yourself.

New comment by abecedarius in "Old and new apps, via modern coding agents"

abecedarius — Sun, 12 Jul 2026 15:31:53 +0000

The same AIs are doing math research now, you know. At what point do you stop explaining it all away?

New comment by abecedarius in "Einstein's relativity rules chemical bonds in heavy elements, new research shows"

abecedarius — Sat, 11 Jul 2026 13:26:12 +0000

"High speed" here can be taken in terms like this: the phase of the wave function changes rapidly with position and time. (Changing with position -> a superposition that's heavy on short wavelengths, high momentum; with time -> high frequency, high energy.)

Re "observed all the time": when gold interacts with light, the light's normally of a strength that's a small perturbation on the fields internal to the atom, which is basically why you can treat the atom/light-field system as two weakly coupled quantum systems. It's an "observation" when the light leaves a classical trace such as a current in a CCD.

(I don't expect this to leave you unmystified about QM, but hopefully a bit clearer about it.)

New comment by abecedarius in "In Emacs, everything looks like a service"

abecedarius — Sat, 11 Jul 2026 00:04:15 +0000

An OS is a virtual machine meant to be shared among programs. Sure the central examples expose most of an ISA that they run on themselves, but there are also examples like Inferno, Taos, AS/400.

New comment by abecedarius in "A love letter to flashcards"

abecedarius — Fri, 10 Jul 2026 23:49:58 +0000

Aside: the example question ("What is the intuition that two reflections gives a rotation?") could have a more intuitive answer involving flipping an actual flashcard over twice, funnily enough...

New comment by abecedarius in "Einstein's relativity rules chemical bonds in heavy elements, new research shows"

abecedarius — Fri, 10 Jul 2026 23:31:15 +0000

I don't know, I'm not very chemical, but fwiw: a friend and I were favorably impressed with Linus Pauling's general chemistry textbook. It tries to supply enough of the physics for the chemistry to make sense. We only studied for a few weeks before moving on, though, and it's a big fat book.

New comment by abecedarius in "Age verification is just a precursor to automated attribution of speech"

abecedarius — Wed, 01 Jul 2026 16:52:35 +0000

There's score voting too. I believe approval is the best focal point for this kind of reform because it's the simplest one, simpler even than the status quo. (In UI terms it's switching from radio buttons to checkboxes.) Any complication or unfamiliarity is a problem in multiple ways. (Score voting goes from checkbox to a 1-5 stars or whatever.)

I was guarded above because even though system-level reform should be a bigger deal than object-level, I think putting a lot of hope on it is setting yourself up for disappointment. You need culture change or competition in governance.

New comment by abecedarius in "Age verification is just a precursor to automated attribution of speech"

abecedarius — Mon, 29 Jun 2026 22:52:29 +0000

Really I'm not married to that proposal, I agree some voting reforms like approval voting should help, and I don't think any formal changes are enough on their own to get our political culture out of the current pit. What I like about this idea is bringing attention to the repeal problem as worth attention and imagination. Achieving a setup with some powerful people with a career interest in simplifying the infinite codebase.

> libertarian fantasy

You can see it that way... though the Prof was not expecting uptake for those proposals, he didn't get them, and the protagonist at the end is thinking of emigrating to the Belt. The U.S. was a libertarian fantasy before its founding.

New comment by abecedarius in "Age verification is just a precursor to automated attribution of speech"

abecedarius — Mon, 29 Jun 2026 18:25:38 +0000

Concentrated interests want legislation favoring them at the expense of the easily-misled public. So what's your model by which repeal becoming less near-impossible makes the net damage from this dynamic greater.

New comment by abecedarius in "Age verification is just a precursor to automated attribution of speech"

abecedarius — Mon, 29 Jun 2026 14:52:23 +0000

Increasingly wishing for this from a fictional constitutional convention:

> I note one proposal to make this Congress a two-house body. Excellent — the more impediments to legislation the better. But, instead of following tradition, I suggest one house of legislators, another whose single duty is to repeal laws. Let the legislators pass laws only with a two-thirds majority... while the repealers are able to cancel any law through a mere one-third minority. Preposterous? Think about it. If a bill is so poor that it cannot command two-thirds of your consents, is it not likely that it would make a poor law? And if a law is disliked by as many as one-third is it not likely that you would be better off without it?

https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/The_Moon_Is_a_Harsh_Mistress