<rss version="2.0" xmlns:dc="http://purl.org/dc/elements/1.1/" xmlns:atom="http://www.w3.org/2005/Atom"><channel><title>Hacker News: varelse</title><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=varelse</link><description>Hacker News RSS</description><docs>https://hnrss.org/</docs><generator>hnrss v2.1.1</generator><lastBuildDate>Sun, 17 May 2026 11:02:20 +0000</lastBuildDate><atom:link href="https://hnrss.org/user?id=varelse" rel="self" type="application/rss+xml"></atom:link><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by varelse in "AI companies cause most of traffic on forums"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>It's certainly one of the few things that actually gets their attention. But aren't there more important things than this for the Luigis among us?<p>I would suspect there's good money in offering a service to detect AI content on all of these forums and reject it. That will then be used as training data to refine them which gives such a service infinite sustainability.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Mon, 30 Dec 2024 16:45:08 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42550933</link><dc:creator>varelse</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42550933</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42550933</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by varelse in "Does current AI represent a dead end?"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>Mamba-ish models are the breakthrough to cheap inference if they pan out. Calling a dead-end already is just silly.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Fri, 27 Dec 2024 21:02:10 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42526003</link><dc:creator>varelse</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42526003</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42526003</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by varelse in "No GPS required: our app can now locate underground trains"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>The heart rate monitors in Google and Fitbit devices are insanely inaccurate during exercise. I had suspected as much already. Whenever a brisk walk indicated my pulse was 150 or so. But first, I could not reproduce this wearing a halter device and later I could not reproduce this wearing a polar heart rate monitor or a Frontier X2 ECG.<p>Conclusion, Fitbit and Google heart rate monitors on those wearables are hot garbage. Cue some snooty googler insisting I'm doing it wrong somehow.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Wed, 13 Nov 2024 14:05:47 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42126203</link><dc:creator>varelse</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42126203</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42126203</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by varelse in "Chemistry Nobel: Computational protein design and protein structure prediction"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>Bezos? Abandoned by his dad who was literally an alcoholic clown and raised by his mom and her 2nd husband Bezos?<p><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ted_Jorgensen" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ted_Jorgensen</a><p>So $300K in 1994 is about $640K. That's nice but about 80th percentile of net worth. It's nice his parents believed in him. How many of your parents would do that for you? I'm sure at 1 in 5 of them have that kind of money because of the distribution here. So the difference here is He was smart, he got lucky, and your parents don't believe in you enough on this front.<p>But compare and contrast Bezos and Musk. Bezos's mid-life crisis is leaving his wife to run around on his yacht banging models. Musk's mid-life crisis is trying to destroy democracy so he and his mom won't have to pay US taxes. Neither one is a role model, but I don't even get the point of the latter.<p>Which brings us back to AlphaFold. The AlphaFold team did something amazing. But also, they had a backer that believed in them. David Baker, for better or worse, didn't achieve what they did and he'd been at it for decades. It's amazing what good backing can achieve.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Wed, 09 Oct 2024 15:05:03 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41788673</link><dc:creator>varelse</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41788673</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41788673</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by varelse in "Ask HN: Former gifted children with hard lives, how did you turn out?"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>It's the past. I've let go of it as much as I can. But I will always have what if questions about it. But broadly, academia was a dead-end. I should have never gotten a doctorate, it was a waste of time. And I doubly should never have done a post-doc because that's indentured labor. The day I left academia my salary more than tripled my income, an experience many sorts in AI encountered more recently. Unless one is born into wealth, academia is a horrible choice IMO. And too many of the tenured sorts calling the shots are some of the most unethical sorts I've ever met. Ironically, the most ethical team I ever worked with was at a hedge fund likely because it's pretty hard to hide the loss of funds at one. And everything else has been between those two extremes.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Mon, 16 Sep 2024 15:54:07 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41557350</link><dc:creator>varelse</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41557350</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41557350</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by varelse in "Ask HN: Former gifted children with hard lives, how did you turn out?"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>ACE score of 5. I turned out badly. Rich, but badly. Just ask any of the data faking cheating scientists I channeled my trauma into exposing who got me kicked out of academia. But that's how I got rich. Money changes everything.<p>You will never feel safe. You will instead build a life, a portfolio, and a network of friends as a surrogate for feeling safe. And you can trust my words, I'm shadowbanned.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Sun, 15 Sep 2024 20:22:14 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41550063</link><dc:creator>varelse</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41550063</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41550063</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by varelse in "Dark Star at 50: How a micro-budget student film changed sci-fi forever"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>It was only last year that I realized the country music opening theme "Benson, Arizona" was about relativistic travel through space, shortly after playing it because I had just driven through Benson, Arizona.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Thu, 04 Apr 2024 10:34:29 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39928596</link><dc:creator>varelse</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39928596</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39928596</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by varelse in "Vernor Vinge has died"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>In 5 to 10 years we will have likely moved on to the next big model architecture just like it was all about convolutional networks 5 to 10 years ago despite the pivotal paper being published in 2017.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Thu, 21 Mar 2024 15:12:14 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39779517</link><dc:creator>varelse</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39779517</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39779517</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by varelse in "They Praised AI at SXSW–and the Audience Started Booing"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>Sure, people hate tech. And tech clearly hates its own customers. So why hasn't something that doesn't hate its own customers disrupted tech? If anything, the enshittification is just getting worse. Prime video's random ads alone should have led to mass cancellations but it's not happening, is it? So what exactly will lead to people walking away as opposed to grumbling as things keep getting worse and worse?<p>Reminds me a lot of politics in the United States at this point: stuck with two disappointing parties with almost no chance of a third party really shaking things up because the one thing they can agree on is that a third party should never arise.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Wed, 20 Mar 2024 08:42:36 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39764044</link><dc:creator>varelse</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39764044</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39764044</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by varelse in "Humanity Is Dangerously Pushing Its Ability to Tolerate Heat"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>Ministry For The Future was far too optimistic. Termination Shock presents how late stage capitalism and the accelerationists would team up to make money on half-baked science to save the planet. The West will probably be fine but we're going to make Mao and Stalin look like amateur hour mass murderers when we finally save our own butts.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Mon, 11 Mar 2024 12:49:28 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39667541</link><dc:creator>varelse</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39667541</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39667541</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by varelse in "Humanity Is Dangerously Pushing Its Ability to Tolerate Heat"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>Why the burgeoning economic development of full self-driving space needles! Sure, their former homes will be uninhabitable, but imagine how much they'll get selling the land? Why they'll be able to move to Antarctica if that's what it takes! I'm getting a tear in my eye right now over all that profit and shareholder value as we boldly evacuate the planet into the future!</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Mon, 11 Mar 2024 12:44:29 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39667487</link><dc:creator>varelse</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39667487</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39667487</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by varelse in "The EPA is proposing that 'forever chemicals' be considered hazardous substances"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>There are a ton of contaminants in our drinking water that the EPA recommends you remove and we know they are harmful but they are not mandated to do so. Get yourself a water filter because they're not going to filter it for you.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Fri, 02 Feb 2024 19:05:46 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39232787</link><dc:creator>varelse</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39232787</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39232787</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by varelse in "AMD's Next GPU Is a 3D-Integrated Superchip"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>And that's the consequence of giving the market leader a decade and a half head start. No one and I mean no one was preventing AMD or Intel from building a competitive hardware and software ecosystem other than themselves.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Fri, 15 Dec 2023 17:29:01 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38656354</link><dc:creator>varelse</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38656354</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38656354</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by varelse in "To revive Portland, officials seek to ban public drug use"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>Yes drugs should be legalized and regulated nationally just like Portugal did. But also we should absolutely unambiguously no excuses house and feed the homeless the end full stop we have plenty of money. It just needs to be redirected to doing something productive other than paying endless assemblies of bureaucrats competing with each other to virtue signal the loudest.<p>Because the reason people get hooked on to drugs is they have nothing better to do with their lives and they've run out of Hope but that runs straight into the effective altruist and effective acceleration as the gender here so it's not going to happen.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Tue, 12 Dec 2023 01:14:10 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38607896</link><dc:creator>varelse</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38607896</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38607896</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by varelse in "Report Phone Spam – Shut down robocallers and text spammers"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>Or simplify a white list for all cell phones by default. But just like they make it hard to keep your snail mailbox from being clogged from garbage, this remains hard.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Sun, 03 Dec 2023 21:04:41 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38510755</link><dc:creator>varelse</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38510755</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38510755</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by varelse in "AI.gov"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>Which is pretty much what the proposed regulations on AI will do as well whist destroying small company innovation and treating consumer AI like software and media piracy.<p>I guess the president felt bad about banning GPU sales to China so he decided to gimp America too.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Mon, 30 Oct 2023 17:45:59 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38072892</link><dc:creator>varelse</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38072892</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38072892</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by varelse in "Dev sets up "goatse" trap for sites that steal his free web game"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>I once had a manager at my dad's company steal my code for my opus Star Trek game. He left tracks so I followed those tracks into his account and made the game absolutely no fun to play by making it impossibly hard (1979).<p>He then had the nerve to complain to my dad that the game was too hard.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Sat, 28 Oct 2023 16:09:48 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38050902</link><dc:creator>varelse</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38050902</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38050902</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by varelse in "OpenAI just replaced its core values with completely different ones"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>The real question would be why anyone cares about empty mission statements like this anyway?<p>Parsing them for meaning is nearly as useful as parsing your morning bowel movement to predict your day.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Wed, 18 Oct 2023 14:52:33 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37929542</link><dc:creator>varelse</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37929542</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37929542</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by varelse in "The AI research job market"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>The biggest tell I got out of this article is OpenAI's willingness to pay $1M per AI researcher but they only want to pay $300K for their new hardware design people. I think we know how that will play out, but narcissists gotta narcissist.<p>As someone who rode the first AI wave to 7 figure comp a decade ago, let moneyball round 2 commence! Let's see who can get to 8 figure comp first! That money isn't doing anyone any good if it's just sitting in a brokerage or bank account. Didn't you hear? The singularity is near! You simply cannot afford to miss out or you're going to get Vernor Vinged!<p>Along the way, don't forget to take some time out of your busy day to drink the delicious bitter tears of venture capitalists and upper management whining that you are paid too much.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Thu, 12 Oct 2023 16:20:03 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37859296</link><dc:creator>varelse</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37859296</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37859296</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by varelse in "Intel Xeon Max 9480 Deep-Dive 64GB HBM2e Onboard Like a GPU or AI Accelerator"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>NUMAAF I guess, but it doesn't seem like they did anything interesting with it yet.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Thu, 21 Sep 2023 12:33:59 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37596667</link><dc:creator>varelse</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37596667</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37596667</guid></item></channel></rss>