Hacker News: voidmain

New comment by voidmain in "Lost Images from the 1945 Trinity Nuclear Test Restored"

voidmain — Thu, 21 May 2026 21:09:57 +0000

I think the tiny size of a nuclear weapon and very short interval of nuclear reaction before "disassembly" mean that even though the energy release is small compared to an asteroid impact the temperatures are probably much higher.

(I'm not an expert, though, this is a guess)

New comment by voidmain in "Shunning AI is the human choice"

voidmain — Thu, 21 May 2026 14:54:54 +0000

Democracy is also doomed by sufficiently capable AI. When the "meta" military unit was a knight in shining armor, most societies were under feudalism, ie rule by knights. When guns became cheap enough that whoever had the most guys would win a civil war, we got democracy: rule by whoever has the most guys. When whoever has the most robots will win a civil war, what kind of government do you expect?

New comment by voidmain in "Shunning AI is the human choice"

voidmain — Thu, 21 May 2026 14:51:47 +0000

Follow this reasoning to its conclusion: once humans are no longer part of the most efficient military-industrial "meta build", states that keep them alive will be outcompeted and eventually destroyed by those that do not.

New comment by voidmain in "A web page that shows you everything the browser told it without asking"

voidmain — Sun, 10 May 2026 12:27:11 +0000

But you sacrificed some of your 33 bits of anonymity to have this setting work as intended. And that isn't strictly necessary: the web could have been engineered so that the selection of light or dark styles takes effect in a way undetectable to a web site.

New comment by voidmain in "Sierra Raises $950M at $15B Valuation"

voidmain — Tue, 05 May 2026 11:46:17 +0000

Making me talk to a fucking robot leaves me with a deep and abiding hatred for your company. I will prefer almost any alternative to doing business with you and hope fervently to read about your bankruptcy.

What percentage of interactions having this result will cancel out your cost savings?

New comment by voidmain in "Simple and correct snapshot isolation"

voidmain — Sun, 03 May 2026 15:59:41 +0000

FoundationDB used this (detection of read-write conflicts in optimistic transactions) as its default isolation level since we started building it around 2009. Doing it at the kv store level has the advantage of providing serializability even for predicate and range reads (sometimes at the cost of unnecessary conflicts, so it offers granular control of read conflict ranges also).

New comment by voidmain in ""People who don't use AI will be left behind""

voidmain — Wed, 29 Apr 2026 19:48:43 +0000

When on the road to hell, it's OK to be left behind.

New comment by voidmain in "Nowhere is safe"

voidmain — Fri, 10 Apr 2026 23:00:37 +0000

“Wilt thou call again thy peoples, wilt thou craze anew thy Kings? “Lo! my lightnings pass before thee, and their whistling servant brings, “Ere the drowsy street hath stirred— “Every masked and midnight word, “And the nations break their fast upon these things.

“So I make a jest of Wonder, and a mock of Time and Space. “The roofless Seas an hostel, and the Earth a market-place, “Where the anxious traders know “Each is surety for his foe, “And none may thrive without his fellows’ grace.

“Now this is all my subtlety and this is all my wit, “God give thee good enlightenment, My Master in the Pit. “But behold all Earth is laid “In the Peace which I have made, “And behold I wait on thee to trouble it!”

The Peace of Dives Kipling, 1903

https://www.kiplingsociety.co.uk/poem/poems_dives.htm

(As you know, there have been no major wars since then)

New comment by voidmain in "People Cheering Verdicts Against Meta Should Understand What Theyre Cheering For"

voidmain — Fri, 27 Mar 2026 01:04:36 +0000

I too fear what governments will actually do in this area. But I think you may be underestimating the threat to personal agency.

Imagine you are trapped in a groundhog day like time loop - but you are not the person who remembers previous loops. "Z" is. He tries to convince you to do something, over and over and over, thousands or millions of times, refining his approach based on your reactions while you remember nothing. Are you really confident that your free will protects you from being taken advantage of in this situation?

Now imagine that instead of a time loop, Z has a million clones of you. He tries his persuasion on one of them at a time, refining it until it works reliably before using it on you. You are just as vulnerable.

Now suppose he has a billion people, not identical to you but drawn from the same distribution. He has a harder computational problem, mapping the high dimensional manifold of their responses to create a model of you sufficiently accurate to manipulate you. But with enough data he can approximate the results of the previous case without more than a tiny fraction of his experimentation being visible to you.

Any relationship where one party gets to surveil and monitor not only the other party, but millions or billions of like parties, has the potential to be a deeply abusive one. We should not tolerate such situations whether the surveilling party is a government or not.

New comment by voidmain in "An AI doomsday report shook US markets"

voidmain — Wed, 25 Feb 2026 12:41:25 +0000

It depends on whether people wake up to the threat before or after there is a robot army that can crush them, doesn't it? If humans are economically and militarily useless, it won't matter what they choose.

New comment by voidmain in "A psychedelic medicine performs well against depression"

voidmain — Fri, 20 Feb 2026 02:08:04 +0000

In the immortal words of Scott Alexander [1],

> I used to think that the alternative medicine people were overestimating how evil Big Pharma was. But now I know that’s not right.

> Now I know they’re underestimating it.

> If it were discovered tomorrow that potatoes cured cancer, then people wouldn’t “suppress” this “natural” remedy. Two years from now there would be an ultrapurified potato extract called POTAXOR™®© that was, on closer examination, physically and chemically identical to mashed potatoes. But these mashed potatoes would be mashed in a giant centrifuge by scientists with five Ph. Ds each. Any time someone got cancer, their doctor would prescribe POTAXOR™®© and charge $6,000 per dose, and the patient would get better, and the thought of just going out and eating a potato would never occur to anybody. Not to the doctor, who doesn’t want to sound like the idiot who tells her cancer patients to eat potatoes. Not to the FDA, who doesn’t know whether potatoes might be contaminated with lead or potato fungus or ketchup or God-knows-what. And certainly not to the patient. They would have to pay 60 cents for a potato at the supermarket, but if they have a good enough insurance the POTAXOR™®© is free!

> This system, bizarre as it is, is your guarantee against the pharmaceutical companies suppressing a promising new natural medication. Your insurance company pays $300 on fish oil, and in exchange you go to sleep at night secure that no one has discovered that potatoes cure cancer but decided to cover it up to protect their bottom line. Good deal? Given the current health system, it’s better than you had any right to expect.

Potatoes aren't on Schedule 1; that makes this situation suck a little more. But probably the alternative scenario is just the treatment remaining illegal forever.

[1] https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/06/15/fish-now-by-prescripti...

New comment by voidmain in "Dark Alley Mathematics"

voidmain — Sat, 07 Feb 2026 16:24:20 +0000

I think this is reasonably precise. "Uniformly" means that all points within the unit circle are equally likely. You can sample this distribution by picking independent rectangular coordinates and rejecting points outside the unit circle. I'm sure you can sample it in polar space by using an appropriate nonuniform distribution for radius (because a uniform radius would not result in a uniform distribution over points in the unit circle). If you want to sample directly in some really weird parameterization I guess markov chain monte carlo methods are available.

New comment by voidmain in "Dark Alley Mathematics"

voidmain — Sat, 07 Feb 2026 16:17:07 +0000

The article currently says

> Three points are chosen independently and uniformly at random from the interior of a unit circle

Has it been edited in the last 15 minutes to address your objection or something?

New comment by voidmain in "Why Intelligence Is a Terrible Proxy for Wisdom"

voidmain — Tue, 27 Jan 2026 15:10:29 +0000

I'm not sure Newton deserves shade for working on transmutation. The reason chemical reactions can't turn lead into gold was totally unknown at the time.

New comment by voidmain in "The Adolescence of Technology"

voidmain — Mon, 26 Jan 2026 20:46:25 +0000

So if someone (actually, practically everyone) who runs an AI company says AI is dangerous, it's bullshit. If someone who is holding NVDA put options says it, they're talking their book. If someone whose job is threatened by AI says it, it's cope. If someone who doesn't use AI says it, it's fear of change. Is there someone in particular you want to hear it from, or are you completely immune to argument?

New comment by voidmain in "The Adolescence of Technology"

voidmain — Mon, 26 Jan 2026 20:40:26 +0000

If AI makes humans economically irrelevant, nuclear deterrents may no longer be effective even if they remain mechanically intact. Would governments even try to keep their people and cities intact once they are useless?

New comment by voidmain in "Weaponized (teeny tiny) black holes"

voidmain — Mon, 05 Jan 2026 15:40:10 +0000

For Newtonian gravity at least, the gravitational force everywhere outside a sphere or spherical shell is exactly the same as if it was a point mass (and everywhere inside a spherical shell it is zero). Not sure if it holds exactly for general relativity.

New comment by voidmain in "IPv6 just turned 30 and still hasn't taken over the world"

voidmain — Sun, 04 Jan 2026 14:02:04 +0000

I can't help but think that numbering all the devices was the wrong idea from the beginning. You don't want to talk to devices, you want to talk to (and offer) services. You probably need something like an AS number to make global routing efficient, but 32 bits would be plenty for that. A packet could be (destination AS, stream ID, encrypted( payload )) and DNS would give you a capability (destination AS, stream ID, keys) for a service. You send a packet to that stream asking to open a connection and providing a capability to reply (with a capability for the specific stream). Your network up to the AS level should have an opportunity to augment the stream IDs in whatever way is convenient for its routing. No one reveals any topology information, network neutrality and a degree of privacy is guaranteed at the protocol level, only really serious multipeer networks need to assign addresses above layer 2, and I think it would be reasonably easy to come up with an edges first incentive compatible transition plan (which is where ipv6 went wrong).

(This is of course an incomplete and poorly thought out proposal, you don't need to dogpile me about that.)

New comment by voidmain in "Self-referencing Page Tables for the x86-Architecture"

voidmain — Thu, 25 Dec 2025 14:34:27 +0000

I'm currently using recursive page tables for the OS I'm working on, but I'm probably going to change that. There are lots of different address spaces for different processes and (with IOMMU) devices, and it's nicer to be able to modify any of them rather than only the current one. I am leaning toward just assigning 2 MiB of memory to page tables at a time and keeping a mapping for these (I don't want to map all physical memory in the kernel for security reasons).

New comment by voidmain in "Indoor tanning makes youthful skin much older on a genetic level"

voidmain — Sun, 21 Dec 2025 16:04:23 +0000

There's a history of finding really strong correlations between vitamin D levels and (many kinds of) health, and then disappointing results for RCTs of vitamin D supplementation. There are lots of possible explanations of this, but it seems like a plausible one is that there are some good things sunlight does for you other than produce vitamin D. So I'm a little nervous about everyone eliminating all sun exposure and then taking vitamin D geltabs to compensate, even though sunlight carries some risks. (But obviously too much ionizing radiation is also a problem, and it sounds like most users of tanning beds are getting a lot of intense exposure)