ragmondo's comments

ragmondo | 12 days ago | on: Ask HN: What Are You Working On? (March 2026)

I'm working on an IoT networked, time sync'd "Smart Dealer Poker Button" - replacing the plastic thing that gets passed around from the current dealer to the next dealer with a IoT display that informs players what level the blinds are etc etc.

Provisional patents went in recently so don't mind broadcasting to a wider audience beyond my poor, unknowing, testers

You can see it working here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G5Xup3kB1D0 and I literally put up a holding page for some media related surges (as it's all self hosted etc and I didn't want to mix my functional stuff with my spikey stuff) here ( name to be worked on, but "NUTS" is the current one) : https://buttonsqueeze.com

ragmondo | 7 months ago | on: Prime Number Grid

Here's a weird relationship between consecutive primes that I discovered while bored trying some python...

Take the last digit (in base 10) of consecutive primes. Now ignore 2 and 5 as .. well they only occur once, and look at the mapping between 1->3, 1->5, 1->7, 1->9 ... 3->1 etc etc..

You would think that they would pretty much all be equal, I mean primes are "random" right?

WRONG!

There are statistically significant differences in those edges, and no-one knows why.

ragmondo | 11 months ago | on: Benchmarking LLM social skills with an elimination game

It shows "state of mind" - i.e. the capability to understand another entities view of the world, and how that is influenced by their actions and other entities actions in the public chat.

I am curious about the prompt given to each AI ? Is that public ?

ragmondo | 1 year ago | on: The era of open voice assistants

Without trying to digress, but why not make it modular too ? I.e. base model is a smart switch, one unit is the “base” unit and the rest talk to that. Possibly even add further switches, dials (thermostat or dimmer etc). Perfect placement in my opinion.

ragmondo | 1 year ago | on: The era of open voice assistants

Yes - exactly this. If there are multiple needed, then some can be smarter/ more capable than others, but this removes the “just another box and cable(s)” issue.

ragmondo | 1 year ago | on: The era of open voice assistants

My plea / request : Make a home assistant a DROP IN replacement for a standard light switch. It has power, its adds functionality from the get-go (smart lighting), it’s placed in a convenient position for the room and no extra wires etc required.

ragmondo | 2 years ago | on: Meta outage

Doesn't this kind of thing happen in every film regarding an AI becoming sentient ??

ragmondo | 2 years ago | on: ELI5: What, really, is an NFT?

^ This.

100% (yes the literal 100%) of media regarding NFTs is purely about NFT art and it annoys the shit out of me. The fact that there is free form data (with some generally accepted fields used for consistency), and that this data can be owned and provably traced back to the originator is remarkably powerful Re: the poster's above example of a wedding certificate is a great example.

The most frustrating thing about this tech was the goldrush that happened and the inevitable crash. I view myself as something of a "pragmatic visionary" (yes self-proclaimed) and to see this tech completely abused was both confusing and crushing. I'm on the verge of releasing a platform that, underneath it all, uses NFTs because they have great use-cases, but none of the marketing material mentions it due to the fact that the media have wrecked the public's opinion of NFTs.

If I had to come up with an analogy, I would say that NFT art was akin to the Model-T coming out and the only use was people driving around a track and having a picture taken of them driving around a track. Yes you can do that but you've completely missed the point.

ragmondo | 13 years ago | on: BTC $141 USD

Anonymity is not really the selling feature of bitcoin - in fact it really only offers pseudo-anonymity.

The fact that no-one else can just "print" bitcoins, and that you can transfer funds at internet speed to anybody else anywhere in the world and that (after a short time), the transaction cannot be reversed are the main utilities.

ragmondo | 13 years ago | on: BTC $141 USD

To enable hedging, someone would have to take a forward position in USD/BTC .. and at the moment, the market is in contango ( see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Contango ) which means that the sentiment is that the price will continue to increase for the near term ... ie you'd have to be very brave indeed in order to put a limit on the expected BTC price.

ragmondo | 13 years ago | on: Remark: The most efficient inbox in the world?

?? what did I just authorise ?? Sorry.. I have no idea what you are doing with my data and I regretted almost immediately the "grant permission" thing when it just said "Thanks ! You are now going to be 99% more efficient !". I couldn't find the revoke access button fast enough !

ragmondo | 13 years ago | on: Bitcoin blockchain issue - Mt Gox Bitcoin deposits temporarily suspended

bzzt wrong. Most pools payout only after 100-120 blocks after the block they have mined is built upon by other miners (they go via an "estimate" then "unconfirmed" stage first). Additionally, the biggest mining pools either 1) only pay out their slave-miners after these confirms or 2) factor this in to their PPLNS slaves as a mining pool cost. Either way, you can bet they have enough in reserves to cover a small number of orphaned blocks. There will be no pools that fail after this event and I am prepared to bet on this.
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