Hacker News: jcims

New comment by jcims in "Ten advances in mathematics and theoretical computer science"

jcims — Mon, 03 Aug 2026 20:12:24 +0000

>Will we develop new ways to let people express their own values in democracies, or will we get much better at manipulation?

Yes.

New comment by jcims in "Karpathy’s Pelican"

jcims — Sun, 02 Aug 2026 20:29:03 +0000

I’d like to see a human one shot a pelican on a bicycle in raw svg.

New comment by jcims in "The development pipeline is a production system"

jcims — Sat, 01 Aug 2026 16:18:55 +0000

Agreed. I've started calling our non-production infrastructure environments 'engineering' rather than dev, and nobody's invited. We'll pull in platform teams that are exposed to this shame environmental offset issue, but no customers.

New comment by jcims in "Elevated errors on Claude Opus 5"

jcims — Mon, 27 Jul 2026 19:23:25 +0000

Indeed. Likely a bit of both.

New comment by jcims in "Elevated errors on Claude Opus 5"

jcims — Mon, 27 Jul 2026 13:22:37 +0000

Operationally (and anecdotally obv) we've found that accessing Claude via AWS Bedrock has been notably more stable than direct to Anthropic.

New comment by jcims in "Clinical failure rates over the decades: yikes"

jcims — Sun, 26 Jul 2026 00:39:05 +0000

Roughly equivalent to the percentage of startups that fail.

Lower numbers don’t mean we’re doing better, it means we’re trying less.

New comment by jcims in "First atmosphere found on Earth-like planet in habitable zone of distant star"

jcims — Fri, 17 Jul 2026 18:07:33 +0000

You would still need the sun shield in place obv.

New comment by jcims in "First atmosphere found on Earth-like planet in habitable zone of distant star"

jcims — Fri, 17 Jul 2026 15:26:46 +0000

The wild thing is that, if I understand it correctly, if you were floating in a spacesuit at the same spot you'd also see that resolution (likely highly distorted) with the naked eye.

New comment by jcims in "Satellite Tracker – Live Map of Starlink and 30k Satellites"

jcims — Tue, 14 Jul 2026 10:26:56 +0000

Yeah if the lower 48 states (~2800 miles) span the width of my entire screen (2560px), each pixel represents just over a mile. The satellites at that level were rendered with dots that are ~3px or just over 3 miles/.1% of that width.

The Starlink v2 is 100ft on it's longest dimension. This means that the actual size of the satellite relative to the dot is on the same order of magnitude (.6%) as the dot is to the size of the US when it takes up my entire screen.

New comment by jcims in "Satellite Tracker – Live Map of Starlink and 30k Satellites"

jcims — Tue, 14 Jul 2026 10:10:21 +0000

Yes

https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2026/05/starlink-blocks-acce...

New comment by jcims in "QuadRF can spot drones and see WiFi through my wall"

jcims — Fri, 10 Jul 2026 18:57:12 +0000

My truck (Ford) has some cell connectivity that I’ve never paid for. At scale it’s likely very inexpensive.

New comment by jcims in "The Vespa at 80"

jcims — Sat, 04 Jul 2026 16:10:23 +0000

What a goofy comment.

Pedestrians are *also* subject to right-of-way rules, just like everyone else on the road. Many examples of people running between parked/stopped cars and getting smoked when they hit an open lane with a vehicle they did not expect to be there.

Not the driver's fault.

New comment by jcims in "Africans Are Turning to Starlink"

jcims — Fri, 03 Jul 2026 22:52:54 +0000

It’s also surprisingly reliable given the physics of it all. I built a house out in the country in 2007 and 10Mbps DSL was all that was available for terrestrial connectivity up until literally yesterday.

The DSL would go down for hours a couple of times per month. I got on an early starlink pilot program and had a dish up in early 2021. Aside from momentary blips on the leading edge of a stormfront and occasional network issues a couple of times per year, it’s been rock solid with half the latency and 20x the bandwidth.

New comment by jcims in "AI learns the “dark art” of RFIC design"

jcims — Wed, 01 Jul 2026 17:42:20 +0000

Great comment!

>I thought was kind of the most fascinating part of the damninteresting article was the revelation that the evolved programs were inseparable from the single physical FPGA used in the training.

100% agree with this!!! It gave me this weird feeling the first time i read it, like the onset of some alien intelligence. xD

I definitely think a simulator is the way to go, but I'm guessing tools like that could find problems and edge cases in the simulator that nobody thought to test for.

I'm just glad they still have the article up. I bet I've shared it 50 times over the past 20 years lol.

New comment by jcims in "Newly discovered spider builds spring loaded snare to catch ants"

jcims — Wed, 01 Jul 2026 11:23:14 +0000

Just saw glow worms for the first time last month. Very cool critters. Not sure I even knew they existed before that.

New comment by jcims in "Department of Commerce has lifted export controls on Claude Fable 5 and Mythos 5"

jcims — Wed, 01 Jul 2026 09:09:14 +0000

Vendor diversity is a longstanding risk management principle. For it to work you need to invest in it as you build, not when the rug is pulled.

New comment by jcims in "I built a mmWave material classification radar (2025)"

jcims — Tue, 30 Jun 2026 19:48:18 +0000

Very cool idea.

I'm sure this can be annoying when people do this, but I can't help myself lol. I wonder if you could operate in a different modality and find discontinuities in material properties rather than use it as a classifier. For some reason skin cancer detection popped into my head, but general purpose inspection/detection cases for any discontinuities might be pretty helpful. Depending on the resolution/size of the field it's inspecting a realtime camera overlay might be interesting for correlation sake.

New comment by jcims in "Words Are a Byproduct of Consciousness. For LLMs, It's Backwards"

jcims — Tue, 30 Jun 2026 14:49:50 +0000

I've noticed that more and more of my mental attention while speaking is observing the words that come out of my mouth rather than 'generating' them. I split time between rough pathfinding in my mind to fit a conceptual framework then kind of sit and listen as it comes out to think about how they sound. If I had to guess this happens on a 1-2 sentence chunk at a time.

New comment by jcims in "AI learns the “dark art” of RFIC design"

jcims — Sat, 27 Jun 2026 18:37:07 +0000

Reminds me of this old article - https://www.damninteresting.com/on-the-origin-of-circuits/

One of my favorite little morsels of internet goodness.

New comment by jcims in "Un-0: Generating Images with Coupled Oscillators"

jcims — Fri, 26 Jun 2026 09:37:59 +0000

Take a look at extropic. AFAICT it's a form of analog computer.