CyLith (u/CyLith) - Readit News

CyLith commented on The wonder of modern drywall worksinprogress.news/p/th... · Posted by u/jger15

nkrisc · a month ago

It's not really a drywall problem, but a drawback of the usual construction method. If you insulate the interior walls then noise isn't really a problem. Of course, most builders are not insulating or noise-proofing interior walls, so there you have it. I suppose with other building materials (bricks, concrete blocks) you get the solution "for free", so to speak.

CyLith · a month ago

My house is plastered, and it is substantially more soundproofed than drywalled houses in the neighborhood. It is not a function of the construction method, since my house is stick framed just like my neighbors.

CyLith commented on Y Combinator CEO Garry Tan launches dark-money group to influence CA politics missionlocal.org/2026/02/... · Posted by u/computerliker

diggyhole · a month ago

Garry has tweeted about the violence his peers have had to endure in SF so I don't blame him for putting his money where is mouth is.

CyLith · a month ago

Perhaps he should reflect on why they deserve this violence, instead of giving people more reason for violence against him.

CyLith commented on Making niche solutions is the point ntietz.com/blog/making-ni... · Posted by u/evakhoury

Bayart · 2 months ago

I've been telling myself that for as long as 3D-printing has been consumer tech (about 20 years ?) and now it's shifted to "I'll borrow one my friends' printers if needs be".

In truth every time an issue fit for 3D printing has come up in my life, I solved it easily with wood and cardboard. I'm starting to recognize I might be a craftsman at heart.

CyLith · 2 months ago

I have had a similar experience; my preferred material to work with is wood. However, as I got more into tinkering with electronics and vintage computing, I'm finding more instances where wood does not achieve sufficient strength-to-weight ratio, especially for small parts where wood grain and anisotropy becomes a significant factor to consider.

CyLith commented on ICE using Palantir tool that feeds on Medicaid data eff.org/deeplinks/2026/01... · Posted by u/JKCalhoun

llbbdd · 2 months ago

There's a popular video on YouTube of him eating skin peeled from his foot during a lecture at a college. Not AI, very old, repellant to normal people.

CyLith · 2 months ago

I was in the room and personally witnessed that. It definitely changed my opinion of him and not in a good way.

CyLith commented on Ask HN: Share your personal website · Posted by u/susam

CyLith · 2 months ago

My extremely out of date never updated site: http://victorliu.info

My also out of date but slightly less so page: https://victorliu.neocities.org

Maybe now I will be inspired to actually update these.

CyLith commented on When would you ever want bubblesort? (2023) buttondown.com/hillelwayn... · Posted by u/atan2

CyLith · 3 months ago

When sorting eigenpairs of a dense matrix, usually tou end up with a Schur decomposition. The basic operation that you can do is swap two adjacent eigenvalues on the diagonal, so bubblesort is a natural candidate.

CyLith commented on We Rarely Lose Technology (2023) hopefulmons.com/p/we-rare... · Posted by u/akkartik

CyLith · 6 months ago

We are constantly losing technology as the treadmill of technological progress continues. Casette tapes, CRT displays, and perhaps photographic film are some examples. One can argue that there are "strictly better" technologies available now, but there are always niche cases where the new and obsolete technology are not quite fungible. What if for some reason a modern industry gets wiped out? Then we'd have to revisit the lost art.

As an immediate example, my wife's business needs p-channel small signal JFETs. These apparently are no longer fabricated, and with the way the semiconductor industry moves, they are likely never coming back in any appreciable quantity. So once the world's supply of obsoleted semiconductors dries up, the technology will basically be lost.

CyLith commented on God created the real numbers ethanheilman.com/x/34/ind... · Posted by u/Bogdanp

andrewla · 7 months ago

I loosely identify with the schools of intuitinalism/construtivism/finitism. Primary idea is that the Law of the Excluded Middle is not meaningful.

So yes, generally not starting with ZFC.

I can't speak to "truth" in that sense. The skepticism here is skepticism of the utility of the ideas stemming from Cantor's Paradise. It ends up in a very naval-gazing place where you prove obviously false things (like Banach-Tarski) from the axioms but have no way to map these wildly non-constructive ideas back into the real world. Or where you construct a version of the reals where the reals that we can produce via any computation is a set of measure 0 in the reals.

CyLith · 7 months ago

I don't understand why you believe Banach-Tarski to be obviously false. All that BT tells me is that matter is not modeled by a continuum since matter is composed of discrete atoms. This says nothing of the falsity of BT or the continuum.

CyLith commented on Open hardware desktop 3D printing is dead? josefprusa.com/articles/o... · Posted by u/rcarmo

the__alchemist · 7 months ago

This is a microcosm of what's happening all over the physical device world, and manufacturing: Everyone (Except Prusa; thank you for your service!) outside of China is forgetting and losing capabilities.

My Raise3D printer is high quality and reliable. It's a nice piece of hardware. The PCBs I order from JLC are high-quality, built-to-specs, and whenever there's an error, it's a design fault. They are cheap, and arrive in 10 days.

I don't like the idea of being this dependent on China, but it's where we are. Weaponizing patents a risk? Problem. Placing the knowledge of how to build civilization in a single country? Problem. At least someone is carrying the torch forward, so it could be worse.

CyLith · 7 months ago

> Everyone ... outside of China is forgetting and losing capabilities.

To me this is the fundamental problem with the notion of intellectual property and its protection: so much of it is trade secret and undocumented (let's be real, we disclose as little in patents as we can get away with). Companies come and go, and in the process, institutional knowledge of how to do things is lost because there is no incentive to make it public for others to replicate. This also means that once lost, it must be rediscovered later.

CyLith commented on Bezier-rs – algorithms for Bézier segments and shapes graphite.rs/libraries/bez... · Posted by u/jarek-foksa

LegionMammal978 · 7 months ago

This library has a very interesting algorithm for computing the curve point closest to a given point, seemingly based on a root-finder that doesn't need any complex numbers. Does anyone know of any resources about such an algorithm?

CyLith · 7 months ago

The library only solves up to cubic equations, and the comments have a link to the following page: https://momentsingraphics.de/CubicRoots.html

For general polynomials, it matters a great deal in what basis it is represented. The typical monomial basis is usually not the best from a numerical standpoint. I am aware of some modern methods such as this: https://arxiv.org/pdf/1611.02435

For polynomials expressed in e.g. a Bernstein basis, there are often much faster and stable tailored methods working solving for the eigenvalues of a companion matrix of a different form.