Hacker News: nDRDY

New comment by nDRDY in "Joby kicks off NYC electric air taxi demos with historic JFK flight"

nDRDY — Thu, 30 Apr 2026 16:08:43 +0000

Given the current state of battery technology, this is probably the only possible commercial use case. Even then, you have serious limitations like low passenger capacity, takeoff/landing still requires a helipad, recharge time, and the questionable safety in the event of motor or hinge malfunction.

New comment by nDRDY in "Joby kicks off NYC electric air taxi demos with historic JFK flight"

nDRDY — Thu, 30 Apr 2026 14:23:05 +0000

I'd rather be in a helicopter than one of these in the case of total engine failure, and I don't really trust helicopters!

New comment by nDRDY in "Joby kicks off NYC electric air taxi demos with historic JFK flight"

nDRDY — Thu, 30 Apr 2026 14:07:47 +0000

Sounds about right. A plane of comparable max take-off weight, a Piper Malibu, has a range of ~1500 miles (with reserve remaining).

New comment by nDRDY in "AI Agents replacing mid-management, not developers"

nDRDY — Mon, 20 Apr 2026 07:55:11 +0000

LLMs are great at producing plausible BS. If your job involves creating plausible BS, then it could be done much faster by "AI". As a low-level programmer, I am much less concerned :-)

New comment by nDRDY in "How Big Tech wrote secrecy into EU law to hide data centres' environmental toll"

nDRDY — Fri, 17 Apr 2026 12:07:52 +0000

>Well datacenters ARE rated by their power usage

Exactly - would be nice if that information was public knowledge!

New comment by nDRDY in "How Big Tech wrote secrecy into EU law to hide data centres' environmental toll"

nDRDY — Fri, 17 Apr 2026 11:42:08 +0000

I wonder if this is less about the environmental impact (which can be greenwashed as necessary), and more about the power consumption of individual data centres.

New comment by nDRDY in "The Accursèd Alphabetical Clock"

nDRDY — Fri, 17 Apr 2026 09:18:28 +0000

Hmm. I wonder what it would look like if you added the corresponding "minute" labels (eight, five, four, etc) at the appropriate places. It might make it at least a little feasible to read the time!

For inspiration: https://www.alamy.com/clock-face-hour-dial-with-numbers-dash...

New comment by nDRDY in "The Accursèd Alphabetical Clock"

nDRDY — Thu, 16 Apr 2026 15:29:52 +0000

Maybe, but the labels and hour markers that contradict the meaning of the hand positions is just perverse :-)

New comment by nDRDY in "The Accursèd Alphabetical Clock"

nDRDY — Thu, 16 Apr 2026 13:35:23 +0000

I think the labels are pointlessly confusing.

New comment by nDRDY in "My AI-Assisted Workflow"

nDRDY — Wed, 15 Apr 2026 13:20:53 +0000

>Because the models only got good enough to be trusted in the past few months

They have got noticably worse over the past few months! It looks like we are going in the direction I've been predicting for a while - the cost of AI will increase until it's similar in cost/benefit to hiring a recent graduate, who can also do all of those things you mention (and will get better at it).

New comment by nDRDY in "My AI-Assisted Workflow"

nDRDY — Wed, 15 Apr 2026 11:11:06 +0000

Why hasn't it gone away already? ChatGPT at least has been around for over 3 years.

Why is my AI-first colleage constantly having to get more expensive AI subscriptions approved?

>most furniture is made in a factory now

Terrible analogy. Software is not like a mass-produced item - it is written significantly less often than it is executed!

You could say that AI will allow many more variations of softwares to be written in the same time frame, but I'm still sure I can produce quality output in a competitive time.

New comment by nDRDY in "My AI-Assisted Workflow"

nDRDY — Wed, 15 Apr 2026 08:47:42 +0000

Here's mine: code to spec until I get stuck -> search Google for the answer -> scan the Gemini result instead of going to StackOverflow.

New comment by nDRDY in "Make tmux pretty and usable (2024)"

nDRDY — Mon, 13 Apr 2026 15:12:07 +0000

This comment would be a lot more convincing if it weren't in response to one expressing the same sentiment :-)

New comment by nDRDY in "Open source security at Astral"

nDRDY — Thu, 09 Apr 2026 09:20:56 +0000

>worse versions of nixpkgs and flakes

You mean statically-compiled binaries and hash pinning? Those have been around a bit longer than Nix :-)

New comment by nDRDY in "Having Kids (2019)"

nDRDY — Fri, 20 Mar 2026 15:53:53 +0000

You have just the one kid, right?

We were the same ;-)

New comment by nDRDY in "I'm OK being left behind, thanks"

nDRDY — Fri, 20 Mar 2026 14:53:28 +0000

Then what is the point? If what I'm doing can be done by Claude, as operated by someone who "doesn't need to get up to speed", then I really need to look at another career.

New comment by nDRDY in "Europe sleepwalked into yet another energy crisis"

nDRDY — Fri, 20 Mar 2026 08:40:50 +0000

A significant source of electricty is generated from waste-to-power plants in the Nordics. Several of those countries import rubbish by the shipload to turn into power.

For that matter, it's probably a net positive to put most plastic "recycling" into such schemes, as we're just turning plastic products into lower and lower grade pieces, with the associated generation of microplastics.

New comment by nDRDY in "Electron microscopy shows ‘mouse bite’ defects in semiconductors"

nDRDY — Wed, 18 Mar 2026 12:21:54 +0000

They work, as long as you replace all of those leaky caps (and maybe the ceramic resonator)!

New comment by nDRDY in "Electron microscopy shows ‘mouse bite’ defects in semiconductors"

nDRDY — Wed, 18 Mar 2026 10:56:22 +0000

And people wonder why I laugh when they say "non-mechanical devices are more reliable." Sure mechanical devices need pieces to stay moving in the same way over and over again, but electronic devices need a huge number of very precisely-placed atoms to not move in any way, including chemically.

New comment by nDRDY in "Qatar helium shutdown puts chip supply chain on a two-week clock"

nDRDY — Fri, 13 Mar 2026 15:57:09 +0000

Somewhat tangential question - for the "Just Stop Oil" folks - is it the extraction of oil that is the problem, or the burning of it? If the former, then we have an opportunity to investigate more renewable sources.