Hacker News: gattr

New comment by gattr in "Artemis II's toilet is a moon mission milestone"

gattr — Fri, 03 Apr 2026 10:44:40 +0000

Delta-v relative to the Orion is probably not that big, so I guess the waste will also circle the Moon and follow the crew into Earth's atmosphere.

New comment by gattr in "Elon Musk pushes out more xAI founders as AI coding effort falters"

gattr — Sat, 14 Mar 2026 08:11:38 +0000

It's Bighetti actually ([1]).

[1] https://silicon-valley.fandom.com/wiki/Big_Head

New comment by gattr in "Living human brain cells play DOOM on a CL1 [video]"

gattr — Sun, 08 Mar 2026 20:41:01 +0000

Yes, sorry! I like them both a lot.

New comment by gattr in "Living human brain cells play DOOM on a CL1 [video]"

gattr — Sun, 08 Mar 2026 20:20:31 +0000

I don't think it's a best example. MMAcevedo is about running a real human mind on a different substrate (for science, for labor, or to torture it for fun a million times, I guess, by a bored teenager who got the image from torrents).

Scaling up these neuron cultures is rather something like "head cheese" from Greg Egan's "Rifters" novels (artificial "brains" trained to do network filtering, anti-malware combat etc.).

New comment by gattr in "Retiring GPT-4o, GPT-4.1, GPT-4.1 mini, and OpenAI o4-mini in ChatGPT"

gattr — Fri, 30 Jan 2026 10:06:10 +0000

Maybe a more formal "with extreme prejudice" would have worked.

New comment by gattr in "OLED, Not for Me"

gattr — Sat, 10 Jan 2026 14:37:12 +0000

I have the same Dell (since 2016) and love it. But eventually I transitioned last year to a 27" 4K monitor. Still almost as sharp (KDE at 175% works fine for me).

New comment by gattr in "Learn computer graphics from scratch and for free"

gattr — Sun, 28 Dec 2025 21:45:56 +0000

I concur; just last month I started with `wgpu` (the Rust bindings for WebGPU) after exclusively using OpenGL (since 2000, I think? via Delphi 2). Feels a bit verbose at first (with all the pipelines/bindings setup), but once you have your first working example, it's smooth sailing from there. I kind of liked (discontinued) `glium`, but this is better.

New comment by gattr in "Toys with the highest play-time and lowest clean-up-time"

gattr — Thu, 25 Dec 2025 18:12:49 +0000

I had such blocks as well. For a recent take on this, I can recommend Kapla, typically come in a large (a couple 100s) box of skinny rectangular cuboids. I had fun doing, ahem, preliminary testing, before gifting them to my niece.

New comment by gattr in "Voyager 1 is about to reach one light-day from Earth"

gattr — Wed, 26 Nov 2025 22:49:54 +0000

Once we develop more efficient propulsion (fission, fusion, light sails, etc.), would you like for someone to catch the Voyagers and bring them back into a museum? I myself am not sure. (Perhaps a "live museum" instead, keep them on their trajectories, but surround with a big space habitat with visitor center and whatnot.)

New comment by gattr in "Human brains are preconfigured with instructions for understanding the world"

gattr — Tue, 25 Nov 2025 09:34:52 +0000

I think it's a wrong way to look at it. In addition to DNA information content, one should count also the complexity of the proteins and higher-level structures in the gametes.

New comment by gattr in "NTSB report: Decryption of images from the Titan submersible camera [pdf] (2024)"

gattr — Sun, 23 Nov 2025 10:09:02 +0000

From the report:

> To conduct the CT scans, the large mass was evaluated by a third-party laboratory under NTSB supervision. This facility had a range of scanners with different power and energy levels and could scan large masses using a rotating table, avoiding the need to rotate the mass itself. Ultimately, the third-party laboratory attempted to image the large mass at a power as high as 320 kilovolts (kV). The scans conducted at 320 kV were not powerful enough to penetrate the object, and as a result, no internal structures or voids were visible, and no memory devices could be identified. The NTSB evaluated using another laboratory with higher power and energy CT scan devices, however, there was concern that increased CT scan energy could damage data stored on any surviving NVM chips. Consequently, higher-energy scans were not pursued.

I'm no expert, but remember reading about neutron imaging ([1]). I'm curious if that was deemed unfeasible, too expensive, or having little chance of success? From Wikipedia:

> X-rays are attenuated based on a material's density. Denser materials will stop more X-rays. With neutrons, a material's likelihood of attenuation of neutrons is not related to its density. Some light materials such as boron will absorb neutrons while hydrogen will generally scatter neutrons, and many commonly used metals allow most neutrons to pass through them.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neutron_imaging#Neutron_radiog...

New comment by gattr in "X5.1 solar flare, G4 geomagnetic storm watch"

gattr — Wed, 12 Nov 2025 08:04:22 +0000

Shameless plug: active region (and sunspot group) 4274 has already produced several X-class solar flares, alas, I didn't manage to catch one during my short weekend imaging session. Though there was a nice prominence; 38-min time lapse (Earth to scale):

https://app.astrobin.com/u/GreatAttractor?i=9tkxay#gallery

New comment by gattr in "A macOS terminal command that tells you if your USB-C cable is bad"

gattr — Wed, 08 Oct 2025 07:42:38 +0000

On a somewhat related note, I like the IO shield of my new MSI motherboard - the USB ports are tersely labeled "5G", "10G", "40G" (and a few lingering "USB 2.0").

New comment by gattr in "Britain to introduce compulsory digital ID for workers"

gattr — Fri, 26 Sep 2025 14:29:55 +0000

> Stored on mobile phones, the ID would contain details including a name, date of birth, residency status and crucially a photo - which would distinguish it from National Insurance numbers.

Surely it will be possible to also store it on some government-issued, GCHQ-vetted digital device, and not rely on foreign companies (Google/Apple) and their locked-down mobile platforms?

New comment by gattr in "Magic Lantern Is Back"

gattr — Wed, 03 Sep 2025 15:29:48 +0000

I used to do it as well with a cheap second-hand IXUS 230 HS. It could run (at least) 48 h off a 7.2 Ah 12 V AGM battery, snapping a photo every 3 s (I used a fake-battery power adapter and a small DC-DC converter.)

New comment by gattr in "Custom telescope mount using harmonic drives and ESP32"

gattr — Tue, 19 Aug 2025 17:13:55 +0000

Another interesting project might be capturing host star light curves for transiting exoplanets. For a number of closer ones, it can be done conveniently from a backyard with just a photographic lens. Here's one amateur using ASI178MM-c with a Canon FD 300 mm:

https://astropolis.pl/topic/60163-wasp-10-b-w-pegazie-1270-m...

New comment by gattr in "US AI Action Plan"

gattr — Thu, 24 Jul 2025 14:54:34 +0000

To be nitpicky, our uranium and thorium were made via r-process (rapid neutron capture), which is not the kind of fusion occurring in the Sun at present.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/R-process

New comment by gattr in "US AI Action Plan"

gattr — Thu, 24 Jul 2025 14:50:13 +0000

Earth's spin comes from the parent molecular cloud which formed the Solar System (including any impacts during the protoplanetary phase.) And that ultimately from density fluctuations after Big Bang, and the way they led to coalescence of galaxies and galaxy clusters.

New comment by gattr in "23andMe is out of bankruptcy and it still hasn’t substantially changed its ways"

gattr — Fri, 18 Jul 2025 11:32:09 +0000

You could always restore from incidental backups (hairbrush, etc.).

New comment by gattr in "The Rise of Whatever"

gattr — Fri, 04 Jul 2025 11:22:08 +0000

On a more positive note, LLMs (or their successors) could be used to create a perfect tutor. Taylored for every individual, automatically adjusting learning material difficulty, etc.

But yeah, first we'll go through a few (?) years of the self-defeating "ChatGPT does my homework" and the necessary adjustments of how schools/unis function.