Hacker News: pasiaj

New comment by pasiaj in "OpenAI's o1 correctly diagnosed 67% of ER patients vs. 50-55% by triage doctors"

pasiaj — Sun, 03 May 2026 19:34:04 +0000

Not an expert but what I’ve heard is that AI-based radiology analysis has brought down prices so much that there’s been a huge increase in demand, which has led to employee shortages.

New comment by pasiaj in "EU Council Approves New "Chat Control" Mandate Pushing Mass Surveillance"

pasiaj — Fri, 28 Nov 2025 13:12:06 +0000

You seem to mistake an ideal for reality and forgo a few difficult eventualities: eg. tyranny of the majority, corruption, regulatory capture, etc.

New comment by pasiaj in "macOS 26 Tahoe's Dead Canary Utility App Icons"

pasiaj — Tue, 26 Aug 2025 11:41:55 +0000

Past canaries of Apple's software downfall: Scripting and the new Notification Center.

The key thing to make macOS feel welcoming to everybody from noobs to the nerdiest of power users: Pretty much all functionality used to be accessible using an easy GUI, and keyboard shortcuts, and scripting and command line interface.

At some point Apple Script support started to thin out. I started to worry a bit at this point. Apps that power users care about rely on scripting support. I felt that advanced users have fallen outside the target audience of the product.

Then the new Notification Center came out. And suddenly there was no way of reacting to individual notifications from the keyboard. Two interfaces were no out! No keyboard shortcuts. No scriptability. You HAVE to use the mouse!

Core functionality was suddenly inaccessible using the PRIMARY input device!

How is it possible that the accessibility of such major OS functionality is this poor!

At this point I felt that it's not about target audiences, but about indifference. They don't much care.

Someone once said that monopolies are often never toppled - instead they just become irrelevant over time. This is what happened to Windows. The OS monopoly still exists, but it's no longer the center of anyone's attention.

The same seems to have happened to MacOS. It's as if it has become unimportant inside Apple.

New comment by pasiaj in "3D Line Drawings"

pasiaj — Tue, 05 Aug 2025 09:57:22 +0000

Yes, all of us born in the 80s or earlier …

New comment by pasiaj in "Two never-before-seen tools, from same group, infect air-gapped devices"

pasiaj — Sun, 13 Oct 2024 08:33:11 +0000

> Security monoculture is not necessarily a great approach

See: Hezbollah & pagers.

New comment by pasiaj in "Llms.txt"

pasiaj — Wed, 04 Sep 2024 08:31:55 +0000

Having two different RFCs on this is clearly causing confusion!

I think I'll create a new RFC to supersede both to clear up the situation.

New comment by pasiaj in "Apollo calls AI a 'bubble' worse than even the dotcom era"

pasiaj — Tue, 27 Feb 2024 05:29:22 +0000

Discounted Cashflows calculation for Nvidia would require 10x growth and a 55% profit margin for 10 years to justify the current valuation.

If the company achieves a 4-5X growth (15% per year) and 30% margins (instead of 55%) that would place the share price at $176 - 1/4th of what it is today.

New comment by pasiaj in "Disney's earliest Mickey Mouse enters public domain as US copyright expires"

pasiaj — Mon, 01 Jan 2024 10:52:20 +0000

The law is the will of ”we”. ”They” can’t change the law – only ”we” can.

New comment by pasiaj in "Bluetooth stack modifications to improve audio quality on headphones without AA (2019)"

pasiaj — Fri, 24 Nov 2023 05:16:02 +0000

Better than what?

New comment by pasiaj in "How to start a rocket engine"

pasiaj — Fri, 10 Mar 2023 15:03:03 +0000

> literally had 2x4's on fire stuck in the combustion chamber

I REALLY wouldn't want to be the person tasked with starting that fire.

New comment by pasiaj in "Finland’s most-wanted hacker nabbed in France"

pasiaj — Sun, 05 Feb 2023 21:13:48 +0000

This was one nefarious operation by the hacker:

- He hacked the patient files of a psychotherapy center Vastaamo. This included therapy notes for more than 22.000 patients.

- First the hacker blackmailed the therapy center.

- Next he started blackmailing individual patients.

- Finally he released the files online revealing very private information on thousands of patients.

I can only imagine the horror felt by the people whose therapy notes were made public.

New comment by pasiaj in "I've procrastinated working on my thesis for more than a year"

pasiaj — Fri, 20 Jan 2023 07:17:35 +0000

Memorable, for the last year two years I've been working on identifying structural causes of procrastination caused by working from home and working on a digital device.

While I'm sure there are personality factors that are affecting your productivity, there are a number of factor in play that are beyond your control.

I've worked closely with a number of CEO's and thesis writers helping them out of the slump.

I'f you DM me, I'd love to have a call with you to give a number of pointers how to get more productive immediately and also to help you find professional help to ease the possible underlying factors that tend to cause procrastination.

New comment by pasiaj in "Nuclear power is too slow"

pasiaj — Fri, 16 Dec 2022 21:44:18 +0000

In Finland wind power provides roughly 30% of the nominal power on average. The problem is that it fluctuates between 0-80%.

The National Emergency Supply Agency calculates 6% of the nominal power capacity as the guaranteed capacity of wind. Unfortunately even that is overly optimistic.

During days when temperatures hover close zero, wind farms are shut down due to the danger from ice debris. This has caused zero production days of wind power in Finland during the last month.

Our electricity prices have been 30x the normal.

List of causes includes: importing electricity from Russia has been halted, unreliability of wind power, delays in building new nuclear power, premature shutting down of certain carbon based energy production, increased exports to Estonia and Germany due to Nordstream/Russia/Ukraine, increased exports to Sweden due to maintenance of a nuclear plant there. )

New comment by pasiaj in "Crimean bridge: Who – or what – caused the explosion?"

pasiaj — Sun, 09 Oct 2022 19:43:55 +0000

There are burnmarks high up on the pillars of the train bridge but not on the lower parts. This would suggest that the explosion happened on top of the bridge.

New comment by pasiaj in "The Ethereum merge is done"

pasiaj — Thu, 15 Sep 2022 14:50:25 +0000

I seriously doubt that. Please elaborate why you think this is the case.

New comment by pasiaj in "Why Punish?"

pasiaj — Sat, 30 Jul 2022 18:50:27 +0000

Road rage and horribly antisocial driving behaviour exists. I don't think it usually includes murderous intent, but intentionally dangerous behaviour is quite common.

New comment by pasiaj in "Iceland’s forest and bush cover has increased sixfold since 1990"

pasiaj — Mon, 18 Jul 2022 10:44:22 +0000

For comparison: Finland (338,440 km²) is three times the size of Iceland (103,000 km²)

Finland has 23 million hectares (76%) of forest cover.

http://www.metla.fi/metinfo/sustainability/finnish.htm

New comment by pasiaj in "The Day George Soros Broke the Bank of England to Make $1.1B (2021)"

pasiaj — Thu, 12 May 2022 10:20:24 +0000

Soros was a disciple of philosopher Karl Popper, one of the 20th century's most influential philosophers of science. Popper was a big influence on empirical falsification. Popper wrote the book The Open Society and Its Enemies that has greatly influenced political ideals both in the left and the right wing in western democracies.

In 2009 Financial Times published an essay by George Soros, where he describes his general philosophical theory "reflexivity", that he applies to life and investing. Reflexivity is an extension of Poppers ideas and are very well grounded.

This essay explains very well the reasoning that eventually led to breaking the Bank of England as well.

https://www.ft.com/content/0ca06172-bfe9-11de-aed2-00144feab...

New comment by pasiaj in "The Day George Soros Broke the Bank of England to Make $1.1B (2021)"

pasiaj — Thu, 12 May 2022 10:19:08 +0000

They explain very well the reasoning that led to breaking of the Bank of England.

https://www.ft.com/content/0ca06172-bfe9-11de-aed2-00144feab...

New comment by pasiaj in "What would open sourcing the Twitter algorithm actually look like?"

pasiaj — Fri, 22 Apr 2022 09:39:12 +0000

The algo surely is quite basic. I believe JanneVee is saying that a "rather basic" algorithm that tries to maximize engagement drifts towards promoting the more divisive posts that amplify our tribalistic tendencies.

And by giving more visibility to polarizing content it incentivises others to create more polarising content.

The algorithm therefore is a positive feedback loop of polarization. It doesn't just show what we are, but amplifies our worst (or tribalistic) tendencies.

Relevant Howard Stern reference: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9G6xu-J_Dmc