Hacker News: xt00

New comment by xt00 in "Eric Schmidt speech about AI booed during graduation"

xt00 — Mon, 18 May 2026 14:16:24 +0000

Totally agree — if AI tools are already or nearly at the point where you can say “write a program to do X” and it does it, that’s like telling people they need to learn skills to order something at McDonald’s. The goal is for the barrier to entry to be basically zero. Oh sure today there are things like “I made a claude.md file that does this and I wrote a really clever prompt!!” But the goal is for that work to be deleted as well — where is the magic skill that is / will be needed?

New comment by xt00 in "Eric Schmidt speech about AI booed during graduation"

xt00 — Mon, 18 May 2026 12:34:02 +0000

Tons of CEOs right now keep saying “young people need to learn how to use AI to be successful” and also “we aren’t planning to hire any new college grads due to AI”.. so which one is it.. seems everybody understands the super pro AI CEOs want to lay off nearly the entire company and run it on skeleton crew with a ton of AI and get ultra rich. While “some other” companies should totally hire lots of young people but not them.. where does that end?

New comment by xt00 in "I did no work for a year and no one noticed"

xt00 — Mon, 27 Apr 2026 20:25:46 +0000

And if you want to divide up the world along a couple of axes into job usefulness and how much the worker cares, then the author of the article was in the “useless job and cared”, while you are in the quadrant of caring and have a useful job best I can tell — which is great. Some people have useless jobs and don’t care much about their job but are happy to get paid. If you for example are a teacher of small children who depend upon you and you basically don’t care then that’s problematic while having a BS job that you care about a lot about is probably mostly an organizational / bad management situation.

New comment by xt00 in "Google plans to invest up to $40B in Anthropic"

xt00 — Fri, 24 Apr 2026 19:51:20 +0000

At this point if you have cash or compute credits laying around in the tens of billions, better to hedge your bets than to find out the winner that took all was not you.

New comment by xt00 in "US Bill Mandates On-Device Age Verification"

xt00 — Fri, 17 Apr 2026 04:19:23 +0000

Do we know who is funding this? is this one of these things where Meta doesn't want the responsibility for this, so they are pushing to have the OS have the responsibility or something like that?

New comment by xt00 in "Android’s new sideload settings will carry over to new devices"

xt00 — Sat, 28 Mar 2026 21:15:03 +0000

How long before there is a "we've detected your account has been used multiple times to re-setup a phone.. we've re-enabled the Google Nanny Safety mode.. also we've locked your google account just in case.. " I mean other than hackers, who has needed to factory reset their phone more than once in a year you must be doing something shady... right right?

New comment by xt00 in "Faster asin() was hiding in plain sight"

xt00 — Thu, 12 Mar 2026 01:15:39 +0000

When you say "this is NOT from Hastings" I had to double check my post again -- I guess you are saying that the Pade approximation is not from Hastings, but the polynomial approximation that the OP referenced from nvidia from A&S and ultimately from Hastings, definitely is in Hastings on page 159 -- I think you were referring to the Pade approximation not being in Hastings, which appears to be true yes. In the article it is interesting that the OP tried taylor expansion and pade approximation, but not the fairly standard "welp lets just fit a Nth order polynomial to the arcsin" which is what Hastings did back in the day.

New comment by xt00 in "Faster asin() was hiding in plain sight"

xt00 — Wed, 11 Mar 2026 16:43:18 +0000

To be accurate, this is originally from Hastings 1955, Princeton "APPROXIMATIONS FOR DIGITAL COMPUTERS BY CECIL HASTINGS", page 159-163, there are actually multiple versions of the approximation with different constants used. So the original work was done with the goal of being performant for computers of the 1950's. Then the famous Abramowitz and Stegun guys put that in formula 4.4.45 with permission, then the nvidia CG library wrote some code that was based upon the formula, likely with some optimizations.

New comment by xt00 in "Americans are destroying Flock surveillance cameras"

xt00 — Mon, 23 Feb 2026 22:30:07 +0000

I imagine there is a process in place to allow cities / states / communities to place the cameras on polls. If Vegas somehow got around public comment process to put these on poles, then what would stop any random company from requesting to put their own camera there? Like lets say a motivated individual went through some process to put a camera on a pole someplace near somebody that would definitely make the govt official / flock exec etc nervous, what is stopping them? It sounds an awful lot like Flock is basically going to town's and saying "we will put up a bunch of cameras in a bunch of places" probably based upon algorithm's etc. How do they decide where these get put, who gets to decide that? Why can't any random company request to put up a camera on a random power pole? After they give the map to the govt officials, do they get a chance to say "oh this one by my house, can you move that?"

New comment by xt00 in "Nvidia-backed Starcloud trains first AI model in space, orbital data centers"

xt00 — Mon, 15 Dec 2025 23:05:47 +0000

Yea I’m super curious if you could build a heat pump to move the heat from the 100C GPUs to concentrate all of the heat into a blazingly hot radiator — and how well that would actually work.

New comment by xt00 in "Nvidia-backed Starcloud trains first AI model in space, orbital data centers"

xt00 — Mon, 15 Dec 2025 07:05:29 +0000

So using Stefan-Boltzmann equation if you have a 1m^2 surface at 100C you can radiate about 1kW from that surface -- assuming both sides radiate that, then lets assume it is double. Assume each blackwell chip + support electronics etc needs about 2kW of power to run. So each 1sq meter of say a copper plate is needed to cool 1 blackwell chip. So if you have some way to make some massive radiators that are basically giant plates spanning thousands of square meters, then you should be good. the Stefan-Boltzmann equation is proportional to the 4th power of T (in kelvin), so if you can somehow manage to use a heat pump for the heat from the GPU's into your heat sink such that you could run your radiators at a much hotter temperature, then the blackbody radiation that they put out dramatically goes up. So cooling is quite challenging but not impossible. (I also neglected importantly that you would need to use the giant solar panels as a sun shade for these radiators otherwise they would be pulling in heat from the sun)

For power, you need to somehow manage to generate all of the power that you would need to cool. So the most logical would be some huge solar panels -- assuming you could use similar tech to the space station, you can get aroudnd 100kW from those solar panels -- assume you can do say 10X better somehow, then now you have 1MW of power.

Unclear what the goal here is -- if the idea was doing this for cost, it sounds super unlikely to pan out -- if they want to put a datacenter in space such that nobody can tell somebody what to do, it would seem just as easy to go hide a datacenter in some random far flung corner of the world in a bunker. Seems just like a great way to light some money on fire.

New comment by xt00 in "I want everything local – Building my offline AI workspace"

xt00 — Fri, 08 Aug 2025 19:33:33 +0000

Yea in an ideal world there would be a legal construct around AI agents in the cloud doing something on your behalf that could not be blocked by various stakeholders deciding they don't like the thing you are doing even if totally legal. Things that would be considered fair use, or maybe annoying to certain companies should not be easy for companies to just wholesale block by leveraging business relationships. Barring that, then yea, a local AI setup is the way to go.

New comment by xt00 in "Intel CEO Letter to Employees"

xt00 — Thu, 24 Jul 2025 22:07:36 +0000

Inference / Agentic AI implies "running models performantly using CPU cores" most likely (maybe with some optimizations / special AVX512 stuff) -- so essentially "welp, no sense in trying to build GPU's, we are too far behind nvidia to catch up".

New comment by xt00 in "AI overviews cause massive drop in search clicks"

xt00 — Wed, 23 Jul 2025 20:50:11 +0000

Yea it is tricky for them -- the old model of "search, see google text / link ad, scroll, click website, scroll, see some ads on that page as well, done" will be replaced with "search, see google text / link ad, read AI result, 'and here are some relevant websites'" -- where all of the incentives there will be to "go into more depth" on the websites that are linked there.

New comment by xt00 in "McKinsey Leans on AI to Make PowerPoints, Draft Proposals"

xt00 — Sun, 15 Jun 2025 22:59:01 +0000

Makes sense — the people getting the presentation will just use AI to summarize it :)

New comment by xt00 in "AOSP isn't dead, but Google just landed a blow to custom ROM developers"

xt00 — Thu, 12 Jun 2025 19:18:40 +0000

The classic "we are taking something away in order to help you -- don't worry!"

In reality, nobody who works on bringing android to other hardware is somehow impeded by having extra device tree info in the source tree.

The most logical thing happening here is like Google is saying "hey man its hard to get drivers working, and we don't want a bunch of freeloaders leveraging our work!!"

New comment by xt00 in "We broke down the Sam Altman and Jony Ive video"

xt00 — Mon, 26 May 2025 01:00:21 +0000

The fact that Sam says he would open his laptop to ask Chatgpt something is almost like he is trying to avoid saying he would use his phone.

The reality is that we likely don't need any new devices as much as people want to keep saying that. If you have airpods and a phone you could talk to chatgpt and say "show me how to fix my kid's bike with a simple video on my phone" -- it buzzes your phone and boom the video is there. Sure it is missing the ability to take a picture of the world / video -- so in that case, a pair of the meta rayban glasses would do that -- again just use your phone / cloud, it all works. Or skip the special glasses and hold your phone up to the thing you want to take a picture of. No need for magical new devices.

Having a camera staring at me while I talk to somebody -- yea I'm gonna pass on that.

New comment by xt00 in "Introducing deep research"

xt00 — Mon, 03 Feb 2025 00:42:22 +0000

"will find, analyze, and synthesize hundreds of online sources"

Synthesize? Seems like the wrong word -- I think they would want to say something like, "analyze, and synthesize useful outputs from hundreds of online sources"..

New comment by xt00 in "Matt Mullenweg, Automattic's CEO, Seems Bound and Determined to Wreck WordPress"

xt00 — Tue, 21 Jan 2025 01:22:50 +0000

Wreck wordpress? doesn't seem like it -- seems like a classic "somebody pseudo forked my open-source-ish product / project and they became too popular".. so I'm going to try to prevent fragmentation / somebody else "making money off of all my hard work" kind of thing.

New comment by xt00 in "I am rich and have no idea what to do"

xt00 — Thu, 02 Jan 2025 23:10:10 +0000

His attention span won't be enough to stick with physics for longer than 4 weeks.. he should just apply his skills in building companies to hire a couple of people to work on cool stuff that he is excited about. A good approach is to find some smart grad students at a local university who are in electrical engineering probably since you have to know lots of physics to get there and say "hey i have some money, want to build some cool prototypes?" and the best part is you can just ask those grad students how all this physics stuff works and they will happily tell you whatever you want to know.