Hacker News: aldonius

New comment by aldonius in "New 14‑inch MacBook Pro with M6"

aldonius — Wed, 28 Oct 2026 07:07:25 +0000

Screen, ports too (to be fair I've used the HDMI port about 5 times, and the card reader never).

The base model chip on the Air is binned too - 8 GPU cores on the Air vs 10 on the Pro.

New comment by aldonius in "Solar surpasses nuclear power globally for first time"

aldonius — Mon, 19 Oct 2026 12:58:29 +0000

Eh, you gotta clean the panels sometimes (rain washes off dust, but lichen/algae/moulds are pretty persistent).

New comment by aldonius in "MCP was always a bad idea?"

aldonius — Mon, 21 Sep 2026 10:12:28 +0000

If your customers are normal people who use ChatGPT in the browser, they want ChatGPT Apps, which are based on MCP.

New comment by aldonius in "Suica, Japan's First IC Transit Card"

aldonius — Fri, 28 Aug 2026 07:53:42 +0000

Turns out Adelaide too, and Canberra.

Meanwhile Hobart and Darwin are free PT right now.

New comment by aldonius in "Suica, Japan's First IC Transit Card"

aldonius — Fri, 28 Aug 2026 00:01:57 +0000

Yep, and it's increasingly common around the world. In Australia, it's also fully rolled out in Brisbane and I believe it's just about finished being rolled out in Melbourne too.

New comment by aldonius in "Turns are Better than Radians (2022)"

aldonius — Thu, 20 Aug 2026 04:47:44 +0000

Binary fractions of a turn are also a nice intuition pump for two's complement in general.

Let's keep it simple and use just 8 bits. 0° is 0x00, 180° is 0x80, and 255/256ths of 360° is 0xFF. And if we wanted to use signed integers, then 0x80 through 0xFF - the high-bit half of the range - now represent the negative quadrants just as they represent negative integers.

New comment by aldonius in "Cerebras CS-4"

aldonius — Wed, 19 Aug 2026 02:51:05 +0000

Yeah, but there's certainly a part of the curve where price drops by X OOMs and demand increases by much more than X OOMs. (Presumably some of that is substitution and some of that is new use cases.)

New comment by aldonius in "Two wheels, a few tradeoffs, and gas prices"

aldonius — Sun, 09 Aug 2026 23:40:57 +0000

You've touched on a key point: in a city, space is at a premium, so taking up a lot of it for yourself _really is_ luxury consumption.

New comment by aldonius in "Humans haven't stopped evolving"

aldonius — Mon, 27 Jul 2026 06:29:49 +0000

Mmm, yes, some real parallels between Blindsight's conception of consciousness and LLM chain-of-thought reasoning.

New comment by aldonius in "Building relationships with customers through support didn't turn out as hoped"

aldonius — Mon, 06 Jul 2026 04:46:21 +0000

> When emails overwhelmed me, I asked a thoughtful user who emailed frequently and seemed to know as much about the product as I did if he’d help answer the emails, so I paid him to do that. And he did a great job, especially in terms of directly solving user problems.

Hey, I got promoted from customer to Customer Support at _my_ $dayjob!

Let's review some common areas.

- Pricing: everyone is always looking to get a better deal. That's their right but I'm unlikely to give one. Saying no here is just another (emotional) cost of doing business.

- Bug reports: broad agree on all four points but not necessarily the conclusion. Users who are willing to go down the debugging rabbit hole with me are golden.

- Pathological customers: I like to call them "frequent flyers". Enough said.

- Feature requests: we're not necessarily as "opinionated" so we rarely give a hard no, but this is why we have a "feedback board with upvotes" approach.

- General usage questions: I have an attitude of fresh eyes often being the best eyes for usability testing. If it's not obvious, what can we do to make it so? We also use Intercom Fin to handle a lot of these level-0-support questions though.

New comment by aldonius in "The unbearable cheapness of open weight models"

aldonius — Thu, 25 Jun 2026 23:00:03 +0000

Oracle's not a good comparison though, because it's getting valued as an AI compute provider as well as for its traditional business. At the end of 2021 Oracle's stock was about $100 (all-time-high in nominal terms at the time), its current ATH was October last year at $292.

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.