Hacker News: michaelscott

New comment by michaelscott in "Localsend: An open-source cross-platform alternative to AirDrop"

michaelscott — Tue, 28 Apr 2026 13:02:47 +0000

For me, video is the main one. Sizes from 100MB - 3GB. Getting videos from an Apple device to an Android is a pain in the ass because I need to 2FA log in or click through something relatively convoluted (Dropbox, GDrive) or deal with pulling out some hardware I use once every 100 years (external drives). Localsend is a 2 or 3 click operation and very robust.

New comment by michaelscott in "Isopods of the world"

michaelscott — Thu, 23 Apr 2026 11:12:23 +0000

The kind of site that makes one happy the Internet exists

New comment by michaelscott in "Claude Opus 4.7"

michaelscott — Fri, 17 Apr 2026 10:27:53 +0000

Their problem space may be just fine with open weight models regardless, but yes the release of gemma 4, GLM 5.1 and qwen 3.5 (and now 3.6!) have all happened in the last 6 months

New comment by michaelscott in "Pinterest is drowning in a sea of AI slop and auto-moderation"

michaelscott — Mon, 23 Feb 2026 14:16:40 +0000

Thanks these are genuinely helpful. I also use/d Pinterest for this kind of use case and haven't managed to find many good alternatives

New comment by michaelscott in "AI is not a coworker, it's an exoskeleton"

michaelscott — Fri, 20 Feb 2026 11:05:53 +0000

I guess it depends on the definition of deterministic, but I think you're right and there's strong reason to expect this will happen as they develop. I think the next 5 - 10 years will be interesting!

New comment by michaelscott in "AI is not a coworker, it's an exoskeleton"

michaelscott — Fri, 20 Feb 2026 10:43:16 +0000

Nothing you've said about reasoning here is exclusive to LLMs. Human reasoning is also never guaranteed to be deterministic, excluding most correct solutions. As OP says, they may not be reasoning under the hood but if the effect is the same as a tool, does it matter?

I'm not sure if I'm up to date on the latest diffusion work, but I'm genuinely curious how you see them potentially making LLMs more deterministic? These models usually work by sampling too, and it seems like the transformer architecture is better suited to longer context problems than diffusion

New comment by michaelscott in "We're no longer attracting top talent: the brain drain killing American science"

michaelscott — Fri, 20 Feb 2026 10:13:18 +0000

Switzerland's draw is the money. It's true that a significant proportion of the population is foreign born, but the whole country is smaller than some tier 2 cities in China and many foreigners do not stay longterm. If China paid Swiss-level salaries there would be more people going for sure, but the country is so big that at a relative level I'm not sure if the proportion would change significantly

New comment by michaelscott in "How London became the rest of the world’s startup capital"

michaelscott — Wed, 28 Jan 2026 22:49:56 +0000

This was crafted with a subtlety that captures the continental combination of infrastructural petrification and untethered pride perfectly. Wonderful

New comment by michaelscott in "“Are you the one?” is free money"

michaelscott — Tue, 16 Dec 2025 14:26:44 +0000

Yes because these descriptions are meant to foster dehumanization and detachment, which is very useful in military and scientific study contexts. That's why they also sound unnatural in casual conversation

New comment by michaelscott in "GPT-5.2"

michaelscott — Fri, 12 Dec 2025 10:58:52 +0000

A lot of mechanisation, especially in the modern world, is not deterministic and is not always 100% right; it's a fundamental "physics at scale" issue, not something new to LLMs. I think what happened when they first appeared was that people immediately clung to a superintelligence-type AI idea of what LLMs were supposed to do, then realised that's not what they are, then kept going and swung all the way over to "these things aren't good at anything really" or "if they only fix this ONE issue I have with them, they'll actually be useful"

New comment by michaelscott in "Thoughts on Go vs. Rust vs. Zig"

michaelscott — Fri, 05 Dec 2025 11:24:28 +0000

After using Rust for many years now, I feel that a mutable global variable is the perfect example of a "you were so busy figuring out whether you could, you never stopped to consider whether you should".

Moving back to a language that does this kind of thing all the time now, it seems like insanity to me wrt safety in execution

New comment by michaelscott in "Cartographers have been hiding illustrations inside Switzerland’s maps (2020)"

michaelscott — Tue, 02 Dec 2025 12:38:16 +0000

* old Toblerone Matterhorn logo unfortunately :( They've had to remove the mountain from branding since the chocolate is no longer produced in Switzerland. Still, I love finding the bear in the older boxes still floating around.

New comment by michaelscott in "Arthur Conan Doyle explored men’s mental health through Sherlock Holmes"

michaelscott — Thu, 27 Nov 2025 16:54:07 +0000

No, more like literal survival. In these conditions there is no mental bandwidth for things like spiritual constipation

New comment by michaelscott in "Jakarta is now the biggest city in the world"

michaelscott — Wed, 26 Nov 2025 11:04:01 +0000

You're conflating 2 issues here: judgement of adult attempts at a new language and the time required to learn it. The first is just a cultural thing, although it is sometimes valid for understanding a speaker (cases in Slavic languages, pronunciation in a homonym-heavy language like French, tones in Asian languages). Problem is that it's oftentimes more "cultural" than "valid" critique, which helps no one.

The second problem is more practical and it's not the only difference between child and adult speakers; the vocabulary required in most day-to-day settings for a child is considerably easier to master than the adult equivalent, regardless of language (describing symptoms to your doctor or getting through a bank or tax appointment will be much more difficult than describing the weather or what you want for lunch). Adults in general are just as good as children at learning new languages, it's just that life has different requirements from that age group.

Edit: that said, I actually am agreeing with your general sentiment

New comment by michaelscott in "Majority of teens hold negative views of news media, says report"

michaelscott — Fri, 07 Nov 2025 15:02:18 +0000

I am not young, but I have never seen a major institution (including governments) caring about citizens in aggregate in my lifetime. To me, this is an artifact of the 50s or 60s, some bygone era (which is funny, because the government did not care about citizens in aggregate back then either).

I can only imagine how the younger kids see things. They're bombarded by public knowledge of nasty things institutions did in the bigoted/ignorant past, underhanded things they're definitely doing now, an anger/fear inducing news cycle and endless social media conspiracy theories (some of which end up being true) engineered for clicks. Extreme cynicism is a logical conclusion.

New comment by michaelscott in "Cryptography 101 with Alfred Menezes"

michaelscott — Fri, 07 Nov 2025 13:51:10 +0000

This is how Cloudflare does (did?) PRNG

New comment by michaelscott in "Cryptography 101 with Alfred Menezes"

michaelscott — Fri, 07 Nov 2025 13:34:29 +0000

I think this is a primary reason why there is no real "cheatsheet" for this stuff. The application of a given algo (and even what types of inputs you provide) are heavily dependent on the detailed specifics of your use case and how you apply them

New comment by michaelscott in "Patagonian Welsh"

michaelscott — Mon, 29 Sep 2025 09:07:48 +0000

Yeah correct, the French relationship with modern English is much closer because of (among other reasons) the Norman conquest that happened long after the Indo-European split and much closer to our time

New comment by michaelscott in "ChatGPT Pulse"

michaelscott — Fri, 26 Sep 2025 07:39:47 +0000

3 trillion is just the top 5 or 6

New comment by michaelscott in "European ant is the first known animal to clone members of another species"

michaelscott — Thu, 18 Sep 2025 07:42:08 +0000

It's telling that my first reaction to this was fear. We watch the same shows