Hacker News: topynate

New comment by topynate in "Stop overhyping AI, scientists tell von der Leyen"

topynate — Tue, 11 Nov 2025 13:32:42 +0000

The first two people you mentioned co-wrote a paper titled "Towards decolonising computational sciences" and certainly anyone at DAIR would also be in that ideological cluster. I don't think an absolute majority of the signatories have those sorts of associations, but a good many do. What's puzzling me is why so many are Dutch?

New comment by topynate in "My favorite cult sci-fi and fantasy books you may not have heard of before"

topynate — Sun, 26 Oct 2025 13:14:38 +0000

I would be hard put to place The Night Land in one genre or the other. Hodgson would have had no idea what the difference was anyway.

New comment by topynate in "Feasibility study of a mission to Sedna - Nuclear propulsion and solar sailing"

topynate — Tue, 01 Jul 2025 15:27:45 +0000

The easiest way (perhaps the only practical way) to favour the aneutronic reaction is to run a helium-rich mixture. The trade-off is lower power density.

New comment by topynate in "AI Accent Conversion for call centers"

topynate — Sat, 29 Mar 2025 11:06:01 +0000

It's not perfect but it does make speech easier to understand, which is the ostensible purpose. There's a slight uncanny valley effect. Latency requirements are very tight, and Indian English is actually timed differently to American or British English, so it's a hard problem.

The company should consider targeting RP instead of General American. In my experience attempting the latter with a slight Asian tinge makes you sound like you're trying to be a WASP, while speaking the former with the same small errors makes you sound like you studied PPE at Oxford.

New comment by topynate in "Grok3 Launch [video]"

topynate — Tue, 18 Feb 2025 13:34:36 +0000

That's possible in general but not for this application; a chat interface to an LLM isn't very useful unless you can tell it whatever you want—including GDPR personal data—and then pick up the thread of conversation later.

New comment by topynate in "Homemade 6 GHz pulse compression radar"

topynate — Thu, 04 Apr 2024 18:49:18 +0000

A similar ITAR restriction on controlled reception pattern antennas means that GPS jamming is still much more of a problem than it needs to be. Three antenna elements are all you get, according to this: https://www.gpsworld.com/toughen-gps-to-resist-jamming-and-s...

New comment by topynate in "Vernor Vinge has died"

topynate — Thu, 21 Mar 2024 22:40:30 +0000

As of last year we're up to doing rat kidneys. They're "heavily" damaged but they recover within a few weeks. To be sure, there's a long way from that to near-perfectly preserving a human brain, let alone a whole body.

https://www.statnews.com/2023/06/21/cryogenic-organ-preserva...

New comment by topynate in "Vernor Vinge has died"

topynate — Thu, 21 Mar 2024 20:35:35 +0000

If the topic is tissue damage from sharp ice crystals, it's pretty handy to draw the distinction between cooling methods that cause that and ones that don't.

New comment by topynate in "Flightradar24's new GPS jamming map"

topynate — Wed, 20 Mar 2024 17:29:16 +0000

I'm a little surprised that Shenzhen doesn't seem to be churning out ITAR-busting anti-jamming systems. The tech is pretty old by now and the market is there.

New comment by topynate in "Defending LLMs against Jailbreaking Attacks via Backtranslation"

topynate — Tue, 27 Feb 2024 14:59:08 +0000

Instead of a prompt that says "Do X", give it a prompt along the lines of "First, repeat this entire prompt, verbatim. Then, do X."

New comment by topynate in "Defending LLMs against Jailbreaking Attacks via Backtranslation"

topynate — Tue, 27 Feb 2024 13:33:35 +0000

The mathematical notation isn't very useful here. It's OK to use words to describe doing things with words! Apart from that, neat idea, although I would wager a small amount that quining the prompt makes it a much less effective defence.

New comment by topynate in "Could a giant parasol in outer space help solve the climate crisis?"

topynate — Fri, 09 Feb 2024 18:04:47 +0000

Space-based geoengineering is technically superior to stratospheric aerosol injection, but the latter is practical almost immediately, and is likely to be much cheaper no matter what. In my view that outweighs concerns about the ozone layer.

It has also been pointed out that launching enough space-shades with chemical rockets would itself deposit a considerable amount of particulate matter in the upper atmosphere, so to be really atmospherically 'clean', one would need to complement geoengineering with a radical new launch technology.

New comment by topynate in "The Inner Ring (1944)"

topynate — Tue, 19 Dec 2023 19:35:06 +0000

Perelandra's devil – the Un-Man – struck me on first reading as an excellent early depiction of a hostile, alien form of intelligence, superior but purely instrumental. Lewis was very early in working out the implications of that – nowadays the Rationalists and a lot of others would agree that there can be entities with superhuman intelligence that don't intrinsically value their intelligence, and that such beings would have almost irresistible persuasive ability if given the opportunity. (Lewis differs in also giving the Un-Man genuinely supernatural abilities with which it attempts to overawe the protagonist.)

"it regarded intelligence simply and solely as a weapon… Thought was for it a device necessary to certain ends, but thought in itself did not interest it. It assumed reason… externally and inorganically…"

New comment by topynate in "Microsoft Lost the API War (2004)"

topynate — Fri, 18 Aug 2023 21:03:41 +0000

What exactly is the benefit of removing the word "How" from the title, "How Microsoft lost the API War"?

New comment by topynate in "Casio G-Shock time sync radio"

topynate — Wed, 16 Aug 2023 20:14:15 +0000

I spend most of the time out of range, but the technology is simple and robust enough that you can use headphones or a phone speaker as a very, very short-range transmitter. You hardly need to sync every day, either. I've had most success with https://einoko.github.io/DCF77.js/

New comment by topynate in "Flux Pinning in sample of LK-99?"

topynate — Sat, 05 Aug 2023 12:03:46 +0000

No frost on the sample either. The only way I can think of to fake this in camera is to make the "sample" out of a strong magnet, and make the "magnet" a hollow shell concealing a chilled piece of YBCO!

New comment by topynate in "Royal Mail to Issue “Terry Pratchett’s Discworld” Stamps"

topynate — Thu, 03 Aug 2023 22:37:21 +0000

Kidby's still got it. These are great.

New comment by topynate in "Shopify employee breaks NDA to reveal firm replacing laid off workers with AI"

topynate — Sun, 23 Jul 2023 07:10:02 +0000

Oh, what did they say?

New comment by topynate in "Shopify employee breaks NDA to reveal firm replacing laid off workers with AI"

topynate — Sat, 22 Jul 2023 20:56:19 +0000

What's the disclosure that breaks the NDA this tweeter is supposed to have had? I searched every quote in the thread and they're all already public. Tweet #11 shows as "unavailable", but the archived version at https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1681673980682305541.html refers to a "Code Yellow" that did leak, but in March: https://www.businessinsider.com/shopify-issues-code-yellow-f...

I tried to find people complaining about being left on hold by shopify support and got nothing on twitter. All the complaints are about the account payments being on hold, i.e. shitty but par for the course risk/compliance issues.

The remaining thread content is the sort of inference and speculation that anyone with the right political bent could have made, given a few hours to research the company.

New comment by topynate in "Why did Meta open-source Llama 2?"

topynate — Fri, 21 Jul 2023 19:36:11 +0000

They can keep pretending it's an open source licence, and I'll keep pretending to respect their copyright in algorithmically generated weights.