Hacker News: aldonius

New comment by aldonius in "Apple's accidental moat: How the "AI Loser" may end up winning"

aldonius — Tue, 14 Apr 2026 13:45:11 +0000

I guess we can imagine a pure reasoning model (if that's even the right word any more) with almost zero world-knowledge. How does it know what to look for? How does it do any meaningful communication at all?

So I think it's useful to have an imprecise-but-fairly-accurate set of world knowledge as part of an otherwise reasoning-heavy model. It's a cache.

And if the it's an LLM, or something like that, I think it basically has to have world-knowledge built in, because what is natural language if not communication about the world?

New comment by aldonius in "Florida judge rules red light camera tickets are unconstitutional"

aldonius — Tue, 10 Mar 2026 01:00:44 +0000

Either way, it's bizarre that blame-assignation is anything other than defaults-to-owner.

New comment by aldonius in "A new California law says all operating systems need to have age verification"

aldonius — Fri, 27 Feb 2026 23:27:43 +0000

Interesting idea and I do agree that contiguous is OK but total is not.

I think I'd suggest a more generous Senate term limit. Three terms (18 years) would allow for someone to see out a complete Presidential super-cycle, for example.

The word Senate is etymologically related to "senior", it's a place where you _want_ people to be able to develop a lot of institutional experience.

New comment by aldonius in "I am directing the Department of War to designate Anthropic a supply-chain risk"

aldonius — Fri, 27 Feb 2026 23:17:10 +0000

I thought Anthropic's take on #2 was they don't think the model's good enough yet?

New comment by aldonius in "Banned in California"

aldonius — Thu, 26 Feb 2026 11:02:18 +0000

I mean, that's pretty normal right. The product starts out as a bit niche and expensive, and then as it scales in manufactured volume, variants & competitors become available at lower price points.

New comment by aldonius in "Openclaw on Oracle's Free Tier: Always-On AI for $0/Month"

aldonius — Sun, 01 Feb 2026 03:48:21 +0000

Given RAM shortages, I really have to wonder how long that 24GB RAM offer is sticking around...

New comment by aldonius in "Radicle: The Sovereign Forge"

aldonius — Sat, 24 Jan 2026 09:35:15 +0000

Thanks for clarifying.

Just for reference, usually folks in this situation use postfix initials rather than prefix (like how blockquotes are cited).

- J.S.

New comment by aldonius in "Allow me to introduce, the Citroen C15"

aldonius — Sun, 11 Jan 2026 03:15:03 +0000

I drive a 20-year-old Civic.

On a trip about 18 months ago I had some Kia soft-roader hire car. I bloody hated the lane keeping (unfamiliar narrow twisty roads are bad enough without the car tugging on the steering wheel).

Conversely the auto-distance thing with cruise control is fantastic - it makes CC usable at way higher traffic densities.

New comment by aldonius in "I've been writing ring buffers wrong all these years (2016)"

aldonius — Fri, 19 Dec 2025 12:43:55 +0000

It's a somewhat different kind of ring buffer, because there's just one index, but I used it in my signal processing class for a finite-impulse-response filter.

Choose N to be a power of two >= the length of your filter.

Increment index i mod N, write the sample at buffer position x[i], output sum of x[i-k mod N] * a[k] where a[k] are your filter coefficients, repeat with next sample at next time step.

New comment by aldonius in "Iowa City made its buses free. Traffic cleared, and so did the air"

aldonius — Tue, 25 Nov 2025 07:05:42 +0000

In Brisbane I think our ticketing system cost overhead is maybe 10%?

The cost of the programme rolling out new ticketing infra (the first major ticketing system upgrade in ~15 years since we first got integrated ticketing, going from a stored-value smart card to also being able to tap your credit card) is roughly the same amount of money as the annual revenue from fares.

New comment by aldonius in "Subway Builder: A realistic subway simulation game"

aldonius — Fri, 10 Oct 2025 04:11:13 +0000

It's coming to Steam in a few months, apparently.

New comment by aldonius in "Microsoft doubles down on small modular reactors and fusion energy"

aldonius — Tue, 09 Sep 2025 12:26:10 +0000

Yes, and if they want to net-zero all their energy, not just their electricity, they will need to do some mix of:

1. electrify those applications currently served by gas 2. import or manufacture carbon-neutral synthetic gas 3. buy a heck of a lot of offsets

New comment by aldonius in "Prime Number Grid"

aldonius — Tue, 19 Aug 2025 12:09:00 +0000

You'll find that when the number of columns is a multiple of 6 you'll get obvious columns in the dots, and if it's +1 or -1 modulo 6 the columns become diagonal stripes (the process sort of continues for ±2 and at ±3 it's pretty broken down).

It's a fairly straightforward number theory result that every prime > 3 is congruent to ±1 modulo 6 so that's probably what you're seeing. (Can't be +2 or +4 because that's divisible by 2, can't be +3 because that's divisible by 3, leaving +1 and +5 aka -1.)

New comment by aldonius in "AI is predominantly replacing outsourced, offshore workers"

aldonius — Tue, 19 Aug 2025 11:36:15 +0000

I'll put in a good word for a chatbot hooked up to the documentation (e.g. at $dayjob we use Intercom Fin) acting as level 0.5 support.

At $dayjob our customers are nontechnical so they don't always know what to search for, so the LLM/RAG approach can be quite handy.

It answers about 2/3 of incoming questions, can escalate to the humans as needed, and scales great.

New comment by aldonius in "Obsidian Bases"

aldonius — Tue, 19 Aug 2025 11:02:18 +0000

Surely that's plugin-modifiable in Obsidian.

New comment by aldonius in "Did California's fast food minimum wage reduce employment?"

aldonius — Sun, 10 Aug 2025 13:12:40 +0000

I'd suggest high local wealth and economic productivity tend to correlate strongly with increased housing costs.

People move there for the jobs, and the ones who do have jobs tend to have relatively well paying ones, so can pay more for housing. But the ones who don't have a well paying job are in trouble...

https://worksinprogress.co/issue/why-housing-shortages-cause...

New comment by aldonius in "I prefer human-readable file formats"

aldonius — Sat, 09 Aug 2025 13:15:18 +0000

I suppose with SQLite files, you could at least in theory diff their SQL-dump representations, though you'd presumably want a way to canonicalise said representation. In a way I suppose each (VCS) commit is a bit like a database migration.

New comment by aldonius in "SQLite Date and Time Functions (2007)"

aldonius — Mon, 16 Jun 2025 09:25:03 +0000

There's just enough there to be able to do "+1 month" calculations and similar, which is really helpful for generating dates in a range.

New comment by aldonius in "Apple has announced its final version of macOS for Intel"

aldonius — Tue, 10 Jun 2025 10:46:59 +0000

> will get full access to all the new features

Plenty of newer image processing and AI features are M-series only.

New comment by aldonius in "Is TfL losing the battle against heat on the Victoria line?"

aldonius — Mon, 26 May 2025 01:20:24 +0000

With frequent trains and close stop spacing you've plausibly got a situation where each train is entering and leaving each station at about the same time? So skip-stop might not save much acceleration/braking.