Hacker News: spacebanana7

New comment by spacebanana7 in "Apple decided not to roll out Siri in EU after denied request for exemption"

spacebanana7 — Tue, 09 Jun 2026 16:45:22 +0000

There’s a difference from being able to protect privacy, and doing so in a way that complies with EU law

New comment by spacebanana7 in "CT scans of BYD car parts"

spacebanana7 — Wed, 03 Jun 2026 09:01:05 +0000

Cars can still show that they're poorly made pretty quickly.

New comment by spacebanana7 in "CT scans of BYD car parts"

spacebanana7 — Wed, 03 Jun 2026 08:33:46 +0000

Additionally, vertically integrated companies don't get to tag along on innovations produced by upstream suppliers. Many EV companies will effortlessly have their range increase by a couple % each year, with battery costs falling, just because they can adopt the improvements of CATL/Panasonic/BYD etc.

New comment by spacebanana7 in "Can the stockmarket swallow Anthropic, SpaceX and OpenAI?"

spacebanana7 — Tue, 02 Jun 2026 10:09:23 +0000

I used Gemini to fix my new boiler by taking various photos and asking it for help. It saved me a plumber call-out (this was a user error issue, nothing safety critical).

Gemini also told me about some obscure procedures to fix my wedding paperwork after it’d been submitted with typos.

New comment by spacebanana7 in "Danish Pension Blacklists SpaceX over 'Catastrophic Governance'"

spacebanana7 — Sat, 30 May 2026 09:02:03 +0000

Google too, and this was in the long term best interests of shareholders.

Imagine in 2010 if investors had real transparency into how much money YouTube or Maps was losing, along with the governance structures to enforce their concerns.

New comment by spacebanana7 in "Danish Pension Blacklists SpaceX over 'Catastrophic Governance'"

spacebanana7 — Sat, 30 May 2026 09:00:08 +0000

Why not Anthropic? They’re a very rare company capable of charging $200 per month per seat level fee across the corporate workforce.

Yes their compute costs are astronomical, but that can be managed down over time by more efficiency or mild enshittification that doesn’t create too much churn.

New comment by spacebanana7 in "Waymo pauses Atlanta service as its robotaxis keep driving into floods"

spacebanana7 — Fri, 22 May 2026 12:20:41 +0000

Google is capable of burning truly huge amounts of money on projects that look exciting and have long term prospects (e.g Youtube). They could lose $10-20 billion a year on Waymo for a decade if needed.

You can't just cancel Sergey's favourite pet project, regardless of economics.

New comment by spacebanana7 in "Anthropic is expanding to Colossus2. Will use GB200"

spacebanana7 — Thu, 21 May 2026 09:56:36 +0000

You won’t see “resell electricity” on the IPO brochures. They’ll say something like multi billion dollar ARR hyperscaler business.

To the extent both are true, it’s non trivial to have large grid connections in the US these days or even gas pipeline connections hooked up to generators around a datacenter. Those assets are valuable.

New comment by spacebanana7 in "Anthropic is expanding to Colossus2. Will use GB200"

spacebanana7 — Thu, 21 May 2026 09:05:46 +0000

SpaceX's data centre business is much more valuable than Grok, so this wouldn't make sense.

New comment by spacebanana7 in "The last six months in LLMs in five minutes"

spacebanana7 — Tue, 19 May 2026 09:04:02 +0000

There's an interesting economic contest here as well - is it more sustainable for a malware group to spend $500 in tokens looking for an issue in my app? or for me to spend $500 scanning for issues on every deployment?

Systemically this usually favours the offence, as they could scan my app once every 6 months whereas I'd need to do it on weekly releases.

New comment by spacebanana7 in "Tesla Wall Connector bootloader bypasses the firmware downgrade ratchet"

spacebanana7 — Fri, 15 May 2026 17:50:21 +0000

I may be misunderstanding your concern but the idea would be for Tesla to dump the energy into car batteries or powerwall storage.

New comment by spacebanana7 in "Tesla Wall Connector bootloader bypasses the firmware downgrade ratchet"

spacebanana7 — Fri, 15 May 2026 17:35:23 +0000

Would the voltage drop before the fuse blew in local transforms?

Modern grids have batteries to manage instantaneous spikes of demand so there’d be a race.

New comment by spacebanana7 in "Tesla Wall Connector bootloader bypasses the firmware downgrade ratchet"

spacebanana7 — Fri, 15 May 2026 12:02:50 +0000

In the event of an internet outage, wall box chargers are legally required to default on. In practice most chargers interpret this as taking the full 7kw - whether this is a bug or misreading of the intent of the law doesn't really matter from the perspective of the grid.

Large ISP outages that affect millions of people are not uncommon on a decade by decade basis, and I suspect an uncomfortable number of UK EV chargers are in some way linked to eu-west-2.

[1] https://www.legislation.gov.uk/uksi/2021/1467/regulation/7/m...

New comment by spacebanana7 in "UK sovereign LLM inference"

spacebanana7 — Fri, 15 May 2026 10:16:13 +0000

Is your business plan essentially to run mid tier models on hardware in the UK?

I do see the value in this as some enterprises need local data residency, the UK energy grid realistically can't handle new multi GW xAI-style data centres, and many applications don't need frontier models (but do need more than small local ones).

New comment by spacebanana7 in "Tesla Wall Connector bootloader bypasses the firmware downgrade ratchet"

spacebanana7 — Fri, 15 May 2026 10:09:12 +0000

One thing I'm really scared of is EV charger software being modified by users, hackers or bugs to pull max power at times that don't suit the grid.

In the UK, for example 10 million EVs all pulling 7kw would overwhelm the roughly 70GW potential of the grid. Even a million EVs charging at an inconvenient time could add a 7GW draw which is enough cause a problem.

New comment by spacebanana7 in "Grand Theft Oil Futures: Insider traders keep making a killing at our expense"

spacebanana7 — Thu, 07 May 2026 13:52:28 +0000

To be fair, you could also be a real world user of a commodity and productively use futures markets. For example, an airline or trucking company using them to hedge fuel prices.

New comment by spacebanana7 in "DeepSeek V4—almost on the frontier"

spacebanana7 — Sat, 02 May 2026 12:59:26 +0000

I also hope that we’ll find effective ways to distribute load between small local models and heavyweight remote models. Sort of like what Apple tried to do in iOS.

So much of what I ask codex to do doesn’t require full GPT 5 intelligence, and if 75% of the tokens were generated locally that’d save a massive amount of cost.

New comment by spacebanana7 in "Belgium stops decommissioning nuclear power plants"

spacebanana7 — Thu, 30 Apr 2026 15:50:50 +0000

It doesn't necessarily take a full blockage of sunlight. Extreme weather conditions that create multi week collapse in solar outputs is enough to create grid stress, if one is totally dependent on solar and 24hr batteries.

New comment by spacebanana7 in "Belgium stops decommissioning nuclear power plants"

spacebanana7 — Thu, 30 Apr 2026 15:47:48 +0000

Gas is an excellent compliment for renewables. It scales up and down quickly, and can cover all the weak spots around intermittency and dunkelflautes. The carbon emissions are relatively low too, because in renewables/battery heavy grid the actual quantity of gas needed is relatively small.

The problem arises in importing gas from unstable places.

New comment by spacebanana7 in "UAE to leave OPEC in blow to oil cartel"

spacebanana7 — Tue, 28 Apr 2026 14:48:09 +0000

Oil will only be in demand as a chemical feedstock as long as it's economically competitive with the alternatives. There's a substitute for virtually every petrochemical process if oil becomes scare (or expensive) enough.

Substitution is highly impractical in the short term but in a conversations of decades/centuries it's significant. Venezuela's reserves alone could run the world's petrochemicals for 60 years (Gemini) so it's a realistic perspective. Together with other proven reserves we could be okay for centuries.

Recycling is sometimes an option too.