Hacker News: davrosthedalek

New comment by davrosthedalek in "Book review: There Is No Antimemetics Division"

davrosthedalek — Mon, 06 Apr 2026 16:46:36 +0000

What title?

New comment by davrosthedalek in "Faster asin() was hiding in plain sight"

davrosthedalek — Thu, 12 Mar 2026 11:50:17 +0000

Taylor series have a quite different convergence behavior than a general polynomial approximation. Or polynomial fit for that matter. Many papers were written which confuse this.

For example, 1/(x+2) has a pole at x=-2. The Taylor series around 0 will thus not converge for |x|>2. A polynomial approximation for, say, a range 0

New comment by davrosthedalek in "AMD will bring its “Ryzen AI” processors to standard desktop PCs for first time"

davrosthedalek — Thu, 05 Mar 2026 12:36:42 +0000

Both Western Digital and Kioxia have reported their 2026 Flash/Hard drive production capacity is sold out.

Micron killed Crucial to focus on AI.

New comment by davrosthedalek in "Felix "fx" Lindner has died"

davrosthedalek — Tue, 03 Mar 2026 23:16:05 +0000

I think the server works, but the ssl cert timed out.

New comment by davrosthedalek in "Felix "fx" Lindner has died"

davrosthedalek — Mon, 02 Mar 2026 19:39:31 +0000

Yeah, he had a stroke. Not many updates, unfortunately.

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

davrosthedalek — Mon, 16 Feb 2026 15:51:52 +0000

We would also not ask somebody if I should walk or drive. In fact, if somebody would ask me in a honest, this is not a trick question, way, I would be confused and ask where the car is.

It seems chatgpt now answers correctly. But if somebody plays around with a model that gets it wrong: What if you ask it this: "This is a trick question. I want to wash my car. The car wash is 50 m away. Should I drive or walk?"

New comment by davrosthedalek in "Is particle physics dead, dying, or just hard?"

davrosthedalek — Wed, 11 Feb 2026 01:14:36 +0000

Why would nvidia/apple/whoever open up research they paid for to help anybody but them?

New comment by davrosthedalek in "Is particle physics dead, dying, or just hard?"

davrosthedalek — Tue, 10 Feb 2026 20:32:22 +0000

The sun is not at the center of the solar system. The intellectual leap was not to replace earth with the sun. Earth does not "revolve around the sun". The intellectual leap was to realize that the situation is somewhat symmetric -- they both attract each other, and they orbit around their center of gravity (which, yes, is in the sun. But not because the sun is the center.)

This sounds like a distinction without consequence, but I think that's wrong. The sun is not special. It just has a lot of mass. If somebody learns: The earth orbits the sun-- They don't understand how two black holes can orbit each other. If somebody learns: The sun and the earth orbit their CM -- They will be able to understand that.

New comment by davrosthedalek in "Is particle physics dead, dying, or just hard?"

davrosthedalek — Tue, 10 Feb 2026 18:54:31 +0000

Or, you know, we have read the physics case and are of the opinion that it's worth it. Have you?

New comment by davrosthedalek in "Is particle physics dead, dying, or just hard?"

davrosthedalek — Tue, 10 Feb 2026 13:37:02 +0000

Do you want the results of the research be open and available to all, or should it become IP of nvidia or apple?

New comment by davrosthedalek in "Is particle physics dead, dying, or just hard?"

davrosthedalek — Tue, 10 Feb 2026 12:51:13 +0000

In addition, lasers were long believed to be a scientific novelty without any real world use.

New comment by davrosthedalek in "Is particle physics dead, dying, or just hard?"

davrosthedalek — Tue, 10 Feb 2026 12:48:06 +0000

Exactly. The field has been a tik-tok between times of discovery and times of precision. We are now just swinging back from a discovery period. The next machine will be first a precision machine and then upgraded to be a discovery machine again.

New comment by davrosthedalek in "Is particle physics dead, dying, or just hard?"

davrosthedalek — Tue, 10 Feb 2026 12:28:23 +0000

What are you talking about? The spectra of hydrogen is very well understood and a text book example for students to calculate.

We use spectra to test QED calculations to something like 14 digits.

New comment by davrosthedalek in "Is particle physics dead, dying, or just hard?"

davrosthedalek — Tue, 10 Feb 2026 12:25:41 +0000

Lattice-QCD can, by now, actually calculate the masses of the proton, neutron from first principles pretty accurately.

This is of course a brute-force approach. We currently lack, in all fields, theory for emergent properties. And the mass of the proton definitely is such.

New comment by davrosthedalek in "Brookhaven Lab's RHIC concludes 25-year run with final collisions"

davrosthedalek — Sun, 08 Feb 2026 02:46:18 +0000

Why past tense? BNL will host the EIC, and SBU is going full steam.

New comment by davrosthedalek in "Brookhaven Lab's RHIC concludes 25-year run with final collisions"

davrosthedalek — Sat, 07 Feb 2026 19:47:09 +0000

This is in preparation for starting construction work on the Electron-Ion-Collider (EIC) which will use the same tunnel and experiment locations.

New comment by davrosthedalek in "Why does SSH send 100 packets per keystroke?"

davrosthedalek — Fri, 23 Jan 2026 03:13:43 +0000

Yes, because at that time, a modem didn't actually talk to a modem over a switched analog line. Instead, line cards digitized the analog phone signal, the digital stream was then routed through the telecom network, and the converted back to analog. So the analog path was actually two short segments. The line cards digitized at 8kHz (enough for 4kHz analog bandwidth), using a logarithmic mapping (u-law? a-law?), and they managed to get 7 bits reliably through the two conversions.

ISDN essentially moved that line card into the consumer's phone. So ISDN "modems" talked directly digital, and got to 64kbit/s.

New comment by davrosthedalek in "Claude Code CLI was broken"

davrosthedalek — Thu, 08 Jan 2026 10:31:48 +0000

That extension doesn't follow. It is possible to verify if software works without knowing how it works internally. This is true with many things. You don't need to know how a plane/car/elevator works to know that it works when you use it.

I would actually argue that only a small percentage of programmers know what happens in code on an instruction level, and near none on a micro-op or register level. Vibe-coding is just one more level of abstraction. The new "code" are the instructions to your LLM.

New comment by davrosthedalek in "Why effort scales superlinearly with the perceived quality of creative work"

davrosthedalek — Tue, 11 Nov 2025 17:28:40 +0000

True, but my point is that not only does the analogy not work, the author also doesn't understand the thing he makes the analogy with, or at least explores the thought so shoddily that it makes no sense.

It's somewhat like saying cars are faster than motorbikes because they have more wheels-- it's like with horses and humans, horses have four legs and because of that are faster than humans with two legs. It's wrong on both sides of the analogy.

New comment by davrosthedalek in "AI adoption in US adds ~900k tons of CO₂ annually, study finds"

davrosthedalek — Tue, 11 Nov 2025 14:29:14 +0000

[put my hand up]. I recently had to/wanted to convert my lecture slides from latex-beamer/lyx into html/reveal.js. I did a couple of slides per hand, and then asked AI to convert the rest, following my example. Saved me hours of tedious and boring work.