Hacker News: mr_toad

New comment by mr_toad in "Teenagers Stayed Overnight at Their School and Found Hidden Ancient Roman Ruins"

mr_toad — Mon, 15 Jun 2026 23:06:27 +0000

There are several levels of understanding of your history. Firstly, you have none. At the second level you suffer the misapprehension that your country has been there forever (which is the level that most nationalists get stuck at).

After that it starts to get complicated.

New comment by mr_toad in "Teenagers Stayed Overnight at Their School and Found Hidden Ancient Roman Ruins"

mr_toad — Mon, 15 Jun 2026 22:58:46 +0000

Old cities used to just level old buildings and build on top of the rubble.

But that doesn’t work if you need to support a skyscraper (not if you want it to stay upright), or dig a metro line, so new developments are now excavating the old rubble.

New comment by mr_toad in "Can Europe train a frontier AI model on the compute it owns?"

mr_toad — Mon, 15 Jun 2026 22:24:31 +0000

> many people don't see themselves as having a meaningful identity as EU citizens

I sometimes wonder if the citizens of the United States (of America) even comprehend that the EU is not itself a sovereign nation (unlike the states in say, the USA, or Australia) and is just a union of sovereign polities.

Nobody in the EU is an EU Citizen unless they are a citizen of one of the member states.

New comment by mr_toad in "Apple Foundation Models"

mr_toad — Mon, 15 Jun 2026 17:24:53 +0000

I’ll be curious to see if they make the models accessible to Shortcuts, like they do with the current models.

New comment by mr_toad in "Twenty One Zero-Days in FFmpeg"

mr_toad — Sat, 13 Jun 2026 14:43:38 +0000

Most of them require hardware acceleration from the CPU or GPU and that can potentially be exploited to escape the sandbox. GPUs in particular are difficult to sandbox.

New comment by mr_toad in "Twenty One Zero-Days in FFmpeg"

mr_toad — Sat, 13 Jun 2026 14:32:47 +0000

The difficulty in exploiting ffmpeg is getting anyone to use it on your input. Sure, you might pwn a few people, but is it worth the effort?

New comment by mr_toad in "Statement on US government directive to suspend access to Fable 5 and Mythos 5"

mr_toad — Sat, 13 Jun 2026 14:09:10 +0000

The EU lost its manufacturing capacity to countries with cheaper labour, just like the US. The US has only succeeded in IT, everywhere else it struggles against Asia.

The ‘American dream’ attracted a lot of talent (look at how many tech leaders were immigrants), and once the network effects (both IT and social) kicked in it was hard to stop. This is a story that has unfolded many times throughout history. Talent moves to where talent is. And it will move if conditions change.

New comment by mr_toad in "Statement on US government directive to suspend access to Fable 5 and Mythos 5"

mr_toad — Sat, 13 Jun 2026 13:53:04 +0000

When the Chinese do it they will use it to attack US infrastructure that won’t have been hardened because the models are behind walled gardens.

Despite the damage it’s better to build up an immunity through ongoing exposure, unless you want to end up like the previous American civilisations.

New comment by mr_toad in "Apple decided not to roll out Siri in EU after denied request for exemption"

mr_toad — Wed, 10 Jun 2026 12:50:56 +0000

I wouldn’t want to try and develop a sandbox for an AI that could protect the user and yet still be useful. Having an AI act on your private data but only in the way you want is hard enough when it’s a model that you control on hardware you own. Having third parties running AI on your private data requires a level of trust that I wouldn’t want in the hands of random developers in the app store.

New comment by mr_toad in "Apple decided not to roll out Siri in EU after denied request for exemption"

mr_toad — Wed, 10 Jun 2026 12:25:42 +0000

They don’t want third parties to be able the access all data on your phone. Do you?

New comment by mr_toad in "Siri AI"

mr_toad — Tue, 09 Jun 2026 22:08:47 +0000

> As an AI I can absolutely guide you through the process of renting the car, but I can't physically access the web site or type in the details for you

It’s like they were trained on corpuses of box ticking material, like iso 9000 documentation, or security certifications. And now they know how to describe what they should be doing, but they never actually do anything.

New comment by mr_toad in "Why are cells small?"

mr_toad — Mon, 08 Jun 2026 20:43:32 +0000

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xenophyophorea

New comment by mr_toad in "The Smallest Brain You Can Build: A Perceptron in Python"

mr_toad — Mon, 08 Jun 2026 15:34:55 +0000

An artificial neuron needs values to compare (the sum of weighted inputs). You can add values with transistors of course, but you need more than a dozen just to do simple addition. The activation function could be a simple binary comparison (e.g. between a weight and a threshold), but it’s usually more complicated.

Artificial neurons are significantly more complex that single transistors, and even a minimal hardwired circuit to implement just one neuron requires quite a number of transistors.

New comment by mr_toad in "The Smallest Brain You Can Build: A Perceptron in Python"

mr_toad — Mon, 08 Jun 2026 15:14:07 +0000

But it can only run that model, so it will be outdated in a few years at best.

New comment by mr_toad in "The Smallest Brain You Can Build: A Perceptron in Python"

mr_toad — Mon, 08 Jun 2026 13:53:28 +0000

> why there wasn't more progress on neural nets being used for many things prior to the 21st century

They were simply too computationally expensive to train for the limited things they could do. It wasn’t until we had the ability to train large neural networks on commodity hardware that things really took off.

New comment by mr_toad in "How liminalism became the defining aesthetic"

mr_toad — Mon, 08 Jun 2026 11:50:01 +0000

Having metro stations as gateways between worlds or spaces is a common trope in fiction, for example in The Matrix or Harry Potter.

New comment by mr_toad in "How liminalism became the defining aesthetic"

mr_toad — Mon, 08 Jun 2026 11:32:32 +0000

Funny, because the Celts, who came up with the idea of thin spaces long before it was cool, did see coastlines as a kind of border between worlds (in a supernatural way, not just the mundane border between land and sea).

New comment by mr_toad in "The placeholder name for the Windows 8 experience was "modern""

mr_toad — Thu, 04 Jun 2026 14:03:54 +0000

Modern in the art & design world is actually quite retro.

New comment by mr_toad in "The placeholder name for the Windows 8 experience was "modern""

mr_toad — Thu, 04 Jun 2026 13:57:05 +0000

I read somewhere that the visual design of Windows 8 was based on the works of Mondrian, because they wanted a design that didn’t just look like the Swiss School that Apple had adopted.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/De_Stijl

I don’t know if the idea of calling Windows 8 modern stemmed from that, or if they decided to pick Mondrian having already decided to go with modern.

New comment by mr_toad in "They’re made out of weights"

mr_toad — Thu, 04 Jun 2026 12:17:29 +0000

Nevertheless in solid conductors it’s the electrons that move, while the nucleus stays put. If the nucleus starts to move it means your circuit is melting!