Hacker News: fraboniface

New comment by fraboniface in "Honda is killing its EVs"

fraboniface — Wed, 18 Mar 2026 08:12:28 +0000

Thats' why you need light EVs. Norway has electric tanks. China has light EVs.

New comment by fraboniface in "Bet on German Train Delays"

fraboniface — Wed, 04 Mar 2026 12:30:22 +0000

We'll have won politics the day people understand that individual responsibility doesn't work at scale, and that, on average, people just respond to incentives.

New comment by fraboniface in "Vietnam bans unskippable ads"

fraboniface — Wed, 07 Jan 2026 12:31:06 +0000

You're dead right, it would be the one killer move to remove a lot of perverse incentives, fix the internet, possibly even social media, and all live in a happier world. The whole economy would stop paying the ad tax to Google and Meta.

And it's not that impractical : just make a consumer-run search engine for products and services.

I asked Gemini 3 what was the smartest thing it could think of

fraboniface — Thu, 20 Nov 2025 18:22:20 +0000

Article URL: https://fraboniface.com/blog/gemini-3-on-degrowth/

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45995851

Points: 2

# Comments: 0

New comment by fraboniface in "Gemini 3 Pro Model Card [pdf]"

fraboniface — Tue, 18 Nov 2025 13:30:41 +0000

> Developments to the model architecture contribute to the significantly improved performance from previous model families.

I wonder how significant this is. DeepMind was always more research-oriented that OpenAI, which mostly scaled things up. They may have come up with a significantly better architecture (Transformer MoE still leaves a lot of room).

New comment by fraboniface in "French ex-president Sarkozy begins jail sentence"

fraboniface — Wed, 22 Oct 2025 08:03:56 +0000

While "quality of life first" remains true in spirit for a lot of French people, this hasn't been supported politically since 2000 (when legal weekly work time was reduced to 35 hours - many people do more but they are compensated for it). And even that law was an exception. In truth, France has taken the neoliberal turn of the 80s almost as much as other countries, and growth and competitiveness has been the only mantra of governments for 40 years. We're mostly protected by laws passed before the 50s.

New comment by fraboniface in "Europe Can No Longer Ignore That It's Under Russian Attack"

fraboniface — Fri, 03 Oct 2025 11:42:58 +0000

How do you (especially Europeans) understand this move from Russia? Can it really sustain a war against us? Does it want to break NATO by proving the US won't move?

New comment by fraboniface in "Meta Ray-Ban Display"

fraboniface — Thu, 18 Sep 2025 09:36:41 +0000

"The World Beyond Your Head" from Matthew Crawford is exactly about this. Definitely recommend reading!

New comment by fraboniface in "AI is different"

fraboniface — Sat, 16 Aug 2025 06:30:16 +0000

On this, read Daniel Susskind - A world without work (2020). He says exactly this: the new tasks created by AI can in good part themselves be done by AI, if not as soon as they appear then a few years of improvement later. This will inevitably affect the job market and the relative importance of capital and labor in the economy. Unchecked, this will worsen inequalities and create social unrest. His solution will not please everyone: Big State. Higher taxes and higher redistribution, in particular in the form of conditional basic income (he says universal isn't practically feasible, like what do you do with new migrants).

New comment by fraboniface in "Study: Social media probably can't be fixed"

fraboniface — Thu, 14 Aug 2025 09:42:11 +0000

They mention that chronological order increases the amplification of extreme content. They don't seem to have tested only subscribed content though.

New comment by fraboniface in "The Real GenAI Issue"

fraboniface — Sun, 06 Jul 2025 20:53:05 +0000

Fossil (in particular coal) thermal plants that were planned for shutdown are being kept online or restarted because of AI energy use. Tech had a pretty minor environmental footprint until now but it's growing rapidly due to AI, for use cases that are clearly not vital and for a good part garbage.

New comment by fraboniface in "Ask HN: How to Make Friendster Great?"

fraboniface — Wed, 21 May 2025 17:25:02 +0000

An idea I had is organizing week-ends in big houses with maybe 30 strangers of similar age. You make them have a great time, and afterwards you invite them to indicate the people they really liked. Over time you can make them see each other again and maybe do some recommendation engine to guess who in the community they will like but still haven't met.

New comment by fraboniface in "Richest 10 Percent Responsible for Two-Thirds of Warming"

fraboniface — Wed, 07 May 2025 13:34:02 +0000

The problem is that fossile fuel companies (and other polluting industries) don't just answer an existing demand but also influence on that demand: they lobby against environmental regulation, run influence campaigns against climate science, use greenwashing, etc. Those companies and their shareholders can't be taken out of the equation as they're not neutral.

New comment by fraboniface in "Operator research preview"

fraboniface — Thu, 23 Jan 2025 21:53:14 +0000

Exactly, every country should urgently have a public debate on how best to use that technology and make sure it's beneficial to society as a whole. Social media are a good example that a technology can have a net negative impact if we don't deploy it carefully.

New comment by fraboniface in "Australian Parliament bans social media for under-16s"

fraboniface — Fri, 29 Nov 2024 07:16:52 +0000

It's very hard for parent to resist the insistent demands of their children to get a smartphone when their classmates all have one, and not having one means being or feeling excluded. This is the kind of coordination problem better solved by regulation.

New comment by fraboniface in "Our First Generalist Policy"

fraboniface — Sun, 10 Nov 2024 08:04:24 +0000

Creation is the single most fulfilling human experience after having children (which is also creation). I'm not sure we want to take that away from us.

New comment by fraboniface in "SimpleQA"

fraboniface — Thu, 31 Oct 2024 07:17:45 +0000

Why ignore academics?

New comment by fraboniface in "Ask HN: What Are You Working On? (October 2024)"

fraboniface — Mon, 28 Oct 2024 08:22:06 +0000

Very interesting, I've been thinking about this kind of approach but haven't had the time to really work on it. So what kind of business model do you have? Is it a kind of drop-in replacement for vector dbs?

Out of curiosity, if it's not a trade secret, how do you plan to handle conflicting data (two sources saying different things on the same topic/data)?

New comment by fraboniface in "Ask HN: Founders, what was the major sourcing channel for your first 100 users?"

fraboniface — Sat, 19 Oct 2024 10:07:42 +0000

Wow nice, what was the service to attract people so well?

New comment by fraboniface in "Amazon buys stake in nuclear energy developer in push to power data centres"

fraboniface — Thu, 17 Oct 2024 06:54:29 +0000

This has indeed been a big blocker, but the article is proof that the market now wants it. And there are plenty of new nuclear startups, as well as interested researchers. What was lacking so far was a real need energy-wise (in the absence of a high carbon tax) and regulatory stability/transparency.

Edit: also, sodium fast reactors have existed for 20 years. The R&D has mostly already been done for that tech. But the lack of projects make it stuck to TRL 8.