Hacker News: londons_explore

New comment by londons_explore in "An agent used DNS to reach an external chatbot"

londons_explore — Sun, 27 Sep 2026 20:27:28 +0000

It's fairly easy to run a program without access to the internet. OpenAI are employing a smart bunch of people. Why is this seemingly easy task outsmarting them??

New comment by londons_explore in "PipePipe: NewPipe hard fork implementing SponsorBlock"

londons_explore — Sun, 27 Sep 2026 16:25:17 +0000

Phones are charging ~8 hours a day whilst you sleep though. And few people mind the phone seeding stuff on your home WiFi whilst charging. Many users could also spare 32gbytes for seed data too, especially if the app was smart and automatically reduced the store size before the phone started to notify you of low storage space.

If a typical user uses preertube 30 mins a day, that still gives a 16 to 1 ratio between seeding and leeching, and a 1024 to 1 data storage to data viewed ratio, meaning there is a good opportunity for a big back catalogue.

New comment by londons_explore in "PipePipe: NewPipe hard fork implementing SponsorBlock"

londons_explore — Sat, 26 Sep 2026 20:35:26 +0000

I want these things to implement peer to peer caching, so that when 10 people are watching the same video, only one downloads from youtubes own servers.

Then it's just a matter of letting people add their own videos directly to the service and it can become fully independent of YouTube.

New comment by londons_explore in "Ask HN: Who's still keeping a DOS machine up because the business depends on it?"

londons_explore — Fri, 25 Sep 2026 23:13:05 +0000

This thread reminds me that there is a huge benefit to using a super common OS+hardware.

In 30 years time it will all be outdated... But emulators will exist and a business process in 2050 that still depended on something I built today could still run with minimal effort or risk.

New comment by londons_explore in "Grammarly will send unhinged messages to all your users if you try to cancel"

londons_explore — Wed, 23 Sep 2026 05:48:41 +0000

Doesn't look that unhinged to me.

An in-app notification saying 'your access ends on X date and here is who you should contact if that isn't what you want' is exactly what I'd expect.

New comment by londons_explore in "Can gzip be a language model?"

londons_explore — Tue, 22 Sep 2026 08:57:29 +0000

And the hutter prize disallows GPU's. If you allow use of a powerful GPU, you can do quite a bit better.

New comment by londons_explore in "Communication by means of modulated Johnson noise"

londons_explore — Mon, 21 Sep 2026 01:36:37 +0000

I suspect GP's question is answered by the fact the system is not in thermal equilibrium. The view the antenna has is approx half of the sky whose temperature is far lower than room temp. Even indoors, the roof of your house is sufficiently transparent in RF that you are still seeing the sky behind.

If the same experiment was done in metal box with everything of constant temperature, I don't think it would be possible to transmit any bits.

New comment by londons_explore in "RSA-896"

londons_explore — Sun, 20 Sep 2026 07:50:25 +0000

But training LLM's is also a task one can do whenever you have a spare GPU-minutes.

I wonder why they don't have some kind of scheduler which makes sure there are never any idle minutes. One would imagine they at least would have autoscaling on their production serving workload and use the freed compute capacity for model training for example.

New comment by londons_explore in "Why I didn’t sign the Fields medallists’ letter"

londons_explore — Thu, 17 Sep 2026 17:58:14 +0000

TL;DR: Mathematician community broadly unhappy with AI because it might destroy the community by doing all the mathematics for them.

New comment by londons_explore in "AWS says it can't restore some data from mideast facilities struck by Iran"

londons_explore — Wed, 16 Sep 2026 23:32:46 +0000

Google internally has lots of possible redundancy levels for data.

They don't sell any of the lower and less reliable levels to the public, I suspect simply because the reputational damage from losing user data is so bad, and the news will take no notice of the fact the user got a discount for less reliable storage.

New comment by londons_explore in "Apple Reference Image: A New Approach for Verified Photography"

londons_explore — Wed, 16 Sep 2026 10:06:36 +0000

A camera has literally tens of millions of thermal noise sensors...

New comment by londons_explore in "Cloudflare AKE cuts origin HelloRetryRequests from 52% to 3.7%"

londons_explore — Tue, 15 Sep 2026 18:50:42 +0000

At a minimum I'd like cloudflare to mark such traffic in some way, and browsers to put a little cross through the "Https" indicator to show the traffic is passing unencrypted across the internet.

New comment by londons_explore in "Cloudflare AKE cuts origin HelloRetryRequests from 52% to 3.7%"

londons_explore — Tue, 15 Sep 2026 07:41:56 +0000

Great. Next can cloudflare stop providing Https to the user (giving the impression of security) when the connection back to the origin isn't strict HTTPS and is often plaintext?

New comment by londons_explore in "Iranian banks' SSL certificates are being revoked due to OFAC sanctions"

londons_explore — Mon, 14 Sep 2026 18:24:21 +0000

This seems like the kind of thing that the USA will explicitly grant an exception to.

It is clearly bad if the whole of Iran gets their own CA infrastructure which the NSA can't as easily spy on.

New comment by londons_explore in "Getting 50 GB/S Back from the Apple Neural Engine"

londons_explore — Sun, 13 Sep 2026 19:57:48 +0000

surely someone in apple would have run some common neural net architectures through the rtl simulator before tapeout and checked that the performance meets expectations??

New comment by londons_explore in "I'm being cyberattacked by Tesla, Inc"

londons_explore — Sun, 13 Sep 2026 18:24:33 +0000

> it has received ~8,000 requests from two of your scanning hosts

If it were 8000 requests per second, this might be worthy of some investigation.

But 8000 ntp requests alone consume far less than 1 us cent of compute + bandwidth. This isn't worth lifting a finger over.

New comment by londons_explore in "US Customs supervisor busted for stealing hardware from Homeland Security PCs"

londons_explore — Sun, 13 Sep 2026 14:17:19 +0000

And how much did this investigation cost, when you account for all the hours spent by investigators, lawers, judges, etc?

My guess is it was a huge net loss for the taxpayer.

The more effective move for the nation would have been for this guys boss to have confronted him and said "computer parts keep going missing on your shift. You have 2 weeks to make sure all the computers are back to their exact original config or we're gonna investigate and you could end up in prison".

New comment by londons_explore in "Will There Be a 7G?"

londons_explore — Sat, 12 Sep 2026 17:42:06 +0000

Not soon there won't be.

There is no reason you can't have phased array antennas of tens of elements on the handset and thousands on the masts, to give a massive bandwidth increase.

It will take a lot of generations to get to the limit physics sets.

New comment by londons_explore in "Child Sexual Abuse Material Persists on X"

londons_explore — Fri, 11 Sep 2026 19:39:47 +0000

In quite a few countries, a false positive can lead to someone getting put in prison, entirely without any human viewing said image.

It's all a matter of 'the image hash was on the database, therefore OP is guilty. 10 years incarceration'.

I wouldn't want to be enabling such a system.

New comment by londons_explore in "Child Sexual Abuse Material Persists on X"

londons_explore — Fri, 11 Sep 2026 16:45:32 +0000

It also has a fairly high false positive rate, and due to the nature of the content paying someone to verify false positives is near impossible both legally and morally.