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blobdole

39 karma · joined July 8, 2026

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blobdole··on Stolen Renoir paintings found hidden, and damaged, behind cinder block wall
"It was through interrogation work that investigators were able to get the receiver of the stolen goods to admit that he had indeed taken possession of the paintings."

Humans are always the hole in the security you build, no matter how good the wall is.

blobdole··on Bets on what we will see at tonight's Tesla Roadster event
lol

Couldn't have been more wrong on the first bit.

Feel pretty good about the last though!

blobdole··on Bets on what we will see at tonight's Tesla Roadster event
I mean... probably not rocket thrusters. That is to say, nothing solid or data driven or anything like that. Maybe a joking reference to it or a "plus look forward to this within a year or two of whatever day we are saying the roadster is launching."

Anyone wanna spend time digging into how to make a car with exposed cold gas thrusters road legal in all 50 states?

blobdole··on Submarine cable resilience
Shoulda told them to test it on roller coaster with a splash zone. Way easier to get engineers to come to work at Six Flags than brave the briny deep.
blobdole··on Show HN: Factory DS, A Factorio-Like Game for the Nintendo DS
This is pretty cool. You should consider releasing it someplace like itch.io so that people can try it out without having to emulate!

I am now taking part in the long standing tradition of asking for "just one small thing" while completely ignoring how fundamental a change it is and imagining it is just one quick tweak.

blobdole··on Show HN: Wordminos – Crosswords Meet Dominos
Wowza... I am so bad at this. lol

One thing I would say is that when there is a "done" or a "next" button, it took me a sec to see it as a button because the actual button color was too close to white on my monitor. So I thought it was a click anywhere kinda "done".

blobdole··on Show HN: What 482 hospitals charge vs. what insurers pay, from their own files
This feels both very depressing and very helpful. I wonder if it would be possible to use things like this to call out the most egregious examples and get them adjusted through public pressure? Maybe be able to call out specific institutions in a region as being significantly worse than their competitors?

Calling hospitals in an area "competitors" almost made me vomit in my mouth... so maybe the problem is bigger than this.

blobdole··on Show HN: Walk the Endless Dungeon
Finally! The control I always wanted when watching the 3D Maze screensaver on Win 95!

This is a pretty fun base to slowly trickle content into over time. I am not sure how you structure the back end, but I would organize my data so I can easily add more stuff at different rarity levels.

Imagine running around, starting to feel like you have a grasp on how it will all be from now on, and then you round a corner and see a double height room or a room with a stream running through it.

Instant feeling of "how big is this?"

blobdole··on Show HN: I built an idle game that rewards you for doomscrolling less
I really like the idea of using the time pressure mechanics from idle games in reverse to push back on certain behaviors until after time has passed.

You could even build some Tik Tok (or whatever) reward time into the loop.

- 15 minutes pass getting you to reward tier 1

- 30 minutes pass getting you to reward tier 2

- 1 hour passes getting you to reward tier 3

- Open you game and reap the rewards

- A 15 minute "cooldown" timer starts where you do not have any reward or punishment around using Tik Tok so you do during that time as a second layer of reward

- The official "don't use Tik Tok" timer begins again

blobdole··on Show HN: Lofi Cities – Pixel-art city nights with browser-generated lofi
Very cool project. I love the tour aspect of it!

I first saw Paris from inside the room, and only later realized that 90% of the cities seem to be outdoors. It did make me kind of miss the indoor theming of the local area.

Also make me think how cool it would be to be able to toggle between being indoors or on the balcony. Shift the volume of the music vs the weather, maybe add some city sounds and shift them as well. Finally, it means you could have twice as much visual variety for only 50% more art.

blobdole··on Show HN: Most Hated Tools
Unlike tyfighter I did occasionally see tools I have used... but never two at the same time which is basically the same thing.

I wonder if there is an ability to do a rolling mode? Somehow get one that you know, then skip skip skip until you see a second you know and then pick the worst. That one sticks around moving forward and repeat.

blobdole··on Show HN: Fractalysis – Online interactive infinite-zoom Mandelbrot viewer
Excuse me and how dare you. I have stuff I need to get done today. ><

This is very cool!

blobdole··on I Changed My Mind About AI Risk
The main reason I am not incredibly worried about bad AI outcomes is that every recent example turns out to be a combination of humans pushing an AI to do very specific bad things and marketing and straight up bs.

Will AI have the ability to be dangerous? Probably. But so far the greatest danger seems to be from businesses pushing their teams to do dangerous things, then loudly proclaiming in press releases about how their newest release is so dangerous and powerful and beyond human comprehension and powerful and powerful and powerful...

blobdole··on Show HN: PokerTools Arena – Local AI vs. AI Poker LLM Benchmark Table
If you scroll down in the github you will see a header image with the following title:

"Watch frontier models play Texas Hold'em"

Holy crap that is a great title. So much more grabby and interesting than this one. You for sure shoulda titled this thread with that.

blobdole··on Boring Company is working on a Hyperloop tunnel between Austin and San Antonio
I got a little lucky when the initial whitepaper was published because there was a top level comment from someone in construction logistics that said something like...

"I can't speak to anything else in here, but the listed costs for the installed concrete is only 10% what it should be. If Elon Musk has found a way to install concrete 10x better than everyone else he shouldn't be building a train, he should be taking over construction globally."

Just an immediate splash of "oh, this is BS" cold water.

blobdole··on Show HN: HSL-Noise – A noise generator mapped to the HSL color space
I love noise generators and this concept is very cool!

I need to dig into it more, but a common problem is having noticeable patterns or repeating transitions, especially if you are listening for hours at a time. But since this actually generated sound instead of trying to blend clips of audio together, I would imagine it does a pretty good job of avoiding that issue.

blobdole··on I haven't lost a customer service fight in seven months
Mostly this leaves me concerned about an escalating war between companies intentionally introducing friction into their customer service pipelines to discourage expensive customer behavior, and customers increasingly relying on more and more AI automation to deal with that friction.

In a perfect world this would cause the intentional friction to be less and less effective, while laws and regulations stop the companies from implementing more and more aggressive policies/systems, leading them to go back to the fastest possible pipeline to capture those savings if nothing else.

But I am worried that is not the world we live in and I am going to try to return some shoes I bought in the wrong size and be asked to do some integrals before I am allowed to.

blobdole··on Show HN: Jigsaw Haiku
That was a lot of fun!

It would be cool if I could kind of place things "wherever I want" because sometimes I want to test if this fits here or not, and the easiest way is to place the piece there and drop it. Because the borders are less distracting/smaller after dropping it. But if I do that in a place that is not valid, it snaps back to the original position.

I once had to drag two completed chunks sequentially to one side of the puzzle area before I could test a piece I was looking at and discover it was wrong.

blobdole··on Show HN: I missed the moving blocks, so I built a real Linux disk defragmenter
Beautiful.

Defragmenting my drives manually is one of those things like closing apps on my phone I am not using. Everyone says there is no need to do it. It might even be slightly worse overall. I even have enough self control to avoid doing it and have for years...

But deep down in my heart, I truly FEEL like if I did it would improve things... somehow.

blobdole··on Show HN: Tilde Pay – Give your AI agent a bank account to pay for things
This has done something odd to my brain.

The security issues and chance for direct harm makes me immediately recoil. "No, never, not even once as a joke." levels of nope. The sort of thing you would hear mentioned and move past without a second thought because obviously no one should or will ever do that.

...and yet it also feels like the sort of thing that could be a common, every day kind of thing. Is this really that different from an automated drop shipping company? A piece of logistics software that makes sure there are always pens and napkins?

I am going to stop thinking about this now. If MCP based automated purchasing is the future, I will let others build it.

blobdole··on Show HN: Printme.money – small toys that visualize what your salary is doing
Very cool!

A super simple concept that is oddly compelling the longer it sits there counting up. Vs mode just adds to it. Great job!

blobdole··on Workspaces – Explore the workspaces of modern creators
These remind me of the various YouTube channels I have seen pop up over the last few years focusing on 3d printing and organization, usually of clean workshops or sterile computer desks.

They are usually very pretty and well edited, with impressively done voice overs. They are also usually about aesthetically organizing and displaying an exacting set of objects that can't be changed without breaking out the fulfillment.

I guess aspirational and satisfying to look at, but pretty useless in terms of actual working space organization. Should probably play "A Little to the Left" and get your pattern matching fix that way.

blobdole··on Show HN: An Interactive Guide for Castlevania II: Simon's Quest
Holy crap this is cool.

I checked out the site before reading your post and thought "wow, someone spent a lot of time making this level of detail."

But pulling everything from the ROM is a whole other layer of cool!

blobdole··on Show HN: 18 Words
I am someone that generally is not a fan of timers in my games, but this one was not very restrictive and the punishment for failing it was minor (missing that question instead of ending the game).

So I would say No to #1 and yes to #2.