Hacker News: tenthirtyam

New comment by tenthirtyam in "I won a championship that doesn't exist"

tenthirtyam — Wed, 29 Apr 2026 13:58:37 +0000

Similar story from just a month or two ago: BBC tech reporter wins non existent competition "The Best Tech Journalists at Eating Hot Dogs."

https://www.scientificamerican.com/podcast/episode/this-bbc-...

New comment by tenthirtyam in "The Theory of Interstellar Trade [pdf] (1978)"

tenthirtyam — Mon, 20 Apr 2026 20:15:12 +0000

I'm not aware of the composition of lunar regolith - but if it can be turned into many solar panels and batteries and a few large railguns then wouldn't it effectively be very economical to get any amount of regolith to earth orbit?

New comment by tenthirtyam in "Haunt, the 70s text adventure game, is now playable on a website"

tenthirtyam — Mon, 13 Apr 2026 11:35:38 +0000

Fund, but had my CPU maxing out (on firefox).

New comment by tenthirtyam in "F-15E jet shot down over Iran"

tenthirtyam — Fri, 03 Apr 2026 15:31:16 +0000

They're going back to the stone age, remember? The Geneva convention wasn't around then AFAICR.

New comment by tenthirtyam in "Solar and batteries can power the world"

tenthirtyam — Fri, 03 Apr 2026 15:25:44 +0000

IIRC nuclear doesn't really work well as the last 5-10%. Start-up and shut-down for nuclear reactors is a slow process. When it's generating, it needs to just keep on generating. Not so quick to dial down or up just because the wind is(n't) blowing.

New comment by tenthirtyam in "Solar and batteries can power the world"

tenthirtyam — Fri, 03 Apr 2026 15:23:03 +0000

This is even more true with international grid connections. Europe in a cold spell? Solar countries import, wind & hydro export. Europe in a heat wave? Flip the switches the opposite direction.

New comment by tenthirtyam in "4D Doom"

tenthirtyam — Wed, 01 Apr 2026 15:07:48 +0000

I've commented elsewhere about an 4D maze (https://urticator.net/maze/ - I am not the author) which mimics this by creating two 3D retinas in red/blue stereoscopic mode - when you cross your eyes just right you see a single volumetric 3D retina.

New comment by tenthirtyam in "4D Doom"

tenthirtyam — Wed, 01 Apr 2026 12:24:45 +0000

I can't play this online (no webgpu) but from the description and comments here it sounds like the 4D Maze from 2002!

https://urticator.net/maze/

The advantage of this one is that it offers a stereoscopic (red/blue) view of the 3D retina. Not sure if this one does too.

New comment by tenthirtyam in "Alzheimer's disease mortality among taxi and ambulance drivers (2024)"

tenthirtyam — Sun, 29 Mar 2026 10:56:23 +0000

Pure speculation here. Driving is a sedentary occupation which might increase the percentage of deaths attributable to a sedentary lifestyle, with consequent decrease for Alzheimers?

New comment by tenthirtyam in "Running Tesla Model 3's computer on my desk using parts from crashed cars"

tenthirtyam — Thu, 26 Mar 2026 11:06:37 +0000

In most cases I agree with this, but maybe not for potentially dangerous things like cars? What if someone roots into their car and disables some essential safety feature - maybe even a legally mandated safety feature?

More concretely, the expertise-required-to-access-root is in a different field to the expertise-required-to-make-wise-changes. i.e. you might know how to hack a car, but that doesn't mean you know how cars operate.

New comment by tenthirtyam in "Motorola announces a partnership with GrapheneOS"

tenthirtyam — Mon, 02 Mar 2026 18:01:36 +0000

Umm, assuming you have the same opinion as grandparent comment, you don't want google tracking your payments but you'll happily trust google's pinky promise about your fingerprint being stored only on the phone?

New comment by tenthirtyam in "The Hunt for Dark Breakfast"

tenthirtyam — Fri, 27 Feb 2026 10:54:30 +0000

I'd add oil as another dimension - sunflower oil, olive oil, butter, lard, whatever.

New comment by tenthirtyam in "Anthropic drops flagship safety pledge"

tenthirtyam — Thu, 26 Feb 2026 15:25:29 +0000

I always enjoyed the Terminator movie series, but I always struggled to suspend my disbelief that any humans would give an AI such power without having the ability to override or pull the plug at multiple levels. How wrong I was.

N.B. the time travel aspect also required suspension of disbelief, but somehow that was easier :-)

New comment by tenthirtyam in "The Age Verification Trap: Verifying age undermines everyone's data protection"

tenthirtyam — Tue, 24 Feb 2026 19:31:41 +0000

I would much prefer to see a ZK system that, by design, CANNOT reveal info neither to the website nor to the authority. e.g. in the new EU system, it is (afaik) conceivable that the ID authority could collude with social network providers, or with government or with police etc. That's not great IMO.

How about a system like Google Authenticator in which google knows nothing about which websites I'm logging into. Except, obviously, it'd have to be some kind of cryptographically signed response. e.g., website puts up a QR code (according to some standard) asking "is the user 18+", I scan with the phone, and the ID app, without accessing internet (like google authenticator) responds.

I suppose that might need a secure computing environment, so no rooted phone etc. But, of course, there's a simple workaround. Any adult can give their phone to a child. As long as that vulnerability is there, there's no such thing as a guarantee on the responses no matter what way you build it.

New comment by tenthirtyam in "Cosmologically Unique IDs"

tenthirtyam — Thu, 19 Feb 2026 15:59:43 +0000

Hmm. There might be 10^80 atoms in the universe, however there are 2^(10^80) possible combinations, more than 2^800.

New comment by tenthirtyam in "Coding agents have replaced every framework I used"

tenthirtyam — Mon, 09 Feb 2026 20:56:05 +0000

Replying to myself here. Maybe coding will eventually be simply learning how to give an AI the right prompt. e.g. instead of

  "Hey AI, create my new banking app with such-and-such functionality, appearance,  properties, APIs, network connections etc"

we will instead do:

  "Hey AI, you are a banking app on a user's cellphone. Connect to mybank.com, authenticate the user and allow the user to perform these-and-those actions in a sensible interface in accordance with the API spec. Don't let yourself be jailbroken."

Then the virus writer's job changes into jailbreaking the AI. Obviously with an AI's assistance...?

Then it would be logical to have a single AI on the phone managing all the prompts in parallel: e.g. "Hey AI, be android by doing [actions]", "Hey AI, be firefox...", "Hey AI, be snapchat...", "Hey AI, be [insert app name]...".

New comment by tenthirtyam in "Coding agents have replaced every framework I used"

tenthirtyam — Mon, 09 Feb 2026 19:53:54 +0000

> "AI" will probably lead to some kind of "digital cancer"

Gosh I've just imagined someone asking an AI agent to code a computer virus to infect software "X". The virus' code will be wonderfully complex and therefore so will the response of the AI responsible for keeping "X" uninfected and in good working order.

I was imagining code becoming awesomely complex even without the adversarial element in play.

New comment by tenthirtyam in "Review of 1984 by Isaac Asimov (1980)"

tenthirtyam — Mon, 09 Feb 2026 19:42:20 +0000

You're right, the TV was evil. I suppose I meant to say: such innocent times when we thought the TV was about as evil as it could get. More better? :-)

New comment by tenthirtyam in "Coding agents have replaced every framework I used"

tenthirtyam — Sat, 07 Feb 2026 18:05:22 +0000

My expectation is that there'll never be a single bust-up moment, no line-in-the-sand beyond which we'll be able to say "it doesn't work anymore."

Instead agent written code will get more and more complex, requiring more and more tokens (& NPU/GPU/RAM) to create/review/debug/modify, and will rapidly pass beyond any hope of a human understanding even for relatively simple projects (e.g. such as a banking app on your phone).

I wonder, however, whether the complexity will grow slower or faster than Moore's law and our collective ability to feed the AIs.

New comment by tenthirtyam in "Review of 1984 by Isaac Asimov (1980)"

tenthirtyam — Thu, 05 Feb 2026 22:54:30 +0000

One of my most fascinating reads of all time was "Brave New World Revisited" (1950s I think), a follow-up of "Brave New World" (1920s I think) by Aldous Huxley. Similarly, the point then was how the mass media and TV would eventually be used to mislead and deflect populations' attentions.

Such innocent times when we thought the TV could be evil.