Hacker News: jakeinspace

New comment by jakeinspace in "Nissan's third generation e-POWER powertrain"

jakeinspace — Mon, 28 Sep 2026 13:57:27 +0000

A cheap diesel/gasoline generator might do like 5kW, which is enough for overnight charging but not for range extension or powering the wheels. There were several pretty good range extended EVs (plugin hybrid with larger battery and smaller engine), like the Volt and BMW i3, those had small engines that mainly acted as generators for the battery, but with enough horsepower to at least keep you rolling on the highway. A $300 modular generator ain't quite gonna cut it.

I believe there's also a bunch of Chinese vehicles with similar design, entirely electric drivetrain with gas generators for range extension. Most of these will need to kick in before the battery is empty so that there's some stored energy buffer available for acceleration.

New comment by jakeinspace in "How to Write with an LLM"

jakeinspace — Thu, 17 Sep 2026 23:51:34 +0000

Probably the worst part

New comment by jakeinspace in "How to Write with an LLM"

jakeinspace — Thu, 17 Sep 2026 22:57:49 +0000

Excessive generative AI output devalues all communication media unfortunately. As a greater and greater portion of text, imagery, audio, and video come to be synthetic, I don't see why anybody would be motivated to do deep reading, or listening, or analysis of said media. It's frightening to think what that might do to our civilization, almost like putting us back into a weird version of the ancient past when nobody was literate, save the priest.

Maybe humans can adapt to care about generated content and treat it with the same emotional weight that human communication has. I don't know if that's good or not.

New comment by jakeinspace in "Towards Self-Driving Codebases"

jakeinspace — Thu, 17 Sep 2026 20:56:08 +0000

Kind of feels like we're in a similar place with AI programming as we are with self driving vehicles. Good enough for the typical case, maybe even better than most humans, but bad when dealing with novel situations or situations which require a really cohesive model of the system (code, business requirements, physical world, whatever).

New comment by jakeinspace in "Whoisinspace.com/"

jakeinspace — Thu, 17 Sep 2026 17:45:24 +0000

New comment by jakeinspace in "Canada holds first defense talks with China in more than 8 years"

jakeinspace — Tue, 08 Sep 2026 13:28:57 +0000

China hasn't invaded another country this century.

New comment by jakeinspace in "A theory for decades of C vulnerabilities"

jakeinspace — Thu, 20 Aug 2026 19:14:19 +0000

Well, sure they make reference. Borrow checkers and memory ownership concepts, like in Rust, are pretty good at giving a very low overhead improvement over bare C pointers. But they're not as flexible. Shared memory complicates ownership rules. And invariably, any Rust program that involves real hardware will require dropping down into unsafe at some points. A safer program with an unsafe kernel is an improvement, don't get me wrong.

I'm not sure how a type system would "solve" arithmetic overflow / bounds dynamically, without expensive overhead (boxed types).

New comment by jakeinspace in "A theory for decades of C vulnerabilities"

jakeinspace — Thu, 20 Aug 2026 17:29:34 +0000

Can't really have it all. If you want runtime assertions on your data/state, that has a cost. Nothing is stopping you from writing that logic out and having all your inputs and outputs sanitized for "semantic invariance". But if you want the language to implicitly do that, you're gonna have overheads. Pick a different systems language in that case, and deal with the tradeoff.

New comment by jakeinspace in "Memory prices climb 500% in 12 months"

jakeinspace — Tue, 18 Aug 2026 23:10:07 +0000

I've got a dead older GPU (RTX titan, 24GB of GDDR6). It's been a paper weight for a while, core is damaged, but I realize I could probably sell it or just the memory chips for a decent price on eBay.

Still, it's a nice reminder of my hubris.

New comment by jakeinspace in "Buyer cancels showing after Deflock shows two cameras utilized by the HOA"

jakeinspace — Mon, 17 Aug 2026 13:04:00 +0000

The police aren't your friends

New comment by jakeinspace in "Terrence Tao's ChatGPT Conversation about the Jacobian Conjecture Counterexample"

jakeinspace — Wed, 22 Jul 2026 22:32:44 +0000

Every quantifiable science has some amount of math, but it's by definition applied math. I think this was more of a debate between applied and more abstract math.

New comment by jakeinspace in "Apple sues OpenAI, accuses ex-employees of stealing trade secrets"

jakeinspace — Sat, 11 Jul 2026 16:52:57 +0000

Apple has all the money in the world to take this to court, I don't see why they'd accept a settlement. The discovery process alone could honestly destroy OpenAI by making investors and employees nervous enough to look elsewhere. Would be especially interesting if this crosses into criminal territory, especially if there's solid proof of upper management or executives being aware.

New comment by jakeinspace in "Microsoft new Outlook takes 10 seconds to do what Outlook Classic does instantly"

jakeinspace — Thu, 18 Jun 2026 18:11:11 +0000

My first week at a new job that forces me back into Windows (with WSL). I'm about ready to throw my machine out the window and follow after it. I understand that a lot of the performance issues are things like crowdstrike and Defender and maybe some poorly configured network proxy stuff but Jesus, this sucks. I write embedded software for machines with 1 ten thousandth the compute of my dev machine, I should not be encumbered by issues like this.

New comment by jakeinspace in "Please Use AI"

jakeinspace — Fri, 29 May 2026 16:42:19 +0000

Marx wrote about the concept of alienation in the context of work, the process by which capitalism would destroy the emotional attachment between laborer and their output in the name of efficiency. Prior to factories and division of labor, while life was still very hard, artisans and craftspeople were more in charge of their work and output.

Software, and knowledge work in general, is facing an even deeper form of alienation from AI. I don't see how I (just past 30) or future generations will be able to find deep satisfaction from "knowledge work" if this current trajectory holds. I don't think our brains are wired for a life of this without tremendous mental anguish.

New comment by jakeinspace in "Ferrari Luce"

jakeinspace — Mon, 25 May 2026 21:14:57 +0000

This sucks

New comment by jakeinspace in "Show HN: I made a calculator that works over disjoint sets of intervals"

jakeinspace — Sat, 18 Apr 2026 15:16:47 +0000

This is great

New comment by jakeinspace in "Isaac Asimov: The Last Question (1956)"

jakeinspace — Fri, 17 Apr 2026 13:05:32 +0000

Stanislaw Lem, if you can handle something a little more poetic and less strictly hard sci-fi.

New comment by jakeinspace in "The beginning of scarcity in AI"

jakeinspace — Thu, 16 Apr 2026 22:04:02 +0000

China is installing something like 500 GW of wind and solar per year now. Even if they're only able to build and otherwise access chips that have half the SoTA performance per watt, they will win.

New comment by jakeinspace in "Apple update looks like Czech mate for locked-out iPhone user"

jakeinspace — Sun, 12 Apr 2026 10:38:48 +0000

That's not really true in any country these days.

New comment by jakeinspace in "How NASA built Artemis II’s fault-tolerant computer"

jakeinspace — Fri, 10 Apr 2026 04:24:26 +0000

True, but BFS was mainly done in-house. Source: my best friend and I worked on some parts of it.