Hacker News: briansm

New comment by briansm in "Electrification Could Cut Global Energy Use in Half"

briansm — Sun, 01 Nov 2026 11:07:41 +0000

I could try and explain 'energy return on energy invested' (EROEI) but what's the point? it won't make any difference.

New comment by briansm in "Electrification Could Cut Global Energy Use in Half"

briansm — Sun, 01 Nov 2026 07:38:05 +0000

For the same reason there were no solar panels prior to 1800, there was not an excess of societal energy to invent and produce them. Solar panels are not trees.

And relying on trees is not a great idea either, look at Easter Island, lol.

(GPT has all the answers anyway, no need to ask me, I'm an old man with no issue and no stake in this stuff)

New comment by briansm in "Electrification Could Cut Global Energy Use in Half"

briansm — Sun, 01 Nov 2026 06:39:57 +0000

And the average increase in world population is about 1% per year, plus the bulk of the existing population is 'developing' i.e industrialization.

As fast as solar, wind, etc electricity production grows, the number of people requiring it grows along-side.

Also, 'renewable' is misleading, 'replaceable' is more accurate, all renewable energy generators wear out as everything does and need to be replaced using non-renewable energy mostly (you can't build solar panels from solar panel energy)

New comment by briansm in "The recently proposed o(n log n) integer multiplication algorithm [pdf]"

briansm — Thu, 22 Oct 2026 08:00:50 +0000

It's interesting that in terms of practical implementations, since each multiply can be done as a series of bit-shifts and additions, and since each element of an FFT is just the solution of a polynomial (a series of multiply-accumulates), in theory it's theoretically possible to do a full FFT in a single cpu clock cycle, much as it's possible to do a single multiply or multiply-accumulate in a single clock cycle (via parallel shift-accumulate operations). It would take a ridiculous number of transistors to implement though.

New comment by briansm in "The 1.5°C goal of the Paris Agreement is no longer viable"

briansm — Wed, 21 Oct 2026 10:21:09 +0000

The world population grows by 200,000 extra people, every day. Keep in mind any adaptations have to compensate for this growth in population, continually, for at least the next couple of decades.

New comment by briansm in "Things that apparently cause cancer"

briansm — Sat, 03 Oct 2026 16:13:11 +0000

It's worse than that, even just plain oxygen causes cancer (via oxidative stress). It also causes aging at the cellular level.

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

Not breathing may have more immediate side-effects though.

New comment by briansm in "The AI Race Just Got Awkward"

briansm — Thu, 01 Oct 2026 06:27:12 +0000

"Standing on the shoulders of giants" and all that, this goes _way_ back.

New comment by briansm in "Robin Williams' Daughter to Fans Creating AI Videos: 'Have Some Shame'"

briansm — Tue, 22 Sep 2026 06:38:06 +0000

Lol, a couple of years go, grown men were getting into fist-fights over toilet paper and it's looking like they are about to wage war over a tank of juice.

New comment by briansm in "San Francisco Onion Futures Company"

briansm — Sat, 19 Sep 2026 05:59:37 +0000

The Future's Bright. The Future's Onion.

New comment by briansm in "Neovim have a ~$800k Bitcoin donation sitting untouched since 2023"

briansm — Thu, 17 Sep 2026 13:45:06 +0000

Fossil fuels were always worth way more than people ever realized.

Like Joni says, "you don't know what you've got till it's gone."

New comment by briansm in "Neovim have a ~$800k Bitcoin donation sitting untouched since 2023"

briansm — Thu, 17 Sep 2026 13:26:16 +0000

The hash is merely a convenience, the _actual_ public key used in transactions is present in the ledger and available to anybody who wants it.

New comment by briansm in "A Looming Rare Earth Shortage Threatens Critical Tech"

briansm — Fri, 28 Aug 2026 08:40:49 +0000

Me too, and I'm now grateful to have been proven wrong.

But then again I certainly wouldn't want to be the youth of today and expect the same outcome.

New comment by briansm in "AMD acquires Taalas to boost inference performance by etching models in silicon"

briansm — Sat, 08 Aug 2026 05:31:07 +0000

Cerebras have special techniques to work around etching errors / bad cores on their wafers. This is possible since their wafers are effectively hundreds of identical copies of redundant cores. Can't do that for a globally unique model.

Etching failure in that situation would be like brain-damage in a human, all sorts of weird effects would start appearing.

New comment by briansm in "There Will Come Soft Rains (1950) [pdf]"

briansm — Tue, 04 Aug 2026 07:13:42 +0000

Reminds me of when November 2019 came and went (the date that Blade Runner is set in)

New comment by briansm in "ReFrame – The EPaper Camera"

briansm — Wed, 29 Jul 2026 09:29:26 +0000

Make hay while the sun shines.

New comment by briansm in "Data Compression Explained (2012)"

briansm — Sat, 20 Jun 2026 07:49:58 +0000

I think so, specifically lossy compression though.

A modern version of the book would include an extra section in the 'Lossy compression' chapter - 'Text' (alongside Images/Video/Audio) that would discuss LLM's.

New comment by briansm in "πFS"

briansm — Thu, 11 Jun 2026 11:36:41 +0000

LLM's seem to be the weird interesting outcome of applying lossy (de)compression concepts to text instead of the audio/image/video domains where they have traditionally been used.

New comment by briansm in "Gemma 4 12B: A unified, encoder-free multimodal model"

briansm — Thu, 04 Jun 2026 11:40:14 +0000

Strange that they are feeding raw audio in. Even in humans, there is a hardware transform to the frequency domain (the cochlea) before data is fed to the brain, effectively doing this part in the LLM seems inefficient.

New comment by briansm in "WriteUp: 16 Bytes of x86 that turn Matrix rain into sound"

briansm — Mon, 18 May 2026 09:14:54 +0000

My favorite is 'spongy', an underwater journey through a Menger-sponge fractal in 128 bytes:

https://www.pouet.net/prod.php?which=53871

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=36BPql6Nl_U

I'm more impressed by the eerie beauty of it than the technical achievement, even if the code was orders of magnitude larger it would still be wonderful.

New comment by briansm in "WriteUp: 16 Bytes of x86 that turn Matrix rain into sound"

briansm — Mon, 18 May 2026 07:03:28 +0000

For a more laid-back chill 'rain' demo, have a look at "Rainy 32b" 32-byte x86 demo:

https://www.pouet.net/prod.php?which=86923

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iCgIQuPHb5w