Hacker News: ctolsen

New comment by ctolsen in "AI companies are shredding rare books"

ctolsen — Mon, 27 Jul 2026 15:27:46 +0000

I'd go for the less complex version: just make copyright last for like 20 years at most.

New comment by ctolsen in "How LLMs work"

ctolsen — Sat, 06 Jun 2026 06:34:45 +0000

No, it’s definitely not what a human brain is. That makes very little sense. The ways we interact with language (and thus conceptual memory) is completely and fundamentally different.

New comment by ctolsen in "Spain to expand internet blocks to tennis, golf, movies broadcasting times"

ctolsen — Wed, 15 Apr 2026 08:13:33 +0000

Yeah, if this is stopped, it'll be because of the European Charter of Fundamental Rights or the ECHR.

The Charter and the European Court of Justice is why we don't have blanket data retention in the EU but it took twelve years to strike down the Data Retention Directive (though it was killed off much faster in some national courts).

New comment by ctolsen in "Sam Altman's response to Molotov cocktail incident"

ctolsen — Sat, 11 Apr 2026 06:24:50 +0000

It's well established that the companies who own the proprietary frontier models complain loudly that open models are distilled from theirs.

There's surely some truth to it (and it's well deserved), but it's happening in every direction.

New comment by ctolsen in "Sam Altman's response to Molotov cocktail incident"

ctolsen — Sat, 11 Apr 2026 06:21:43 +0000

I mean, I could say the same about Gemini. 3.1 Pro tops a bunch of benchmarks out there but any practical use I've put it to it's underperforming both other proprietary and open weight models. Benchmarks are suspicious in general.

New comment by ctolsen in "Sam Altman's response to Molotov cocktail incident"

ctolsen — Sat, 11 Apr 2026 06:12:17 +0000

Having worked with both proprietary and open weight SOTA models lately, my view is it's definitely not 6 months, it's less -- and shrinking.

New comment by ctolsen in "MoD sources warn Palantir role at heart of government is threat to UK security"

ctolsen — Mon, 16 Mar 2026 14:46:13 +0000

It's 100% laziness on the side of procurement, aided by some good marketing and a complete lack of guardrails. Exactly the same mindset that has led to every European government now being tied to US big tech.

New comment by ctolsen in "You don't have to"

ctolsen — Mon, 02 Mar 2026 09:40:18 +0000

I'd challenge that assertion. LLMs still produce very bad results with greenfield work, so that seed was generated by people who had both creativity and skill a thousand times before. Having a glimmer of an idea that you've probably seen more or less intact somewhere else and getting an AI to take it from that point is much closer to Milli Vanilli than any actual creative work.

New comment by ctolsen in "Asahi Linux Progress Report: Linux 6.19"

ctolsen — Wed, 18 Feb 2026 13:40:32 +0000

To add to that, they'll continue to be great machines running Linux even after Apple has bloated MacOS to death. Tahoe has made my M1 MBP feel significantly less snappy for no good reason.

Building x86_64 Docker containers on Apple Silicon

ctolsen — Fri, 04 Dec 2020 21:08:58 +0000

Article URL: https://ctolsen.medium.com/building-x86-64-docker-containers-on-apple-silicon-a6d868a18f37

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25308020

Points: 12

# Comments: 1

New comment by ctolsen in "Travel Time London Underground Map (2016)"

ctolsen — Thu, 21 Sep 2017 13:49:50 +0000

What would it give you that, say, Citymapper doesn't?

New comment by ctolsen in "Atmospheric CO2 levels accelerate upwards"

ctolsen — Tue, 11 Apr 2017 10:15:17 +0000

It is comparable, and thinking about agriculture as a closed system is not even close to correct. We're mowing down natural carbon sinks to an insane degree to grow crops to feed animals, one of the major reasons of deforestation and land use change in South America, for instance.

And not only that, we grow slow-acting carbon and turn it into fast-acting methane.

I strongly doubt Musk would have such a simplistic view of agricultural emissions, they're a big concern for a reason.

New comment by ctolsen in "Lyft's Nice-Guy Strategy Leaves It Struggling to Catch Uber"

ctolsen — Thu, 21 Apr 2016 09:28:14 +0000

Not the same guy, but I feel like Uber is a pretty cutthroat company, and they are probably not an example of a sustainable model in a more freelance/gig based economy. I like that they're paving the way for a new way of doing things and I use them almost exclusively here in London.

I wouldn't say I want Uber to go under, I really don't. But if another company like Lyft can do it in a way I feel is more ethical, I would easily switch over.

New comment by ctolsen in "Canada to introduce legislation to legalize recreational cannabis"

ctolsen — Thu, 21 Apr 2016 08:50:04 +0000

It's only a holdup if the government wants it to be a holdup.

New comment by ctolsen in "Canada to introduce legislation to legalize recreational cannabis"

ctolsen — Thu, 21 Apr 2016 08:46:38 +0000

Well, even if it doesn't change much, you're still stuck with the absolute worst part of drug prohibition – unregulated and unclean drugs, turf wars and violence, and hundreds of thousands of murders in less fortunate countries.

I find decriminalisation to be a pretty egoistic way around the problem. Sure, it makes lives better for people at home, but it completely ignores the massive amount of suffering countries (including Canada) has brought on supply and transit countries.

New comment by ctolsen in "NPM and Left-Pad: Have We Forgotten How to Program?"

ctolsen — Thu, 24 Mar 2016 16:22:31 +0000

There are tools to include only the stuff you actually use that you can stuff in your build process though.

New comment by ctolsen in "NPM and Left-Pad: Have We Forgotten How to Program?"

ctolsen — Thu, 24 Mar 2016 13:11:57 +0000

When using a language where

    isArray(arr)

turns into

    toString.call(arr) == '[object Array]'

...then I guess that's more reasonable than if you use something sane.

New comment by ctolsen in "NPM and Left-Pad: Have We Forgotten How to Program?"

ctolsen — Thu, 24 Mar 2016 13:04:09 +0000

It's interesting to me that people find this convincing. I find it to be complete insanity. People need their libraries, but putting everything in tiny buckets is just not working. Why aren't people working on good utility libraries instead?

There's even some guy calling for a "micro-lodash". To me, as a Python engineer, lodash [1] is already a tiny utility library.

I guess it's also about the fact that JS is a pretty bad language. That you need a one-line `isArray` dependency to `toString.call(arr) == '[object Array]'` is crazy.

[1] https://lodash.com/docs

New comment by ctolsen in "What is the real reason we sleep?"

ctolsen — Mon, 21 Mar 2016 15:40:40 +0000

I use a mouth guard, it turned out to be sufficient.

New comment by ctolsen in "What is the real reason we sleep?"

ctolsen — Mon, 21 Mar 2016 12:26:58 +0000

From someone else with apnea: absolutely none at all.

I didn't have to use CPAP to treat it though, so other people's experiences might be different.