Hacker News: mr_toad

New comment by mr_toad in "The only known trebuchet casualty in history"

mr_toad — Mon, 17 Aug 2026 16:50:10 +0000

More like ‘named’. There are accounts of trebuchets causing hundreds of deaths, but individual casualties in medieval battles are rarely identified.

New comment by mr_toad in "The only known trebuchet casualty in history"

mr_toad — Mon, 17 Aug 2026 16:43:59 +0000

In some cases they’d hurl dead cattle, people’s heads, and flaming projectiles over the walls to damage morale and potentially damage infrastructure.

New comment by mr_toad in "On AI regulation and messaging"

mr_toad — Mon, 17 Aug 2026 16:26:00 +0000

> Second, the human body is a complicated thing. You can feed your fancy LLM as many textbooks and academic papers as you like, but the reality on the hospital ward will always be different.

And they’ll be using detailed medical records. Personalized medicine and the use of ML in medicine has been around longer than LLMs (and will continue regardless). There is a lot more data available than just studies and textbooks.

https://www.cancerresearchuk.org/about-cancer/treatment/pers...

New comment by mr_toad in "Anthropic becomes the 'Apple of AI': Most revenue despite being most expensive"

mr_toad — Mon, 17 Aug 2026 12:19:23 +0000

My hot take: the only people willing to pay for LLMs are using it for code generation, and they prefer Claude.

New comment by mr_toad in "Super El Niño Keeps Growing as New Forecasts Reach Record Territory Ahead Winter"

mr_toad — Sun, 16 Aug 2026 12:53:48 +0000

Go back and compare some of the earlier IPCC reports and see which bits have been left out. The worst case scenarios keep getting removed, and the best case scenarios are based on projections of CO2 emissions which are highly unrealistic.

Official reports have been downplaying the impact for decades, while countries have been setting climate targets that they had no intention of achieving.

New comment by mr_toad in "Choose Boring Technology (2015)"

mr_toad — Thu, 13 Aug 2026 20:35:16 +0000

Does nobody ever think of trying more than one technology? It’s like people buying a car based on what everyone else is driving rather than actually driving different cars.

New comment by mr_toad in "Choose Boring Technology (2015)"

mr_toad — Thu, 13 Aug 2026 20:27:10 +0000

My recollection is that MongoDB was based on CouchDB, except they dispensed with Erlang & JSON and went with more conventional technology.

New comment by mr_toad in "New Zealand lost its music media, and what we're building to replace it"

mr_toad — Mon, 10 Aug 2026 09:59:19 +0000

I think music videos, then MTV, then the internet/youtube all gave ways for fans to see a band without actually going to see a band. Live gigs are expensive, require a bit of planning in advance, and sometimes the crowds are just downright unpleasant.

New Zealand also has the disadvantage of being so far away that many international acts will skip it.

New comment by mr_toad in "Can Intel finally beat ARM on performance per Watt?"

mr_toad — Sun, 09 Aug 2026 03:25:35 +0000

“But they can’t match Intels performance” used to be the rejoinder of the Intel crowd. Now we’ve come full circle.

New comment by mr_toad in "AI-Generated Images Discourage Me from Reading Your Blog"

mr_toad — Tue, 04 Aug 2026 12:41:00 +0000

It’s not like stock photos of infeasibly attractive people eating ludicrously overstuffed burgers were ever interesting or believable.

New comment by mr_toad in "U.S. used 'virtually all' of its long-range precision missiles during Iran war"

mr_toad — Tue, 04 Aug 2026 11:53:31 +0000

The US bombed North Vietnam into dust, but because they didn’t occupy it with ground forces they simply rebuilt and kept coming.

You can’t win a war with just air power.

New comment by mr_toad in "Don't be a meat proxy"

mr_toad — Mon, 03 Aug 2026 11:51:58 +0000

> What the hell is the point of human interaction if the "human" just forwards a chat bot's response

Forwarding an AI response (or any canned response) sends the message that they don’t want to interact with you. That could be intentional.

New comment by mr_toad in "How the words we teach English language learners changed"

mr_toad — Sun, 02 Aug 2026 16:32:01 +0000

Mods might be amused to be described as fairly godmothers.

New comment by mr_toad in "Deep-sea vehicles spot 'alien' sharks deep beneath the waves in the Pacific"

mr_toad — Sun, 02 Aug 2026 13:29:22 +0000

Glid vs glided, slid vs slided are examples of the inconsistency of the English language. Glided is more common than glid, and slid is more common than slided. Linguistics says that that makes slide an ‘irregular’ verb, but that’s basically a circular definition.

New comment by mr_toad in "Oil companies report sky-high profits thanks to wartime crude prices"

mr_toad — Sat, 01 Aug 2026 20:11:32 +0000

If you constrained the inputs of Apple or Nvidia then their sales and profits would tumble (just look at what happened to Apples stock price in the last week because of the memory chip shortage).

Off the top of my head I can’t think of another company or industry that would profit from a supply side shock the way the oil industry does.

New comment by mr_toad in "Situational Awareness down 67% in July in AI stock rout"

mr_toad — Fri, 31 Jul 2026 17:39:00 +0000

It’s an odd kind of bubble that slowly deflates over the course of a year.

New comment by mr_toad in "Physicists Solve a Muon Mystery. Now, Old Results Don't Add Up"

mr_toad — Fri, 31 Jul 2026 12:35:27 +0000

> Quantum experiments you're always looking at some medium that detects or measures or whatever the original interaction. So you're only interrogating the detector, not the original particles or interaction.

Exactly, waveform collapse is a philosophical question, it’s not an actual problem for the theory.

New comment by mr_toad in "Physicists Solve a Muon Mystery. Now, Old Results Don't Add Up"

mr_toad — Fri, 31 Jul 2026 12:29:12 +0000

Observations keep poking holes in those hypotheses (I’m not sure they even count as theories). We keep finding black holes with anomalous masses, or black holes that formed too early.

Part of the problem is that we have very little observational data. But another big problem is that our best ideas, based on general relativity are known to be incompatible with quantum mechanics.

New comment by mr_toad in "The mean means nothing: data visualization to debug a latency problem"

mr_toad — Fri, 31 Jul 2026 12:02:23 +0000

Headline is unnecessary clickbait, the mean was still signaling that something was wrong.

New comment by mr_toad in "AI companies spend record sums on Washington lobbying"

mr_toad — Mon, 27 Jul 2026 17:49:11 +0000

> What's there, that politicians don't know already?

They need to be ‘reminded’ of the issues that ‘campaign contributions’ are contingent upon.