Hacker News: prvc

New comment by prvc in "All elementary functions from a single binary operator"

prvc — Mon, 13 Apr 2026 05:19:12 +0000

This is neat, but could someone explain the significance or practical (or even theoretical) utility of it?

New comment by prvc in "They're made out of meat (1991)"

prvc — Wed, 08 Apr 2026 18:42:52 +0000

The concept of "meat" presupposes the existence of carnivores, so it's hard to see how the realization in the story could ever have been surprising.

New comment by prvc in "Raspberry Pi and mini PC home lab prices hit parity as DRAM costs skyrocket"

prvc — Tue, 06 Jan 2026 19:07:53 +0000

Have they announced any price from which to adjust? If not, then it would be unnecessary for them to announce the adjustment.

New comment by prvc in "Terrence Malick's Disciples"

prvc — Tue, 23 Dec 2025 22:01:32 +0000

"Disciples", but seemingly without back and forth feedback from the "teacher". Many happy to ride on the coattails of his reputation, though. This particular style might also be attractive to new film-makers because it allows them to dispense with learning the basics of traditional film language.

New comment by prvc in "Gemini 3 Flash: Frontier intelligence built for speed"

prvc — Thu, 18 Dec 2025 06:24:35 +0000

Apples to oranges.

New comment by prvc in "Robert Hooke's "Cyberpunk” Letter to Gottfried Leibniz"

prvc — Tue, 04 Nov 2025 07:09:24 +0000

Should have just quoted what Hooke said... not sure what we're supposed to take away from this.

New comment by prvc in "TextEdit and the relief of simple software"

prvc — Fri, 24 Oct 2025 20:59:15 +0000

>The best way to reclaim our digital experiences, though, might be to stick with the likes of TextEdit, software that is unable to do anything except follow our commands.

Man, if he only knew...

New comment by prvc in "What happened to Apple's legendary attention to detail?"

prvc — Thu, 23 Oct 2025 20:20:41 +0000

This situation persists: for instance, try to write to an external disk formatted with NTFS using the GUI tools alone. Baffling why Apple doesn't simply obtain a license in order to gain this capability. Big unnecessary inconvenience, primarily for their own users.

New comment by prvc in "Bertrand Russell to Oswald Mosley (1962)"

prvc — Wed, 17 Sep 2025 10:17:15 +0000

Anyone wondering what might have prompted his evident change of attitude after already having engaged in a "correspondence" with Mosley should note that this letter was written during Ralph Schoenman's infamous tenure as Russell's secretary.

New comment by prvc in "Scanned piano rolls database"

prvc — Thu, 17 Jul 2025 05:11:02 +0000

An interesting prospective project for a technically minded musician would be would be to find an automated way to "correct" the surviving corpus of Welte-Mignon[1] recordings. They were designed to capture the small nuances of performances (such as dynamics), and a large number of historically important musicians made recorded performances in this medium before the era of sound recording. In my strongly-held opinion, the rolls were marked in an uneven and imprecise way, making direct playback on anything but the original recording apparatus inaccurate. A common trait of modern renderings of these rolls as sound recordings (as found on CD or on Youtube) is an unevenness of tempo and a seeming lack of synchronization of voices (really piano keys). However, the mechanical quirks and imprecision in the recording apparatus must be regular enough to allow for a more accurate version of the performances to be reconstructed, without relying on unduly many aesthetic assumptions.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Welte-Mignon

New comment by prvc in "TikTok is being flooded with racist AI videos generated by Google's Veo 3"

prvc — Thu, 03 Jul 2025 00:55:37 +0000

None of the examples shown in the video are passable hoaxes. They are all obvious burlesque-style parodies, albeit made in bad taste. They all also have clear and prominent hallmarks of AI generation. Anyone fooled by these has got bigger, prior problems than any potential belief instilled by these videos.

New comment by prvc in "The Death of the Middle-Class Musician"

prvc — Sat, 28 Jun 2025 23:55:17 +0000

I assumed the article would be about orchestral musicians (for whom there is a high, and increasing skill threshold) or session musicians (whose work is increasingly being replaced by computer synthesis). Instead, we get a very long narrative about a rapper who is still struggling to "make it" as a recording artist. In the era of sound recordings (which began well over a century ago) there is little incentive for the consumer to choose one with middling appeal over the most popular options. This makes the task of becoming a star, but on a small scale, a difficult one. Instead, a prospective "middle-class musician" must find a niche of some kind, perhaps by focusing on the local market. For example, a busker could potentially make more (than his cited $250k in recording revenue) over a period of 9 years with sufficient dedication.

New comment by prvc in "YouTuber claims to have received an offer to buy the Commodore brand"

prvc — Mon, 09 Jun 2025 00:54:28 +0000

>NES

No, I meant, if you want to provide video games, just provide whatever is current and popular. Also, they should research whether there is actually a need for this. One suspects that such a thing already exists.

New comment by prvc in "YouTuber claims to have received an offer to buy the Commodore brand"

prvc — Sun, 08 Jun 2025 20:54:23 +0000

On the building a Commodore game room for sick kids charity idea: one thing they wouldn't have is nostalgia for the 1980s home computers. Just get them Nintendos.

New comment by prvc in "AlphaEvolve: A Gemini-powered coding agent for designing advanced algorithms"

prvc — Wed, 14 May 2025 18:04:38 +0000

Merely from your telling, it seems it is no longer "not worth the effort", as "the effort" has been reduced drastically. This is itself significant.

New comment by prvc in "US Copyright Office found AI companies breach copyright. Its boss was fired"

prvc — Mon, 12 May 2025 12:28:44 +0000

The released draft report seems merely to be a litany of copyright holder complaints repeated verbatim, with little depth of reasoning to support the conclusions it makes.

New comment by prvc in "For $595, you get what nobody else can give you for twice the price (1982) [pdf]"

prvc — Sun, 11 May 2025 05:32:41 +0000

How big a selling point would CP/M have been, really?

New comment by prvc in "My new deadline: 20 years to give away virtually all my wealth"

prvc — Thu, 08 May 2025 15:33:22 +0000

Have to disagree about the 'effective' part. Gates seems to have had a knack for massive inefficiencies and negative externalities in every way that he has impacted the world. Think of how many man-hours (measured in human lifetimes) have been wasted due to the shortcomings of various MicroSoft programs. Weigh that against his health initiatives in the third world. Or the impact of dimming the sun by depositing massive quantities of particles in the atmosphere: the resources consumed and carbon emissions that placing them would entail, and of course the intended effect, which is to impede human progress as measured by the Kardashev scale. Everything starts to look much more efficient if this is taken as the goal, though.

New comment by prvc in "101 BASIC Computer Games"

prvc — Tue, 22 Apr 2025 00:33:57 +0000

BASIC, that is.

New comment by prvc in "Gemma 3 QAT Models: Bringing AI to Consumer GPUs"

prvc — Sun, 20 Apr 2025 20:16:43 +0000

> ~15GB (MLX) leaving plenty of memory for running other apps.

Is that small enough to run well (without thrashing) on a system with only 16GiB RAM?