Hacker News: barelyauser

New comment by barelyauser in "Why bother with argv[0]?"

barelyauser — Tue, 03 Sep 2024 14:34:08 +0000

Can something posses extrinsic properties? Or are them a intrinsic property of external things?

New comment by barelyauser in "New forms of steel for stronger, lighter cars"

barelyauser — Tue, 03 Sep 2024 14:22:58 +0000

Once I was told by a mechanic the following: if car companies where the ones liable for fixing your car, the design would look very much different.

Car companies choose what is simple to manufacture, but eventually making it very hard to maintain. If it where not for regulation, they would give you something that has a timer for breaking. That is how little they respect their customers.

Anecdotal (but at this point one of hundreds I've come across): older car had fuel pump accessible through a little sealed hatch. In current car the same pump was integrated into the fuel tank. It went bad. Guess what? You have to remove the whole fuel tank to service it. And that entails taking the exhaust out of the way. Car companies hate you.

New comment by barelyauser in "Smaller, Weaker, yet Better: Training LLM Reasoners via Compute-Optimal Sampling"

barelyauser — Tue, 03 Sep 2024 14:16:18 +0000

I find that researchers choices of names for the sake of differentiation is more of a barrier than something helpful. Sometimes it feels like I know nothing, but in reality it is the name of the "technique" or phenomena that does not get parsed by my brain.

Things like "Compute-Optimal Sampling" sound just like any other made up gibberish that may or may not exist. Wordings like "memory-centric subsampling", "search based hyper space modeling", "locally induced entropy optimization" don't get parsed. And more often than not after reading such papers, I've come to find out that it is a fancy name for something a toddler knows about. Really disappointing.

New comment by barelyauser in "Ask HN: Imagine a world with 1Tb/s internet. What would change?"

barelyauser — Fri, 23 Aug 2024 19:53:24 +0000

Pretty much this. It was a huge disappointment for me to understand that even if I made a revolutionary discovery and doubled the yield of food crops, people would reproduce and the prices (and availability) of food would not change.

New comment by barelyauser in "Writing a C Compiler: Build a Real Programming Language from Scratch"

barelyauser — Fri, 16 Aug 2024 11:22:59 +0000

The Byte magazine is incredible. First time reading it. The archive.org collection is a gold mine for learning. Thank you very much for posting it.

New comment by barelyauser in "Fiber optic drone control beats any RF jammer"

barelyauser — Mon, 05 Aug 2024 19:17:49 +0000

Beam riding is also a thing. The missile is guided by a sensor in its butt, therefore making it harder to jam.

New comment by barelyauser in "Breakthrough a step toward revealing hidden structure of prime numbers"

barelyauser — Thu, 01 Aug 2024 13:59:32 +0000

Also, the safest data is the one never sampled into digital format and stored in computer systems.

New comment by barelyauser in "Racist plant names will change after historic vote by botanists"

barelyauser — Fri, 19 Jul 2024 17:27:38 +0000

Perhaps they are not. What is really happening is the world is getting more complicated. And if people don't get smarter, or better informed, their capacity to create problems is going to increase.

New comment by barelyauser in "What Materials Are Magnetic?"

barelyauser — Thu, 18 Jul 2024 20:12:16 +0000

But they can be picked up with right kind of electromagnetic arrangement[0].

[0]. https://youtu.be/7ZeBWJLRXqM&t=1231

New comment by barelyauser in "310-mile automated cargo conveyor will replace 25,000 trucks in Japan"

barelyauser — Thu, 27 Jun 2024 12:11:57 +0000

So you are telling me that a certain linear city will also not materialize?

New comment by barelyauser in "Volkswagen to invest up to $5B in Rivian"

barelyauser — Tue, 25 Jun 2024 21:13:48 +0000

Would you rather have Cars as a Service?

New comment by barelyauser in "Chang'e 6 lunar sample return mission returns with samples from moon's far side"

barelyauser — Tue, 25 Jun 2024 18:00:29 +0000

Don't they use radar altimeters to get altitude? You don't need to rely only on image processing. You can even pull off stereo using a single camera since you are moving and know the altitude at every point.

New comment by barelyauser in "The Impossibility of Supersized Machines (2017)"

barelyauser — Sat, 15 Jun 2024 14:51:41 +0000

People got very upset when chemistry proved that we are made of the same thing as "unalive" things like rocks. You can see the same now that we proved the same for intelligence.

New comment by barelyauser in "Unitree G1 Humanoid Agent"

barelyauser — Tue, 14 May 2024 01:53:19 +0000

We will probably get as much collaboration as the car industry does with some basic components and standards. But perhaps big differences in the major hardware (hands, chassis). The most valuable part, the AI models, will certainly be closed.

With that said, it is hard to imagine the economics of humanoid robots. The trend seems to favor automation in controlled environments for certain products. Then the displaced factory workers flood remaining jobs driving down labor costs and shutting down any prospect of a humanoid machine.

New comment by barelyauser in "Unitree G1 Humanoid Agent"

barelyauser — Tue, 14 May 2024 01:38:45 +0000

Yet again very little attention is given to the touch sensing. No sensors on the back and sides of the fingers. I can grasp objects blind folded because of the richness of touch. It is super costly to try to compensate lack of touch with vision and all these robotics companies seem to miss this.

A big problem is the lack of innovation in touch sensing. We mass planar (sometimes flexible) products with millions of little active devices (OLED). Cannot be this hard to assemble a decent touch sensing planar device. It will be like a camera for touch and then all the beautiful neural net techniques can be used.

New comment by barelyauser in "What John von Neumann did at Los Alamos (2020)"

barelyauser — Mon, 08 Apr 2024 00:16:02 +0000

This is an absurd take, to say the least. It offends the intelligence of virtually everyone involved in the bomb development. Plutonium usefulness would be noticed eventually. Implosion of fusion fuel using X-Rays thermal transport would have been discovered as well. The world does not have a single point of failure based on a single person, like you paint it.

New comment by barelyauser in "Advances in semiconductors are feeding the AI boom"

barelyauser — Thu, 28 Mar 2024 17:55:57 +0000

Non-deterministic means random. AI or natural I is not random. Analog suffers immensely from noise and it is the reason the brain has such a large number of neurons, part to deal with noise and part to deal with losing some neurons along the way.

New comment by barelyauser in "Engineering household robots to have a little common sense"

barelyauser — Wed, 27 Mar 2024 19:08:31 +0000

If they think this plan of "connecting" word to actions is promising then they should ask it to tie a shoelace based on "natural language" description. I'm shocked. I really did not expect that MIT would foster such naivety. They completely disregard the fact that natural language is a very crude description of physical actions. Perhaps next they will include in the instructions numerical values, and rediscover CNC.

New comment by barelyauser in "A Stabilizing Robotic Tail for Floating Astronauts"

barelyauser — Sat, 23 Mar 2024 16:47:52 +0000

Perhaps your assumption that stepper motors are the first solution to any motion problem speaks more about your lack of resourcefulness than the ingenuity of another solution.

New comment by barelyauser in "Mercedes is trialing humanoid robots for 'low skill, repetitive' tasks"

barelyauser — Fri, 15 Mar 2024 22:47:55 +0000

Can one achieve elite status without wealth?