Hacker News: unlikelymordant

New comment by unlikelymordant in "Two kinds of AI users are emerging"

unlikelymordant — Mon, 02 Feb 2026 09:05:59 +0000

In your experience, can you take the tech debt riddled code, and ask claude to come up with an entirely new version that fixes the tech debt/design issues you've identified? Presumably there's a set of tests that you'd keep the same, but you could leverage the power of ai in greenfield scenarios to just do a rewrite (while letting it see the old code). I dont know how well this would work, i havn't got to the heavy tech debt stage in any of my projects as I do mostly prototyping. I'd be interested in others thoughts.

New comment by unlikelymordant in "You’re not burnt out, you’re existentially starving"

unlikelymordant — Mon, 22 Dec 2025 02:58:36 +0000

Would you mind expanding on what you do for anticorruption? It has been something ive been thinking about and wanting to get into lately. It seems like complete poison to democracy, and more should be done to bring it to light wherever it occurs

New comment by unlikelymordant in "OpenAI's o1 Playing Codenames"

unlikelymordant — Sat, 25 Jan 2025 13:18:59 +0000

generally there is a "temperature" parameter that can be used to add some randomness or variety to the LLMs outputs by changing the likelihood of the next word being selected. This means you could just keep regenerating the same response and get different answers each time. each time it will give different plausible responses, and this is all from the same model. This doesn't mean it believes any of them, it just keeps hallucinating likely text, some of which will fit better than others. It is still very much the same brain (or set of trained parameters) playing with itself.

New comment by unlikelymordant in "A three month review of kagi search and the orion web browser (2024)"

unlikelymordant — Fri, 10 Jan 2025 12:39:39 +0000

I have been using search for engines for 30 years, my queries are not vague, i put as many keywords and "inurl"s and whatnot in as i can manage. I dont use kagi blocklists. Google results for my specific queries are garbage. I am much happier with kagi. If you are happy with google, thats fine too. Perhaps we are just in different bubbles and mine are not well served by google.

New comment by unlikelymordant in "A three month review of kagi search and the orion web browser (2024)"

unlikelymordant — Fri, 10 Jan 2025 09:27:59 +0000

I haven't found quoting helps much. I also feel like i shouldnt have to craft search queries with a lot of inurl or other tags or quoting. Kagi just seems to work better. Its worth 10$ a month to me to not have to worry about it, I use search engines a lot.

New comment by unlikelymordant in "A three month review of kagi search and the orion web browser (2024)"

unlikelymordant — Fri, 10 Jan 2025 05:00:11 +0000

I have used kagi for quite a while now, and i use it pretty much exclusively. I was unhappy with google ignoring many terms in my search queries and giving me results that I generally considered to be 'intro' pages and generic content, even when my searches were very specific. I have found kagi much better. I dont use any of the advanced stuff like summarisation or ai stuff, i just want search results that have my keywords in them.

New comment by unlikelymordant in "We fine-tuned Llama 405B on AMD GPUs"

unlikelymordant — Tue, 24 Sep 2024 06:17:55 +0000

are you at all confident that this isn't hallucinated? I'd never trust an answer like this from an LLM

New comment by unlikelymordant in "Was early modern writing paper expensive? (2018)"

unlikelymordant — Sat, 27 Jul 2024 23:36:17 +0000

You need to break down the lignin without damaging the cellulose. Boiling and mashing doesnt do this very well, you still get bundles of fibres sticking together, you really need them all to separate. The bonds holding lignins together are slightly different between grasses and wood. For grasses sodium carbonate or hydroxide dissolves the lignin pretty well (i havnt tried but you could probably get away with wood ash and some salt for this, to provide sodium and high ph), and allows you to make some pretty nice paper. This as far as i know includes things like papyrus, sugarcane etc. Wood is different, you need sodium hydroxide and sodium sulfate to dissolve the lignin. This contributes to the smell of the paper making process where wood is used. I dont think the ancients knew about the use of sulfates, so their papers were mostly made of grasses or leather (vellum).

New comment by unlikelymordant in "Mangrove trees are on the move, taking the tropics with them"

unlikelymordant — Sun, 21 Jul 2024 11:40:56 +0000

Of course there has been 'climate change' and 'global warming' before, caused by things like large volcanic eruptions (deccan traps) or meteorites. But they have pretty universally coincided with mass extinctions. And when we say glabal warming is anthropogenic, we mean this time humans are causing the warming by emitting a lot of co2 (and methane and no2 etc). It is fairly unequivocal at this point. This time its entirely within our power to prevent another mass extinction, because this this time we are causing it. Why wouldnt we try?

New comment by unlikelymordant in "House prices are surging once again"

unlikelymordant — Tue, 18 Jun 2024 23:21:21 +0000

Australian houses aren't bought with american dollars though. If this were the case wouldnt we see a big correlation between house prices and USD exchange rates? Why wouldn't the correlation be with other currencies such as china. Honest questions, it seems to me like massive immigration/low supply seems to e plain things pretty well.

New comment by unlikelymordant in "Making my own mattress"

unlikelymordant — Thu, 18 Jan 2024 10:50:15 +0000

What is the coconut coir for? How did you stick everything together? Does it all go in a bag of some sort? How does price compare to retail mattresses? Hoe comfortable is it?

New comment by unlikelymordant in "Ask HN: Is it impossible to use Kagi as default search engine on iOS?"

unlikelymordant — Wed, 10 Jan 2024 09:37:12 +0000

I haven't tried on ios, but brave browser has an inbuilt ad blocker. Might be worth a try. I am quite happy with brave and kagi on android.

New comment by unlikelymordant in "NRF retracts its assertion that organized retail crime led to 50% of losses"

unlikelymordant — Thu, 21 Dec 2023 01:01:03 +0000

Disorganised theft, damage, mislaid, lost

New comment by unlikelymordant in "Weak-to-Strong Generalization"

unlikelymordant — Fri, 15 Dec 2023 00:41:20 +0000

If a 'superintelligence' achieves the same outcomes as humans without engaging in the same class of intellectual tasks that humans do, wouldnt it still be a superitelligence? Deep blue was beating everybody at chess without engaging in the same process as humans. If chess is a metaphor for life, it seems some algorithm might do better at all the things a human does while not arriving at its decisions in a remotely similar way.

New comment by unlikelymordant in "You Won't Survive as Human Capital"

unlikelymordant — Fri, 24 Nov 2023 22:44:38 +0000

The title "you wont survive as human capital" sounds interesting, but beyond the first paragraph, i cant quite connect the content to the title, it seems to mostly talk about the size of political groups. I feel like it needs a conclusion paragraph that ties the points made in the article back to the central point.

New comment by unlikelymordant in "Adding crushed rock to farmland pulls carbon out of the air"

unlikelymordant — Wed, 25 Oct 2023 23:26:08 +0000

Humans are currently on track for around 4 degrees of warming by 2100 assuming we hit all our current emission reduction targets (i.e. reaching net zero when governments have said they would). So removals are quite necessary.

New comment by unlikelymordant in "Adding crushed rock to farmland pulls carbon out of the air"

unlikelymordant — Wed, 25 Oct 2023 23:22:06 +0000

This whole 'undesireable side reactions' thing is completely overblown for basalts. The effects to soil of volcanic ash from eruptions is quite well studied, not to mention crushed basalt is a recognised fertiliser in organic and biodynamic farming, and there have been places spreading it each year for the last 40 years (purely as a fertliser). You cant use rocks with significant sulphides or other heavy metals though, that has to be tested before spreading. Basalt is quite wide spread.

New comment by unlikelymordant in "We’ll call it AI to sell it, machine learning to build it"

unlikelymordant — Wed, 11 Oct 2023 23:00:59 +0000

The fourier transform converts between time domain and frequency domain. The fourier transform is linear, which means it can be implemented as multiplying your time domain signal by a matrix of complex fourier coefficients. Usually we dont do it this way because the fft is faster than matrix multplication, but the result is the same.

New comment by unlikelymordant in "We’ll call it AI to sell it, machine learning to build it"

unlikelymordant — Wed, 11 Oct 2023 15:33:11 +0000

The fourier domain is just a linear transform of the time domain, i.e. just a matrix multiply away!

New comment by unlikelymordant in "September was the most anomalously hot month ever"

unlikelymordant — Thu, 05 Oct 2023 13:23:28 +0000

Youd expect much bigger increases in atmospheric methane if that were the case i think: https://gml.noaa.gov/ccgg/trends_ch4/