Hacker News: redhed

New comment by redhed in "LLM Voice"

redhed — Thu, 29 Oct 2026 17:52:44 +0000

Yeah, I swear AI writing is worse than it was. Part of my big model release tests has always been asking it to write a few chapters in different styles, and I swear they have slowly gone from really bad, to boring and plain (I remember Gemini 3 being peak of this), to now over-complicated and quite bad. My guess is that they were initially being trained on writing quality but that has taken a backseat since it's not really a profit generator.

New comment by redhed in "QGIS enacts moratorium on AI contributions"

redhed — Mon, 12 Oct 2026 16:09:43 +0000

As someone working on a geospatial program, Astra does not seem significantly different to Opus to me. I was surprised myself.

New comment by redhed in "Questions for Believers in AI Consciousness"

redhed — Mon, 05 Oct 2026 19:28:13 +0000

I can definitely emergency power off most living creatures.

New comment by redhed in "Pi 1.0"

redhed — Thu, 01 Oct 2026 21:58:06 +0000

Yeah I also created my own TUI one and only took a couple days. Using it less now though because the models have gotten pretty good at spinning up their own agents.

New comment by redhed in "DraftKings is using AI to behaviorally target chronic gamblers"

redhed — Tue, 29 Sep 2026 18:22:16 +0000

I know people who place bets fairly regularly (weekly during their favorite sports seasons) and they have been making profits yearly. You're not going to get banned for making hundreds of dollars in profit. I'm not saying these guys are making good decisions or should even keep doing it, but I have seen their activity statements.

New comment by redhed in "12,000-year-old Göbeklitepe burials explain scattered bones"

redhed — Tue, 29 Sep 2026 14:34:38 +0000

Also in Neolithic Yellow River it was pretty common to bury infants in jars/pots underneath the floor from what I remember.

New comment by redhed in "Show HN: HN.watch – Videos of all Hacker News posts"

redhed — Mon, 28 Sep 2026 19:16:40 +0000

Yeah I feel like this would be better as summaries of textbook chapters or information rich sources, a lot of HN posts are already basically text summaries of a complex topic that it doesn't really make sense to further summarize them.

New comment by redhed in "13 Months Sober (2025)"

redhed — Mon, 28 Sep 2026 17:32:35 +0000

I'm not sure what you mean by running on booze (perhaps you mean daily drinkers), but I think this is real consensus bias to think drinking is not still fairly common socially even after college.

New comment by redhed in "GPT-6 Astra, looped transformers, and hidden reasoning"

redhed — Wed, 09 Sep 2026 17:50:14 +0000

Yeah my scenario was we had old paper drawings without actual CAD models. Fed those into Astra and it did it 100% perfectly. Honestly might be the easiest scenario for it, but that's also what I thought for Fable and Sol and those completely butchered it. Wish I could share pictures of those attempts but just imagine a completely mangled model that barely looks good if you squint. These were not simple models either, pretty large/complex machinery.

New comment by redhed in "GPT-6 Astra, looped transformers, and hidden reasoning"

redhed — Wed, 09 Sep 2026 17:34:40 +0000

Using KiCad by uploading their _sch and _pcb files. Originally with Sol, I stuck to using it for finding parts and double checking my KiCad schematic. Definitely good at finding parts quickly from JLCPCB's stock and for quick cosmetic edits of the schematic. I found its PCB editing abilities pretty bad, though it was useful for cosmetic edits (quickly relabeling silkscreen labels) and for creating a nice custom DRU file. With Astra on the other hand it can actually make good PCB edits. Still not great but usable and editing it quicker than starting from scratch. I do doubt you can go 0-100 with just Astra but definitely sped up my work. For reference my circuits are high amperage, noise sensitive, and interface with sensors. They are pretty simple circuits though, just fairly simple ICs with no MCU or anything like that.

New comment by redhed in "GPT-6 Astra, looped transformers, and hidden reasoning"

redhed — Wed, 09 Sep 2026 16:53:17 +0000

I have tested it out with CAD and PCB circuits and it is a huge jump compared to Sol. I agree though when trying it with programming I don't notice a huge jump.

New comment by redhed in "EasyEffects can improve laptop speaker sound quality"

redhed — Fri, 28 Aug 2026 22:02:05 +0000

Yeah that's pretty good way to put it, except I'd say the average person is using way better screens with smartphones than the quality of speakers/headphones their using.

New comment by redhed in "EasyEffects can improve laptop speaker sound quality"

redhed — Fri, 28 Aug 2026 20:19:09 +0000

I have heard that audio engineer's don't necessarily master to a flat EQ because such a small section of listeners are listening with a flat EQ. Most are using car speakers, airpods, etc so they master it based on those expectations.

New comment by redhed in "11,000-year-old sculpture of man riding a leopard found in Turkey"

redhed — Wed, 26 Aug 2026 21:02:44 +0000

I think writing was forced more by demand than the ability to do. Before the first city states which needed laws, taxes, debts, etc to be recorded, people just did not need to write detailed information. Like most technology it could have been invented earlier, but the need just wasn't there. Simple oral story telling and a few written symbols was good enough.

New comment by redhed in "Project Cybersyn (2022)"

redhed — Thu, 20 Aug 2026 19:54:19 +0000

I understand that line of thinking and honestly think it's possible you're correct. On the other hand, this is exactly historical rhetoric that was used against republicanism/democracy, with people saying the only successful examples were city states and that it was impossible to scale. Maybe we just need a corporate "America" that figures out the correct governing structure. If anything I think it's possible it might only be possible with extremely large firms while small firms stay autocratic to stay dynamic.

New comment by redhed in "Project Cybersyn (2022)"

redhed — Thu, 20 Aug 2026 19:46:47 +0000

That's pretty interesting. I always found the idea of democratizing a company pretty easy to understand (can easily just mirror civilian governmental structure in some sense), but creating an internal free market system harder to wrap my head around so pretty cool to see an example of it.

New comment by redhed in "Project Cybersyn (2022)"

redhed — Thu, 20 Aug 2026 19:10:24 +0000

Yeah, the economy is basically a bunch of oligarchical/dictatorial command economies, or what we like to call companies. It's funny, a lot of leftist people use them as examples of how a larger command economy could work (usually the reaction a lot of leftists I know had to People's Republic of Walmart), whereas it makes me wonder what more democratic, free market companies would be like.

New comment by redhed in "The Indo-European Family Tree"

redhed — Thu, 13 Aug 2026 18:58:33 +0000

Another cool one, Svet in Russian and Schwet in Hindi, both meaning white/light and both being in names (Svetlana, Shweta)

New comment by redhed in "Compression is prediction"

redhed — Tue, 11 Aug 2026 20:42:25 +0000

How I see it, is if the human brain does lossy compression/prediction of the natural world that learns from its "training set" (sensory inputs) and we have been able to come up with new ideas, then it seems like AI would be able to as well.

New comment by redhed in "The Kaiser and a "Mediocre Man" Theory of History"

redhed — Sat, 30 May 2026 11:32:07 +0000

It'll then just be Confucius, Cao Cao, Oda Nobunaga. Doesn't really refute the point.