jononor (u/jononor) - Readit News

jononor commented on AI coding is sexy, but accounting is the real low-hanging automation target · Posted by u/bmadduma

notahacker · 4 days ago

Lots of this is already being done (and using computers to check books balanced predates latest gen AI by some decades). But of course what accountants actually get paid for is tax strategy, edge cases, messy history and talking to authorities (or at least having their stamp of approval on it if the authorities come calling). There's plenty of market for writing software to automate aspects of invoice reconciliation or monitoring accounts for exceptions, but competition already exists...

jononor · 3 days ago

At the SMB scale accountants are mostly paid to coach/pester/goade the employees to hand in the necessary paperwork in time. The accountants job is relatively quick from there on.

jononor commented on Should CSS be constraints? pavpanchekha.com/blog/why... · Posted by u/pavpanchekha

Inviz · 5 days ago

If I am to provide a summary of why layout shouldnt be linear constraints, is that it can't faithfully represent content overflowing onto multiple lines. I.e. it's inherently one dimensional. I.e. you can't really have a layout that adaprts to the screen size without creating a lot of separate breakpoints. This is a big limitation, that for example flexbox doesnt have. When I left Grid i immediately went and reproduced a lot of stuff we've been doing in (new then) flexbox layout engine, and i was like: Oh my god, this is so much more powerful.

jononor · 4 days ago

Good point about overflow. Did you ever do any write-ups about your flexbox experiments, or constraints for layout more generally?

jononor commented on Should CSS be constraints? pavpanchekha.com/blog/why... · Posted by u/pavpanchekha

Inviz · 5 days ago

Hello Jon! This is Yarik. Cool to see you doing all this machine learning work these days.

jononor · 4 days ago

Hi Yarik! Nice to hear from you again. Hope all is well :)

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

addaon · 4 days ago

The article, and many of the responses, are hinting at the fact that bubblesort is an example of an anytime algorithm. This is a wide class of algorithms which provide a correct answer after some amount of time, but provide an increasingly good answer in increasing amounts of time short of the completion time. This is a super valuable property for real time systems (and many of the comments about games and animations discuss that). The paper that introduced me to the category is "Anytime Dynamic A*" [0], and I think it's both a good paper and a good algorithm to know.

[0] https://cdn.aaai.org/ICAPS/2005/ICAPS05-027.pdf

jononor · 4 days ago

Anytime algorithms are great for robotics planning, for example. A plan does not have to be perfect to be useful, especially when it can be refined further in the next timestep. And the robot cannot act out the plan instantaneously, so by the time one is close to the point where a non-ideal segment would be, one has had many timesteps to refine/optimize it. But robot could start moving right away.

jononor commented on CATL expects oceanic electric ships in three years cleantechnica.com/2025/12... · Posted by u/thelastgallon

jillesvangurp · 7 days ago

Here's some back of the envelope math for batteries and ships:

- Weight is less of a limitation than you would think. Ship size is measured in tonnage. 40K-60K is a medium sized cargo carrying ship. So lets assume a ship like that.

- Battery weight calculations are going to be key. If you assume 170 wh/kg, 6 tonnes of battery equals about 1 mwh of battery.

- Energy usage of ships is speed dependent and it's a non linear relationship. You can save a lot of energy by going a bit slower. Going about 15 knots, a ship like this might use 15mw of power.

So the math becomes something like 6 x 15 = 90 tons of battery per hour. 5000km is about 2700 nautical miles (1 knot == 1 nautical mile/hour). So, you need about 180 hours of battery. Or about 16200 tons for a total of 15mwh x 180 = 2.7gwh of energy. That's a big battery.

The real limitation here comes from the cost of the batteries, which is dropping fast with sodium ion. The reason CATL is bringing this up is because they've been doing similar math with some informed $/kwh math. If they can get it down to around 20$/kwh, a mwh would cost 20K, and a gwh would cost 20M. So the battery would cost 54M$.

The key here is that this is still assuming 15knots. Energy usage might drop considerably if you drop it to 10 knots or even lower. You might only need 7200 tons of battery at those speeds.

The ship can handle the weight either way, though you are sacrificing useful load of course. The real constraints here are cost and speed. You pay a fat premium for a fast ship. Of course ships this size aren't cheap. A few tens of millions is normal. And they burn through many millions worth of fuel per year too. So, even though that amount of battery is expensive, the math might actually work out to these ships being cheap enough to operate that they'd earn back their battery.

You'd have to be pretty bullish about cost and performance of batteries. But CATL clearly feels that way. They have several battery chemistries at their disposal with higher densities (and cost). Over time, batteries might get cheaper and more dense. Ship designs might be optimized for batteries (e.g. structural hulls with battery). There's a lot of wiggle room here. But it's not an impossible proposition.

jononor · 7 days ago

If we could only complement that battery with a small nuclear reactor, then we'd be in business. Come to think of it, shipping would be quite interesting for a SpaceX style disruption - there is a market for many many thousands of units - enough to actually get good at building them in a repeatable fashion. Of course there are considerable engineering and political challenges, to put it mildly.

jononor commented on Should CSS be constraints? pavpanchekha.com/blog/why... · Posted by u/pavpanchekha

jononor · 7 days ago

Grid Style Sheets / GSS was an implementation of this idea. https://gss.github.io/guides/ccss

I saw was because I do not think anyone has used or maintained it since the company behind went belly up. But the code is still out there as open source, probably can be learned from.

Disclaimer: I used to contract for them, but in other areas.

jononor commented on Linux Instal Fest Belgrade dmz.rs/lif2025_en... · Posted by u/ubavic

swed420 · 9 days ago

Depends on what the main goals are.

First time users might appreciate seeing the USB drive method since that's probably what they'd attempt next time at home.

jononor · 8 days ago

Yeah the USB stick enables the participants to replicate it more easily at home or with friends etc. Encouraging that the participants are in the driver seat also helps with this.

jononor commented on YouTuber accidentally crashes the rare plant market with viral cloning technique dexerto.com/youtube/youtu... · Posted by u/StrangeSound

pixl97 · 10 days ago

>Plants in Jars admitted that, while she’s far from the first person to popularize tissue culture, her tutorials and videos explaining the method have likely been a significant driver in its growth within the plant collecting community, leading to a big change in the overall market.

Sometimes a good instructor makes all the difference in the world.

jononor · 10 days ago

And sharing/spreading the knowledge widely. If 1000x are doing something smart vs a few here and there, makes a huge difference in a marketplace.

jononor commented on Claude 4.5 Opus’ Soul Document lesswrong.com/posts/vpNG9... · Posted by u/the-needful

ahel · 12 days ago

You don't keep violent and intelligent animal as pets, you keep them in cages at the zoo.

jononor · 12 days ago

Or domesticate them. A superintelligence could probably figure out how to do that with humans, _if_ they saw a reason for it.

jononor commented on Beej's Guide to Learning Computer Science beej.us/guide/bglcs/... · Posted by u/amruthreddi

BeetleB · 13 days ago

> You don’t see investment bankers / lawyers / management consultants / etc. go on about side projects, leveling up their skills during the weekend, and other things that are considered completely normal in this industry.

Maybe not side projects, but their work schedules can be insane when compared to the typical SW engineer.

jononor · 12 days ago

High performing types in those areas network a lot, and just as much off the clock (or more) as on. From those I know, many of them seem to pick hobbies, friends, holidays, activities, gym, etc that is compatible with connecting with the right people. And that is considered very normal, more ore less expected if aiming for partner type roles.