Hacker News: stymaar

New comment by stymaar in "Citroen revives the 2CV for an electric age"

stymaar — Mon, 12 Oct 2026 18:29:34 +0000

I wouldn't take the 2CV as an example of suspension that modern cars don't match, but Citroën's later hydropneumatic suspension[1] are indeed unmatched.

[1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HKyWKKs4ISo

New comment by stymaar in "Hackers activate automatic defrosting in supermarket fridges across Europe"

stymaar — Mon, 12 Oct 2026 17:57:26 +0000

If what's needed is the ability to monitor them, then why are these things remote-controllable?!

Obviously read-only access to some sensor is not the same attack surface as having the ability to remotely shut-down the refrigeration.

New comment by stymaar in "Illustration Beyond Proof"

stymaar — Mon, 12 Oct 2026 09:54:15 +0000

> I think in Mathematics will be like chess.

What do you mean?

Do you think more people than ever will start doing math, with millions of people solving daily math puzzles on their phone on math.com[1] while commuting ?

I don't think Mathematics will be like Chess.

[1]: (or its open-source variant limath.org)

New comment by stymaar in "Illustration Beyond Proof"

stymaar — Mon, 12 Oct 2026 09:50:55 +0000

The goal of mathematics is to solve problems the same way the goal of a marathon is to do a 42km travel.

Why are people running in the first place when they could just take their car?!

New comment by stymaar in "Scandinavia's first farmers slaughtered hunter-gatherer population, DNA suggests"

stymaar — Sun, 11 Oct 2026 13:58:11 +0000

It's exactly as rational as people hoarding toilet paper at the beginning of Covid.

Just because some behavior made sense in a prehistoric society doesn't mean it does in a modern one.

New comment by stymaar in "Scandinavia's first farmers slaughtered hunter-gatherer population, DNA suggests"

stymaar — Sun, 11 Oct 2026 13:56:03 +0000

Interestingly enough, agrarian societies being invaded (and then ruled) by nomadic tribes has been a recurring phenomenon in the past two millennia (by the Arabs, the Turks, the Mongols, etc.)

New comment by stymaar in ""Robot" Is a Social Construct: Why Your Dishwasher Is Not a Robot"

stymaar — Sun, 11 Oct 2026 12:27:01 +0000

An anti-tank mine is a robot.

New comment by stymaar in ""Robot" Is a Social Construct: Why Your Dishwasher Is Not a Robot"

stymaar — Sun, 11 Oct 2026 12:25:47 +0000

Same for “drones”: a cruise missile is as much of a drone as a Shahed 136, and remote-controlled boats or planes are also technically drones.

New comment by stymaar in "Nitter: Update Oct 10th seeking funding and legal help"

stymaar — Sun, 11 Oct 2026 11:51:53 +0000

I just did.

New comment by stymaar in "Typesafe AI raises $870M at $7.5B"

stymaar — Sat, 10 Oct 2026 16:00:32 +0000

Multi-hundred million raised at a multi-billion valuation for a series A is literally insane.

How are the investors hoping to get their money back? With a $20B acqui-hire from X.ai later this year or what's the plan?

New comment by stymaar in "Cloudflare acquires Deno"

stymaar — Fri, 09 Oct 2026 16:41:11 +0000

> there wasn't a ton of explanation given beyond the general vibe of "ai bad"

I'm very bullish on AI, but vibe-porting the piece of software you're the main maintainer over a few weeks without letting anyone in the community know and pushing that as a fait accompli to both your userbase and your open source community is definitely the kind of behavior that makes you not trustworthy enough to depend on.

New comment by stymaar in "Whistle: Speech to Text in 16.9 MB"

stymaar — Thu, 08 Oct 2026 18:48:27 +0000

There are still people speaking a whisking language in the south-west of France[1], not many but it's being taught in school there to preserve it[2]

[1]: https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Langage_siffl%C3%A9_d%27Aas

[2]: https://www.dailymotion.com/video/x4lxhsi

New comment by stymaar in "OpenAI annualised revenues $20B less than previously signalled"

stymaar — Thu, 08 Oct 2026 18:41:33 +0000

They have found a path to “profitability” iif you define “profitable” in a way that makes every early stage start-up that has at least one paying customer as “profitable”. Literally any start-up has a COGS lower than their income, but that doesn't mean anything at actual profitability given that the rest of their expenses dwarfs it.

New comment by stymaar in "The Mathocalypse"

stymaar — Thu, 08 Oct 2026 16:33:22 +0000

That's what Buckmaster and Alpöge said about the Navier–Stokes equations paper: they had the meat of their own paper ready by the beginning of August thanka to LLM assistance, but it was so messy they spent the whole month turning that into a paper worth publishing. Then OpenAI heard about their work, spent a few millions of dollar of compute to beat them (likely exploiting their own work with ChatGPT in the process) and released something.

When all you value is being the first, you have not time producing useful papers.

New comment by stymaar in "Sharing AI progress in mathematics"

stymaar — Thu, 08 Oct 2026 06:21:27 +0000

And we should trust OpenAI's “clarification” because they have a long history of reliability and no prior shaddy behavior, right?

New comment by stymaar in "LLMs and Data Poisoning Are Weaponized to Manufacture Consensus"

stymaar — Wed, 07 Oct 2026 16:23:10 +0000

Pick the two counterfactuals:

- would have USSR marched on Berlin without the US landing in Italy and Normandy ?

- would have the US landings be successful if the Nazi army from 1940 had remained in Western Europe because it was at peace with the USSR ?

The answer for #1 is an obvious yes, and for #2 it's unlikely to be one.

WWII in Europe was won (or rather lost, by the Nazi who betrayed their totalitarian ally) on the Eastern front, and it's not a controversial take.

> Further, war is fundamentally economic, so trying to argue that some less efficient means of conducting it is somehow superior is mind-boggling.

This is nonsense. The US lost a war against Afghanistan, not because the Talibans were more efficient (they weren't, they lost orders of magnitude more soldiers than the US). Thinking about war as an economic thing is exactly how the US keeps losing all its wars since the Korean War.

New comment by stymaar in "Sharing AI progress in mathematics"

stymaar — Wed, 07 Oct 2026 10:10:24 +0000

> Yes, I actually work in the medical industry. There is no hiding the cure for cancer.

There's no need to hide anything, it's just pay-walled (and it's not an hypothesis, most human beings on this planets cannot afford the SotA treatments for their cancer today).

New comment by stymaar in "Mistral Large 4"

stymaar — Tue, 06 Oct 2026 19:02:56 +0000

> hands are actually where they should be.

If you don't mind the fact that a pelican shouldn't have hands, of course.

New comment by stymaar in "Run Qwen 3.8 Flash Next (125B) on consumer hardware (RTX 4090) at 100T/s"

stymaar — Tue, 06 Oct 2026 05:19:59 +0000

I dont understand people running agentic harnesses outside of sandnoxes,…

New comment by stymaar in "Run Qwen 3.8 Flash Next (125B) on consumer hardware (RTX 4090) at 100T/s"

stymaar — Mon, 05 Oct 2026 05:14:35 +0000

I feel like Anthropic is going back and forth on this, as Opus 5 was the laziest since 4.6 by far, often giving up after ten or fifteen minutes and being like “of course there's still this, and this and this to do, but it's long and you should take time to think about the schedule for these tasks”. It gave up way earlier than Qwen3.8-27B for instance.

Opus 5.5 just fell like a return to the mean afterwards (it's probably an improvement over the previous versions, but I couldn't really feel it because I've been burned by Opus 5).