Hacker News: butokai

New comment by butokai in "Differences Between `Foldl` and `Foldr`"

butokai — Tue, 06 Oct 2026 13:36:50 +0000

Related and quite cool: Unifying fold left and fold right https://kirancodes.me/posts/log-unifying-folds.html

New comment by butokai in "Direct retinal projection display for smart glasses using a meta-optic mirror"

butokai — Tue, 06 Oct 2026 13:30:12 +0000

I have a quite badly displaced retina due to a detachment. I wonder if technology like this could be used in conjunction with mapping the distorted retina in order to obtain a correct perceived image.

What is mathematics now, and what should it be?

butokai — Fri, 25 Sep 2026 12:13:13 +0000

Article URL: https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.23218

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49843541

Points: 2

# Comments: 0

New comment by butokai in "iOS 27, iPadOS 27, and macOS 27"

butokai — Tue, 15 Sep 2026 12:09:50 +0000

I am very sad that there is no iPadOS for A12X iPads. That tablet is the first one to be clearly desktop-class, and would still be usable with Linux as a desktop. iPadOS 26 sadly has too many issues, and it would have deserved an upgrade to 27.

New comment by butokai in "iPod Classic 6G in QEMU"

butokai — Fri, 11 Sep 2026 14:38:27 +0000

I think another problem is: vibecoded emulators (like this one seems to be?) are likely to be a stunt, a cool project, but will not be maintained. Upstreaming this to qemu requires at least some human effort, and it is not very likely to happen. So we are left with a cool trick.

New comment by butokai in "Lake Ontario ("Lake America")"

butokai — Tue, 01 Sep 2026 12:17:50 +0000

I feel like instances of this kind of decision (also from your examples) fall into two groups: replacing names from colonization with local names, and... Second group name left as an exercise to the reader.

New comment by butokai in "Lake Ontario ("Lake America")"

butokai — Tue, 01 Sep 2026 12:14:51 +0000

I am Italian, and we get quite pissed when the government issues executive orders (the head of state can't do it), although it happens relatively often. I live in France, and when the president resorted to using them it felt like he was threatening democracy.

The US mechanism seems the strongest of the three, and people have considered this a normal thing in a democracy long enough for this to happen.

New comment by butokai in "Tether: iMessage, SMS, etc. on Linux"

butokai — Sun, 30 Aug 2026 07:35:05 +0000

Of course kudos to the author. But I am pretty sure that the availability of iMessage and notifications over Bluetooth starting from iOS 26.5 is a direct result of the EU’s policies for smartwatch interoperability, so… kudos to the EU as well!

New comment by butokai in "Tether: iMessage, SMS, etc. on Linux"

butokai — Sun, 30 Aug 2026 07:32:36 +0000

There’s also the old work on owlink and opendrop https://github.com/seemoo-lab/opendrop, which reimplement apple’s version of WiFi direct and use it to have a Linux implementation of AirDrop. I guess Continuity’s functionality are based on this as well.

New comment by butokai in "TheoremDB – A public workspace for machine mathematics"

butokai — Sun, 09 Aug 2026 11:24:32 +0000

Andrej Bauer and others are working on a kind of similar infrastructure, and developing a dedicated query language: https://math.andrej.com/2026/07/11/making-ai-smarter-with-ai...

New comment by butokai in "Why Erdős Problems Are Falling to AI"

butokai — Wed, 05 Aug 2026 15:06:25 +0000

Your observation is perfectly on point, I think the season of companies announcing breakthroughs might be over soon (unless they somehow manage a major achievement, P vs NP or similar). At the same time, mathematicians will be left with superintelligent machines solving the actual math for them, much like software engineers nowadays. This was unexpected, and unexpected at this scale up to a couple of months ago.

New comment by butokai in "Leanstral 1.5"

butokai — Wed, 01 Jul 2026 08:21:32 +0000

I am getting 404 right now

New comment by butokai in "Making Sense of Proof by Contradiction [pdf]"

butokai — Sat, 27 Jun 2026 07:57:11 +0000

Neither of the two. A proof by contradiction, as other comments have stated, is: assuming not P1, we reach a contradiction; thus P1 must be true. This is equivalent to tertium non datur in classical logic. I’m not sure it’s a valid deduction in your trivalent logic.

New comment by butokai in "Making Sense of Proof by Contradiction [pdf]"

butokai — Sat, 27 Jun 2026 04:59:01 +0000

This document misses the point in a way that very commonly arises when mathematicians (as opposed to logicians) discuss proof by contradiction. The examples in this document all revolve around assuming a fact, showing that it would lead to an absurd, and thus establishing that that fact can’t be the case: there is no rational equal to sqrt(2), there is no finite listing of all the primes. They are not using proof by contradiction at all, and on the contrary these proof are fully constructive: if one where to give us what they believe is a finite list of all the primes, the proofs gives us a method to construct a new prime.

Proof by contradiction, on the other side, deems that we derive a contradiction from the assumption that a statement does not hold. Then, by contradiction, we may state that is true because it is impossible for it to be false.

This is why it is rejected by the intuitionists and constructivists: there is no way to extract an explicit procedure from such a proof, since it only states that what can’t be false must me true.

New comment by butokai in "A 10 year old Xeon is all you need"

butokai — Mon, 01 Jun 2026 12:42:45 +0000

Do you think there will still be an incentive to release weights in that scenario? Everyone will have models only if there continue to be companies releasing weights.

New comment by butokai in "Ex-Apple engineer says Apple deliberately slows older phones via updates"

butokai — Wed, 20 May 2026 07:43:50 +0000

I remember trying an iPhone 12 in 2020 and feeling it was so fast that no phone task would ever be able to use all that power. Definitely not my current experience on my now old iPhone 12. A lot of it can be attributed to ever increasing ram usage by web pages, but that doesn’t seem to be all.

New comment by butokai in "A new spam policy for “back button hijacking”"

butokai — Tue, 14 Apr 2026 18:11:27 +0000

Same for me! It took me a while staring at the article and wondering why "browser" was mentioned so many times, to realize it was not Android

New comment by butokai in "Apple update looks like Czech mate for locked-out iPhone user"

butokai — Sun, 12 Apr 2026 11:38:46 +0000

That's what I was thinking, but the phrasing seems to imply that he did update to 26.4.1? Not sure how that was possible.

New comment by butokai in "I turned my Kindle into my own personal newspaper"

butokai — Sun, 29 Mar 2026 07:14:24 +0000

This setup feels cumbersome, since you also have to manually track which items you have read. Kobo seems to offer better features in this sense (better than a jail broken kindle), however I like the build of my Kindle Oasis 2 too much.

New comment by butokai in "FSFE supporters affected: Payment provider Nexi cancelled us"

butokai — Fri, 20 Mar 2026 07:47:58 +0000

As an Italian living in another EU country, I always thought that the amount of (broken) bureaucracy of Italy was not particularly worse. However this story comes after a couple more I heard this week, in a line of absurd practice possibly due to absurd regulations.