Hacker News: quirkot

New comment by quirkot in "Antares achieves criticality of Mark-0 reactor"

quirkot — Tue, 30 Jun 2026 19:18:01 +0000

Footnote has the backup. 2-3x is guesstimate, but it doesn't really matter. The answer is there's just not much waste to store

New comment by quirkot in "Antares Achieves Criticality of Mark-0 Reactor"

quirkot — Tue, 30 Jun 2026 13:21:45 +0000

Europe has about 60,000 tons of nuclear waste storage[1], so lets say the global nuclear waste quantity is 2-3x or 120,000 to 180,000 tons. That sounds like a lot, however it's less than 2 weeks of coal deliveries to a coal plant (at 1 train of 115 cars each with 116 tons of coal = 13,340 tons delivered per day[2]). To take another approach, the average landfill size is 600 acres[3].

The "eh, just bury it" approach is really not a bad one. Its not even that much stuff to bury

[1] https://worldnuclearwastereport.org/

[2] https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.php?id=16651

[3] https://www.colorado.edu/ecenter/2021/04/15/hidden-damage-la...

New comment by quirkot in "Daisugi, the Japanese technique of growing trees out of other trees (2020)"

quirkot — Mon, 29 Jun 2026 13:40:38 +0000

In english this is called pollarding a tree. Historically it has been used for smaller wood pieces (firewood, etc). It's fuctionally different [from daisugi] because you don't get construction grade timber from it

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pollarding

[edit: clarification]

New comment by quirkot in "Do we need billionaires?"

quirkot — Fri, 05 Jun 2026 15:17:17 +0000

If you want good checks against a government, one dude rich enough to field an army has historically been a bad way to keep the government in existence

New comment by quirkot in "Do we need billionaires?"

quirkot — Fri, 05 Jun 2026 15:13:59 +0000

Made $1 billion? Throw 'em a parade, put their name on a plaque on Wall Street, and never let them touch a new penny from here on out.

New comment by quirkot in "Superintelligence: The Idea That Eats Smart People (2016)"

quirkot — Tue, 02 Jun 2026 11:46:54 +0000

Gotta keep in mind that "you control what you can destroy" was expressed as the crux of a single-planet guerrilla group's maximalist negotiation strategy with an interstellar government, where the destruction was of the ability to travel between the stars. It's not a coherent theory of control outside of the razor thin application of "I'm willing to accept pain as long it hurts you much more." It is not a control that builds stability and infrastructure, it is the control of base extortion

New comment by quirkot in "We let AIs run radio stations"

quirkot — Mon, 18 May 2026 21:03:27 +0000

> do children have personalities if we left them in a dark room with no interactions with other humans?

Short answer: yes. generally speaking, personality traits range between 30% to 60% heritable

New comment by quirkot in "Music has scales / raagas. What about storytelling in movies and prestige shows?"

quirkot — Tue, 12 May 2026 13:52:06 +0000

Maybe there's some technical definitions for the words used to describe the films, but match between archetype and movie is incomprehensible to me. I'm not seeing a single one where the film is where I'd expect based on the descriptions

New comment by quirkot in "ASML became the chokepoint for cutting-edge chips"

quirkot — Tue, 28 Apr 2026 17:53:28 +0000

> But it boils down to having the vision, the belief and the strength to follow through over many years

And importantly, that vision being correct. The graveyard of history is full of the dedicated yet incorrect.

New comment by quirkot in "Microsoft and OpenAI end their exclusive and revenue-sharing deal"

quirkot — Mon, 27 Apr 2026 21:17:47 +0000

By that example, PostgreSQL itself is a form of intelligence relative to a physical filing system. It doesn't seem like your working definition of intelligence has a large overlap with a layman's conception of the word.

New comment by quirkot in "How to be anti-social – a guide to incoherent and isolating social experiences"

quirkot — Fri, 24 Apr 2026 12:36:25 +0000

"being yourself" means choosing to believe that the you that is true is competent and capable of growth while the awkwardness is a temporary barrier between that is not reflective of your true nature.

New comment by quirkot in "AI-assisted cognition endangers human development?"

quirkot — Wed, 15 Apr 2026 19:23:53 +0000

regarding #2: how many serfs came home after re-digging the toilet hole to eat a meal of hand-milled grain bread and old vegetables with the members of the family that survived infancy and thought "life just doesn't get any better than this"? Probably almost all of them

New comment by quirkot in "Cambodia unveils statue to honour famous landmine-sniffing rat"

quirkot — Tue, 07 Apr 2026 19:14:34 +0000

Magawa cleared 1,517,711 sq.ft of land. He could work at a pace of 2,808 sq.ft (a doubles tennis court) every 20 minutes. If he maintained that pace, he worked 180.2 hours. Let's assume, with hazardous terrain, he worked 25% that speed on average. If that's the case he worked ~720 hours during a 5-6 year career. A different rat, Ronin, that found more stuff found a total of 124 explosive devices. So Magawa found no more than 1 explosive for every 5 hours and 45 minutes of searching. Or approximately one device every 17.25 tennis courts of searching.

Real needle in a haystack stuff, wow

New comment by quirkot in "“Collaboration” is bullshit"

quirkot — Mon, 23 Mar 2026 18:06:43 +0000

Money is the sledgehammer of incentives. Above a reasonable amount of pay, it's overkill and makes lots of collateral problems. The really effective incentives are status based and situational to the group dynamic

New comment by quirkot in "Ask HN: How do you deal with people who trust LLMs?"

quirkot — Thu, 19 Mar 2026 20:23:28 +0000

i just actually read that and it is possibly the most morally abominable screed I've come across in a long time. Shocking that its acceptable to share in polite company

New comment by quirkot in "Ask HN: How do you deal with people who trust LLMs?"

quirkot — Thu, 19 Mar 2026 16:12:47 +0000

observation a: Document title is about a minority's rightful supremacy

observation b: document says "this is not political" then dives into persuasive speech

conclusion: this document was written by the bad guys

New comment by quirkot in "Ask HN: How do you deal with people who trust LLMs?"

quirkot — Thu, 19 Mar 2026 12:35:17 +0000

You're limiting the frame to an employment situation. Higher quality sources of knowledge are free: Wikipedia, public libraries, etc. Similar quality sources of information are also free: human relationships.

New comment by quirkot in "Ask HN: How do you deal with people who trust LLMs?"

quirkot — Thu, 19 Mar 2026 02:44:07 +0000

counterpoint: if I have to treat the computer like a person, what's the point of talking to a computer in the first place? Particularly when there are so many other systems that can provide answers without the runaround

New comment by quirkot in "The political effects of X's feed algorithm"

quirkot — Wed, 18 Feb 2026 21:46:32 +0000

Train the algorithm so that you can be the sort of product you want to see in the world

New comment by quirkot in "The political effects of X's feed algorithm"

quirkot — Wed, 18 Feb 2026 21:45:21 +0000

the issue brought up in the article isn't that "the algorithm is biased" but that "the algorithm causes bias". A feed could perfectly alternate between position A and position B and show no bias at all, but still select more incendiary content on topic A and drive bias towards or away from it.