Hacker News: w4der

New comment by w4der in "Early progress on accelerating drug development with Claude"

w4der — Wed, 28 Oct 2026 08:42:28 +0000

Many times issues with clinical trials is not a technical one, it's a human one, practitioners unwilling to test, patients that stop showing up, red tape, committees, denial of consent, etc. I do not see how AI as it stands currently can solve those issues.

New comment by w4der in "The Exponential Time Hypothesis Is False [pdf]"

w4der — Tue, 27 Oct 2026 11:41:18 +0000

Wasn't there a comment a while ago when all major LLM providers went down almost at the same time that it was caused by a sort of virtual "Room 641A" thing?

New comment by w4der in "Superhuman Hardware Design Is the Easy Part"

w4der — Mon, 26 Oct 2026 11:08:56 +0000

But the tooling required for guns and rifling in particular is pretty hard to come by, whereas the tooling required to assemble a DIY drone is basically indistinguishable from R/C hobby equipment. You can (try) to regulate where/who/how/when can fly a drone, but regulating drone building seems almost impossible to me.

New comment by w4der in "Ask HN: If the models are so good, why doesn't OpenAI just start 100 companies?"

w4der — Fri, 23 Oct 2026 10:44:55 +0000

Neither gold nor pickaxes did, but both business went back to reasonable levels and valuations.

New comment by w4der in ""I'm on a war footing": Terry Tao and the crisis in math"

w4der — Mon, 19 Oct 2026 06:22:45 +0000

That was a scam or at least overblown in scope, the "control room" you see in pictures was basically a movie prop, and their idea was basically to connect that room to every factory/port/mine with teletypes, it's similar in spirit to what a modern stock should do.

New comment by w4der in "Intel D270 GPU AI Accelerator–Up to 480 GB LPDDR5X"

w4der — Tue, 13 Oct 2026 08:56:44 +0000

The average person may not even own a personal computer, has a company-owned notebook with barely 16 GB of RAM and maybe a TPU, and here you are saying that owning a prosumer GPU and more RAM than what most people will buy across their entire lifetimes is common.

New comment by w4der in "Sales of sub-€25,000 electric car models set to rise sevenfold"

w4der — Mon, 05 Oct 2026 09:44:13 +0000

And further down the rung, the electric Twingo, Panda and such go toe for toe with the cheaper Chinese EVs.

New comment by w4der in "Improper redaction reveals Google Data Center water and electricity usage"

w4der — Mon, 05 Oct 2026 09:41:07 +0000

I'm gonna plug a recommendation here based on your comment: if anyone wants to marvel or horrify at the US' water development history, Cadillac Desert is an excellent read, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cadillac_Desert .

New comment by w4der in "Nvidia wants to put a watchdog chip next to every AI agent"

w4der — Tue, 29 Sep 2026 08:29:28 +0000

I think it is well known by this point that hardware-backed security is good until an unfixable hardware bug is found, this just reads to me as Nvidia saying "please don't regulate open models out of existence, look, I have a solution to appease the regulators, please let me keep selling accelerators"

If this comes through, there's gonna be a grey market for "unlocked" GPUs, were the watchdog is disabled either from firmware, or physically replaced if it's not embedded into the die.

New comment by w4der in "VSCode's SSH Agent Is Bananas (2025)"

w4der — Mon, 28 Sep 2026 13:06:01 +0000

You mean mirror.vim? Or something else?

New comment by w4der in "Nissan's third generation e-POWER powertrain"

w4der — Mon, 28 Sep 2026 12:57:11 +0000

Where did you get the 10L/100km figure from? I saw closer to 7L/100km when driving it, and the 2.2 diesel on the older X-Trails has about 100 less horsepower.

New comment by w4der in "Analysis: EVs are now nine times cheaper than petrol or diesel to drive in UK"

w4der — Mon, 28 Sep 2026 10:24:35 +0000

Why is EV insurance that more expensive than an ICE vehicles'?

New comment by w4der in "Nissan's third generation e-POWER powertrain"

w4der — Mon, 28 Sep 2026 09:43:12 +0000

I think these kinds of vehicles are fine for countries were fast charging networks are still not widespread. I drove a rental X-Trail e-Power AWD a while ago, and fuel economy, while not spectacular, was still great given the quality of the powertrain. Of course a low displacement manual can get better fuel economy, and an electric will be cheaper, but if you are driving 800km on a country with little charging infrastructure, powertrains like this one or Toyota's eCVTs make sense.

New comment by w4der in "Nissan's third generation e-POWER powertrain"

w4der — Mon, 28 Sep 2026 09:35:30 +0000

Chrysler built one in the 60s: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chrysler_Turbine_Car

New comment by w4der in "VSCode's SSH Agent Is Bananas (2025)"

w4der — Thu, 24 Sep 2026 08:46:02 +0000

The one this that is better than just SSH+Tmux+Vim, is that if your latency is higher than 30-50ms, since VSCode's SSH agent streams the files to your computer, the typing experience feels snappier. When you work half a continent away from where the servers are, it makes life nicer.

New comment by w4der in "Why I didn’t sign the Fields medallists’ letter"

w4der — Fri, 18 Sep 2026 08:53:07 +0000

I am not debating IA's capabilities at coming up with proofs, I'm debating whether such systems will be able to figure out new mathematical fields or not. If they can't figure out some field from what was known at the time, what guarantees are there that AI-mathematics won't just bog down at its current state? There must be some evidence that AI can come up with novel mathematics before we decide to throw academics out the window. The risk of creating a sort of mathematical dark age just based on the current situation is far too great to stop funding mathematics research.

New comment by w4der in "Why I didn’t sign the Fields medallists’ letter"

w4der — Fri, 18 Sep 2026 07:58:16 +0000

The hell is that reply? If we're obsoleting human mathematicians, which have fundamentally been the same thing brains-wise since forever, why shouldn't an AI system be able to replace a 1870s mathematician in the same way you are proposing it replace a 2020s mathematician?

New comment by w4der in "How do we prevent mathemathics from devolving into the Medieval Era of secrecy?"

w4der — Fri, 18 Sep 2026 07:51:19 +0000

Google trends shows it spiking last year: https://trends.google.com/explore?q=frontier%20mathematics&d...

New comment by w4der in "Why I didn’t sign the Fields medallists’ letter"

w4der — Fri, 18 Sep 2026 07:46:31 +0000

You are making your argument on the basis that LLMs and future AI system will be just as good or better as current mathematicians at all the relevant processes involved in academic math and mathematics in general. I'd like to see an experiment where an AI system was trained as a 1870s mathematician and see if it can come up with set theory, if that is not possible, then current AI systems are not fit to replace mathematicians.

New comment by w4der in "German Rheinmetall open-sources its Battlesuite connected weapon system protcol"

w4der — Wed, 16 Sep 2026 14:18:18 +0000

Isn't $1000 a bit low for compliance consulting fees?