Hacker News: svnt

New comment by svnt in "Bitcoin miners are losing on every coin produced as difficulty drops"

svnt — Sat, 11 Apr 2026 16:15:02 +0000

You’re fractionally right with GPUs but RAM and SSDs run on different processes at different fabs.

New comment by svnt in "Has Mythos just broken the deal that kept the internet safe?"

svnt — Sat, 11 Apr 2026 00:20:33 +0000

Ding ding ding, and this is why you are hearing about it. It is marketing for enterprise to pay a premium for the next model, with maybe a wakeup call to enforcement agencies as well (which is also marketing).

Codegen for many companies is much less continuous. Security is always on, and always a motivator.

New comment by svnt in "Filing the corners off my MacBooks"

svnt — Sat, 11 Apr 2026 00:11:15 +0000

The past few generations I found I was not pleased with their performance, so now I take them weekly to the macbook sharpener at the saturday market.

New comment by svnt in "Moving fast in hardware: lessons from lab to $100M ARR"

svnt — Wed, 08 Apr 2026 03:32:24 +0000

At what point does active suspension become robotics? Because there are a lot of automakers who should be repositioning to get their multiples up.

New comment by svnt in "Moving fast in hardware: lessons from lab to $100M ARR"

svnt — Wed, 08 Apr 2026 03:29:53 +0000

And it is extremely likely Nio made that deal to see whether they could embrace, extend, extinguish them.

New comment by svnt in "Issue: Claude Code is unusable for complex engineering tasks with Feb updates"

svnt — Tue, 07 Apr 2026 14:47:23 +0000

Right but wasn’t high effort the default effort before? So ultrathink is gone in all but name.

New comment by svnt in "Issue: Claude Code is unusable for complex engineering tasks with Feb updates"

svnt — Tue, 07 Apr 2026 14:42:56 +0000

They don’t want to officially disclose the reality because while some users will understand the realities of protecting a product while innovating, many will just realize it means one can go looking for claude 4.5 performance elsewhere.

New comment by svnt in "Issue: Claude Code is unusable for complex engineering tasks with Feb updates"

svnt — Tue, 07 Apr 2026 03:42:17 +0000

I’m going in circles. Let me take a step back and try something completely different. The answer is a clean refactor.

Wait, the simplest fix is the same hack I tried 45 minutes ago but in a different context. Let me just try that.

Wait,

New comment by svnt in "Author of "Careless People" banned from saying anything negative about Meta"

svnt — Sun, 05 Apr 2026 13:34:34 +0000

If this were true and you were their manager you would not have to deal with it. You could coach or remove them.

New comment by svnt in "Author of "Careless People" banned from saying anything negative about Meta"

svnt — Sat, 04 Apr 2026 21:22:58 +0000

The job of execs/middle managers seems to often be dual parenting: 1) coordinate the capable well-parented employees below them, and 2) pander to the usefully myopic spoiled brats above.

New comment by svnt in "The Failure of the Thermodynamics of Computation (2010)"

svnt — Wed, 01 Apr 2026 22:51:48 +0000

Yes exactly, your conception of write includes their conception of erase.

Bennett’s reversible computing is essentially just the way to avoid erasure: whenever you write, keep all the previous states around.

New comment by svnt in "Marc Andreessen's dangerously unexamined life"

svnt — Wed, 01 Apr 2026 16:26:56 +0000

I view people like him like large satellites or small planets that have been crashing through everything mindlessly and creating this wake of wreckage. The only way to keep going is to not look back, or in this framing, not look in.

In single-minded pursuit of a simple goal and with early success they reduce their own humanity so that their repeated actions can maintain their simple function.

Looking anywhere behind/within has become so overwhelming and so painful they will construct elaborate narrative and even engage in medical assistance (eg ketamine) to avoid the consequences of integration.

New comment by svnt in "Ordinary Lab Gloves May Have Skewed Microplastic Data"

svnt — Wed, 01 Apr 2026 12:05:34 +0000

This is an overstatement of the protection that blanks provide. As it says, they only (potentially) provide insight into contamination caused during the extraction process.

New comment by svnt in "Claude Code's source code has been leaked via a map file in their NPM registry"

svnt — Tue, 31 Mar 2026 14:54:35 +0000

Yeah it’s called a regex. With a lot of human assistance it can do less but fits in smaller spaces and doesn’t break down.

New comment by svnt in "Claude Code runs Git reset –hard origin/main against project repo every 10 mins"

svnt — Mon, 30 Mar 2026 09:12:45 +0000

Is this true for anything beyond the simplest LLM architectures? It seems like as soon as you introduce something like CoT this is no longer the case, at least in terms of mechanism, if not outcome.

New comment by svnt in "The sudden fall of Sora"

svnt — Mon, 30 Mar 2026 04:05:09 +0000

Those products aren’t typically described as having been “hyped” though — just successful or viral. Hyped has a sort of derogatory/schadenfreude subtext.

New comment by svnt in "The Failure of the Thermodynamics of Computation (2010)"

svnt — Sun, 29 Mar 2026 23:38:40 +0000

Erasure is logically irreversible, writing a bit is not. When you erase a bit you compress the logical phase space of the closed system, which means the missing information has to go somewhere — in this case a couple of very low energy phonons into the larger environment.

New comment by svnt in "The Failure of the Thermodynamics of Computation (2010)"

svnt — Sun, 29 Mar 2026 21:10:42 +0000

That was the limit of just one experimental approach that was peer reviewed and published in a major journal. As you can see there are many experiments validating the limit and none invalidating it.

The reality is that the Landauer limit is vanishingly small. I would encourage you to review the experiment methodology and see if you can come up with better, fundable methods.

New comment by svnt in "The Failure of the Thermodynamics of Computation (2010)"

svnt — Sun, 29 Mar 2026 18:59:08 +0000

This was published right before people started experimentally validating the Landauer limit. I am not sure why it hasn’t been taken down at some point as the evidence has accumulated:

2012 — Bérut et al. (Nature) — They used a single colloidal silica bead (2 μm) trapped in a double-well potential created by a focused laser. By modulating the potential to erase the bit, they showed that mean dissipated heat saturates at the Landauer bound (k_B T ln 2) in the limit of long erasure cycles.

https://www.physics.rutgers.edu/~morozov/677_f2017/Physics_6...

2014 — Jun et al. (PRL) — A higher-precision follow-up using 200 nm fluorescent particles in an electrokinetic feedback trap. Same basic physics, tighter error bars.

https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC4795654/

2016 — Hong et al. (Science Advances) — First test on actual digital memory hardware. Used arrays of sub-100 nm single-domain Permalloy nanomagnets and measured energy dissipation during adiabatic bit erasure using magneto-optic Kerr effect magnetometry. The measured dissipation was consistent with the Landauer limit within 2 standard deviations using the actual the basis of magnetic storage.

https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/sciadv.1501492

2018 — Guadenzi et al. (Nature Physics) — Opens with:

The erasure of a bit of information is an irreversible operation whose minimal entropy production of kB ln 2 is set by the Landauer limit1. This limit has been verified in a variety of classical systems, including particles in traps2,3 and nanomagnets4. Here, we extend it to the quantum realm by using a crystal of molecular nanomagnets as a quantum spin memory and showing that its erasure is still governed by the Landauer principle.

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41567-018-0070-7

The Landauer limit is not conjecture.

New comment by svnt in "Anthropic Subprocessor Changes"

svnt — Thu, 26 Mar 2026 23:46:35 +0000

For people who want to ask a model for an app, or a website, or something at a level of “hey you make apps right, I have had this idea for years…” the experience is akin to a slot machine — sometimes they get what they imagined their description would create and it works, and sometimes they get a hollow chocolate approximation.