computator

12 days agodiscuss

Not a technical talk but he gave testimony a month ago: "OpenAI co-founder and former chief scientist Ilya Sutskever said his stake in the ChatGPT maker is worth roughly $7 billion, making him one of the largest individual shareholders. Sutskever confirmed the size of his stake in response to a question from Elon Musk’s attorney on Monday [May 11, 2026] during his testimony in a closely watched trial between the world’s richest man and OpenAI." [1]

[1] https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2026-05-11/sutskever...

computator

4 months agodiscuss

This trend story about wired headphones is possibly a "submarine" story as Paul Graham calls it[1], like a headline that "Suits make a corporate comeback":

"The suit is back," it begins. Trend articles like this are almost always the work of PR firms. Once you know how to read them, it's straightforward to figure out who the client is. With trend stories, PR firms usually line up one or more "experts" to talk about the industry generally. In this case we get three: the NPD Group, the creative director of GQ, and a research director at Smith Barney. When you get to the end of the experts, look for the client. And bingo, there it is: The Men's Wearhouse.

[1] https://paulgraham.com/submarine.html

computator

5 months agodiscuss

Although I liked the video of the artist working, I didn't appreciate that they took away the controls to pause, play, seek. Is there a workaround to get back the playback controls on websites that disable it?

computator

5 months agodiscuss

I have a weird long-shot idea for GPT to make a new discovery in physics: Ask it to find a mathematical relationship between some combination of the fundamental physical constants[1]. If it finds (for example) a formula that relates electron mass, Bohr radius, and speed of light to a high degree of precision, that might indicate an area of physics to explore further if those constants were thought to be independent.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_physical_constants

computator

6 months agodiscuss

> if your ISP-side modem directly outputs digital audio, the downstream channel capacity is significantly higher

But why is it higher? It's still an analog channel (the last mile from the ISP to your house), right? Doesn't it get filtered? So isn't it still subject to the Shannon-Nyquist limit?

Here's an ASCII drawing of which parts are digital vs analog as I understood your explanation:

  Rest of world<--- digital--->Telco<---digital--->ISPmodem<---analog--->HomeModem

Suppose you're saying that the link between the ISPmodem and the HomeModem is a bare unfiltered copper wire. In that case, I have a different question: Couldn't you send data at megabits per seconds over a mile long copper wire without using modems at all (using just UARTs?).

I hope you can clear up my confusion.

computator

6 months agodiscuss

But l and I (ell and eye) are identical in Inter.

https://fonts.google.com/specimen/Inter?preview.text=lllll%2...

I never understood why a font designer would ever choose to do that. There should be an ironclad rule that different letters must look different.

computator

7 months agodiscuss

The Costco one uses household current (as can be seen in one of the photos that shows a cord and a plug) and the AliExpress uses USB. I doubt that USB can supply enough power to do more than a trivial amount of heating. USB 3.1 has a max of 15W, and I can't imagine that a $25 blanket is going to use the more sophisticated USB Power Delivery connections where even the cable & charger can cost more than $25.

While trying to find the actual power consumption of the Costco model, I found this very useful comment on the Costco site: "The power consumption is not listed anywhere - product packaging, website, or included manual. I went ahead and made the purchase and hooked it up to my battery unit once I got home. I can confirm, the blanket uses an average 99W regardless of which mode it's in. I left it in each mode for about 5 minutes. There's no difference to the touch of the blanket and there's no difference with the power consumption. In other words this blanket has one heat setting and it's not very warm."

So disappointing.

computator

8 months agodiscuss

> But oh what a difference it makes in the accounting! In the first case, where Autodesk sold the copy of AutoCAD to the dealer, that was the whole transaction; whatever happened to the copy of AutoCAD after the dealer paid for it has no effect on Autodesk’s books. Autodesk sells, dealer pays, end of story. But in the second case, when Autodesk sells to Spacely Sprockets, that appears on Autodesk’s ledger as a sale of AutoCAD for $1000. The instant the $1000 shows up, however, we immediately cut a check for the commission, $500, and mail it to the representative, leaving the same $500 we’d get from the dealer. Same difference, right? Not if you’re an accountant! In the first case, Autodesk made a sale for $500 and ended up, after expenses and taxes, with $125, and therefore is operating with a 25% margin (125/500). In the Spacely sale, however, the books show we sold the product for $1000, yet wound up only with the same $125. So now our margins are a mere 12.5% (125/1000).

I'd like to know how an accountant would respond to the above. Based on his two examples, it seems like accounting rules really distort the financial picture of a company.

computator

7 years agodiscuss

The top Google hit for "yices alarm" is currently the exact Hacker News comment you've replied to. I wonder if Google adapted its search results based on that very comment? Maybe their algorithms shrewdly give more weight to fixing search results when the context mentions Google ("I googled for...", "Google didn't work when...", etc.) and the site is high profile (like HN). That would be very crafty.

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