tacticalturtle (u/tacticalturtle)

tacticalturtle commented on Ask HN: Why hasn't x86 caught up with Apple M series? · Posted by u/stephenheron

alt227 · a day ago

Any downvoters care to actually leave me a reply telling me why?

Im not wrong!

You might find these posts informative:

https://chipsandcheese.com/p/arm-or-x86-isa-doesnt-matter

https://chipsandcheese.com/p/why-x86-doesnt-need-to-die

All instructions across x86 and Arm are being decoded to micro-operations, which are implementation specific. You could have an implementation which prioritizes performance, or an implementation that prioritizes power consumption, regardless of the ISA.

Decoding instructions, particularly on a modern die, doesn’t consume a significant amount of area or power, even for complicated variable length instructions.

tacticalturtle commented on Waymo granted permit to begin testing in New York City cnbc.com/2025/08/22/waymo... · Posted by u/achristmascarl

massung · 5 days ago

I haven’t lived in NYC, but I have lived in Boston. Isn’t the real concern winter? Has Waymo (or any other self driving tech company) shown that it can handle the snow well: non-visible lanes, downshifting to avoid braking, etc.?

Definitely interested in how this turns out.

tacticalturtle · 5 days ago

Even if they never actually solve winter driving, they could just… not drive during the winter?

If there’s a high probability of below freezing temperatures, cars can just make their way out of the city to some parking lot to hunker down.

Or move them elsewhere in the country during the winter months.

tacticalturtle commented on Pebble Time 2 Design Reveal [video] youtube.com/watch?v=pcPzm... · Posted by u/net01

numpad0 · 14 days ago

For those confused like I was:

  - Pebble 2 Duo: $149, B&W, original Pebble look
  - Pebble Time 2: $225, color, new round square look
  * both with intended IPX8, 30-day battery, "e-paper" aka gameboy style LCD, suite of sensors, Pebble app compatibility

tacticalturtle · 14 days ago

Did they give up on the “Core” branding?

When I was looking at this a month ago it was the “Core 2 Duo”

https://ericmigi.com/blog/introducing-two-new-pebbleos-watch...

Maybe Intel had a word?

tacticalturtle commented on Trump Orders National Guard to Washington and Takeover of Capital’s Police nytimes.com/live/2025/08/... · Posted by u/Tadpole9181

pohl · 17 days ago

A staged "carjacking" that the police got lucky enough to "stumble upon" — the "victim" of which just so happened to be the DOGE employee known as "Big Balls" — isn't enough justification for the presence of the National Guard for you?

tacticalturtle · 16 days ago

Not a fan of the national guard deployment, but I don’t see why they would bother staging a carjacking when they can reference the very real murder of a congressional intern last month.

In fact that’s actually what they’re doing:

https://www.cbsnews.com/amp/boston/news/president-trump-wash...

tacticalturtle commented on What happens when housing prices go down? clmarohn.substack.com/p/w... · Posted by u/chmaynard

alexb_ · a month ago

What? Strong Towns is not just their "content creation", they ARE local organizations. You might have a chapter in your city. This criticism tells me that you don't know what Strong Towns is, what they do, the actual specific policy guidelines they come up with and push that have real influence on local city planning.

Strong Towns gives actionable proposals all the time, and their main purpose is local organizations to actually do local change. To accuse them of being a content creation scheme that does no organizing tells me that you have not looked into this at all and are making immediate assumptions based on the aesthetics of their content.

tacticalturtle · a month ago

Yeah I think my original comment was too cynical and misplaced when lumping in all of the Strong Towns organization with Not Just Bikes style content. I’ll read through what they have today.

Admittedly my experience might be colored by the fact that they don’t seem to have much of a presence in my home town of Boston - it’s more other groups like the Cyclist Union showing up at meetings carrying forward things like bike lane advocacy, etc.

tacticalturtle commented on What happens when housing prices go down? clmarohn.substack.com/p/w... · Posted by u/chmaynard

rwarfield · a month ago

This article is a mess. From the third paragraph:

> What happens when prices actually start to fall? Because that’s not just a hypothetical. It’s already happening in places like Phoenix, Atlanta, Miami, Dallas...

Then two paragraphs later

> In The Atlantic, Rogé Karma recently pointed out that housing prices are rising fastest in the very cities once seen as escapes from high-cost coasts, places like Phoenix and Dallas...

So which is it?

There is truth to the fact that the way the housing market is intertwined with the financial markets creates some risk, but those risks are manageable - a nationwide downturn in housing prices is exactly the kind of scenario addressed by the Fed's stress tests for banks.

The article is full of bizarre logic. An increase in housing supply leads to a fall in prices, which leads to a fall in supply? No, in fact the conclusion contradicts the premise. The author is making the classic econ 101 mistake of confusing the supply curve (which is supply as a function of price) and quantity supplied.

And finally the author explains his own solution which is... an increase in supply! But only the kind of supply he approves of ("small scale, incremental development"). Left unexplained is why this type of supply, if carried out on sufficient scale, wouldn't have the negative financial effects he worries about.

tacticalturtle · a month ago

As soon as I saw it was the founder of Strong Towns it all made sense.

Strong Towns, Not Just Bikes, and all those content creators are fulfilling the “hobby” of city planning (ie, watching hours of city planning YouTube videos, but never actually organizing at a local level)

This is a really great video about one man’s experience with trying to improve his community, getting involved in local government, and his criticism that the city planning YouTubers always gloss over what this actually looks like - they just point out what we’re doing wrong.

https://youtu.be/bUs0ecnbOdo?si=8dVweyWfvIF5ddg-

So I think that’s why the logic doesn’t make sense. It’s not meant to be actionable. It’s meant to be easily digestible so that people participating in the hobby can feel enlightened.

tacticalturtle commented on Meta announces new data centers engadget.com/ai/meta-anno... · Posted by u/ksec

barbazoo · a month ago

From https://www.eesi.org/articles/view/data-centers-and-water-co...

> Large data centers can consume up to 5 million gallons per day, equivalent to the water use of a town populated by 10,000 to 50,000 people.

Doesn't seem to be a closed system.

tacticalturtle · a month ago

That article has been posted several times in this thread.

But that article lists out several solutions for using water cooling - one of which is evaporative. And another mentioned is closed loop.

How do we know which solution Meta is using here?

tacticalturtle commented on Open letter accuses BBC board member of having a conflict of interest on Gaza theguardian.com/media/202... · Posted by u/mhga

bigyabai · 2 months ago

A lot of the flagged posts look completely fine, to me. Basically the entire discussion is greyed out, which suggests a pretty intense unwillingness to talk about the subject on principles alone.

I think by playing the brinksmanship card of "there can be no level-headed discussion" you inadvertently discount a lot of perfectly coherent and important digression, on both sides. If every HN thread resorted to this logic, nobody would want to use the site.

tacticalturtle · 2 months ago

I think the flag system in HN is unnecessary and prone to abuse in threads like these.

Some comments that clearly break the rules should be removed by the community. But that should take multiple downvotes.

The flagging just allows one or two people to remove a part of the discussion, and we rely on other users to view dead or flagged comments to “rescue” them

tacticalturtle commented on Open letter accuses BBC board member of having a conflict of interest on Gaza theguardian.com/media/202... · Posted by u/mhga

strictnein · 2 months ago

> Off-Topic: Most stories about politics

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

edit: honestly, look at the comment quality on this post. There's a reason that HN should avoid purely political stuff like this.

tacticalturtle · 2 months ago

You can look at the post history of some of the comments here - some of the most prolific commenters in this thread appear to only comment on the Israel/Palestine conflict.