Hacker News: momoschili

New comment by momoschili in "QuadRF can spot drones and see WiFi through my wall"

momoschili — Fri, 10 Jul 2026 23:50:49 +0000

can this sense mice?

New comment by momoschili in "Lost city discovered beneath Egypt's desert with ancient church"

momoschili — Fri, 10 Jul 2026 23:09:16 +0000

You're correct, I'm mistaken that Constantine split the empire. That being said I think there are some semantics as far as "co-emperors with regional responsibilities" being in a single polity or separate polities.

I do agree with you that there was no instantaneous Eastern character that sprang up out of nowhere.

New comment by momoschili in "Lost city discovered beneath Egypt's desert with ancient church"

momoschili — Fri, 10 Jul 2026 19:07:28 +0000

Many Western polities have sought the title of the Roman Empire and the legitimacy it endows. Constantine split the empire, and Constantius II did not rule over Rome (or many other parts of the empire). Is it even reasonable to assert it was still the Roman Empire after the fracture?

Is it legitimate for the Eastern Roman Empire to claim the legacy? I think so, and I think they have among the best arguments for it. Conversely it is also legitimate to note the major differences between the two and the fact that discontinuities do exist.

New comment by momoschili in "Meta reuses old RAM in new servers with custom bridge chip"

momoschili — Thu, 09 Jul 2026 18:57:41 +0000

on the contrary it's important for these people to be unencumbered by the technology of today to imagine the future. Imagine thinking in 1900 about flying, or even going to the moon in the context of what existed back then?

New comment by momoschili in "Sam Bankman-Fried loses bid to appeal against fraud conviction in FTX case"

momoschili — Sat, 13 Jun 2026 18:42:17 +0000

I think it would be prudent to disengage democrats from being 'left wing'. There is certainly a progressive wing of the democratic party, but none of those are the people he donated to. After all, this is the Democratic Party that a couple years ago during election season were trying to get George Bush and Dick Cheney to come to Kamala's rally.

He also secretly donated significant amounts of money to republicans (self-admitted), so all-in-all his contributions definitely skew center-right.

New comment by momoschili in "Sam Bankman-Fried loses bid to appeal against fraud conviction in FTX case"

momoschili — Sat, 13 Jun 2026 16:31:47 +0000

he ain't a left winger. right winger cosplaying

New comment by momoschili in "The dead economy theory"

momoschili — Sat, 30 May 2026 07:13:28 +0000

what do you mean short term? We aren't even in the short term yet (has the AI revolution truly begun?) and the owners of compute are already disgustingly rich.

New comment by momoschili in "Seeing Around Corners Using Smartphone-Grade Lidar"

momoschili — Fri, 29 May 2026 05:19:33 +0000

Pixel 8 uses a version of stereo imaging but at the pixel level instead of at the full sensor level. It's not fake at the base level, the physics of it allow for depth information to be retrieved this way (compared to most monocular deep depth for example, which does not)

IDK about other manufacturers, but the iPhone Pros have a pretty good measurement app that uses LIDAR, there's some augmented reality apps that use it, and it's also used for autofocus in dark environments. There's plenty of ways to use depth information.

New comment by momoschili in "Seeing Around Corners Using Smartphone-Grade Lidar"

momoschili — Thu, 28 May 2026 15:52:27 +0000

depends on what phone you have but LIDAR sensors are used for more than just faceID

New comment by momoschili in "Seeing Around Corners Using Smartphone-Grade Lidar"

momoschili — Thu, 28 May 2026 15:50:58 +0000

This is a very natural progression of technologies that escape industry/defense to get into the consumer's hand.

New comment by momoschili in "All of human cooking compressed into 2 megabytes"

momoschili — Thu, 28 May 2026 04:37:36 +0000

there are thousands of varieties of a lot of things though...

New comment by momoschili in "If AI writes your code, why use Python?"

momoschili — Tue, 12 May 2026 02:50:35 +0000

Are you trying to psyop us into using Lojban?

New comment by momoschili in "Finding the differences in a series of power supplies"

momoschili — Thu, 07 May 2026 03:50:08 +0000

Not really a fixed relationship between the two. Sometimes the entire blueprint of the PSU is from a different OEM. Corsair did this back in the day for a while where their HX750/HX850W PSUs were all made from a CWT design, their 1000W PSU was made from a different CWT design, and their 650/620W PSUs were a Seasonic design. I think this is less popular these days, but I think that's about as extreme as the difference gets.

At the component level, the focus is often on the sourcing and tolerances of the capacitors, which are used to clean up transients (very important) and power flow correction, among other things. I think the next most important components are the AC/DC conversion and the voltage transformers. Specifically for higher wattage PSUs vs lower wattage PSUs, the major difference is the amperage along the 12V rail.

A rough chain is: Outlet -> transient clean up circuit -> AC-to-DC conversion -> power factor correction -> PWM circuit (pseudo DC-to-AC) -> 3.3V/5V/12V transformers -> AC-to-DC conversion -> power delivery circuit (separate for 12V/5V/3.3V) -> power to components. The biggest difference between the wattages (if you keep the design fixed) would likely be in the power delivery circuit

New comment by momoschili in "ASML became the chokepoint for cutting-edge chips"

momoschili — Tue, 28 Apr 2026 18:29:35 +0000

yes, but it has been given the blessing by the western governments.

New comment by momoschili in "If America's so rich, how'd it get so sad?"

momoschili — Thu, 23 Apr 2026 22:26:59 +0000

Unfortunately this is using BLS data that captures largely urban areas and fails to account for a large and quickly growing segment of the workforce that also tend to be lower earners - self-employment (eg uber drivers, doordash, gig working, contractors). This is definitely an over-estimate of real wages, a best case scenario of sorts.

With the backdrop of it coming from the organization that is supposedly supposed to be managing inflation... :P

New comment by momoschili in "NIST scientists create 'any wavelength' lasers"

momoschili — Wed, 22 Apr 2026 18:21:48 +0000

its purpose isn't to produce photons, neither is the lithium niobate. The purpose is act as a material to mediate the nonlinear interactions between photons to achieve fun things like supercontinuums, frequency comb generation, etc.

Think of it like the phosphor on your white LED - it produces no photons by itself, but it takes in the blue photons and remits them in a different spectrum. Obviously different physics, but still a similar concept.

New comment by momoschili in "NIST scientists create 'any wavelength' lasers"

momoschili — Sun, 19 Apr 2026 07:41:30 +0000

I don't think so- seems like they demonstrated a supercontinuum source, which is a pretty good approximation of "any wavelength" laser. Pretty cool on an integrated chip.

New comment by momoschili in "'Pokémon Go' players unknowingly trained delivery robots with 30B images"

momoschili — Tue, 17 Mar 2026 21:37:03 +0000

30B images over the course of 6 years by a few million players. In a game that runs daily quests like this and weekly quests can easily be accounted for by a small fraction of users. I don't know how much you played Pokemon Go, but when the AR scanning tasks were introduced, most players didn't really want to do them, which resulted in the tasks be segregated from Field Research (since they were taking up a valuable spot)

This was GP's original point - it doesn't take the majority of people playing Pokemon Go to do it in order for them to get 30B images, especially since each scan was like multiple images - you look like a dork doing the scan

New comment by momoschili in "'Pokémon Go' players unknowingly trained delivery robots with 30B images"

momoschili — Mon, 16 Mar 2026 18:28:11 +0000

30B images isn't that much in the context of Pokemon Go playerbase of ~50 million (conservative estimate based on users today). That's about 600 images per person, in a game that has been out since 2016... that's pretty low adoption as the previous user said. I don't think the quest has been out since 2016, but considering a large fraction of users are basically daily users, it's still quite a small number of images.

New comment by momoschili in "AirPods Max 2"

momoschili — Mon, 16 Mar 2026 18:25:02 +0000

Different target markets. Audiophiles and wealth exhibitionists are much more willing to pay the large amount