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bobroon Stop Turning every purchase into a tip request

It's close to 100% of carry out/counter service establishments. This advice isn't practicable.

bobroon France is banning unsolicited telemarketing calls starting next week

Annoying tons of people so some small percent buys your stuff is a shitty thing to do. Their winning more than they lose from being shitty isn't something we have to offer an alternative to.

bobroon SpaceX stock erases all its gains and slides below IPO price in intraday trading

I'd strongly recommend you read back what I've said and what you've said. The idea that I've presented anything "very passionate" while you've just been "nuanced" is a little silly. Read it. Please.

bobroon SpaceX stock erases all its gains and slides below IPO price in intraday trading

Obviously it’s not “perfectly consistent”. There is at least a bit of incongruity in these three, no? A sniff of something off? Also, I’m not conflating anything. I asked you to say more on a couple of things you said in your comment. No need to be absolutist or argumentative about it.

bobroon SpaceX stock erases all its gains and slides below IPO price in intraday trading

Can you spell out a bit more how these three thoughts live together consistently for you:

1) The price is insane

2) The price is a work of great financial engineering

3) The price isn’t a scam

bobroon The Tower Keeps Rising

Really surprised not to see Pope Leo's recent encyclical on AI/tech mentioned here.

https://www.vatican.va/content/leo-xiv/en/encyclicals/docume...

bobroon Your 'App' Could Have Been a Webpage (so I fixed it for you)

examples?

bobroon Norway imposes near ban on AI in elementary school

> eacher uses AI, creates lesson plan -> AI creates assignments -> Teacher gives assignments to students |

Up to this point, it's actually completely fine. LLMs do an excellent job up to here.

> | Teacher grades with AI -> Principal uses AI to monitor teachers progress.

Again, this is probably mostly fine. Assuming they are taking it seriously, this is also fine.

> Students use AI to do assignment

This is singularly the section of the loop that AI has no place in. The ENTIRE point of the education system is for the students to learn how to use their brains to accomplish tasks.

bobroon Norway imposes near ban on AI in elementary school

I feel like in the context of AI in education, "wisdom through dogma" still doesn't capture it. It's not even wisdom nor dogma, but something in the form of wisdom developed through something in the form of dogma. "Wisdom" implies you actually believe it and embody it, but students don't believe it or embody it as much as just pass it along to finish the assignment. "Dogma" implies there's a coherent logic of accepted doctrine, but the output is more a stretched and morphed version of the most generalized doctrine imaginable.

bobroon Is Meta destroying its engineering organization?

So you think they weren’t getting paid for this? You think they just freely mention corporate food companies purely for users benefit?

bobroon Massachusetts bans sale of precise location data in new privacy rights bill

https://malegislature.gov/Bills/194/S2619/BillHistory

SECTION 1. The General Laws are hereby amended by inserting after chapter 93L the following chapter:-

Chapter 93M. Massachusetts Data Privacy Act

Section 1. As used in this chapter, the following words shall have the following meanings unless the context otherwise requires:

...

“Sale of personal data”, the transfer of personal data in exchange for monetary or other valuable consideration by the controller to a third party; provided, however, that “sale of personal data” shall not include: (i) the disclosure of personal data to a processor that processes the personal data on behalf of the controller if limited to the purposes of the processing; (ii) the disclosure of personal data to a third party for purposes of providing a product or service affirmatively requested by the consumer; (iii) the disclosure or transfer of personal data to an affiliate of the controller; (iv) the disclosure of personal data with the consumer’s affirmative consent, where the consumer affirmatively directs the controller to disclose the personal data or intentionally uses the controller to interact with a third party; (v) the disclosure or transfer of personal data to a third party as an asset that is part of a merger, acquisition, bankruptcy or other transaction or a proposed merger, acquisition, bankruptcy or other transaction, in which the third party assumes control of all or part of the controller’s assets; or (vi) the disclosure of personal data that the consumer: (A) intentionally made available to the general public via a channel of mass media; and (B) did not restrict to a specific audience.

bobroon LLMs are eroding my software engineering career and I don't know what to do

>literally hundreds of orders of magnitude slower

I'm sure this is just a slip of the tongue (finger), but the idea of being a numerical googol times slower is funny.

bobroon LLMs are eroding my software engineering career and I don't know what to do

Imagine taking up a hobby of drawing, then bemoaning the existence of a printer. Or learning spanish, and bemoaning google translate. Or trying out woodworking, and bemoaning IKEA.

bobroon Microsoft Wants to 'Make People Addicted' to Its New AI Assistant

From the article this one links to:

>Microsoft has been piloting Scout as an internal tool for employees it was calling “ClawPilot,” since March. ClawPilot—and now Scout—are part of “Project Lobster,” which is a Microsoft plan to bring the popular OpenClaw AI tool to its Microsoft 365 suite of products in a way that nontechnical people can use.

bobroon AI outperforms law professors in Stanford Law study

>the study where it beats our highest caliber of knowledge workers may have some methodological deficits.

That isn’t even remotely what this study is looking at.

bobroon Tech CEOs are apparently suffering from AI psychosis

Those feelings fall apart very quickly though. A project from a non-technical person may seem to roll out well, but they aren't seeing the parts that are misguided, not generalizable, or plainly wrong. MVPs are most useful because it means someone with domain knowledge was able to not just put together a product, but they understand the difficult parts, what will work and what won't, whether the pursuit is viable. Vibecoding doesn't do that exactly. It produces something that looks like an MVP, but who knows.

To me, intoxicating is a better word for that feeling than empowering.

bobroon Removing the modem and GPS from my 2024 RAV4 hybrid

I think the problem is there isn't a fortune there. It would be a successful endeavor, but not something to rake in huge piles of cash. The kinds of leaders and investors who could pull off what you're describing are instead working where they can make multi-millions rather that multi-hundreds of thousands.

bobroon Kickstarter is forced to ban adult content by payment processors

I feel like if you’re going to write an article like this, you should at least engage with why it’s happening. Maybe deep down for some of the participants it’s a kind of moral thing, but mostly this is because payments for NSFW/porn stuff are dramatically more expensive. All of the “stuff” payment processors are doing is harder for NSFW/porn content, so that’s the main reason the processors want these companies to separate/cutoff that type of content.

EDIT: I’m kind of sensitive to getting downvotes on a comment. Do the downvoters think this is a high quality article giving a good amount of context for the upstream policy choices? Do the downvoters take me for supporting some kind of decision like this? Do you think I’m just wrong on my understanding of why these policies are made? I’d really encourage you to look into it. Google or chat something like “why do payment processors ban adult content”.

bobroon Driver accused of DUI tracks missing laptop to Illinois State trooper's house

Police and fire fighters have tons of opportunities for overtime. they get paid absurd amounts of money to do it. It’s another thing that badly needs reform.

bobroon Removable batteries in smartphones will be mandatory in the EU starting in 2027

I’ve definitely replaced iphones because the battery wasn’t holding a charge. My understanding is that this is a pretty common issue, no?

bobroon Why Almost Everyone Loses–Except a Few Sharks–On Prediction Markets

Every time a drug addict uses, they’re actually learning about biology and the sociology of addiction.

bobroon Tesla owner won $10k in court for Tesla's FSD lies. Tesla is still fighting him

The judgement also includes interest, 6.75% per year.

bobroon Uber wants to turn its drivers into a sensor grid for self-driving companies

I find the idea of learning from simulated data so unintuitive. How can you radically improve your model with just your model? I take it people do it, so it must work, but i just don’t understand it at all.

bobroon Maryland becomes first state to ban surveillance pricing in grocery stores

i really doubt the downsides of adding that layer of complexity can compete with the upsides of surveillance pricing.

bobroon Running local LLMs offline on a ten-hour flight

Can’t you guys just read a book and take a nap?

bobroon The Joy of Folding Bikes

There’s something mind-boggling about the prices that get charged for these things. $2k-$3k for a not particularly complicated array of steel and plastic. I bought my (used) car in that price range, a big intricate machine with way more engineering and way more physical mass. Isn’t bicycle design is a mostly solved problem problem by now?

bobroon A Periodic Map of Cheese

Aren’t you concerned with consuming made up information? There has to be a million fun silly sites you haven’t read that a real person put real research and real effort into. LLMs just can’t do stuff like this accurately right now.

bobroon Anthropic takes $5B from Amazon and pledges $100B in cloud spending in return

Your point 1 and point 2 live in direct tension. The reason the closed models are better is very likely that they are paying so much to train them.

bobroon US v. Heppner (S.D.N.Y. 2026) no attorney-client privilege for AI chats [pdf]

Chatting with Claude strikes me as fundamentally different from writing your own notes.

bobroon Ask HN: What Are You Working On? (April 2026)

Can you explain some use cases you have in mind?