Hacker News: hallgrim

New comment by hallgrim in "Chernobyl particles reveal unexpectedly stable nuclear fuel after 40 years"

hallgrim — Sat, 10 Oct 2026 16:53:49 +0000

Not really? How do you define efficiency here?

Thermonuclear bombs literally create lots of heat, and don’t tend to drive anything that produces work. It’s the opposite of efficient.

Just like lighting gasoline on fire and claiming that that’s more efficient than a combustion energy…

New comment by hallgrim in "Google’s Project Suncatcher to put ML infrastructure in space"

hallgrim — Fri, 25 Sep 2026 06:30:05 +0000

Maybe they figured out something us “normal” people haven’t, but the physics and economic challenges haven’t really been addressed, at all.

Suggesting such an idea without indicating how - and more importantly, why - you are going to do it makes it an article of faith.

Do I have faith in their trustworthiness? No. Do I think they want to do marketing for their AI financing? Yes!

New comment by hallgrim in "My weird new hobby: Wandering around Tokyo on Google Maps"

hallgrim — Fri, 25 Sep 2026 06:17:33 +0000

“I walk the streets of Japan Till I get lost ‘Cause it doesn’t remind me of anything” - Audioslave (“Doesn’t Remind Me”)

New comment by hallgrim in "Houthis used Anthropic to develop guided weapons"

hallgrim — Sat, 12 Sep 2026 06:31:45 +0000

As far as I heard they had that strategy as a possibility for decades, US experts had warned the current and prior administrations about it’s possible ramifications, warning against attacking Iran for exactly this reason.

The previous German minister of economy, Robert Habeck, had warned of such a situation a few years ago, too.

New comment by hallgrim in "Mistral raises €3B"

hallgrim — Tue, 08 Sep 2026 06:06:36 +0000

If you follow the ideology of the Silicon Valley billionaire types, based around Ayn Rand (eg “Atlas Shrugged”) and Curtis Yarvin, as well as what Thiel himself has said over the years, the Antichrist is governmental institutions, seen as the inhibitors of progress. I am not joking btw.

New comment by hallgrim in "Hilariously Fast Volume Computation with the Divergence Theorem"

hallgrim — Fri, 28 Aug 2026 12:51:43 +0000

The author is just expressing amusement at the surprising simplicity of the resulting algorithm

New comment by hallgrim in "Australia Bans Generative A.I. From Official Music Charts"

hallgrim — Thu, 27 Aug 2026 13:41:00 +0000

They should add labels for auto-tune as well, so I can filter it out more easily

New comment by hallgrim in "U.S. State Department pauses immigrant visa applications"

hallgrim — Thu, 27 Aug 2026 13:31:04 +0000

“Hey, I disinvite you from my board game nights, so now your apartment can delight in your prolonged presence!”

New comment by hallgrim in "I'm becoming AI-blind"

hallgrim — Fri, 21 Aug 2026 15:18:02 +0000

The food “photography” I’ve noticed in our local area - and many have started putting up these AI images - all have a weird distribution of shapes to them, a strangely uniform rhythm of same-sized features with almost blue-noise spacing. Every texture looks unnatural in the shapes it presents as, similar to this picture.

New comment by hallgrim in "The federal keyword lists that canceled billions in research funding"

hallgrim — Mon, 17 Aug 2026 12:13:45 +0000

Also, I know this isn’t the definition of free speech per se. Hence the nod at citizens united which made a farce of the whole concept.

New comment by hallgrim in "The federal keyword lists that canceled billions in research funding"

hallgrim — Mon, 17 Aug 2026 12:12:22 +0000

Government funding didn’t use to be political. Humanities existed and got funding even during republican presidents.

It has been made political relatively recently. That’s one of my issues.

New comment by hallgrim in "The federal keyword lists that canceled billions in research funding"

hallgrim — Mon, 17 Aug 2026 06:12:05 +0000

*devolution

New comment by hallgrim in "The federal keyword lists that canceled billions in research funding"

hallgrim — Mon, 17 Aug 2026 06:09:48 +0000

Well, the government funds science projects in general, and now they are limiting it based on a very loose list of terms related to ideas counter to their own ideology.

The idea of freedom of speech is to not limit expression of ideas counter to any one ideology.

Also, if corporations donating to political campaigns is speech, so should science funding be - which is now being restricted.

Their usual retort is: “we need more speech in the market place of ideas, not censorship”.

So why don’t they just fund right-wing-aligned projects instead?

Hypocrisy all around.

New comment by hallgrim in "Hello, me. It's been a while"

hallgrim — Fri, 14 Aug 2026 04:21:49 +0000

Funny. For me, instrumental music is just as distracting. If I don’t know the music I listen to well enough, my attention will go there and make any coding or reading impossible.

New comment by hallgrim in "I'm not anti-AI, but I have QUALLMS"

hallgrim — Tue, 11 Aug 2026 07:10:11 +0000

Another awkward overlap with the use of “AI” exists in games, too. Because here AI just means behavior, from a simple Goomba walking left to right to smart squads of soldiers coordinating, taking cover etc.

New comment by hallgrim in "I hacked my clock to control my focus"

hallgrim — Mon, 12 May 2025 08:16:28 +0000

Check out swiftbar (see my other comment) https://github.com/swiftbar/SwiftBar

New comment by hallgrim in "I hacked my clock to control my focus"

hallgrim — Mon, 12 May 2025 08:14:10 +0000

On macOS there is xBar (haven't tried it) and SwiftBar [1]

Its really cool because it lets you use any shell-executable file, including bash scripts, python scripts (with shebangs and made executable), as a menu bar tool. The standard output is expected to follow a very simple structure and will be used to create the menu bar tool's text/icon. You can have your scripts simply output emoji as well!

Not just that, but any output after a `---` will be treated as drop down options, and depending on format, those can contain info, or be exectuable actions.

Verrrry useful for all sorts of things.

1. https://github.com/swiftbar/SwiftBar

New comment by hallgrim in "Cognate: Readable and concise concatenative programming"

hallgrim — Mon, 24 Jun 2024 09:10:35 +0000

I would disagree with this. The prefix notation isn’t hard to understand, but even if I am familiar with how it works, it still requires the reader to do conversion, whereas when I write “a + b” in most other languages, it is quite clear to anyone what it means without mental conversion.

New comment by hallgrim in "The new math of how large-scale order emerges"

hallgrim — Tue, 11 Jun 2024 14:39:56 +0000

Not sure but turbulent diffusion might be an example? Fluid dynamics is emergent from its constituent particles, creating sometimes vortices etc. which can decay into ever smaller vortices through the fluid’s coarser dynamics. At some point the vortices become so small that the kinetic energy is turned into diffusive behavior at the particle level instead.

New comment by hallgrim in "Unity plan pricing and packaging updates"

hallgrim — Wed, 13 Sep 2023 08:13:01 +0000

Unfortunately the blog post is so poorly worded that I'm not sure after that. My reading, too, is that once you reach the threshold, you pay for those first 200k installs, too! The table says 'per install', not 'per additional install' or anything like it. Not sure though.