Hacker News: advisedwang

New comment by advisedwang in "A Call to Action: Stop the FCC's KYC Regime"

advisedwang — Fri, 12 Jun 2026 19:00:48 +0000

Stopping caller ID spoofing doesn't have to mean caller ID is always enabled. You should be able to make a call with NO caller id, but not a call with somebody else's caller id.

New comment by advisedwang in "Looking Forward to Postgres 19: It's About Time"

advisedwang — Fri, 12 Jun 2026 18:58:05 +0000

JOINs and other operations become really difficult if you can't evaluate whether a row applies or not based on that row alone.

New comment by advisedwang in "AI juries"

advisedwang — Fri, 12 Jun 2026 17:50:08 +0000

The link does not match the title

New comment by advisedwang in "Euro-Office, open standards, and native ODF"

advisedwang — Fri, 12 Jun 2026 17:36:32 +0000

LibreOffice seems to be badly fumbling making a web version. Euro-Office, the falling-out with collabora and other such drama all seem to be downstream of LibreOffice Online sucking and being hard to deploy.

New comment by advisedwang in "A jacket that harvests drinking water from the air"

advisedwang — Fri, 12 Jun 2026 17:31:10 +0000

The thermodynamic issue is not that there's not enough energy, it's that the heat output has nowhere to go.

New comment by advisedwang in "A jacket that harvests drinking water from the air"

advisedwang — Fri, 12 Jun 2026 17:27:12 +0000

I really enjoy that the outbound links go through a redirect on nam12.safelinks.protection.outlook.com (as well as awstrack.me). Did the article author just copy the links they were sent by email without even opening them?

New comment by advisedwang in "The Future of Email"

advisedwang — Fri, 12 Jun 2026 16:35:42 +0000

Because it's just inbound marketing. Write some random vaguely interesting blog article, post it everywhere, then watch as thousands of people see your brand name for the first time, connect it with being helpful. Maybe even see a search engine boost for your product.

New comment by advisedwang in "US Consumer Price Index up 4.2%"

advisedwang — Wed, 10 Jun 2026 16:13:15 +0000

It's possible for energy to be behind the rises in other cost, but the data presented here gives no evidence for or against that possibility.

New comment by advisedwang in "US Consumer Price Index up 4.2%"

advisedwang — Wed, 10 Jun 2026 16:07:58 +0000

The Iran war is for sure a huge part of that (just look at the energy cost inflation!), but other elements are a factor too. "Months ago" is really not that long when it comes to inflation.

New comment by advisedwang in "US Consumer Price Index up 4.2%"

advisedwang — Wed, 10 Jun 2026 16:06:26 +0000

Per the link, food is up 3.1% and everything else 2.9%. So energy pulled inflation up from about 3% to about 4%, but that's not "all of the increase"

New comment by advisedwang in "Apple reveals new AI architecture built around Google Gemini models"

advisedwang — Mon, 08 Jun 2026 20:29:42 +0000

Google pays to be the default search because they make more from selling ads on those searches than they are paying for the search.

I don't see the same thing here. Google isn't making any money from being the assistant in Apple, so why would they pay to be it?

New comment by advisedwang in "Boeing 787 Dreamliner Loses Door at Remote Pacific Airport, Puzzling Engineers"

advisedwang — Fri, 05 Jun 2026 23:20:43 +0000

https://worldairlinenews.com/2026/05/31/latam-boeing-787-cc-... says: "The second door (L2) was torn off by the airstairs truck."

New comment by advisedwang in "Am I Unc?"

advisedwang — Fri, 05 Jun 2026 17:26:40 +0000

Can the author please tell us if ANYONE has paid $2.99 for their complete unc report

New comment by advisedwang in "UK media fails to disclose defence sector links in nearly 60% of cases"

advisedwang — Thu, 04 Jun 2026 15:53:18 +0000

I think it should always be disclosed. Even when they aren't explicitly advocating for a direct benefit to their company, their overall analysis is colored by their interests. The defense industry is going to amp up risks of an aggressor, downplay the risk of appearing to be aggressive, downplay non-military foreign policy strategies etc. Allow the defense industry to influence how we think about foreign events is certainly going to influence how we think about policy and spending.

New comment by advisedwang in "They’re made out of weights"

advisedwang — Thu, 04 Jun 2026 15:41:34 +0000

AKA the "Chinese Room" argument. Ultimately this argument boils down to the idea that consciousness can't be something mechanistic, which is intuitively appealing but still just an assertion.

New comment by advisedwang in "They’re made out of weights"

advisedwang — Thu, 04 Jun 2026 15:29:40 +0000

The neural network in LLMs are not really that similar to brains. Here are a couple of the biggest differences:

1. Brains are plastic, making connections, breaking connections and changing "weights" on the fly. LLM have static weights. The best they have is writing to MEMORY.md or data getting used in the training run for the next model.

2. LLMs neural networks do not have loops. The best they have is that their output is available as future input, but that is not the same.

New comment by advisedwang in "Can You Stop a Hypersonic Missile?"

advisedwang — Mon, 01 Jun 2026 17:08:03 +0000

Sometimes pedantic is needed to deflate over-enthusiastic headlines.

New comment by advisedwang in "Can You Stop a Hypersonic Missile?"

advisedwang — Mon, 01 Jun 2026 17:07:23 +0000

The earlier interceptors were for ballistic missiles. They are traveling at hypersonic speeds but have high trajectories (so radar can see them earlier) and can't maneuver for significant parts of their flight (so they are easier to track and target).

FWIW they were cancelled because they didn't have a particularly good kill ratio and proliferation and MIRV meant you'd need a ton of them to prevent an attack landing (and doing so would involve a significant number of nuclear blasts pretty close to the targets anyway). Deterrence was more credible.

New comment by advisedwang in "The Pirate Bay Remains Resilient, 20 Years After the Raid"

advisedwang — Mon, 01 Jun 2026 16:46:27 +0000

Channel issues are like 90% of issues like this, but it's not always user error. Often a cheap production will just ship the front left + right channels as the stereo mix, instead of down mixing all the left + center channels into the stereo left etc. This is endemic in back catalogs on streaming providers where the catalog is a bulk assets that nobody reviews and is passed around between companies that don't care about the quality they deliver to each other.

New comment by advisedwang in "Canada to order military plane fleet from Sweden in shift from US suppliers"

advisedwang — Wed, 27 May 2026 21:27:54 +0000

Do military versions of aircraft use the same production lines, and the same production queue, as commercial aircraft?