Hacker News: verytrivial

New comment by verytrivial in "Ball Pit"

verytrivial — Wed, 25 Mar 2026 19:57:04 +0000

For some context, I think this is by mr.doob of three.js fame.

New comment by verytrivial in "Show HN: Tanstaafl – Pay-to-inbox email on Bitcoin Lightning"

verytrivial — Sat, 07 Mar 2026 11:16:05 +0000

Just say I'm a sender who wants to send an email to someone on this system, and who also holds zero BTC and is justifiably deeply skeptical of anyone pushing it, exactly what steps would I need to take with this system vs hitting "Send" from Outlook?

New comment by verytrivial in "US economy unexpectedly sheds 92k jobs in February"

verytrivial — Fri, 06 Mar 2026 18:05:42 +0000

That's a fine economic statistics operation you've got there. Shame if something were to happen to it.

New comment by verytrivial in "Making Wolfram tech available as a foundation tool for LLM systems"

verytrivial — Tue, 24 Feb 2026 10:43:54 +0000

Something this "shape" has been coalescencing since the first tool calls were done. To draw another Star Trek parallel, this reformulation is what Brent Spiner is during the little stares and pauses made before answering a complicated but constrained problems on the show. Onward!

New comment by verytrivial in "FlashAttention-T: Towards Tensorized Attention"

verytrivial — Wed, 04 Feb 2026 00:10:53 +0000

Tldr: 5% - 17% speedup due to removing a bottleneck by juggling where on a GPU/compute core a computation is done during Flash attention.

New comment by verytrivial in "Data centers in space makes no sense"

verytrivial — Tue, 03 Feb 2026 23:59:55 +0000

The numbers matter. The thermal budget a satellite is an tightly controlled thing. Large modern ones are in the order of a few to a couple of 10s of kilowatts, so something like a few to several low 10s of modern GPU compute power. Even with thousands of yet to be designed or launched satellites, it's going to have trouble competing with even a single current DC, plus it is in SAPCE for some reason, so everything is more expensive for lots of reasons.

New comment by verytrivial in "The engineer who invented the Mars rover suspension in his garage [video]"

verytrivial — Sat, 31 Jan 2026 01:20:31 +0000

I don't think that was the point being made by GearSkeptic, the video creator. It was a demonstration to the lay person who may not be familiar with what 5W "looked like".

New comment by verytrivial in "The engineer who invented the Mars rover suspension in his garage [video]"

verytrivial — Sat, 31 Jan 2026 01:16:47 +0000

I don't think so (either by the vibe/tone of the guy portrayed in the video or from my searches.)

New comment by verytrivial in "The engineer who invented the Mars rover suspension in his garage [video]"

verytrivial — Fri, 30 Jan 2026 17:23:01 +0000

Building a robot and building a robot to operate on Mars are eye-wateringly different challenges.

New comment by verytrivial in "AI on Australian travel company website sent tourists to nonexistent hot springs"

verytrivial — Thu, 29 Jan 2026 15:34:09 +0000

I binged ST:NG before it went away again on Netflix. The more I heard from Data, the more he sounded like where Ai should be heading: Quick, thorough reasoning but followed by explicit, tagged verification from external ground truth.

There needs to be a more meta, layered approach to reason. Different personalities viewing the output with different hats on: "That's a bold claim, champ. Search required." But I guess the current real-time, interactive nature of these systems makes it difficult to justify.

New comment by verytrivial in "High-speed train collision in Spain kills at least 39"

verytrivial — Mon, 19 Jan 2026 17:39:34 +0000

If sabotage it will be plain as day to a trained eye. I await the report. That break could also be explained by the rail heading away in that photo snapping at that point because the train pushed it out, noting the rail has rotated 90 degrees clockwise -- something did that work, and it was probably the train going out and over. I'm not a rail tie expert (nor is anyone likely to be on HN) so I don't know if this is an unusual failure mode. But there was a line change point intersection immediately south of the crash. My money is there was a fault (accidental or deliberate) there, not at this snapping point.

New comment by verytrivial in "High-speed train collision in Spain kills at least 39"

verytrivial — Mon, 19 Jan 2026 15:54:53 +0000

Assuming no foul play, it's going to be a Points Failure, isn't it? Like Potters Bar (2002) where most of the train makes it through, but rattles/breaks some weak point that was just holding on, and the last carriages change tracks. But at 250mph. Shocking stuff.

New comment by verytrivial in "SparkFun Officially Dropping AdaFruit due to CoC Violation"

verytrivial — Wed, 14 Jan 2026 17:37:51 +0000

I tried to parse the history and it goes back to 2021 and apparently touches upon pronouns, NFTs, online unmasking and various online battles around the same. Sigh. Can we put this HN thread out of its misery, please?

New comment by verytrivial in "Turn a single image into a navigable 3D Gaussian Splat with depth"

verytrivial — Fri, 09 Jan 2026 23:34:28 +0000

My understanding of JavaScript is cursory, but my reading of that webpage is the UI is just smoke and mirrors, and it is just waiting for the whole thing to be processed in a single remote API call to some back-end system. If the back-end is down, it will always stop at 90%. The crawling progress bar is fake with canned messages updated with Math.Random() delays. Gives you something to look at, I guess, but seems a little misleading. Might be wrong ...

New comment by verytrivial in "Efficient method to capture carbon dioxide from the atmosphere"

verytrivial — Wed, 31 Dec 2025 20:53:19 +0000

Indeed. I've always had trouble picturing how to efficiently "unmix the cake" too. CO2 is rare and throughout the whole atmospheric column. What kind of concentration gradient can you get going to meaningfully pull it out from everywhere in human timescales? (Sorry if this nerd-snipes someone stronger with calculus than me.)

New comment by verytrivial in "The story of Squeak, a practical Smalltalk written in itself (1997) [pdf]"

verytrivial — Wed, 31 Dec 2025 20:48:02 +0000

Not quibbling at all, but I recall some discussion somewhere saying that the history of the Squeak impl itself (not the name) traces back via saved base images to the original Smalltalk implementations, including via customs at-rest transformation tools when backwards incompatible changed where made in the primordial days. Base images, at least back when I was toying with Squeak, where never rebuilt from scratch, just modified, transformed etc. In some sense, at least for the image, they were decades old.

New comment by verytrivial in "Rob Pike goes nuclear over GenAI"

verytrivial — Fri, 26 Dec 2025 14:27:12 +0000

That's the quiet voice many are carrying around in the heads announced clearly.

New comment by verytrivial in "Fuzix on a Raspberry Pi Pico"

verytrivial — Sat, 20 Dec 2025 09:32:42 +0000

This port of Fuzix to the Pico was done by David Given. In 2021 he also screen-recorded and narrated basically his entire effort porting Fuzix to similarly-sized ESP8266. Really very interesting if you are in to that sort of thing!

https://cowlark.com/2021-02-09-esp8266-fuzix/index.html

New comment by verytrivial in "Overconsumption is a spiritual problem"

verytrivial — Wed, 17 Dec 2025 09:10:02 +0000

I have a colleague whom refers to the emails he sends as 'letters'. It was strange at first, but it also implies some effort being taken. I read the 'essays' terminology the same way. If it isn't some textual version of habitual food/travel/life logging, and has some cohesive topic, it's an essay.

New comment by verytrivial in "SQLite JSON at full index speed using generated columns"

verytrivial — Fri, 12 Dec 2025 18:31:41 +0000

If you replace JSON with XML in this model it is exactly what the "document store" databases from the 90s and 00s were doing -- parsing at insert and update time, then touching only indexes at query time. It is indeed cool that sqlite does this out of the box.