Hacker News: oidar

New comment by oidar in "Project Gutenberg – keeps getting better"

oidar — Fri, 15 May 2026 17:42:00 +0000

I'm slightly curious how PG handles heavily illustrated books. I've downloaded some years ago, and the quality of the illustrations was always pretty poor. Has it been improved lately? What's the QA like for illustrations?

New comment by oidar in "Show HN: Auto-Architecture: Karpathy's Loop, pointed at a CPU"

oidar — Wed, 29 Apr 2026 11:50:28 +0000

It's the OODA loop for LLMs writing code.

New comment by oidar in "Claude for Creative Work"

oidar — Wed, 29 Apr 2026 11:46:33 +0000

Which reverb and at what levels? It's way, way faster to hot swamp for previewing and getting the sound at what levels. Same with drums, I believe there are about 10 different kits per each of the 909 and 808 flavors in the factory tool kit. Typing out claude commands to do this kinda thing would be way slower than actually doing it. I'm not opposed to LLMs having control of the ableton interface, but adding and tweaking devices is going to be glacially slower via an LLM.

New comment by oidar in "To my students"

oidar — Tue, 28 Apr 2026 00:29:52 +0000

You could write this from the perspective of a historical luddite [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Luddite] and the points would be identical.

New comment by oidar in "Show HN: I built a dual crossword puzzle where two crosswords share one grid"

oidar — Mon, 27 Apr 2026 13:12:55 +0000

Doesn't load on latest firefox.

New comment by oidar in "Girl, 10, finds rare Mexican axolotl under Welsh bridge"

oidar — Thu, 23 Apr 2026 20:14:46 +0000

It's against the law for it to be in the wild. And the temperature range in which it can survive is quite narrow, it would probably die sometime this year if left alone.

New comment by oidar in "New study compares growing corn for energy to solar production"

oidar — Wed, 22 Apr 2026 21:07:05 +0000

> Inputs for solar? Do you mean the sun? That's a new complaint I've never heard anybody state.

Well more precisely, the inputs for making the solar panels compared to the inputs for making geothermal plants. The best of solar last 30 years atm and the best of geothermal atm last 100+ years. Not to mention you don't need any rare imported minerals to make geothermal plants.

New comment by oidar in "New study compares growing corn for energy to solar production"

oidar — Wed, 22 Apr 2026 20:42:25 +0000

Solar is nice and all - it's is cleaner than fossil fuels, but requires a bunch of inputs. Geothermal really needs to be pushed for more; after the initial investment, requires basically no inputs and has no toxic byproducts or disposal problems.

"The full technical potential of next-generation geothermal systems to generate electricity is second only to solar PV among renewable technologies and sufficient to meet global electricity demand 140-times over."

https://www.iea.org/reports/the-future-of-geothermal-energy/...

New comment by oidar in "AI Resistance: some recent anti-AI stuff that’s worth discussing"

oidar — Mon, 20 Apr 2026 22:08:37 +0000

> If humanity goes extinct in the next few years because of unaligned superintelligence,

I've seen people claiming that this could happen, but I've yet to read any plausible scenario where this might be the case. Maybe I lack the imagination, could you enlighten me?

New comment by oidar in "John Ternus to become Apple CEO"

oidar — Mon, 20 Apr 2026 20:47:05 +0000

situations like this should allow for relaxing the title rules to "unbury" the lede.

New comment by oidar in "Sauna effect on heart rate"

oidar — Mon, 20 Apr 2026 15:45:25 +0000

Also not controlled: Maybe on Sauna days they drank more water before bed? Or less alcohol?

New comment by oidar in "Qwen3.6-Max-Preview: Smarter, Sharper, Still Evolving"

oidar — Mon, 20 Apr 2026 14:45:55 +0000

Opus 4.6 performance has been so wildly inconsistent over the past couple of months, why waste the tokens?

New comment by oidar in "Playdate’s handheld changed how Duke University teaches game design"

oidar — Thu, 16 Apr 2026 22:43:56 +0000

I love the aesthetic of the playdate, the educational outreach, and how easy the whole platform is. It’s just so well designed all around. But the only way I am able to play it is by casting the screen to my computer, the screen is so tiny. Otherwise, I love it.

New comment by oidar in "Claude Opus 4.7"

oidar — Thu, 16 Apr 2026 14:58:10 +0000

Anthropic isn't going to give us that information. It's not actually static, it depends on subscription demand and idle compute available.

New comment by oidar in "The Seasons Are Wrong"

oidar — Sat, 11 Apr 2026 08:17:28 +0000

“One sort of optional thing you might do is realize that there are six seasons instead of four. The poetry of four seasons is all wrong for this part of the planet, and this may explain why we are depressed so much of the time. I mean, spring doesn’t feel like spring a lot of the time, and November is all wrong for autumn, and so on. Here is the truth about the seasons: Spring is May and June. What could be springier than May and June? Summer is July and August. Really hot, right? Autumn is September and October. See the pumpkins? Smell those burning leaves? Next comes the season called Locking. November and December aren’t winter. They’re Locking. Next comes winter, January and February. Boy! Are they ever cold! What comes next? Not spring. ‘Unlocking’ comes next. What else could cruel March and only slightly less cruel April be? March and April are not spring. They’re Unlocking.”

—Kurt Vonnegut

New comment by oidar in "Anthropic expands partnership with Google and Broadcom for next-gen compute"

oidar — Tue, 07 Apr 2026 01:49:51 +0000

Doesn't that beat openai in revenue?

New comment by oidar in "The underrated benefits of always having oatmeal at lunch"

oidar — Sun, 05 Apr 2026 21:57:20 +0000

Oatmeal is for breakfast, lentils are for lunch. Here's a good lentil recipe: https://web.archive.org/web/20200309092143/https://www.washi...

New comment by oidar in "OpenAI closes funding round at an $852B valuation"

oidar — Tue, 31 Mar 2026 20:48:45 +0000

>> To finish, I do just sort of straight up hate the idea that we're comparing this moment to the invention of electricity. It's on the face of it absurd.

Do you feel that any technology is comparable in it’s impact?

New comment by oidar in "Some uncomfortable truths about AI coding agents"

oidar — Fri, 27 Mar 2026 20:52:55 +0000

> The fun in the job is not knowing where to place a semicolon.

If a person needs an LLM to figure where an semicolon goes, a LLM is not going to help them code.

New comment by oidar in "Don't Wait for Claude"

oidar — Fri, 27 Mar 2026 18:47:12 +0000

I disagree with this take. I get that LLM produced text is filled with crappy, over the top writing in pretty much all cases, but if a prompter/writer/blogger is using it iteratively, the LLM output is going to be way better than their writing. Also, if a person is using LLMs to write articles, do you really want to see their likely even worse writing?