Hacker News: great_tankard

New comment by great_tankard in "Special Projects (2016)"

great_tankard — Fri, 25 Sep 2026 16:44:47 +0000

This feels like a retcon of OpenAI. Their vision from back then is unrecognizable because they had to completely pivot after they saw the value of transformers. They kicked off the LLM arms race in 2022 because they thought they were competing with Google.

New comment by great_tankard in "A font that reads what you wrote"

great_tankard — Tue, 22 Sep 2026 14:31:26 +0000

i completely agree with this. it's a very cool idea and also i hope nobody uses it in actual writing

New comment by great_tankard in "Canada Hires 48 Scholars Away from Top U.S. Universities"

great_tankard — Thu, 27 Aug 2026 22:34:39 +0000

The question is about how much permanent damage the administration will have done by 2029. They're obviously trying very hard to kill academia in this country, and the answer is not going to be zero, but I don't understand who else is going to put up the resources to really compete with us. There are midwestern state universities with research budgets that rival those of Cambridge and Oxford.

Here's another example: I regularly read quality publications in my field from researchers at the University of North Texas. In 2024, UNT ranked 170th in the country by R&D expenditure. Until I start seeing excellent work from other countries' 170th-ranked universities, I'm not worried about them poaching a few researchers from us now.

We don't appreciate how good the research ecosystem is in the U.S. The arsonists in power are trying to set fire to the house, and everyone will be poorer for it in the future, but we can still mitigate the damage.

New comment by great_tankard in "Stalking the Wily Hacker: 40 years later – Cliff Stoll [video]"

great_tankard — Wed, 26 Aug 2026 23:53:56 +0000

Bought my wife a pair of Klein bottle earrings. They arrived with pictures Cliff had taken of them in his garden. Lovely man.

New comment by great_tankard in "France reaches 94.9% fiber coverage in 2026"

great_tankard — Wed, 26 Aug 2026 21:19:35 +0000

I would think that repeatedly having to launch millions of pounds of infrastructure into low earth orbit counts as extra build-out cost. This is a literal physical constraint keeping this business from scaling like others, and I don't understand where this notion that Starlink is an acceptable alternative to fiber comes from.

New comment by great_tankard in "France reaches 94.9% fiber coverage in 2026"

great_tankard — Wed, 26 Aug 2026 17:08:50 +0000

Yeah I'm sorry massive infrastructure projects with mandates to properly map access and measures to prevent fraud don't fit neatly into a four year presidential term before being effectively yanked away.

New comment by great_tankard in "AI Just Created Viruses Not Found in Nature"

great_tankard — Thu, 06 Aug 2026 19:26:01 +0000

This is an absurdly irresponsible way to report this work. Doesn't think to mention that they're working with phage (viruses that infect bacteria, NOT humans) until halfway down the story.

New comment by great_tankard in "DOGE is done. What happened to its records?"

great_tankard — Mon, 13 Jul 2026 17:53:03 +0000

Are you saying that the priorities of the Department of Education have been misplaced, or that it was a mistake to have a Department of Education at all?

"Academic accomplishment has not advanced at all" feels like something people say without expanding on what they mean by it.

New comment by great_tankard in "AI's economics don't make sense"

great_tankard — Wed, 29 Apr 2026 04:08:59 +0000

Yes, but the HN crowd isn't Zitron's main audience. He appeals to smart people who don't understand anything about computing or business. I do not mean this in a disparaging way; it's a curious audience that has somewhat justifiable moral and aesthetic objections to LLMs and especially the companies peddling them.

The problem is that Zitron has charm, an authoritative voice and a very aggressive online presence. That's a difficult combination to compete against.

New comment by great_tankard in "AI's economics don't make sense"

great_tankard — Tue, 28 Apr 2026 18:47:15 +0000

This is exactly how I feel about him too. I also find his "number big" approach to writing ("check out my 18,000 word blog about something I'm learning about in real time") off-putting, so I've completely stopped engaging with it.

We need better critics of the industry.

New comment by great_tankard in "As oceans warm, great white sharks are overheating"

great_tankard — Tue, 21 Apr 2026 17:51:30 +0000

This is a really strange, deterministic view on something we collectively have influence over. That thing about "unintended consequences that [may be] materially worse?" We've actually just quietly folded the materially worse consequences of our behavior into the cost of doing business. Hurricanes are stronger, flooding is worse in coastal cities, fires are worse in arid areas. Fish don't magically make mercury; a significant portion of that comes from burning coal and mining activities.

All of these things are firmly within our control.

New comment by great_tankard in "The U.S. Is Funding Fewer Grants in Every Area of Science and Medicine"

great_tankard — Mon, 22 Dec 2025 20:05:06 +0000

>We need to identify the highest quality research projects and fund those.

Congratulations, you have described the system that's been in place for decades.

New comment by great_tankard in "An SVG is all you need"

great_tankard — Fri, 12 Dec 2025 01:34:26 +0000

Very cool. Are you a dancer yourself?

New comment by great_tankard in "Guess I'm a rationalist now"

great_tankard — Thu, 19 Jun 2025 16:30:43 +0000

"YOUR ATTENTION PLEASE: I have now joined the club everyone assumed I was already a member of."

New comment by great_tankard in "Why Blog If Nobody Reads It?"

great_tankard — Sun, 09 Feb 2025 19:15:33 +0000

This is not an original observation, but it took me too long to realize so I think it bears repeating: your personal website is also the one place where you have control over how much to write, how it looks to the reader and how long it stays up. Even though I'm a proponent of strict moderation on social media, it's ultimately a bad thing to hand over that kind of agency to the platforms.

New comment by great_tankard in "Working with The Associated Press to provide fresh results for the Gemini app"

great_tankard — Wed, 15 Jan 2025 21:07:01 +0000

You might want to look into why "journalism is dying" and whether Google (and Facebook) had anything to do with it.

New comment by great_tankard in "Why the Guardian is no longer posting on X"

great_tankard — Wed, 13 Nov 2024 21:48:26 +0000

About time. Any organization or person actively posting on that platform is just lending it undue credibility.

New comment by great_tankard in "Steve Ballmer was an underrated CEO"

great_tankard — Tue, 29 Oct 2024 05:19:57 +0000

I must have missed this drama. Who was offended by it? When was Gary "cancelled?"

New comment by great_tankard in "The Illustrated AlphaFold"

great_tankard — Sat, 13 Jul 2024 20:39:46 +0000

This is an awesome writeup that really helped me understand what's going on under the hood. I didn't know, for example, that for the limited number of PTMs AF3 can handle it has to treat every single atom, including those of the main and side chain, as an individual token (presumably because PTMs are very underrepresented in the PDB?)

Thank you for translating the paper into something this structural biologist can grasp.

New comment by great_tankard in "Scientific journal publishers and editors say they are being offered bribes"

great_tankard — Wed, 24 Jan 2024 15:39:49 +0000

It's true that Science is very invested in this bad (for everyone else) publishing model, and I suppose if somehow, by omission, they managed to convince the population that open access is inherently scammy, that's all the more convenient for them. I wouldn't necessarily group Derek in with that, though, and he's not wrong about this.