YHK - yet another hacker news clone

Flapping Airplanes

14 points handfuloflight 3 days ago 16 comments

MiroslavPokorny 3 days ago | parent

Do you know whats even more efficient ?

Not flying...

crancher 42 minutes ago | parent

Depends on requirement vs. distance.

amelius 1 hour ago | parent

Flapping wings because ... rigid wings were too energy efficient?

Anyway, the post tells me little. Aren't the big AI labs already doing all these things?

JumpCrisscross 1 hour ago | parent

> Flapping wings because

It's memorable and cute and funny. And you can over-intellectualize it by talking about how "an optimized flapping wing could actually require 27 percent less power than its optimal steady-flight counterpart at small scales" [1], emphasis on small scales. (Propeller-powered fruit flies would be a good airport-bar name.)

[1] https://news.cornell.edu/stories/2009/09/birds-fly-more-effi...

delichon 30 minutes ago | parent

Flapping wings are at least neutral nonsense. There's another AI startup called "LawZero", which is far worse. It's a reference to Asimov's zeroth law.

  A robot may not harm humanity, or, by inaction, allow humanity to come to harm.
So their name is a statement of an ambition to replace human agency with AI agency. The ultimate paternalism. The exact thing we should be working feverishly to align AI in order to prevent is the identity of this company. It's a little like naming your beverage brand Liquid Death.

jrm4 1 hour ago | parent

This is a joke, right? "Flapping airplanes" is a great metaphor for AI as it exists today; e.g. we basically already have what we need and more is stupid.

Planes are awesome and important, and also building ones that actually flapped is technically possible and also wasteful and pointless.

vekntksijdhric 1 hour ago | parent

I thought this was a joke, but apparently it isn't.

willio58 1 hour ago | parent

The glitchiness of this website on my fairly new iOS device…

Goes to show big investment doesn’t mean shit if the engineers behind it don’t know what they’re doing.

XenophileJKO 1 hour ago | parent

Or maybe they know that the website isn't super important if they already hve backing by the big firms and they don't yet have a product to sell.

I also don't know how "Good HTML/Javascript" translates to hyper optimization, analog computing, optical computing, or whatever skills their approach needs.

It just comes across as jealous and petty.

codeduck 1 hour ago | parent

The most efficient aircraft are gliders.

JumpCrisscross 1 hour ago | parent

> most efficient aircraft are gliders

L/D, yes. Complete aircraft configuration, not always (actually, rarely).

Kuyawa 1 hour ago | parent

> "We have developed the world’s most complete megakernel framework"

Where is it? Can we see it? Test it? Play with it?

Aboutplants 51 minutes ago | parent

Now valued at $6 billion dollars apparently, not having shipped a single thing. What a time to be alive

https://techcrunch.com/2026/10/21/year-old-ai-lab-flapping-a...

siva7 44 minutes ago | parent

> "Together, the founders “are building the ‘young person’s AGI lab,’” as Cahn described it."

As opposed to what exactly? Is OAI considered now the IBM of AI?

siva7 48 minutes ago | parent

I hoped this would be flappy birds but with airplanes :/

rvz 46 minutes ago | parent

The founders know the company name and the entire AI VC bubble is a joke (but the company isn’t) and the US VCs will invest in anything (if you have the correct old pedigree connections)

Don’t be fooled by the company’s name. Its silliness all got your attention and curiosity. The VCs invested in the team, not the company name.