Hacker News: francoi8

New comment by francoi8 in "1-Bit Hokusai's "The Great Wave" (2023)"

francoi8 — Sat, 25 Apr 2026 18:03:02 +0000

For those wanting to explore automatically converting art pieces to 1-bit you can use 8Bit Photo Lab on iOS or Android. Select the black and white palette and choose resolution and dithering type.

Play Store: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.ilixa.ebp&...

App Store: https://apps.apple.com/us/app/8bit-photo-lab/id6759910005

New comment by francoi8 in "We found a stable Firefox identifier linking all your private Tor identities"

francoi8 — Thu, 23 Apr 2026 00:35:21 +0000

All of these could have a set of standard non identifiable answers (eg. firefox reports the same 20 fonts, couple video formats, one among a few standard window sizes etc.) and for anything more extensive/precise, it would require the user's authorization and the user should have the option of feeding fake info (eg. fake timezone)

New comment by francoi8 in "Generative art over the years"

francoi8 — Fri, 10 Apr 2026 15:15:25 +0000

One Lab is an Android/iOS app I develop that has quite a few generative algorithms (mostly pixel shaders). You can combine them with the various effects in the app to create your custom generative stack.

Link: https://onelab.ilixa.com/

New comment by francoi8 in "LinkedIn is searching your browser extensions"

francoi8 — Thu, 02 Apr 2026 17:10:24 +0000

This blows my mind. What good reason is there for giving javascript such permissions by default? This should at the minimum trigger an explicit permission request from the user.

New comment by francoi8 in "I dumped Windows 11 for Linux, and you should too"

francoi8 — Sun, 11 Jan 2026 16:54:12 +0000

There's nothing silly about those reasons.

New comment by francoi8 in "Busy beaver hunters reach numbers that overwhelm ordinary math"

francoi8 — Mon, 25 Aug 2025 08:08:26 +0000

Busy Beaver is non computable and grows much faster than the various subcubic graph numbers (you could easily encode a subcubic graph number computation in a relatively small turing machine).

New comment by francoi8 in "Powers of 2 with all even digits"

francoi8 — Thu, 20 Mar 2025 19:57:21 +0000

I wonder if we can get a sense of how fast it would grow if we hypothesize it is an infinite sequence.

And if it is a finite sequence, one could define f(p, n) as the sequence of successive exponents of 2 such that the ratio of even digits over its total number of digits is greater than p. This could be an interesting way of describing a set of fast growing functions from exponential growth (p=0) to arbitrarily fast growth as p grows closer to 1 (or P where P is the smallest number such that f(P, n) is a finite sequence).

New comment by francoi8 in "Meta's Mark Zuckerberg explores purchase of Washington DC property"

francoi8 — Wed, 29 Jan 2025 17:43:56 +0000

I would say any large corporation should meet higher standards of public benefit.

New comment by francoi8 in "How many holes does the universe have?"

francoi8 — Fri, 31 May 2024 21:26:45 +0000

I don't understand why the 4 corners of the screen make up the single hole. You could scroll the screen by 1 "square" which would change the corners which makes me feel there is nothing special about the original four corners.

New comment by francoi8 in "Ask HN: What non-AI products are you working on?"

francoi8 — Tue, 26 Mar 2024 20:18:56 +0000

These past 4 years, I've been working on One Lab https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.ilixa.onel...

It's a non destructive photo editor with a strong bend towards procedural generation.

Working on a video touch recording feature at the moment.

New comment by francoi8 in "Launch HN: OutSail (YC W23) – Wingsails to reduce cargo ship fuel consumption"

francoi8 — Mon, 03 Apr 2023 20:11:36 +0000

For CO2 at least the average price that it costs to pump the CO2 out of the atmosphere.

New comment by francoi8 in "Bitcoin drops below $18,300 as sell-off accelerates"

francoi8 — Sat, 18 Jun 2022 19:26:47 +0000

A lot of people are rooting for Bitcoin to crash so it will stop pumping carbon in the atmosphere like a middle sized country.

New comment by francoi8 in "The Crypto Elites Are Plotting a Wall Street Merger"

francoi8 — Tue, 03 May 2022 23:38:17 +0000

Unfortunately, it's a sandbox that consumes as much electricity as some mid-sized countries. An absolute obscenity.

New comment by francoi8 in "Ubisoft’s first NFT plans make no sense"

francoi8 — Wed, 08 Dec 2021 18:53:59 +0000

No, it's just a URL.

New comment by francoi8 in "Trust-Busting as the Unsexy Answer to Google and Facebook"

francoi8 — Fri, 15 Oct 2021 16:06:55 +0000

The larger a company becomes, the more it should be regulated.

New comment by francoi8 in "NFTs Are a Pyramid Scheme and People Are Already Losing Money"

francoi8 — Sun, 21 Mar 2021 14:30:51 +0000

Except they're shitting on our planet in the process!

New comment by francoi8 in "Live feed of Starship SN10 flight test [video]"

francoi8 — Thu, 04 Mar 2021 00:13:26 +0000

It felt like CGI

New comment by francoi8 in "Cambridge Bitcoin Electricity Consumption Index"

francoi8 — Wed, 10 Feb 2021 17:05:13 +0000

Back of the envelope calculations for the yearly operation of:

- Visa: 7 million GJ

- Bitcoin: 403 million GJ

New comment by francoi8 in "VLC 3.0 release"

francoi8 — Fri, 09 Feb 2018 18:54:37 +0000

I gave 10€.

New comment by francoi8 in "We have a pretty good idea of when humans will go extinct"

francoi8 — Sat, 07 Oct 2017 16:08:39 +0000

I think his argument is wrong and the fallacy comes when making the hypothesis the is a "50 percent chance that it was somewhere in the middle portion of the wall's timeline". It seems like a relatively reasonable assumption in that context but it is actually very arbitrary.

Imagine applying his reasoning to any building that has just been completed. Say we visit it the following day, make the 50% hypothesis and then conclude the building has a 50% chance of falling within 8 hours to 3 days. Obviously the conclusion is wrong as vastly more than 50% of buildings last longer than 3 days. We see in this case that postulating that there is a 50% chance that we visited the building somewhere in the middle portion of the building's timeline was completely unreasonable - we know from experience that buildings tend to last years.

So basically his estimation of when humans go extinct derives from a guess that may or may not be correct and in any case seems very arbitrary.