Hacker News: adonovan

New comment by adonovan in "Radiation damage to Hubble has been 4.3 years out of phase with the Solar cycle"

adonovan — Fri, 21 Aug 2026 16:44:17 +0000

Can anyone tell whether these exposures occurred through the camera lens (from fallout particles in the sky of the depicted scenes) or in post- (or pre-) exposure handling of the film from hot dust carried by the photographer?

New comment by adonovan in "New Worlds: We are living in the future of J.G. Ballard or William Gibson"

adonovan — Fri, 21 Aug 2026 16:33:25 +0000

These companies do have an aesthetic, it's just not cool. Mike Merrill calls it "Corporate Memphis"; see https://www.wired.com/story/corporate-memphis-design-tech/.

New comment by adonovan in "Go 1.27"

adonovan — Wed, 19 Aug 2026 22:49:05 +0000

Broken how? Please report an issue. The latest gopls should support generic methods.

New comment by adonovan in "Scientists stunned by children's lung recovery in ultra low emission zone"

adonovan — Wed, 19 Aug 2026 06:59:20 +0000

You can switch it off, or make it play one of several different ridiculous sounds.

New comment by adonovan in "Should you wash your solar panels?"

adonovan — Mon, 27 Jul 2026 21:43:53 +0000

At least here in Brooklyn a significant minority (a third?) are purchased outright, as that gives the best long term return if you can afford the initial investment, and it simplifies a later house sale (see thread above). I think some of the tax incentives only apply in that case too.

New comment by adonovan in "A taxonomy of omnicidal futures involving artificial intelligence (2025)"

adonovan — Fri, 24 Jul 2026 04:15:22 +0000

Stuart J. Russell (he of the AI textbook) claims in Human Compatible that YouTube is already an example of a runaway feedback loop between AI (YouTube's recommender "algorithm") and humanity (viewers, content producers, YouTube staff, and society at large). The AI doesn't have a body, a voice, a conscience, or a purpose yet it is busily working away to maximize engagement by changing people's minds, and in particular by bringing extremism into mainstream discourse.

(It seems to me that framing it this way does seem to absolve YouTube executives of responsibility by making the AI, not them, seem like the agent.)

New comment by adonovan in "Map of the world's great castles and fortresses"

adonovan — Wed, 22 Jul 2026 04:00:10 +0000

Inferring pronunciation from spelling is very regular in French; the reverse, not so: there may be many ways to spell a sound like “o”, each with a different meaning.

New comment by adonovan in "Why do AI company logos look like buttholes? (2025)"

adonovan — Sat, 18 Jul 2026 12:03:45 +0000

This trend is far older than the AI era. The British magazine Private eye for many years in the 1990s had a running joke in which each issue displayed the new logos of old companies that had spent a fortune on rebranding. All of them were variations on circles.

Naomi Klein in her book No Logo interprets it as a form of abstraction away from the passé and less profitable business of whatever concrete task those industries used to do, and towards outsourcing, branding, and financialization as an end in itself.

New comment by adonovan in "Genuinely, my all-time favourite image: Mamenchisaurus hochuanensis"

adonovan — Thu, 25 Jun 2026 00:54:46 +0000

How many parts is this skeleton disassembled into in transit? Each bone? Crazy project!

New comment by adonovan in "Update on Ocean Observatories Initiative"

adonovan — Fri, 19 Jun 2026 01:23:55 +0000

I agree. This is a most unexpected ray of hope.

New comment by adonovan in "Midjourney Medical"

adonovan — Thu, 18 Jun 2026 02:36:01 +0000

Can someone with expertise explain what kinds of medical imaging are theoretically possible with this kind of sensor?

New comment by adonovan in "How JPL keeps the 13-year-old Curiosity rover doing science"

adonovan — Sat, 13 Jun 2026 13:07:49 +0000

Understood. My point is that the job requirements are almost mutually exclusive: must be physically and mentally fit enough for arduous travel and harsh work, yet basically suicidal.

New comment by adonovan in "How JPL keeps the 13-year-old Curiosity rover doing science"

adonovan — Fri, 12 Jun 2026 11:37:07 +0000

Like enjoying earthly pleasures? The terminally ill do not make good astronauts.

New comment by adonovan in "How JPL keeps the 13-year-old Curiosity rover doing science"

adonovan — Thu, 11 Jun 2026 03:38:15 +0000

I'd be surprised if there's a single person alive who would volunteer for a suicide mission to a miserable cold dark planet and could travel there for nine months in a tin can through a harsh radiation/muscle atrophy/psychological environment and arrive in any condition to conduct useful scientific work.

New comment by adonovan in "Have a Coherent AI Policy"

adonovan — Fri, 15 May 2026 02:18:25 +0000

It seems quite common for the infrastructure teams to put up a dashboard just to keep a sense of what is going on, but it is then misinterpreted as a “leaderboard” and encourages the most prolific users to find creative ways to squander more to stay the “winner”. Management is slightly disappointed by the waste but also happy that staff are engaging with their future replacements.

New comment by adonovan in "Ask HN: We just had an actual UUID v4 collision..."

adonovan — Sat, 09 May 2026 03:57:31 +0000

For a while we’ve been fixing telemetry-reported crash bugs in the project I maintain, and now hardware bugs are showing up with some frequency. I was amazed how common they are. Sometimes data values (e.g. SP register) are corrupted, but other times even infallible operations (e.g loads of rodata constants) crash, indicating that the instruction itself was corrupted. So, yeah, I believe you’ll eventually see UUID collisions, but not because the underlying cryptanalysis was wrong.

New comment by adonovan in "Heat pump sales rise across Europe"

adonovan — Mon, 04 May 2026 20:43:32 +0000

Does the ground source heat up (or cool down) over time, making it less effective? The deep ground is very well insulated, which is why after a century of operation the London Underground is 10 degrees warmer. I wonder whether GSHP users need to balance their load by (say) consuming more heating than they actually need in winter so that summer cooling remains effective.

New comment by adonovan in "NASA Force"

adonovan — Fri, 17 Apr 2026 21:47:13 +0000

This administration does love "force".

New comment by adonovan in "Too much discussion of the XOR swap trick"

adonovan — Thu, 16 Apr 2026 12:16:01 +0000

Another situation to avoid the XOR trick, even when registers are tight, is when swapping pointers in a garbage-collected language, since the intermediate bit patterns are invalid pointers: if a GC mark phase occurs at that moment, you might lose some objects, or spuriously mark others as live.

New comment by adonovan in "The buns in McDonald's Japan's burger photos are all slightly askew"

adonovan — Thu, 16 Apr 2026 12:08:56 +0000

Quite. A burger that wears its hat at a jaunty angle for a rakish look.