Hacker News: wolfd

New comment by wolfd in "The United States and Israel have launched a major attack on Iran"

wolfd — Sat, 28 Feb 2026 08:44:06 +0000

I hope you and I never get the opportunity to learn how this would end. We’ve had nukes on Earth for less than 100 years, do you expect the next few thousand to go that well? Do you think in that time, nobody will ever roll a nat 1 on a wisdom check?

New comment by wolfd in "Steam Frame"

wolfd — Thu, 13 Nov 2025 00:41:10 +0000

I think it’s possible that there’s a technical reason for monochrome cameras. For example, to let in the maximum amount of IR light for tracking. Bayer filters reduce the amount of light getting in, so it might help the IR LEDs be visible on surrounding walls in the dark.

Still hoping that you’re right, though.

New comment by wolfd in "Simple trick to increase coverage: Lying to users about signal strength"

wolfd — Mon, 03 Nov 2025 16:58:17 +0000

I would assume that this was a carrier request/demand that got filtered down to some poor employee that had to implement it. There’s a linked bug, but the bug is restricted.

New comment by wolfd in "Nearly 20 Percent Fewer International Students Traveled to the U.S. in August"

wolfd — Tue, 07 Oct 2025 15:58:18 +0000

I don’t know if this was one of the intended outcomes, but this will probably cause some struggling college and universities to shut down.

International students raise quite a lot of money for higher-ed institutions because they pay full price without financial aid. The loss of that income is going to make a bad situation for higher-ed budgets much worse. Unless you are Harvard or Stanford (or a few other universities that are endowments with schools attached), you’re probably already in a budget crunch or eating into your endowment.

A side note, one of the founders of the college I went to has been convinced that higher-ed needs an entirely new business model in order to survive, and is founding a new school called Greenway (https://www.greenwayinstitute.org) that is trying to blend internships and co-op programs into an engineering education.

New comment by wolfd in "Stone blocks from the Lighthouse of Alexandria recovered from seafloor"

wolfd — Fri, 18 Jul 2025 20:43:44 +0000

Are you talking about the 3D rendering in the article? The source is linked, and it was uploaded to Wikimedia in 2013.

Edit: Oh! I see, the article URL was changed after you made your comment and before I made mine.

New comment by wolfd in "Japan's IC cards are weird and wonderful"

wolfd — Sun, 18 May 2025 01:30:56 +0000

The gates are extremely fast, and you don’t need to wait at all when you tap your card. In practice, this ends up being a pretty big deal for the number of passengers going through some of those gates. The whole experience is noticeably faster than any other ticket gate I’ve been through.

New comment by wolfd in "Australian who ordered radioactive materials walks away from court"

wolfd — Sat, 26 Apr 2025 17:08:04 +0000

I believe it was this https://www.luciteria.com/element-cubes/plutonium-for-sale

New comment by wolfd in "The "S" in MCP Stands for Security"

wolfd — Sun, 06 Apr 2025 22:30:22 +0000

How are these levels actually encoded? Do they use special unwritable tokens to wrap instructions?

New comment by wolfd in "A Letter to the American People"

wolfd — Sat, 01 Mar 2025 22:32:36 +0000

I think the goal is to not antagonize the administration but convince them that they're making a mistake and to reverse it.

New comment by wolfd in "Wild – A fast linker for Linux"

wolfd — Fri, 24 Jan 2025 23:30:55 +0000

Good question, I always wonder the same thing. https://www.phoronix.com/news/Mold-Linker-2024-Performance seems to show that that the newer linkers still outperform their predecessors, even after maturing. But of course this doesn’t show the full picture.

New comment by wolfd in "Wild – A fast linker for Linux"

wolfd — Fri, 24 Jan 2025 21:28:26 +0000

I’m not sure if you’re intending to leave a negative or positive remark, or just a brief history, but the fact that people are still managing to squeeze better performance into linkers is very encouraging to me.

New comment by wolfd in "After initially rejecting it, Apple has approved the first PC emulator for iOS"

wolfd — Sun, 14 Jul 2024 16:18:43 +0000

Could you explain why you think that Linux created more problems than it solved? In my eyes it is the backbone of most of what I do as a developer and I can’t imagine trying to work without it.

New comment by wolfd in "GPT-4o's Memory Breakthrough – Needle in a Needlestack"

wolfd — Wed, 15 May 2024 07:57:59 +0000

It’s absurd but LLMs for military targets is absolutely something that some companies are trying to sell regardless of the many known failure modes.

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/newsletters/2023-07-05/the-us...

https://youtu.be/XEM5qz__HOU

New comment by wolfd in "What made Apollo a success? (1971) [pdf]"

wolfd — Mon, 18 Dec 2023 15:59:25 +0000

This document was referenced by Smarter Every Day in his latest video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OoJsPvmFixU

New comment by wolfd in "Switch off bad TV settings"

wolfd — Mon, 04 Dec 2023 20:00:56 +0000

What do you mean by “tearing”? Like, VSync-off tearing or a different effect?

New comment by wolfd in "Switch off bad TV settings"

wolfd — Mon, 04 Dec 2023 19:56:22 +0000

A major issue with motion interpolation is that it can’t be perfect, and is often far from it. The implementation on many TVs is jarring, you’ll see super-smooth motion while an object is moving a slow or medium speed, but as soon as the patch of pixels that it’s tracking goes really fast, it assumes the patches are distinct, and the motion will be juddery. Individual objects switching from high-framerate to low in the span of a half-second is quite noticeable to my eyes, but I admit that most people around me don’t seem to care.

Maybe one day the real-time implementation will be good enough, but I find that it’s shockingly bad most of the time.

New comment by wolfd in "Meta AI Unleashes Megabyte, a Scalable Model Architecture"

wolfd — Wed, 24 May 2023 07:49:56 +0000

I would be _shocked_ if Zuck wasn't thinking 24/7 about how to capitalize on LLMs. I'm sure there are a thousand ideas (maybe even a few good ones?) being thrown around Meta at how to use LLMs to beat Google/Microsoft+OpenAI at the "search buddy" game.

New comment by wolfd in "Unlocking North Korean songs on a karaoke machine"

wolfd — Wed, 03 May 2023 17:25:04 +0000

I find it interesting that they haven't rebranded "CNC" as something in Korean.

New comment by wolfd in "Remove “This incident will be reported.” from user warnings"

wolfd — Sat, 29 Apr 2023 19:44:28 +0000

When I was in uni, the computer science school actually did occasionally check these reports. Specifically, a guy named Chris checked them. Some friends of mine apparently used this to send him messages.

`sudo hi chris`

New comment by wolfd in "Stable Diffusion PR optimizes VRAM, generate 576x1280 images with 6 GB VRAM"

wolfd — Sun, 04 Sep 2022 08:14:56 +0000

The implementation as it stands is actually easier the way they do it. They replace the image by scaling Rick to the image size. That means that they can still automatically put your output images in a grid without any extra code. They could have zeroed the pixels, but that could have led to confusion about if things were working or not.

It's silly and you're able to patch it out if you so desire. But most importantly, they released the model to everyone so it's way more open than OpenAI's DALL-E 2 (for better or worse). I don't think the argument that they're trying to control you really makes a lot of sense given how widely accessible this model is.