Hacker News: patapong

New comment by patapong in "iOS 27 is adding a 'Create a Pass' button to Apple Wallet"

patapong — Tue, 05 May 2026 14:47:20 +0000

So? Computers are the dream machine, we should strive to do better than physical reality, not mimic it.

New comment by patapong in "Men who stare at walls"

patapong — Tue, 28 Apr 2026 14:20:00 +0000

An early stage iPhone app has you covered for typing ;) https://www.type-n-walk.com/

New comment by patapong in "NIST scientists create 'any wavelength' lasers"

patapong — Sun, 19 Apr 2026 12:35:05 +0000

At the same time, there's some commonality for what words mean in different contexts. For example, even though we all have our own experiences with the concept of "dog", there's a common core where we have enough of an understanding what other people refer to as "dog" to allow discussing the concept. Likewise, for most people, dog is more similar to cat than to house.

Imagine if we could build a machine that reads a bunch of texts and tries to extract this meaning by looking at which words commonly co-occyr with other words in different contexts. Perhaps something interesting would happen...

New comment by patapong in "Bitcoin miners are losing on every coin produced as difficulty drops"

patapong — Sat, 11 Apr 2026 15:29:16 +0000

But mining costs are (cost of equipment+cost of electricity)/total coins mined, so can miners not end up in a situation where they need to keep mining to pay off equipment despite the individual coins being unprofitable?

New comment by patapong in "Ask HN: Any interesting niche hobbies?"

patapong — Wed, 08 Apr 2026 14:35:41 +0000

Synthesizers! I like it because it's tactile and immediate, and you're not glued to a screen, but can create fun-sounding beats.

Nowadays there are nice, cheapish groove boxes that are perfect for noodling on the couch. I started with the Novation Circuit Tracks, and also really enjoy the Teenage Engineering EP-133. Not to say that I am any good at this, but it's an enjoyable hobby! Bonus if you are friends who are also into it and you can jam together :)

New comment by patapong in "LÖVE: 2D Game Framework for Lua"

patapong — Sun, 05 Apr 2026 19:57:06 +0000

One of the biggest recent indie hits, Balatro, was made in Löve!

I really like it, the developer experience is so smooth for beginners, just drag a zip onto the exe and it starts. And the APIs are simple enough to memorize while allowing pretty cool rendering stuff.

New comment by patapong in "The threat is comfortable drift toward not understanding what you're doing"

patapong — Sun, 05 Apr 2026 13:09:17 +0000

I think this is a very important debate, and I think the author here adds a lot to this discussion! I mostly agree with it, but wanted to point out a few areas where I do not fully agree.

> Take away the agent, and Bob is still a first-year student who hasn't started yet.

This may be true, but I can see almost no conceivable word where the agent will be taken away. I think we should evaluate Bob's ability based on what he can do with an agent, not without, and here he seems to be doing quite well.

> I've been hearing "just wait" since 2023.

On almost any timeline, this is very short. Given the fact that we have already arrived at models able to almost build complete computer programs based on a single prompt, and solve frontier level math problems, I think any framework that relies on humans continuing to have an edge over LLMs in the medium term may be built on shaky grounds.

Two very interesting questions today in this vein for me are:

- Is the best way to teach complex topics to students today to have them carry out simple tasks?

The author acknowledges that the difference between Bob and Alice only materializes at a very high level, basically when Alice becomes a PI of her own. If we were solely focused on teaching thinking at this level (with access to LLMs), how would we frame the educational path? It may look exactly like it does now, but it could also look very differently.

- Is there inherent value in humans learning specific skills?

If we get to a stage where LLMs can carry out most/all intellectual tasks better than humans, do we still want humans to learn these skills? My belief is yes, but I am frankly not sure how to motivate this answer.

New comment by patapong in "iPhone 17 Pro Demonstrated Running a 400B LLM"

patapong — Mon, 23 Mar 2026 17:40:04 +0000

Also check out "The Great Automatic Grammatizator" by Roald Dahl for another eerily accurate scifi description of LLMs written in 1954:

https://gwern.net/doc/fiction/science-fiction/1953-dahl-theg...

New comment by patapong in "iPhone 17 Pro Demonstrated Running a 400B LLM"

patapong — Mon, 23 Mar 2026 17:39:00 +0000

Depends on cost IMO - if I could buy a Kimi K2.5 chip for a couple of hundred dollars today I would probably do it.

New comment by patapong in "iPhone 17 Pro Demonstrated Running a 400B LLM"

patapong — Mon, 23 Mar 2026 16:27:42 +0000

What do you get if you multiply six by nine?

New comment by patapong in "Bombadil: Property-based testing for web UIs"

patapong — Mon, 23 Mar 2026 14:42:20 +0000

I am in support. In general he was really good with names I thought, they always had an otherwordly flair while being clear to pronounce. Skaffen-Amtiskaw, Anaplian, Elethiomel...

New comment by patapong in "Migrating to the EU"

patapong — Mon, 23 Mar 2026 12:56:52 +0000

Hmmm this looks like a really nice option! Any issues with deliverability?

New comment by patapong in "OpenAI Has New Focus (on the IPO)"

patapong — Thu, 19 Mar 2026 07:44:19 +0000

ChatGPT: Would you like me to show you one simple trick to improve prompt adherence?

New comment by patapong in "Yann LeCun raises $1B to build AI that understands the physical world"

patapong — Wed, 11 Mar 2026 15:15:34 +0000

It really reminds me of the movie Memento - it has to constantly put notes down to remember who it is and what it should do after waking up without memory every n minutes.

New comment by patapong in "First MacBook Neo Benchmarks Are In"

patapong — Fri, 06 Mar 2026 14:02:35 +0000

Agreed! For the longest time, I feel like for most "regular" people (mostly used for web browsing, communication and light gaming) the choice between windows and Mac has mostly come down to price. I feel like this is the first attempt by Apple to disrupt this segmentation and take a stab at the mass market as well.

New comment by patapong in "AIs can't stop recommending nuclear strikes in war game simulations"

patapong — Wed, 25 Feb 2026 21:53:15 +0000

Humans can't stop using deadly violence against police officers in city simulation

New comment by patapong in "Mercury 2: Fast reasoning LLM powered by diffusion"

patapong — Wed, 25 Feb 2026 11:01:13 +0000

I do wonder if there are tasks where 16k garbage words/s are more useful than 200 good words per second. Does anyone have any ideas? Data extraction perhaps?

New comment by patapong in "VTT Test Donut Lab Battery Reaches 80% Charge in Under 10 Minutes [pdf]"

patapong — Mon, 23 Feb 2026 14:06:43 +0000

Thank you for sharing this, relevant context...

New comment by patapong in "VTT Test Donut Lab Battery Reaches 80% Charge in Under 10 Minutes [pdf]"

patapong — Mon, 23 Feb 2026 13:59:26 +0000

Careful though, this test explicitly only tests the charge and discharge capabilities of the battery, not whether it's a solid state battery or not. According to ChatGPT, these results would in theory also be possible with a normal Li-ion battery. I am really hoping this is real though! And waiting for further tests.

New comment by patapong in "Anthropic officially bans using subscription auth for third party use"

patapong — Thu, 19 Feb 2026 10:40:14 +0000

Presumably most people also do not use their full quota when using the official client, whereas third-party clients could be set up to start back up every 5 hours to use 100% of the quota every day and week.

It's the whole "unlimited storage" discussion again.