Hacker News: mattclarkdotnet

New comment by mattclarkdotnet in "AI Companies Are Trying to Hide a Staggering Amount of Debt"

mattclarkdotnet — Fri, 24 Jul 2026 04:55:24 +0000

But, there is no fixed quantity of money in modern finance. It's created every someone or some business takes out a loan from a bank, and every time the government spends money. It's destroyed when the loans are repaid or taxes are paid.

New comment by mattclarkdotnet in "Japan develops a method to recover up to 90% of lithium from used EV batteries"

mattclarkdotnet — Tue, 14 Jul 2026 07:38:01 +0000

Why would any of those compounds come from fossil fuels? Sulfur is mined, hydrogen peroxide is water with some oxygen taken off, and sodium carbonate is made from salt and limestone

New comment by mattclarkdotnet in "Migrating a production AI agent to GPT-5.6: 2.2x faster, 27% cheaper"

mattclarkdotnet — Mon, 13 Jul 2026 06:30:33 +0000

For PCB design 5.6 Sol/Terra is streets ahead of 5.5, and uses fewer tokens, so I'm not sure it can really be the same model.

New comment by mattclarkdotnet in "Is The Economist Always Wrong?"

mattclarkdotnet — Wed, 08 Jul 2026 04:12:10 +0000

The problem is the assumption that in most debates there are sides to be taken, and that there are 2 of them. It leads to shoddy journalism where "balance" means finding someone to debate another, regardless of the bizarreness of their position.

In the real world there are many perspectives on a given issue, and a lot to be learned by everyone through open discussion. "Both sides" mentality discourages this, and also tends to give too much airtime to extreme views.

New comment by mattclarkdotnet in "Flat Datacenter Networks at Scale at Amazon"

mattclarkdotnet — Tue, 09 Jun 2026 23:26:50 +0000

It's almost certainly meant to be 27%, not a factor of 27.

New comment by mattclarkdotnet in "Humanoid Robot Actuators"

mattclarkdotnet — Mon, 04 May 2026 10:08:19 +0000

So you’re wanting to bet that we’ll get humanoid robots capable of driving a dumb car at L4 before we get cars capable of L5? When we have no humanoid robots driving cars, and many L4 cars driving around? I’ll take that!

New comment by mattclarkdotnet in "We still don't have a more precise value for "Big G""

mattclarkdotnet — Wed, 29 Apr 2026 13:42:45 +0000

Only by embracing solipsism, in which case why are you here debating things, since your entire truth is derivable from your existence alone with no other observations or interactions required?

New comment by mattclarkdotnet in "We still don't have a more precise value for "Big G""

mattclarkdotnet — Wed, 29 Apr 2026 08:35:02 +0000

Philosophy can be perfectly effective as a tool of thought while still being unable to resolve self evidently unsolvable “ultimate questions”

New comment by mattclarkdotnet in "We still don't have a more precise value for "Big G""

mattclarkdotnet — Wed, 29 Apr 2026 07:27:16 +0000

The theistic schism? I had to look it up, and was not cleverer after. Nobody can ever know an ultimate why, for obvious and well established philosophical reasons. At least the scientists are trying to squeeze the knowledge gap down as small as possible instead of making up stories.

New comment by mattclarkdotnet in "Fully Featured Audio DSP Firmware for the Raspberry Pi Pico"

mattclarkdotnet — Mon, 27 Apr 2026 23:01:12 +0000

Oh it's worse than that, for distribution and playback sampling at more than 48kHz is likely worse in many ways due to unwanted ultrasonic noise and increased intermodulation distortion. 96/24 makes sense for production, and 96/float56 is common in DSP chains.

New comment by mattclarkdotnet in "Fully Featured Audio DSP Firmware for the Raspberry Pi Pico"

mattclarkdotnet — Mon, 27 Apr 2026 22:02:40 +0000

The analog input will use separate ADC modules, just as the analog output uses separate DACs. DSPi itself is purely digital (OK, excepting the PWM based sub out). These modules are just a few dollars on AliExpress for ~96dB SINAD

New comment by mattclarkdotnet in "Fully Featured Audio DSP Firmware for the Raspberry Pi Pico"

mattclarkdotnet — Mon, 27 Apr 2026 22:00:42 +0000

I2S input is on the roadmap, and hardware modules from AliExpress are being tested by Troy, so yes you will get plenty of analog inputs!

New comment by mattclarkdotnet in "Fully Featured Audio DSP Firmware for the Raspberry Pi Pico"

mattclarkdotnet — Mon, 27 Apr 2026 21:58:51 +0000

It's for the pico. RP2040 works fine, but RP2350 has a hardware FPU and much more processing capability, so supports more channels and filters

New comment by mattclarkdotnet in "Amateur armed with ChatGPT solves an Erdős problem"

mattclarkdotnet — Mon, 27 Apr 2026 00:25:37 +0000

We throw away food because we are so good at making it cheaply that the problem has shifted to distribution costs and fair wages. Also high productivity economies need to deal effectively with the Baumol effect (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baumol_effect). If they don't then even people in the USA can be food poor despite huge GDP per capita.

New comment by mattclarkdotnet in "Amateur armed with ChatGPT solves an Erdős problem"

mattclarkdotnet — Mon, 27 Apr 2026 00:15:18 +0000

You might enjoy the book "Red Plenty" by Francis Spufford, which traces the consequences of this thesis ("Capitalism already is a poor allocator") through the Khrushchev years of the USSR, seen through the eyes of the economists, mathematicians and planners who tried to do better than capitalism.

Of course there are in-between approaches like industrial policy in mixed economies, for example the South Korean shipbuilding industry. But those tend to work with the grain of capitalism, not against it.

New comment by mattclarkdotnet in "Migrating the American express payment network, twice"

mattclarkdotnet — Mon, 23 Mar 2026 08:54:03 +0000

At best it’s checking available credit. All the other stuff is done after the fact. The idea that any banking transaction involves “subtracting one number from another” is so wrong it’s barely worth engaging with.

New comment by mattclarkdotnet in "Migrating the American express payment network, twice"

mattclarkdotnet — Mon, 23 Mar 2026 03:40:53 +0000

Since when were payment networks latency sensitive? It’s usually 2 or more seconds to even get a payment up on the card terminal from the merchant POST system, then 2-5 seconds more from card presentation to getting approval back.

New comment by mattclarkdotnet in "Python 3.15's JIT is now back on track"

mattclarkdotnet — Thu, 19 Mar 2026 22:51:42 +0000

Thank you! Spy looks brilliant, especially the comptime-like freezing after import.

New comment by mattclarkdotnet in "Python 3.15's JIT is now back on track"

mattclarkdotnet — Wed, 18 Mar 2026 05:34:47 +0000

What's nuts is that the language doesn't guarantee that successive references to the same member value within the same function body are stable. You can look it up once, go off and do something else, and look it up again and it's changed. It's dynamism taken to an unnecessary extreme. Nobody in the real world expects this behaviour. Making it just a bit less dynamic wouldn't change the fundamentals of the language but it would make it a lot more tractable.

New comment by mattclarkdotnet in "Python 3.15's JIT is now back on track"

mattclarkdotnet — Wed, 18 Mar 2026 04:53:58 +0000

Let's not get started on the cached shared object refs for small integers....