Hacker News: unmole

New comment by unmole in "A Eureka machine that thinks like nature and explores what AI cannot"

unmole — Thu, 28 May 2026 15:10:00 +0000

You're describing The Hardware Lottery: https://arxiv.org/abs/2009.06489

New comment by unmole in "I think Anthropic and OpenAI have found product-market fit"

unmole — Thu, 28 May 2026 11:06:18 +0000

I still don't understand why that means they need to make 5-10 trillion over the next 5 years.

New comment by unmole in "I think Anthropic and OpenAI have found product-market fit"

unmole — Thu, 28 May 2026 02:14:41 +0000

> They've got, ballpark, $5t to $10t

What are you basing this on? For reference, Anthropic raised ~$70 billion in total and OpenAI ~$190 billion. Why do they need to make 20-40x that?

New comment by unmole in "Childhood Computing"

unmole — Tue, 26 May 2026 00:48:27 +0000

> The computers were very old IBM PC compatible machines, mostly with monochrome cathode-ray tube (CRT) monitors. They had no hard disks at all. They had a few hundred kilobytes of RAM. Every time, we performed the same ritual. Insert a 5¼-inch floppy disk to load MS-DOS into memory. Then insert another disk to load LOGO.COM. Then write small Logo programs and watch the turtle move.

I'm a few years younger than OP and grew up in a large Indian city, but this matches my earliest experience exactly, right down to having to take our shoes off before entering the computer lab.

New comment by unmole in "Memory has grown to nearly two-thirds of AI chip component costs"

unmole — Mon, 25 May 2026 04:35:50 +0000

Tata and ASML recently signed an agreement to build a fab in India: https://www.reuters.com/world/india/tata-electronics-asml-pa...

The Indian Government is heavily pushing for domestic capabilities.

To understand why India failed to replicate the Chinese or East Asian model, I recommend A Sixth of Humanity by Devesh Kapoor and Aravind Subramanian.

New comment by unmole in "Is AI Profitable Yet?"

unmole — Sat, 23 May 2026 05:12:33 +0000

You should do a Michael Burry and go short. Clearly you seem to think you are much better informed, put your money where your mouth is.

New comment by unmole in "Is AI Profitable Yet?"

unmole — Sat, 23 May 2026 03:23:23 +0000

Yeah, institutional investors who plowed billions into them are unsophisticated rubes who got hoodwinked because they don't get GAAP. And it's not like both OpenAI and Anthropic are both going to IPO soon which would require disclosures far beyond GAAP numbers. /s

New comment by unmole in "An OpenAI model has disproved a central conjecture in discrete geometry"

unmole — Thu, 21 May 2026 01:55:00 +0000

I can't tell if this is satire.

New comment by unmole in "Is China using fentanyl as a weapon against the United States?"

unmole — Sat, 16 May 2026 02:32:26 +0000

> Accounts drop genuinely insightful takes on niche threads

I thought the same about this account until I read multiple completely wrong takes on topics I actually know well and realised they were just making up plausible sounding nonsense. After that, I started disregarding or outright ignoring their comments altogether. Almost like the of reverse Gell-Mann amnesia.

> one random thread reveals they're absolutely batshit crazy

I still can't tell whether this is continued LARPing or a genuinely tenuous grasp on reality.

New comment by unmole in "Cisco workforce reductions"

unmole — Thu, 14 May 2026 05:05:46 +0000

Why would an individual buy stocks other than to make money? Certainly not for charity. And if it's just virtue signalling, there are far cheaper ways to feel morally superior.

New comment by unmole in "Poland is now among the 20 largest economies"

unmole — Fri, 08 May 2026 16:27:06 +0000

Singapore says hi.

New comment by unmole in "FreeBSD Device Drivers Book"

unmole — Fri, 01 May 2026 15:06:31 +0000

openSUSE with snapper does this automatically. It's far more mainstream than FreeBSD.

New comment by unmole in "It’s Toasted"

unmole — Fri, 01 May 2026 09:49:28 +0000

The UX and feature set of WhatsApp is much better than SMS. India has practically free SMS but WhatsApp remains pervasive.

New comment by unmole in "UAE to leave OPEC"

unmole — Wed, 29 Apr 2026 09:12:41 +0000

You say "people tend to get cause and effect confused" and then unironically follow that up with:

> What makes the dollar strong? The US military

The US military and the dollar are strong because the US economy is strong.

New comment by unmole in "UAE to leave OPEC"

unmole — Tue, 28 Apr 2026 17:43:29 +0000

I’ve developed a simple heuristic: If someone unironically invokes petrodollar as an explanation for anything in 2026, they’re probably not worth taking seriously.

New comment by unmole in "For $700 a Month, Sleeping Pods Make SF More Affordable"

unmole — Thu, 23 Apr 2026 03:52:31 +0000

I don't think NIMBY capture and restrictive zoning regulations are popular distopian SciFi tropes.

New comment by unmole in "Books are not too expensive"

unmole — Thu, 23 Apr 2026 01:20:06 +0000

> lots of paperbacks with glossy covers etc.

Glossy cover lamination is actually cheaper than matte lamination.

If you meant more fancier finishing like spot UV or foil-stamping, ignore what I said.

New comment by unmole in "Meta to start capturing employee mouse movements, keystrokes for AI training"

unmole — Wed, 22 Apr 2026 10:22:19 +0000

I don't see how people using a work computer exclusively for work would lead to a shitty work culture, let alone lowered productivity.

New comment by unmole in "Meta to start capturing employee mouse movements, keystrokes for AI training"

unmole — Wed, 22 Apr 2026 10:17:28 +0000

> Most job offers now come with statements about how you don't have right to your likeness

[citation needed]

New comment by unmole in "Acetaminophen vs. ibuprofen"

unmole — Wed, 22 Apr 2026 07:20:21 +0000

> I presume other Commonwealth countries) default to paracetamol (acetaminophen) before ibuprofen

Can confirm this is true in India.

Paracetamol is widely used. Paracetamol + Ibuprofen is more common than Ibuprofen by itself.