Hacker News: jojomodding

New comment by jojomodding in "French firefighters face 'pyrocumulonimbus' for first time"

jojomodding — Mon, 27 Jul 2026 18:58:20 +0000

This video is so insane. They're in a combustion engine. I can not fathom why they survived let alone managed to drive out of this. Trains are not build for fire resistance.

New comment by jojomodding in "BYD Yangwang U8 has remarkable emergency floating function that would save lives"

jojomodding — Sun, 26 Jul 2026 19:33:31 +0000

Is it gonna be one of those things where increased safety encourages dumb people because "it is watertight you know" so now a lot more people drive into the floods, and even though it's a smaller proportion more people in total drown.

New comment by jojomodding in "German battery maker Varta files insolvency applications"

jojomodding — Fri, 24 Jul 2026 12:35:03 +0000

I am not sure I understand what you are trying to say. There is currently a lot of demand for building out solar and wind in Germany. There is also large demand for building battery storage. The demand especially for the latter comes from the mismatch between supply and demand in electricity markets, so in a sense the battery operators hope to do arbitrage in a way that will also increase the efficiency of the market (by allowing the use of solar after dark).

This is very much a market-based solution. What the state has to do is provide permits and stuff for getting the batteries etc. actually built; which the state is doing but not as fast as it could right now. (at least in Germany)

New comment by jojomodding in "German battery maker Varta files insolvency applications"

jojomodding — Fri, 24 Jul 2026 12:30:21 +0000

You can never know. People in Germany have wildly divergent takes on what would be good for the country right now and some things that are acceptable to say in mainstream circles seem batshit insane to me.

New comment by jojomodding in "GitHub shouldn't be a dependency for publishing Rust on crates.io"

jojomodding — Wed, 24 Jun 2026 21:32:09 +0000

The non-profit (the Foundation) pays for specific things but it is not really there to hire people to work on things. It pays for infrastructure work and to pay the existing maintainers who often do review work. It also gives stipends to up-and-coming contributors for Open Source outreach programmes, but this are not really the people who you want to have immediately work on your critical infrastructure code.

New comment by jojomodding in "Founding a company in Germany: €9600, 152 days and I still can't send an invoice"

jojomodding — Wed, 24 Jun 2026 18:12:27 +0000

Probably criminally liable for bankruptcy as well. At least in Germany (where I am vaguely familiar with the law) you lose bankruptcy protection for debts you take on that are knowingly not covered by existing assets or expected future income. This is usually hard to prove, but if your assets are 0 and there was never a viable plan all along they'll likely found you guilty. This means you become personally liable to the creditors and might also face jail time.

New comment by jojomodding in "How Japan's railways stayed one while splitting apart"

jojomodding — Fri, 19 Jun 2026 09:15:16 +0000

You can tell this is a true success in Germany because 95% of local passengers now use it. It also caused a significant increase in ridership, putting the already overloaded rail system under a lot more pressure while taking away income from the rail companies (after making it cheaper).

New comment by jojomodding in "Swiss parliament lifts ban on new nuclear power plants"

jojomodding — Thu, 18 Jun 2026 19:43:37 +0000

Ah, that's what they're building the power plants for. Blasting things into space.

New comment by jojomodding in "Want your images back? That'll be $5"

jojomodding — Thu, 18 Jun 2026 00:56:05 +0000

In times like this, I am happy I live in the EU where I can request a company send me a copy of all data they have stored about me. That includes all pictures I ever send to them, or at least a low-resolution preview sufficient for me to realize which picture it is, or at the very least a file listing. Ah yes and they must do so without charging me anything.

New comment by jojomodding in "Police officer investigated for using AI to 'create evidence' in multiple cases"

jojomodding — Sun, 14 Jun 2026 21:25:30 +0000

The judge will decide if the evidence is admissible or not.

New comment by jojomodding in "Swiss voters reject proposal to cap Population at 10M"

jojomodding — Sun, 14 Jun 2026 21:13:19 +0000

Switzerland already has such a party, the SVP (UDC in French), and in fact they put forward the initiative.

This was widely understood to be a vote on how well the SVP can appeal to the center. Turns out pretty well but it's not entirely surprising given their recent election results.

New comment by jojomodding in "German ruling declares Google liable for false answers in AI Overviews"

jojomodding — Wed, 10 Jun 2026 08:56:51 +0000

Newspapers have mechanisms like corrections and apologies that can be used to "right" a published falsehoods.

This relies on me being able to find out if a newspaper lies about me, which is usually easy since we can all go buy the same newspaper. With AI it is much harder to find out that it has been telling potential customers wrong things about my business.

New comment by jojomodding in "Is it possible to send a message in Morse code by un-following someone on x.com?"

jojomodding — Wed, 03 Jun 2026 23:15:16 +0000

Well, you can use tap code: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tap_code

Or you can use "Morse tap code" where two close knocks represent a dot, and if the gap between them is slightly longer it's a dash. That takes two knocks for one dot/dash but it works and is (was?) used in practice.

New comment by jojomodding in "WH proposes rules giving political appointees final approval on research grants"

jojomodding — Sun, 31 May 2026 21:12:46 +0000

Most countries you would consider "developed" in the world (and then some more) switched to having a professional, non-political civil service in the last 100 years, if they hadn't already had one.

Do you think that this maybe indicates something? Or did your analysis stop at the US border? Is it wise to base policies on a system that has not been used in more than 100 years based on the perception that this was some sort of golden age even if a cursory glance around the world show that no country you want to live in is run like that?

New comment by jojomodding in "Performance of Rust Language [pdf]"

jojomodding — Tue, 26 May 2026 08:06:50 +0000

Once it shortens the loop, the compiler can also observe that `tab` is a local variable and therefore move the writes up "to the initializer." It can then see that the variable is unused and delete it, and also delete the loop.

New comment by jojomodding in "Alexander Grothendieck Revolutionized 20th-Century Mathematics"

jojomodding — Sun, 24 May 2026 22:02:42 +0000

Interestingly, the way in which Grothendieck conceived of equality is nowadays being questioned, especially due to the rise of formalized mathematics and Lean. More concretely, there is this fun paper by Kevin Buzzard which deconstructs it: https://arxiv.org/abs/2405.10387

Money quote:

> In this paper I argue that the first assertion above is false, the second is dan- gerous, and the third is meaningless.

New comment by jojomodding in "What Do Gödel's Incompleteness Theorems Mean?"

jojomodding — Thu, 21 May 2026 18:03:35 +0000

This also makes it obvious that at some point, the halting problem becomes "unprovably hard." There must be Turing Machines for which it is independent of the accepted axioms of mathematics whether or not they halt. And indeed, constructing such machines is not too difficult.

There is current research into finding the smallest such Turing Machine. Here is one with 748 states: https://www.ingo-blechschmidt.eu/assets/bachelor-thesis-unde...

New comment by jojomodding in "The Iranian Government Internet Filtering Machine Is Trying to Get Into Mozilla"

jojomodding — Tue, 19 May 2026 18:47:37 +0000

That title is a gross misrepresentation of what is actually happening. This is actually about an Iranian Cloud Provider wanting to be added to the public suffix list.

New comment by jojomodding in "LLM Policy for Rust Compiler"

jojomodding — Fri, 15 May 2026 22:18:50 +0000

Not sure what is particularly autistic about the observation that "couldn't we just all get along" is unfortunately not how the world works even if we would like it to?

New comment by jojomodding in "Bun Rust rewrite: "codebase fails basic miri checks, allows for UB in safe rust""

jojomodding — Fri, 15 May 2026 18:55:46 +0000

exactly. If they wanted to iterate on their port they would add lifetime annotations here, which are the tool Rust be uses to ensure safety. They're just kicking the unsafety block down the road. This accomplishes nothing and is not how you get Rust to deliver its safety promise.