Hacker News: grumbelbart

New comment by grumbelbart in "Claude for Small Business"

grumbelbart — Thu, 14 May 2026 07:33:14 +0000

Of course, should it be as cost efficient as claimed and if you don't use it but everybody else does, you might be pushed out of the market.

New comment by grumbelbart in "Eka’s robotic claw feels like we're approaching a ChatGPT moment"

grumbelbart — Sat, 02 May 2026 10:10:18 +0000

Agreed. The solution will likely be some vision foundation model that directly sends controls to the robot ("move here, grab, move there"), trained by Amazon with RL to integrate collision avoidance, object detection, grasping point detection, grasp verification etc.

New comment by grumbelbart in "Seven countries now generate nearly all their electricity from renewables (2024)"

grumbelbart — Sun, 12 Apr 2026 17:12:56 +0000

> But electricity is under half (30%?40%?) and the rest of that energy isn't fossil-free.

The trick of course is that if you electrify heating and transportation they'll need much less energy. Your average car with an ICE has an efficiency of 20-40%, electric cars have 60-80%. Heating your house with gas has an efficiency of around 100%, heat pumps have 300%-500%.

New comment by grumbelbart in "Great at gaming? US air traffic control wants you to apply"

grumbelbart — Sat, 11 Apr 2026 07:29:29 +0000

> If you were to design an entire ATC system from scratch (pilot interfaces, sensors everywhere in the airport and planes etc) it can be automated.

Even then you'll probably run into the long-tail distribution issues, similar to self-driving cars. 99.9% of all situations are pretty standard, but once in a while something so abstruse happens that it's not pre-programmed and requires some creativity to solve.

> What you can probably do is create software which observes traffic and simulates it into the future and notifies the human ATCs about risks.

Fully agree. Some of the recent close calls really were "obvious" much earlier, meaning they were not caused by late course changes.

New comment by grumbelbart in "Embarrassingly simple self-distillation improves code generation"

grumbelbart — Sun, 05 Apr 2026 10:34:43 +0000

Is this some kind of calibration then? I'd expect that the probabilities automatically adjust during training, such that in "lock" mode, for example, syntax-breaking tokens have a very low probability and would not be picked even wich higher temperature.

New comment by grumbelbart in "German men 18-45 need military permit for extended stays abroad"

grumbelbart — Sat, 04 Apr 2026 21:14:51 +0000

I'm reasonably sure Russia would take you.

New comment by grumbelbart in "Miasma: A tool to trap AI web scrapers in an endless poison pit"

grumbelbart — Sun, 29 Mar 2026 17:23:45 +0000

Would using an actors face and voice as training data be fair use?

What it the model then creates a virtual actor that is very close to the real actor?

New comment by grumbelbart in "App that shows real-time lightning on Earth is showing bombings in Middle East"

grumbelbart — Sun, 29 Mar 2026 17:12:15 +0000

The data behind the app is pretty solid, but lightningmaps.org has a much better visualization (based on the same data).

New comment by grumbelbart in "So you want to build a tunnel"

grumbelbart — Wed, 18 Feb 2026 13:10:42 +0000

I use them as cheap-man's VPN. A ssh server on a public IP but a non-obvious port brings you into the network, and port forwarding allows you to connect to relevant endpoints in your remote network via localhost:12345.

New comment by grumbelbart in "Improving 15 LLMs at Coding in One Afternoon. Only the Harness Changed"

grumbelbart — Fri, 13 Feb 2026 08:28:37 +0000

> My Weird Hill is that we should be building things with GPT-4.

Absolutely. I always advocate that our developers have to test on older / slower machines. That gives them direct (painful) feedback when things run slow. Optimizing whatever you build for an older "something" (LLM model, hardware) will make it excel on more modern somethings.

New comment by grumbelbart in "The risk of a hothouse Earth trajectory"

grumbelbart — Wed, 11 Feb 2026 20:14:51 +0000

Putting sulfur into the right layers of the atmosphere seems to be the currently best viable options. It's not overly expensive, either. It acts fast and is reversible.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stratospheric_aerosol_injectio...

New comment by grumbelbart in "The risk of a hothouse Earth trajectory"

grumbelbart — Wed, 11 Feb 2026 20:09:47 +0000

The low prices of solar and batteries are a glimmer of hope. For many regions it's now the cheapest source of electricity.

New comment by grumbelbart in "Mathematicians disagree on the essential structure of the complex numbers (2024)"

grumbelbart — Tue, 10 Feb 2026 19:50:58 +0000

They would never be the same. It's just that everything still works the same if you switch out every i with -i (and thus every -i with i).

New comment by grumbelbart in "Mathematicians disagree on the essential structure of the complex numbers (2024)"

grumbelbart — Tue, 10 Feb 2026 19:49:33 +0000

> Is this the shadow of something natural that we just couldn't see, or just a convenience?

They originally arose as tool, but complex numbers are fundamental to quantum physics. The wave function is complex, the Schrödinger equation does not make sense without them. They are the best description of reality we have.

New comment by grumbelbart in "In Europe, wind and solar overtake fossil fuels"

grumbelbart — Fri, 23 Jan 2026 06:08:41 +0000

The thing is that your home's heatpump has an efficiency of 300%-500%. So even if your power plant and power delivery only has say 50% gas-to-electricity-at-home, you are still looking at 150%-250% gas-to-heat-your-house efficiency.

New comment by grumbelbart in "In Europe, wind and solar overtake fossil fuels"

grumbelbart — Thu, 22 Jan 2026 19:19:46 +0000

Exactly. It is in general (much) more efficient to burn natural gas in a power plant and use the electricity for heatpumps compared to simply burning gas at home for heating.

New comment by grumbelbart in "There were BGP anomalies during the Venezuela blackout"

grumbelbart — Tue, 06 Jan 2026 15:42:18 +0000

Would that help against a man in the middle that blocks the H3 traffic to snoop the URL when the client falls back to H2?

New comment by grumbelbart in "Five Years of Tinygrad"

grumbelbart — Tue, 30 Dec 2025 20:45:49 +0000

> The "Elon process" relies specifically to the goal of getting rid of all dependencies. Musk has spoken extensively about building things from the ground up and not relying on other vendors (in this example complex software dependencies). He says he wouldn't be able to build SpaceX competitively if he had just bought rockets or components.

That I cannot believe. He might have shifted the make-or-buy decisions, but both Tesla and SpaceX do a lot of outsourcing.

New comment by grumbelbart in "Growing up in “404 Not Found”: China's nuclear city in the Gobi Desert"

grumbelbart — Sun, 28 Dec 2025 11:28:55 +0000

Stupid question, but is 404 the real designator of that city, or a pun towards the HTTP error code?

Edit: And what a great read, thank you!

New comment by grumbelbart in "Memory Safety"

grumbelbart — Fri, 26 Dec 2025 10:40:56 +0000

Can you say what hardware could do better? I.e. which kind of primitives do you miss, or would make it easier to develop safer software?