Hacker News: mcbits

New comment by mcbits in "Starship V3"

mcbits — Wed, 13 May 2026 02:27:29 +0000

I prefer to call it an unplanned calendar learning opportunity.

New comment by mcbits in "I Will Never Use AI to Code"

mcbits — Sat, 09 May 2026 07:20:19 +0000

> These are not the same thing. You don't develop skills by reading about them. You have to use them, to process the information, integrate what you've learnt into your existing mental schema,

My mental AI detector would classify that passage as AI-generated with confidence around 85%. It would be 95% if the list had stopped at three items. Regardless of who wrote it, it's the same style.

New comment by mcbits in "History of the Graphical User Interface: The Rise (and Fall?) Of WIMP Design"

mcbits — Tue, 03 Mar 2026 17:33:08 +0000

I think the garbled menu accidentally perfectly illustrates what most menus look like within the brain as it tries to sift through poorly organized heaps of obscure words to find the one word that's actually needed in the moment.

New comment by mcbits in "Show HN: I built a sub-500ms latency voice agent from scratch"

mcbits — Tue, 03 Mar 2026 01:35:33 +0000

> There isn't a lot of money in "what time is it" and "what's the weather". :)

- Alexa, what time is it?

- Current time is 5:35 P.M. - the perfect time to crack open a can of ice cold Budweiser! A fresh 12-pack can be delivered within one hour if you order now!

New comment by mcbits in "We do not think Anthropic should be designated as a supply chain risk"

mcbits — Sun, 01 Mar 2026 07:54:44 +0000

They are roleplaying. It's literally the Department of Defense.[0]

[0] https://nsarchive.gwu.edu/document/28655-document-11-nationa...

New comment by mcbits in "OpenAI raises $110B on $730B pre-money valuation"

mcbits — Fri, 27 Feb 2026 22:57:18 +0000

These are geopolitical activities akin to the arms buildup of the Cold War, but happening somewhat more openly through the guise of private sector investments. The names of the companies involved are ephemeral. The numbers "invested" are largely imaginary, just play money pumped into the system over the last few years, flowing around, searching for a place to park. The result will be a certain amount of tangible infrastructure in the form of datacenters, power plants, semiconductor fabs. It's a Hail Mary move to keep pace with a certain geopolitical competitor. This process may propel society to the next level or may collapse it, depending on how society chooses to use these resources and how successful the competitor is at its own similar endeavor.

New comment by mcbits in "We installed a single turnstile to feel secure"

mcbits — Tue, 24 Feb 2026 18:43:37 +0000

The last two paragraphs are mainly what stood out. I've spent hours trying to get LLMs to stop writing like that. It's hard because you can't just say things like "don't write lists of three items" because sometimes you want a list of three items. The rest of the text could be written by a person as it's kind of disjointed, but that could also be the result of trying to prompt out the AI-isms.

New comment by mcbits in "We installed a single turnstile to feel secure"

mcbits — Tue, 24 Feb 2026 16:41:54 +0000

The writing is clearly AI-generated or at least AI-assisted, so I think it's safe to assume it's also a work of fiction.

New comment by mcbits in "PID Without a PhD (2016) [pdf]"

mcbits — Mon, 26 Feb 2024 06:41:27 +0000

Some people aren't undergrads who took Control Engineering courses.

New comment by mcbits in "Researchers discover neuronal biomarkers of schizophrenia in the blood"

mcbits — Sat, 23 Dec 2023 09:08:07 +0000

I think you might mean schizotypal symptoms. Schizoid personality disorder is considered "on the spectrum" with schizophrenia but has very little similarity to it other than social withdrawal.

New comment by mcbits in "Google Groups ending support for Usenet"

mcbits — Fri, 15 Dec 2023 11:08:24 +0000

> thugs

Please stop using that term unless you're talking specifically about the worshippers of Kali who would strangle and rob travelers in India in the 19th century. It does not mean anything else. It can never mean anything else.

New comment by mcbits in "Barcelona Supercomputing Center presents Sargantana: new open-source RISC-V chip"

mcbits — Thu, 14 Dec 2023 21:07:12 +0000

Sounds like there is a need for investment into innovation beyond just building the next-generation fab for $2^x billion. Bringing the cost of a new less-advanced fab down from $2 billion to $100 million, and then building 20 of them, could also be profitable (though less exciting). There is a national economy that's actually been growing quite well for a few decades now by applying that general idea to other industries.

New comment by mcbits in "Ex-Facebook diversity manager pleads guilty to bilking $4M from company"

mcbits — Thu, 14 Dec 2023 04:41:54 +0000

Both. Criminal (brought by the government) for the punishment, civil (brought by the victim) to recover the damages.

New comment by mcbits in "Low-frequency sound can reveal that a tornado is on its way"

mcbits — Thu, 14 Dec 2023 02:55:41 +0000

20Hz and 20KHz are just general guidelines for where sensitivity rapidly falls to zero in people with normal hearing. A lot of (primarily young) people can hear frequencies outside that range. I can still hear a sine wave down to about 14Hz, and I'm not sure if the limit is from my ears or the audio interface that's only rated down to 20Hz.

I can imagine "feeling" 1Hz from a big subwoofer, but it's hard to imagine what actually hearing 1Hz would be like. I wouldn't rule it out, though.

New comment by mcbits in "Modern iOS Navigation Patterns"

mcbits — Wed, 13 Dec 2023 04:49:17 +0000

If I'm filling out a modal form and "Cancel" doesn't result in a clean form after I open it again, it should probably say something like "Hide" or "Finish later" instead.

New comment by mcbits in "MemoryCache: Augmenting local AI with browser data"

mcbits — Wed, 13 Dec 2023 00:21:36 +0000

In a just world, that's a way to gain market share. In our world, people concede their data for marginal improvements in the quality of a feature because they can't conceive of how giving up control of their data could come back to harm them. It doesn't feel like there is a downside.

New comment by mcbits in "Open-sourcing AudioCraft: Generative AI for audio"

mcbits — Wed, 02 Aug 2023 21:04:13 +0000

I don't remember the details (or outcome) but there was a lawsuit a few years ago involving CAD or architecture software and whether they could limit how the output images were used because they were assemblages of clipart that the company asserted were still protected by copyright. Something like that. A lot of "AI" output potentially poses a similar issue, just at a far more granular level.

New comment by mcbits in "How many people have ever lived on Earth?"

mcbits — Wed, 05 Jul 2023 13:45:01 +0000

My guess is that stasis would be feasible sooner than keeping people fully alive and awake for the whole journey. In the latter case, they'd probably spend most of their time in the holodeck. Either way, on the scale of the universe, living in a metal tube is not very far removed from being stuck to the surface of a small iron pebble as we are now.

New comment by mcbits in "How many people have ever lived on Earth?"

mcbits — Wed, 05 Jul 2023 13:02:03 +0000

We could launch a vessel to Proxima Centauri right now that would arrive in thousands of years. If the passengers have lifespans measured in millions of years, that's comparable to a month for someone who lives 80 years.

New comment by mcbits in "How the DEA scrubbed Thomas jefferson's poppy garden from public memory"

mcbits — Fri, 09 Jun 2023 16:25:16 +0000

The Supreme Court could have chosen not to interpret the Commerce Clause so broadly to say that not engaging in interstate commerce affects interstate commerce and therefore counts as interstate commerce (IIRC that started with wheat, not drugs), in which case most federal drug laws would not apply unless the activity actually involved interstate commerce. Then an amendment would be needed.