After clicking the link and seeing the demo: man, I’ve always wanted a programmable timer.

This is awesome, can see myself using this for workouts and focus sessions. Thank you for sharing.

One supplier ended up with a direct sale they wouldn’t have otherwise

Not exclusively. A few power companies (like SRP) innovated here with TOU plans that have variable costs throughout the day. You can save huge amounts of monthly spend by moving energy intensive work to off-peak hours and by “priming” things ahead of peak hours, like over-cooling your house ahead of the peak window.

The most costly part of an infrastructure build out is supporting peak-of-peak - that capacity exists year round to service the demand generated by peak mid-day usage during a heatwave in July.

If you can “lop off” that peak - it dramatically reduces the infra build out cost.

Peak-of-peak tends to correspond with sunny days: mid-day in summer. I could see battery-less solar being a useful tool there.

Absolutely incredible, but then confused by the next assertion that is made without context:

> New kinds of clocks may soon open up capabilities that previous generations could only dream about.

What is possible by pushing past that incredibly narrow margin of 1s in 13b years? What dreamy capabilities do we get that we don’t enjoy today?

Edit: I’d assumed they were talking about new approaches to making these clocks more accurate, but I wonder if they’re referring to power and form factors? I.E. an atomic clock the size of a grain of rice: https://www.nist.gov/noac/success-story-chip-scale-atomic-cl...

https://archive.org/details/OTRR_X_Minus_One_Singles/XMinusO...

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49170375

Points: 2

# Comments: 0

https://archive.org/details/OTRR_X_Minus_One_Singles/XMinusO...

I.E. avoiding population collapse due to lack of ecosystem carrying capacity? Eliminating famine? etc.

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49063757

Points: 19

# Comments: 10

Looking at the Wikipedia article - I wonder if it is because SIMD and SIMT are enabled by hardware first

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49049064

Points: 3

# Comments: 0

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49035880

Points: 22

# Comments: 1

> My philosophy with LLMs is to try to use them to achieve levels of quality and polish that would’ve been previously unreasonable. I hope this project is a demonstration of that.

This philosophy has been growing on me - a coworker framed it as “nuance melts away with LLMs”

I recently wanted to render a 100+ page document in an interactive WYSIWYG editor using a single stroke font and join the letters to form single stroke cursive words that appeared handwritten.

The permutations of rulesets that governed connections between letters (I.e. how does t connect to c, and do you need to lift the pen to make that connection) amplified by the randomness injected into the strokes and line width/angle (handwriting doesn’t have uniform letters or lines!) would have been intractable previously.

But, with an agent harness, I could do 3 or 4 examples of what “right” looked like - give it the ability to generate and screenshot test cases to see the output of its work - and it could grind through a reasonable ruleset for about $20 in spend.

Stories like this give me hope - thank you for sharing

For me and my experience, it’s reversed. Someone says some measured statement against a piece of regulation and someone shakes out of the woodwork mumbling something about some horrific thing like slavery.

Arguments of the structure:

“Aha, so you do like regulation, therefore you must like ALL regulation”

Or

“Oh, you oppose this piece of regulation, therefore you must want lord of the flies”

Or

“You only like regulation you like” (which is effectively a tautology)

People can oppose the burden of a body of regulation without opposing a government enforcing contract law.

And when someone says “regulation is bad” - a good faith interpretation of their statement is that they mean we have a large body of bad regulation, not that we should abolish the state and devolve into trading Monero for slaves.

Option 1: “we won’t trade humans as slaves at all costs, even if it makes us less competitive in the global market - and we don’t hold that conviction about other things”

Option 2: “We won’t trade slaves - and if we find you trading slaves we will kill you. So we don’t have to worry about competing against slaves in the global marketplace.”

Option 3: “slavery is less efficient than having the same people as market participants - so I don’t consider giving up slaves to be less competitive”

Many more options, and mixtures of any or all of them.