Hacker News: natosaichek

New comment by natosaichek in "Extropic is building thermodynamic computing hardware"

natosaichek — Wed, 29 Oct 2025 22:58:48 +0000

I think it's more a concern that the hardware isn't useful in the real world, rather than that the hardware doesn't meet the description they provide of it.

New comment by natosaichek in "Neuralink 'Participant 1' says his life has changed"

natosaichek — Tue, 26 Aug 2025 18:25:03 +0000

There are flexible electrodes, rather than rigid arrays. The idea was that this would reduce scarring. I'm not aware of the exact results of the trials, but it works better than rigid arrays for longevity of recording.

New comment by natosaichek in "Show HN: AI Baby Monitor – local Video-LLM that beeps when safety rules break"

natosaichek — Sun, 25 May 2025 14:44:15 +0000

This thing will not kill babies. That's like saying seatbelts kill people because they don't save everyone in a car accident. It is precisely this attitude that prevents good things from flourishing - the idea that if something is involved however tangentially in a safety important subsystem it must have perfect results. No, we should not have this view. If something is net positive, we should promote it.

New comment by natosaichek in "Federal workers ordered to return to offices without desks, Wi-Fi and lights"

natosaichek — Tue, 04 Mar 2025 13:54:30 +0000

Can you point to some of the stuff (presumably doge) that you particularly approve of? Id like to better understand this perspective

New comment by natosaichek in "Tether and Circle are battling to win the US stablecoin market"

natosaichek — Tue, 04 Mar 2025 13:47:39 +0000

Trump isnt smarter than that. Also his goal in taking office was to smuggle taxpayer money into crooks pockets.

New comment by natosaichek in "A Mount Lyell shrew has just been photographed alive"

natosaichek — Thu, 06 Feb 2025 03:40:14 +0000

Wikipedia says:

The shrew is between 8.9 and 10 centimetres (3.5 and 3.9 in) long[4] and weighs 4–5 grams (0.14–0.18 oz).[5] It has 32 teeth.[4]

Must be a mistake on both?!? No way its got less that 5 ccs of blood in a 9-10 cm long body.

New comment by natosaichek in "Bi-elliptic transfer orbit maneuver"

natosaichek — Wed, 11 Dec 2024 15:16:47 +0000

It should work in ksp. Its still an impulsive maneuver.

New comment by natosaichek in "Founder Mode"

natosaichek — Sun, 01 Sep 2024 14:37:52 +0000

I feel like this article is reaching towards similar conclusions:

https://www.palladiummag.com/2024/08/30/when-the-mismanageri...

Trained managers have learned how to continue to extract value from some discovered market, rather than create new value chains.

New comment by natosaichek in "A post by Guido van Rossum removed for violating Python community guidelines"

natosaichek — Thu, 29 Aug 2024 17:00:08 +0000

Rated voting methods are great, but more complicated than simple choices. Given how challenging it is to get people to just pick the thing they want in very simple situations, I would not be optimistic about their implementation.

New comment by natosaichek in "Electrostatic motors reach the macro scale"

natosaichek — Thu, 22 Aug 2024 01:24:43 +0000

The dielectric is internal, and the motor will presumably have a built-in driver to adapt from wall voltage to 2kv. Neither of those issues are at all an issue.

New comment by natosaichek in "Silicon Valley's best kept secret: Founder liquidity"

natosaichek — Wed, 12 Jun 2024 19:32:34 +0000

This is basically arguing "It's good to deceive your early employees about the value of their compensation" This is morally repugnant to me, and I hope you're not an executive at a company. If you are, I would not work for you.

New comment by natosaichek in "My $500M Mars rover mistake"

natosaichek — Wed, 29 Nov 2023 01:01:14 +0000

I've worked on satellites, and yeah - everything is super bespoke, very low quantity, very expensive. There is probably a qualification unit, or a flight spare that may be available for many subsystems, but maybe not. Integration is a long and complicated process. Pulling apart this bot, with however many fasteners, joints, etc, and then reassembling it correctly would be a decidedly non-trivial project that could easily take a month or two, given that testing has to be performed at each step along the way to ensure that every sensor and actuator is fully functional throughout the integration process. This style of traditional aerospace assembly / integration is not particularly efficient. The only reason it is done this way is that for these kinds of missions you only get one shot, and total cost is ridiculously high so everything must be done correctly.

New comment by natosaichek in "Ways to Make Sand (2020) [video]"

natosaichek — Fri, 27 Oct 2023 20:24:08 +0000

Todepond is a treasure. Everything they touch is brilliant. This is one of my favorites: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q4OIcwt8vcE

New comment by natosaichek in "We're not Platonists, we've just learned the bitter lesson"

natosaichek — Wed, 26 Jul 2023 00:47:22 +0000

The basic idea of the essay, I think, is that "an agent" is a thing in idea-space that a non-agent intelligence (oracle) has access to and can describe to a user. "describe" in this context means "write code to represent" Then the user is turning what was an oracular AI into an agentic AI. The idea here, is that if you think that you're safe because you haven't made an agent, just an oracle, that's a false sense of security. Oracles are just one user choice away from becoming an agent. If one thinks agents are safe for some reason, that's a whole separate discussion I think.

New comment by natosaichek in "We're not Platonists, we've just learned the bitter lesson"

natosaichek — Wed, 26 Jul 2023 00:41:56 +0000

The whole point is that intelligence is a concept that points at a bundle of related characteristics. There is one indication that Deep blue is more intelligent than a toddler - it can beat the toddler at a game of chess. There are other indications that a toddler is more intelligent than deep blue - they could write better poetry, play tic-tac-toe better, play checkers better, play, well, literally _any_ other game better, do arithmetic better, etc.

So on one metric DB is more intelligent. On every other metric the toddler is more intelligent.

New comment by natosaichek in "A petabyte of health insurance prices per month"

natosaichek — Tue, 11 Jul 2023 19:48:50 +0000

It's kinda ridiculous that because it costs x billion in doctors overcharging, we'll spend 100x on administration to control costs. Cutting off one's nose to spite one's face and all that.

New comment by natosaichek in "Superintelligence: An idea that eats smart people (2016)"

natosaichek — Sun, 28 May 2023 16:18:26 +0000

This is like saying "sure, that site is susceptible to a sql injection, but that doesn't mean the whole thing is insecure."

If you have an intelligent adversary and the stakes of them succeeding are high, it is the defenders job to prove the system secure. Systems don't start off secure and become vulnerable - they start off vulnerable until proven secure.

So yes, its okay to say "the things we're doing to 'contain' ais are almost certainly inadequate" until shown otherwise.

New comment by natosaichek in "A Lecturer Showed a Painting of the Prophet Muhammad. She Lost Her Job"

natosaichek — Sun, 08 Jan 2023 13:57:17 +0000

We can avoid violence by _not responding violently_ to feeling offended. Being offended is not the same as being physically harmed. Those people who respond with violence to the non-violent acts of others should be censured. Their ideologies deserve ridicule and suppression to the extent that they condone such violence.

New comment by natosaichek in "Strg.snek"

natosaichek — Sat, 17 Dec 2022 19:36:43 +0000

I think I must be missing something. Seems like a snake game, but no food shows up to eat... wander around the screen until I die. See my ghost there, but running over it does nothing.

New comment by natosaichek in "Things I've noticed while visiting the ICU"

natosaichek — Fri, 18 Nov 2022 22:36:51 +0000

Totally agree. Also, let people open more medical care facilities. Right now "Certificate of Need" legislation is killing lots of viable options for care _outside_ hospitals.