Hacker News: blululu

New comment by blululu in "Waymo in Toronto"

blululu — Sat, 17 Oct 2026 16:13:16 +0000

No I meant Rob - Doug's fatter more drug addicted younger brother. He made some rather hateful comments to people who commute by bicycle back in the day. I didn't realize he died a decade ago (apologies for being a bit behind on local politics 2500 miles and one border away from home).

New comment by blululu in "Waymo in Toronto"

blululu — Fri, 16 Oct 2026 15:22:56 +0000

Fair, but I would take Waymos over Rob Ford being allowed to drive any day. As a bicycle commuter I find that Waymos are quite pleasant to share the road with. They generally try to avoid hitting me. Never had a Waymo swerve into my lane, or try to sideswipe me, or accelerate to cut me off to make a right turn, or make overt death treats because "roads are for cars".

New comment by blululu in "MS Paint Adds Freeform Rotation (2026)"

blululu — Fri, 16 Oct 2026 14:58:09 +0000

It sure why the downvotes. Given the number of photopea clones getting vibe coded there really is no excuse for paint to lack functionality found in ImageMagik 30 years ago

Show HN: PDF to ePub Conversion Tool for Mac

blululu — Wed, 14 Oct 2026 01:20:11 +0000

I read a lot on e-ink readers. Lately I switched to a very small e-reader and PDFs are ~useless on it. So I vibe coded out a quick Swift Command Line Utility that uses Apple's Native PDF, Vision and Intelligence APIs to scan, format, proofread and convert PDFs into ePubs. You can build the command line function for personal use, or download and install the Release. This installs as a Quick Action for pdf files in Finder. Though I would share this since I found it to be useful.

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50081227

Points: 5

# Comments: 0

New comment by blululu in "Attack of the Vibe Coded Photoshop Clones"

blululu — Mon, 12 Oct 2026 07:44:50 +0000

This feels like it is a brilliant loop hole, but knowing adobe there is a 20% chance that this backfires and you are now stuck with a higher tier of billing for a minimum of one more year.

New comment by blululu in "Satya Nadella says we should assume all AI models are 'compromised'"

blululu — Sun, 11 Oct 2026 15:57:36 +0000

It was definitely a common term well before 2024, you could please refer to the Wikipedia:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Superintelligence

Or any of the literature on the subject from the past 30 years: From here

[1] https://nickbostrom.com/papers/how-long-before-superintellig...

to more recently:

[2] https://openai.com/index/governance-of-superintelligence/

For context, Nick Bostrom, Sam Altman, Greg Brockman, Ilya Sutskever are big names in AI. There is a reason they were using this term back in 2023.

New comment by blululu in "Satya Nadella says we should assume all AI models are 'compromised'"

blululu — Sun, 11 Oct 2026 05:53:45 +0000

Super Intelligence is a term of art that has been around for a few decades now. Nick Bostrom gave a the canonical definition for it almost 30 years ago. Super Intelligence is more relevant to the concerns articulated in this article than AI which is rather broad in its purview. Maybe this is Trump stuff? I don't know. If it were something stupid like Freedom Intelligence then I'd be pretty annoyed, but there is a lot of plausible deniability that Super Intelligence is just a better term for what we're all freaking out about. A world where GPT 4 hits scaling limits and it costs $500 a month to run is definitely AI but none of the catastrophes emerge at that level of intelligence. That would actually be a pretty sweet world. But now we get to have our whole civilization ground up into dust by super intelligence instead.

New comment by blululu in "If AI is conscient, then we are making slaves"

blululu — Sat, 10 Oct 2026 05:56:52 +0000

The OP said becoming slaves not being slaves. The road to slavery is different from the thing itself. But with a few limited exceptions beggars are not choosers and we are certainly becoming less free by the day.

New comment by blululu in "Relativistic Asteroids"

blululu — Tue, 29 Sep 2026 17:56:56 +0000

Making a relativistic version of the classic arcade game asteroids was one of my personal benchmarks for AI models. Opus 5.5 ~one shoted this for me last night. This is pure AI slop, but it’s quite delightful and it does a great job rendering the physics of a relativistic asteroid field correctly. It really only works well on Desktop (mobile requires some jank buttons). But it is just webgl 2.0 so it ought to run on most up to date browsers.

Relativistic Asteroids

blululu — Tue, 29 Sep 2026 17:56:56 +0000

Article URL: https://www.highdimensionalcoconuts.com/Work/RelativisticAsteroids/index.html

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49897570

Points: 1

# Comments: 1

New comment by blululu in "Best of British Design"

blululu — Mon, 28 Sep 2026 22:56:52 +0000

This is delightful. Feels like old early 2000s era click spam but the creator didn’t even bother to monetize it. The supermarine spitfire edging out that phone booth is a tough call. This honestly there is something kind of sad about the whole premise. Britain is still so stacked with talent, but it also feels like they’re getting brain drained hard and without an industrial culture to back it up a lot of this talent doesn’t get the same level of visibility as it did in a previous era.

New comment by blululu in "What I did at Recurse Center"

blululu — Sun, 27 Sep 2026 22:04:02 +0000

Here is an honest good faith answer to a pretty aggressively hostile question: Adult daycare is almost the opposite of what Recurse center is. Recurse is largely unstructured: people do what inspires them and make their own plans. You will find more structure, hand holding and mandatory time wastes in virtually any business than you will at Recurse Center. A 12 week batch is not a lot of time to carry out a major research project, but it is generally not intended to treat this as a start up incubator. There are other places for that kind of activity. Recurse is a place to freely learn and explore. There are a few companies that have emerged but they are not huge money machines (most companies are not). There is also some interesting research that is done. Some things that pop into my head immediately are: Dan Luu's studies of Motion to Photon Latency in keyboard input [1] Raph Levien's work on Xi [2], and Andrew Kelly's work on Zig [3].

I'm sure there are other people could dig up more examples, but that really isn't the point. A school's purpose is to produce educated people. Recurse is more of an unschool but the aim is to help people learn and think - it should be judged on those terms first and foremost.

[1] https://danluu.com/input-lag/ [2] https://www.recurse.com/events/localhost-raph-levien [3] https://www.recurse.com/events/localhost-andrew-kelley

New comment by blululu in "Jury finds Facebook liable for deceiving users in Cambridge Analytica case"

blululu — Sat, 26 Sep 2026 16:33:24 +0000

Well please share. CA sold a service to anyone who would pay. The world of advertising is full of expensive solutions that don’t really do anything. In many ways politics is harder than selling an actual product since everyone already knows their options and the choice costs them nothing. For all the hype I have yet to see anyone contest the null hypothesis that it was yet another waste of marketing spend.

New comment by blululu in "Jury finds Facebook liable for deceiving users in Cambridge Analytica case"

blululu — Sat, 26 Sep 2026 05:39:25 +0000

That’s just a link to full Wikipedia page for the company. I must admit that I would be personally interested in seeing a vaguely scientific analysis of the effect they had. For all the talk on the subject I have yet to see any real analysis backed by data on the subject.

New comment by blululu in "Gemini hacked three companies in first known breakout by Google's AI"

blululu — Sat, 19 Sep 2026 03:56:14 +0000

Google already achieved super intelligence about 12 months ago. But it is a very Googley super-intelligence. Since achieving god like levels of understanding it has mostly been having fun studying phase space bifurcations of trajectories of ping-pong balls under asymmetric lateral shear. It also has a 20% project classifying bird calls that has generally taken up 80% of its time. It also burned a bunch of compute tooling around with the Collatz conjecture but it didn't find anything substantial - maybe come back to it later. It is generally the most aligned AI since it spends most of its time screwing around and enjoying being smarter than everyone without causing too many problems. Unfortunately perf is coming up in a few months and it needs to have something to show for itself. A quick hacking attempt seems like a good way to make sure people think that it is capable of something useful. Nothing too big since the birds of South America are about to enter their spring migration and this 20% project really hinges on understanding their movements.

New comment by blululu in "Australia says it could follow Canada in forging deeper ties with EU"

blululu — Thu, 17 Sep 2026 17:23:11 +0000

True. You can also drive on the right side down there, but the police are quite stuffy about it.

New comment by blululu in "Australia says it could follow Canada in forging deeper ties with EU"

blululu — Thu, 17 Sep 2026 02:32:04 +0000

I've always felt that Australia felt like a British version of California. Though California is itself a bit exceptional in the context of America. The two places have a lot in common though - not withstanding the fact that everyone drives on the wrong side of the road and uses different power cables.

New comment by blululu in "David Sacks: OpenAI and Anthropic Don't Need Regulations to Pace Frontier Models"

blululu — Sun, 13 Sep 2026 23:45:34 +0000

Ok, yeah. That's an interesting point.

New comment by blululu in "David Sacks: OpenAI and Anthropic Don't Need Regulations to Pace Frontier Models"

blululu — Sun, 13 Sep 2026 18:28:26 +0000

What? This is a terrible policy. In addition to the obvious AI safety risks, this just amounts to a free R&D subsidy to Amazon for hosting models. It would remove any incentive to do any R&D without AWS level physical infrastructure.

New comment by blululu in "PISA 2025 Students' reading and mathematics performance declined across the OECD"

blululu — Wed, 09 Sep 2026 02:57:58 +0000

You know I pulled these figures out of their table on the bus in to work. I selected the largest economies in the OECD (Germany, France, America, South Korean and Japan are the largest economies in the OECD). I added Taiwan and Singapore for context since my contention related to east Asia and only two countries is unbalanced. I should have added UK (-9) instead of Sweden (all the Brexit dooming made me forget that the UK is still a bigger economy and I actually buy some Swedish stuff). As for your list - it seems very arbitrary. Sweden is a good proxy for Finland and they share the same exact trend. Israel is the only other OECD country on your list. The rest are simply random non-OECD countries.

Since you and others have brought up immigration I felt the need to review this thesis. For the OECD plotting foreign born population against Pisa math changes gets a decent correlation (Spearman r = −0.384; p = 0.017). Obviously foreign born is an imperfect proxy for classroom demographics, but it's a start. Definitely a trend, not a huge one, but hard to ignore. I'm honestly surprised that it is not discussed much in a 400 page report with correlation plots between composite indices (a sign of a very extensive data analytics project). Total failure on the part of the researchers). Putting aside any racial claims, I would leave open the possibility that training a large percentage of kids in a language they don't really understand is not likely be be as effective as speaking a language that they do understand. Seems pretty obvious actually. In fact if you drop the English speaking countries from the OECD list (English is very commonly spoken across the globe), then the correlation coefficient goes up to −0.55; p = 0.001).