Hacker News: briansm

New comment by briansm in "US and Iran agree to provisional ceasefire"

briansm — Wed, 08 Apr 2026 09:03:07 +0000

That will happen on the day there is enough to go around.

Unfortunately I fear that time has long gone.

As long as the population is growing and/or the (fossil) energy is falling there will never be enough to go around.

New comment by briansm in "Department of State advises Americans worldwide to exercise increased caution"

briansm — Mon, 23 Mar 2026 07:53:38 +0000

I keep reading this, is it meant to be a joke? What is being won?

New comment by briansm in "Global warming has accelerated significantly"

briansm — Fri, 06 Mar 2026 15:36:16 +0000

People are losing their minds at the prospect of oil availability dropping just 20% for a month or two with the closing of the Strait of Hormuz - even just this could collapse the global economy.

So yea, no way is oil stopping or even dipping slightly any time soon.

New comment by briansm in "The Xkcd thing, now interactive"

briansm — Tue, 03 Mar 2026 13:14:19 +0000

Just to mention the original was cited in the most recent Veritasium video:

"The Internet Was Weeks Away From Disaster and No One Knew"

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoag03mSuXQ

(at about the 9:50 mark)

New comment by briansm in "RAM now represents 35 percent of bill of materials for HP PCs"

briansm — Thu, 26 Feb 2026 07:56:29 +0000

Economies die from lack of produce though.

New comment by briansm in "How Taalas “prints” LLM onto a chip?"

briansm — Sun, 22 Feb 2026 10:20:29 +0000

I wonder if you could use the same technique (RAM models as ROM) for something like Whisper Speech-to-text, where the models are much smaller (around a Gigabyte) for a super-efficient single-chip speech recognition solution with tons of context knowledge.

New comment by briansm in "I want to wash my car. The car wash is 50 meters away. Should I walk or drive?"

briansm — Mon, 16 Feb 2026 13:03:46 +0000

I think this lack of 'G' (generality, or modality) is the problem. A human visualizes this kind of problem (a little video plays in my head of taking a car to a car wash). LLM's don't do this, they 'think' only in text, not visually.

A proper AGI would have have to have knowledge in video, image, audio and text domains to work properly.

New comment by briansm in "Trump says Venezuela’s Maduro captured after strikes"

briansm — Sat, 03 Jan 2026 12:52:01 +0000

Has overtaken Saudi Arabia as nation with largest proven oil reserves.

Although it is 'heavy' oil, the 'brown coal' of liquid fossil reserves (i.e. low quality).

The fact that such a fuss is being made about low-grade oil is a concern in itself.

New comment by briansm in "James Moylan, engineer behind arrow signaling which side to refuel a car, dies"

briansm — Fri, 02 Jan 2026 09:54:08 +0000

At least HDMI is a 'low frequency' connector, often only ever plugged in once, as opposed to USB (or refueling a car)

New comment by briansm in "Vibe Coding in the 90s"

briansm — Sat, 25 Oct 2025 10:10:00 +0000

I believe this is what "Cargo-Cult Programming" is.

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

New comment by briansm in "Scripts I wrote that I use all the time"

briansm — Wed, 22 Oct 2025 23:05:05 +0000

Using 'copy' as a clipboard script tells me OP never lived through the DOS era I guess... Used to drive me mad switching between 'cp' in UNIX and 'copy' in DOS. (Same with the whole slash vs backslash mess.)

New comment by briansm in "./watch"

briansm — Sat, 18 Oct 2025 13:09:13 +0000

I believe this is why all modern digital watches use a 32768.0Hz crystal resonator, it's a power-of-2 frequency above the 20Khz top end of the range of human audio perception, to avoid the whole 'tinnitus on your wrist' thing.

New comment by briansm in "Hosting a website on a disposable vape"

briansm — Tue, 16 Sep 2025 09:46:03 +0000

The old 1980s computers also had no equivalent of flash storage though, the RAM had to store the program being run as well as act as scratch-space.

New comment by briansm in "FFmpeg 8.0 adds Whisper support"

briansm — Wed, 13 Aug 2025 16:56:34 +0000

I believe youtube still uses 40 mel-scale vectors as feature data, whisper uses 80 (which provides finer spectral detail but is computationally more intensive to process naturally, but modern hardware allows for that)

New comment by briansm in "British man claims he's unable to watch porn as tattoos confuse age check system"

briansm — Fri, 01 Aug 2025 09:26:46 +0000

that's not true, consumerism is only growing, people are not giving up anything in that regard.

The planet is getting trashed and 'the children' are doomed.

Individually We try and help, driving less, recycling and so on, but it kinda gets diluted by a billion Chinese moving into the middle-class and burning coal like there's no tomorrow.

New comment by briansm in "Math.Pow(-1, 2) == -1 in Windows 11 Insider build"

briansm — Wed, 02 Jul 2025 16:20:20 +0000

Reminds me of the Pentium FDIV bug from 1994.... a half-billion-dollar 'ouch' for Intel were many hard lessons were learned.

Surely math libraries and optimizations have been a solved problem for the last 20+ years.

Show HN: Simple Speech-to-Text with an Arduino Nano

briansm — Fri, 27 Jun 2025 14:40:51 +0000

Hi HN.

A while back, somebody (not me) posted a link here to a hobby project I did:

"Simple Speech-to-Text on the '10 Cents' CH32V003 Micro-controller"

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40504481

So I though I'd submit a link to a follow-up project, that uses an 8-bit 'Arduino Nano' micro-controller instead to see how low-power I can go doing real-time MFCC-based feature extraction for spoken audio samples. Because reasons. (proof-of-concept more than anything).

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44397159

Points: 2

# Comments: 0

New comment by briansm in "Start your own Internet Resiliency Club"

briansm — Tue, 17 Jun 2025 05:07:56 +0000

I would disagree. The dark ages were hundreds of years ago, the electric grid is much less than a century old. Plenty of countries have unreliable supply and rolling blackouts and have adapted to it or have just never became accustomed to the luxury of 24/7 electricity on demand. Being without juice is not the end of the world.

New comment by briansm in "Brain aging shows nonlinear transitions, suggesting a midlife "critical window""

briansm — Wed, 04 Jun 2025 16:38:49 +0000

Bit ironic when the path to ketosis is fasting (i.e. not using products).

New comment by briansm in "Writing into Uninitialized Buffers in Rust"

briansm — Wed, 21 May 2025 06:59:37 +0000

and yet an article about a 'safe' language has code examples full of 'unsafe'... wut.