Hacker News: timdiggerm

New comment by timdiggerm in "Kindle to end store downloads and registering for 1st-5th gen kindles in May"

timdiggerm — Tue, 07 Apr 2026 18:27:18 +0000

Yeah but HN commenters are not a representative sample of the ebook consumer base

New comment by timdiggerm in "We found an undocumented bug in the Apollo 11 guidance computer code"

timdiggerm — Tue, 07 Apr 2026 12:45:22 +0000

It's not a shallow dismissal; it's a dismissal for good reason. It's tangential to the topic, but not to HN overall. It's only curmudgeonly if you assume AI-written posts are the inevitable and good future (aka begging the question). I really don't know how it's "sneering", so I won't address that.

New comment by timdiggerm in "We found an undocumented bug in the Apollo 11 guidance computer code"

timdiggerm — Tue, 07 Apr 2026 12:43:21 +0000

So you're saying Pangram isn't worth much?

New comment by timdiggerm in "I'm Getting a Whiff of Iain Banks' Culture"

timdiggerm — Mon, 09 Mar 2026 16:38:06 +0000

The key line "I’m getting a similar sense for the recent US foreign interventions and wars. They all seem to work slightly better than they should."

There is no measurement of efficacy here. It feels like these things are working better because the US military is now doing big public things, but that is not necessarily a good change over not-doing-big-public-things.

New comment by timdiggerm in "Gemini 3 Deep Think"

timdiggerm — Fri, 13 Feb 2026 15:10:53 +0000

Wait where does the idea of consciousness enter this? AGI doesn't need to be conscious.

New comment by timdiggerm in "Is beef tallow making a comeback?"

timdiggerm — Tue, 13 Jan 2026 14:49:04 +0000

It's not a liquid, but it's pretty soft.

New comment by timdiggerm in "Mechanical power generation using Earth's ambient radiation"

timdiggerm — Mon, 08 Dec 2025 13:56:56 +0000

But can he speak Italian lawn games?

New comment by timdiggerm in "The writing is on the wall for handwriting recognition"

timdiggerm — Wed, 03 Dec 2025 15:19:02 +0000

For that to be relevant to this post, they would need to write with secretary hand.

New comment by timdiggerm in "A Spectral-Geometric Proof of the Riemann Hypothesis"

timdiggerm — Fri, 14 Nov 2025 13:46:59 +0000

I look forward, should this prove correct, to the explainers from Quanta, Numberphile, etc.

New comment by timdiggerm in "Laptops with Stickers"

timdiggerm — Wed, 12 Nov 2025 13:22:53 +0000

The edginess was, at the core of it, what made them fun in the first place

New comment by timdiggerm in "Laptops with Stickers"

timdiggerm — Wed, 12 Nov 2025 13:22:05 +0000

You're right, you just can't make memories without injecting ink into your skin.

New comment by timdiggerm in "Laptops with Stickers"

timdiggerm — Wed, 12 Nov 2025 13:20:45 +0000

Right, which tells us that what was fun about it was feeling cool for doing something unusual.

New comment by timdiggerm in "The next chapter of the Microsoft–OpenAI partnership"

timdiggerm — Tue, 28 Oct 2025 17:55:21 +0000

> Progress in AI is happening faster than ever before

Is it happening faster than it was six months ago? a year ago?

New comment by timdiggerm in "Sora 2"

timdiggerm — Wed, 01 Oct 2025 13:19:12 +0000

Yeah, and definitely not AITok

New comment by timdiggerm in "Sora 2"

timdiggerm — Wed, 01 Oct 2025 11:17:33 +0000

That's interesting, but how many people are actually going to just scroll and watch these (thereby generating ad revenue)?

New comment by timdiggerm in "Clankers Die on Christmas"

timdiggerm — Tue, 09 Sep 2025 13:42:11 +0000

https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/cultures/trad

New comment by timdiggerm in "Poisoning Well"

timdiggerm — Fri, 05 Sep 2025 18:15:05 +0000

If it's ad-supported or I'm seeking donations, I only want people reading it on my website. Why would I want people to access it through an LLM?

New comment by timdiggerm in "Melvyn Bragg steps down from presenting In Our Time"

timdiggerm — Thu, 04 Sep 2025 12:18:21 +0000

His notes, of course, were assembled by his producers, based on the notes & writing of those academics (and others, I'm sure, thus the weekly reading list). He sometimes made reference to this, saying things like "Well you said it in your notes; what did you mean?"

New comment by timdiggerm in "Doctors could hack the nervous system with ultrasound"

timdiggerm — Tue, 10 Jun 2025 12:16:19 +0000

A nontrivial plot point in Kim Stanley Robinson's "Green Mars" (1993)

New comment by timdiggerm in "The Chicxulub Asteroid Impact and Mass Extinction"

timdiggerm — Tue, 10 Jun 2025 12:15:07 +0000

There are still paleontologists [who?](I do not know; I'm sorry) who would like to substantially credit the Deccan Traps; this appears to be adding stronger analysis to the evidence that it really was the meteor impact.