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WolfeReader

787 karma · joined April 16, 2014

Any discussion of AI that fails to mention its tremendous cost to Earth should be regarded as suspicious. Like talking about the pros and cons of tobacco without mentioning cancer.

https://unu.edu/inweh/collection/environmental-cost-of-AIs-Enrgy-Use-Carbon-water-and-land-footprints

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WolfeReader··on The federated code forge
Fossil has you covered!
WolfeReader··on Why I Wrote PGP (1991, revised 1999)
It's easy to explain. "I use PGP for my personal notes (symmetric) and for e-mailing my security conscious friends (public-key)". That's sufficient and not awkward.
WolfeReader··on E Ink Kaleido 4
I am regularly reading comics and colored PDFs; the value of color e-ink is definitely not up for debate for me.

There's no question that there's room for improvement! But if you're only reading prose or black & white documents, you'd be better served by a black & white screen. Which is not cause to say that a useful, functional technology is "fundamentally flawed".

WolfeReader··on RacketCon Is Saturday
so-cal-schemer attempted to bypass HN moderation by reposting a flagged post in its entirety without waiting for the "vouch" process to complete.

Meanwhile, behnamoh's post was essentially dismissing the idea that we should discuss non-AI topics in the age of AI. His mention of his hobby project doesn't redeem a garbage comment.

WolfeReader··on FTC is investigating OpenAI, Anthropic and other AI companies over product risks
I get the sarcastic intent in your comment; but it's more useful to focus on what Trump does than the things he says.

One of his strategies is to say unbelievable things like he's gonna revoke Rosie O'Donnell's citizenship or something weird like "superior intelligence", and the news will cover that instead of whichever agencies he's getting or how much he appears in the Epstein files.

WolfeReader··on RacketCon Is Saturday
If someone posts a story about topic Y and a reply is "does anyone really care about topic Y?" I would expect it to be flagged and downvoted.

The answer is "yes". Obviously people still care. No need to resurrect a dead bad post.

WolfeReader··on RacketCon Is Saturday
There are enough AI stories on Hacker News. We don't need AI advocates coming to the stories that aren't about AI and saying they don't matter because they're not AI.

Things that aren't AI still matter and are still interesting.

WolfeReader··on Astra for Law
I am not sure "eaten out" was the correct phrase to use here.
WolfeReader··on Show HN: An e-ink frame that hears birds and draws them as 1800s illustrations
Most "Show HN" posts these days are vibe-coded garbage. It is a pleasant surprise to see one that isn't!
WolfeReader··on Hacker News with reduced priority for AI driven content
This makes Hacker News usable again. Thank you.
WolfeReader··on How to disable or avoid intrusive AI
Actually it is. I haven't seen any Google AI summaries since I started using non-Google search engines.
WolfeReader··on How to disable or avoid intrusive AI
Use a different search engine such as Ecosia or noai.duckduckgo.com
WolfeReader··on Born Against, or why hobby programming communities are against LLM usage
Offer low pay and start using lines of code as a metric. Not only will you not hire such people, you'll also filter out any who might already be on your team!

(Assuming "these people" is a euphemism for "skilled engineers")

WolfeReader··on Get ready to flee, Americans in ten countries warned
"Thanks Obama" is sometimes used sarcastically by people who actually don't mind Obama, as a parody of how conservatives would blame literally anything on him.

Too bad the above post didn't give enough context to say which sense they're using it.

WolfeReader··on KOReader
Thanks for letting me know about mupdf! One of my favorite things about KOReader is its ability to handle humongous PDFs on extremely modest hardware; it's good to know what this ability is based on.
WolfeReader··on KOReader
Windows would be a whole different build target, and Koreader works great through WSL anyway.
WolfeReader··on Recursion is lying to you
The thread title should be updated to clarify that it's a JavaScript-specific article.
WolfeReader··on Teaching Kids Forth
claps
WolfeReader··on Codeberg Divides
It sure is! But I guess it would be less fun to say "1 out of 5 developers will not be using Codeberg going forward". Especially since that may well be an intended effect of Codeberg's decision here.

As long as AI is a source of environmental damage, cognitive harm, and a cause of rising hardware costs, there will always be a sizeable set of developers who want nothing to do with it. The headline should be "AI Divides".

WolfeReader··on Codeberg Divides
The current adoption of LLMs by developers seems to be a bit more than 20%.

https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2025/10/06/about-1-i...

This is just for professional jobs (and is 9 months old) of course.

WolfeReader··on Book prizes don't work how you think
It's a completely different statement, so yes.
WolfeReader··on Codeberg Divides
"Write" is not the correct verb for how you produce software if you get it from GenAI.

May I suggest a few replacements? "Plagiarize" or "excrete" are both more fitting in different ways.

WolfeReader··on Codeberg Divides
If the outcome is that most vibe-coders leave Codeberg alone, that seems like a win for Codeberg.
WolfeReader··on Book prizes don't work how you think
If you say "publishers require DRM" and then say that publishers sometimes sell books without DRM, you might need to review the definition of the word "require".

Some publishers require DRM. Which is entirely different than the false claim made earlier that "selling ebooks necessarily requires DRM".

WolfeReader··on Book prizes don't work how you think
Selling books doesn't require DRM at all. I buy DRM-free books all the time.

As an example: Kobo will tell you, at the bottom of each book's page, if it has DRM or not. And it will happily sell you a book without DRM and let you download it.

WolfeReader··on Are we offloading too much of our thinking to AI?
I'm anti-AI as heck, but this is a really good point.
WolfeReader··on Are we offloading too much of our thinking to AI?
Bicycles don't consume the energy of a small nation.
WolfeReader··on How to stop Claude from saying load-bearing
Yes. They're using AI to write Git commits. They're using AI to delete directories. They're using AI to summarize articles written by AI. And the planet just gets hotter and hotter.
WolfeReader··on How to stop Claude from saying load-bearing
Now this is the sort of stock phrase AI should use more
WolfeReader··on How to read more books
I already gave a specific example. And since your second paragraph shows that you don't understand what generative AI even is or how it works, you have got some learning due before you continue to discuss AI.
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