Hacker News: ufocia

New comment by ufocia in "The day Steve Jobs dissed me in a keynote (2010)"

ufocia — Fri, 24 Jul 2026 12:39:01 +0000

Sad comment really. I could make a counterargument that it could've gone to an alcoholic who wasted his liver, which would be equally uncalled for.

New comment by ufocia in "The day Steve Jobs dissed me in a keynote (2010)"

ufocia — Fri, 24 Jul 2026 12:06:17 +0000

Very interesting insight. OP essentially lost at playing chicken.

New comment by ufocia in "Japan develops a method to recover up to 90% of lithium from used EV batteries"

ufocia — Tue, 14 Jul 2026 11:55:43 +0000

> Of course it should be done anyway as there will be a lot of used batteries in near future.

The necessity for recycling those batteries, without more, does not logically follow from their relative abundance in view of the purely economic perspective you posit. Why not just bury them?

It may be the scarcity of lithium that may drive us to take otherwise expensive steps to recycle such batteries.

The conclusory "of course" sets the argument up for a failure from the outset. Though it is not the only flaw.

New comment by ufocia in "Japan develops a method to recover up to 90% of lithium from used EV batteries"

ufocia — Tue, 14 Jul 2026 11:47:19 +0000

Poison hemlock is a carrot. Socrates and I would consider it toxic.

New comment by ufocia in "Japan develops a method to recover up to 90% of lithium from used EV batteries"

ufocia — Tue, 14 Jul 2026 11:43:19 +0000

There are other toxic substance like phosphorus in "lithium" batteries. Some "lithium" battery chemistries, though reportedly not LFP, contain cobalt, a very toxic heavy metal. Besides, there isn't a clear definition of what is a heavy metal. Even iron and copper, used in LFP, are considered heavy metals by some.

BTW, lithium itself is highly toxic too.

New comment by ufocia in "Japan develops a method to recover up to 90% of lithium from used EV batteries"

ufocia — Tue, 14 Jul 2026 11:24:20 +0000

Still slop. This article appears to conflate battery recycling with lithium recovery, two distinct steps to achieve high lithium reuse.

New comment by ufocia in "Japan develops a method to recover up to 90% of lithium from used EV batteries"

ufocia — Tue, 14 Jul 2026 11:08:16 +0000

Agreed. For example, what does the color of lithium hydroxide used instead of sodium hydroxide have to do with anything? They are both white.

New comment by ufocia in "Apple's new SpeechAnalyzer API, benchmarked against Whisper and its predecessor"

ufocia — Tue, 14 Jul 2026 02:50:46 +0000

Yes, poor comparison to what's now a relatively low end model.

New comment by ufocia in "Medieval-style fortifications are back in the Sahel"

ufocia — Sun, 05 Jul 2026 15:12:09 +0000

"Newly walled towns are a sign of shrivelling state authority" was my thought when I saw the walled off Capitol.

It is sad when the government needs walls to protect itself from its own people, a sign of weakness. To add to the irony the Capitol used to be, quite literally, the "people's house."

New comment by ufocia in "Android Developer Verification: Threat masquerading as protection"

ufocia — Fri, 03 Jul 2026 15:17:00 +0000

How so? Please elaborate.

New comment by ufocia in "The 'papers, please' era of the internet will decimate your privacy"

ufocia — Fri, 26 Jun 2026 05:21:42 +0000

Children can buy their own devices. School issued devices are not under parent control. Parental controls and school controls are laughable. There is no incentive for OS vendors/retailers to provide robust solutions to this problem. PII industry is essentially pushing regulatory capture.

New comment by ufocia in "Overfitted a 900KB Transformer to Compress a 100MB CSV into 7MB"

ufocia — Fri, 26 Jun 2026 04:58:43 +0000

Sounds like presenting no patterns, apparently or otherwise, would be a pattern in itself.

New comment by ufocia in "AI misidentification results in wrongful arrest; man seeks justice"

ufocia — Wed, 10 Jun 2026 00:43:05 +0000

What does 85% accurate even mean?

New comment by ufocia in "APC–2 – A professional record cutter for producing original playback discs"

ufocia — Mon, 08 Jun 2026 15:34:38 +0000

Archival optical media is likely much better than any kind of open groove technology.

New comment by ufocia in "APC–2 – A professional record cutter for producing original playback discs"

ufocia — Mon, 08 Jun 2026 15:33:03 +0000

Vinyl is not great for archiving. It degrades and is affected by dust.

New comment by ufocia in "APC–2 – A professional record cutter for producing original playback discs"

ufocia — Mon, 08 Jun 2026 15:20:22 +0000

Also https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RIAA_equalization

New comment by ufocia in "APC–2 – A professional record cutter for producing original playback discs"

ufocia — Mon, 08 Jun 2026 15:11:43 +0000

You could just sell old vinyl with new labels and sleeves and they would be none the wiser.

New comment by ufocia in "Replies to comments on my "LLMs are eroding my career" post"

ufocia — Mon, 08 Jun 2026 11:43:57 +0000

Libraries, Google and YouTube were/are not nearly as efficient at conveying _targetted_ _actionable_ expertise as AI is.

New comment by ufocia in "Replies to comments on my "LLMs are eroding my career" post"

ufocia — Mon, 08 Jun 2026 11:38:38 +0000

"I'm finding LLMs also competent at explaining and giving advice on other domain stuff I'm totally new to, which I have cross-checked with Legal/Product Managers and is usually right."

"Usually" is the keyword. Until it becomes "always" (counterintuitive for heuristic systems) or "almost always" some human experts will (/may?) be needed to babysit.

P.S. "_are_ usually right" since they are "LLMs". Methinks running the response through an LLM could've made it more "right".

New comment by ufocia in "Unicode Fonts and Tools for X11"

ufocia — Sun, 07 Jun 2026 01:00:53 +0000

A font is not a typeface