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driggs

879 karma · joined October 25, 2013

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driggs··on Reasons I didn't become an EMT, ranked
If you're someone who offsets the typical HN vocation with outdoor recreation like hiking, cycling, climbing, mountaineering, etc., then consider the weeklong Wilderness First Responder (WFR) course. Much more practically useful than EMT for the majority of time where you don't have an ambulance handy, and you can scratch a similar itch as the author's by doing volunteer Search and Rescue work.
driggs··on OpenAI bots knew about the RubyGems caching vulnerability
I appreciate the minimalist HN aesthetic, but without some context I'm not willing to click a mystery link to "Tender Lovemaking dot com".
driggs··on Flock worker calls police on reporter filming public camera installation
I love a good taste-of-their-own-medicine story like anyone else, but the headline is false.

It seems that this is about a YouTuber stalking a Flock employee's vehicle through traffic for 10-15 minutes, which is why the police were called.

driggs··on The turbulent AI era is here
> He's not the fucking pope

No, but he did link to the Pope in this very essay.

Pope Leo XIV, "On Safeguarding the Human Person in the Time of Artificial Intelligence":

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

driggs··on Mushroom behind 'tiny people' hallucinations identified
It's an evolutionary curiosity that their DNA study identified 17 species within the genus Lanmoa, but L. asiatica was the only species which produces this hallucinatory effect.

There are several very commonly found boletes within the genus Lanmoa in the US, including L. pseudosensibilis and the "Bouillon Bolete" L. rubissima.

driggs··on Decades-old fish sauce at abandoned factory in Canada finally being removed
I purchased a bottle of good Vietnamese fish sauce after reading a thread on HN about its mythical flavor profile.

Added a few meager drops to a noodle soup, and I was so overwhelmed with nausea that I threw out the entire pot, and threw the entire bottle of fish sauce into the trash.

I can't imagine want an unholy stench this decades-old fish sauce plant must produce. I would have evacuated permanently, without question.

driggs··on We discovered a new variant of Super Mario Bros
TLDR: The new variant is that the word "repair" was changed to "service" in the user manual.
driggs··on Show HN: Oak – Git replacement designed for agents
Seconding this for geospatial dev projects, which may have absolutely massive binary data files.
driggs··on Echoes (Live at Pompeii) (1972)
You've described every recording ever made.

I'm describing a band playing a concert to an empty ampitheatre which has been silent for two millennia after its inhabitants perished together in an instant.

driggs··on Echoes (Live at Pompeii) (1972)
The Live at Pompeii "concert" in that empty amphitheatre has always felt to me like they were playing to an audience of ghosts or spirits.

If you have the opportunity to see it on a big screen or IMAX, it's an incredibly moving experience.

driggs··on Show HN: Hallucinopedia
That really improved things! Now each rabbithole goes deeper and deeper and deeper...
driggs··on Show HN: Hallucinopedia
This is why we can't have nice things.

Looks like someone scripted `curl` in a loop and generated thousands of permutations of hate content.

driggs··on Show HN: Hallucinopedia
It seems like the site's algorithm is that every newly-generate page includes multiple links to not-yet-existing pages. So it doesn't matter that existing pages are cached, all the "leaf node" pages link to multiple uncached new pages.
driggs··on Inkscape 1.4.4
That's a pretty absurd complaint.

Are you aware of any XML parser ever which preserves the plaintext formatting of the .xml file while magically inserting and modifying an arbitrary amount of XML data anywhere within the document?

SVG is just XML. Save your file in Inkscape, and then run `tidy` on it, or whatever you like for format your XML with.

(As a fellow hand-crafted XML fan, I feel your pain. But I also know when to choose my battles!)

driggs··on Show HN: Hallucinopedia
This site is going to be expensive when a web crawler hits it. A honey pot that burns tokens.
driggs··on Show HN: Hallucinopedia
This is fantastic. I couldn't find any obvious way to search for a new page, but you can simply bang out any arbitrary URL slug and the new article will be hallucinated fresh, eg:

https://halupedia.com/shortest-cave-in-the-world

https://halupedia.com/echolocation-ability-in-spiders

driggs··on Why are there both TMP and TEMP environment variables? (2015)
Agree, CP/M has nothing to do with the story, nor does the 8080/8086 sidetrack.

The whole story is that Microsoft just never bothered to standardize, despite using it themselves.

driggs··on Why Zip drives dominated the 90s, then vanished almost overnight
Zip drives were revolutionary for 100mb and then 250mb storage, at the same time that many people gained widespread access to the Internet. But they were proprietary and required you to have an external drive available to write or read from them (and that might also mean a SCSI port).

So when affordable CD-R became available, even though early drives were slow writers, they had the advantage that they could be read from practically any computer. With ubiquitous non-proprietary CD-ROM drives and the huge 700mb capacity, Zip drives were tossed as soon as someone bought a CD-R drive.

driggs··on MM120, a pharmaceutical form of LSD, shown to reduce anxiety symptoms (2025)
The "neuroplasticity" which leads to a relative quietness presumably comes after the psychedelic experience.

Interestingly, the paper only lists the following adverse effects: visual perceptual changes, nausea, and headache. Given that the patients in the double-blind study were those who suffer from moderate to severe Generalized Anxiety Disorder, I could imagine some significant anxiety in the 200 µg active group!

The paper only reports significant results at the 100 µg and 200 µg dose level, not less, which seems like another strike against psychedelic microdosing. The pharmaceutical industry would love to find a magic psychedelic drug which doesn't result in the psychedelic experience, but it seems like that experience is the key to their mental impact.

driggs··on Editor's Note: Retraction of article containing fabricated quotations
Wow, he admits to using two AI tools: He used Claude Code, which failed because the blog was intentionally set up to refuse AI crawlers, so he pasted the page into ChatGPT. Then he blames ChatGPT for paraphrasing the hallucinated quotes.

He makes the claim that he was just using AI to help him put together an outline for his article, when the evidence clearly shows that he used the AI's verbatim output.

driggs··on How often do full-body MRIs find cancer?
Retinal imaging is used to detect damage from glaucoma or other eye disease, by "diffing" the fine blood vessels and nerves.
driggs··on Bob Weir has died
Particularly relevant to HN is that Bobby's primary writing partner for decades was John Perry Barlow, cofounder of the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF):

https://www.eff.org/john-perry-barlow

  A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace
  by John Perry Barlow
  
  Governments of the Industrial World, you weary giants of flesh and steel,
  I come from Cyberspace, the new home of Mind. On behalf of the future, I
  ask you of the past to leave us alone. You are not welcome among us. You
  have no sovereignty where we gather.
   
  We have no elected government, nor are we likely to have one, so I address
  you with no greater authority than that with which liberty itself always
  speaks. I declare the global social space we are building to be naturally
  independent of the tyrannies you seek to impose on us.
https://www.eff.org/cyberspace-independence#main-content

Many of Bobby Weir's best-known songs had lyrics penned by Barlow. The world is a brighter place because of their partnership, and a little more grey in their absence.

driggs··on Rats caught on camera hunting flying bats (2025)
While predation by rats is curious news, much more common (here in the US at least) is predation by raccoons.

Conservation-minded management practice is often to build a "bat friendly" gate at the entrance of a significant bat cave or an abandoned mine portal. These gates are the ideal perch for hungry raccoons to pluck bats right out of the air. Bats emerge from entrances like this near the ceiling, when possible, specifically to avoid predators. Poorly designed gates are the opposite of "bat friendly" and turn the safe entrances into buffets for raccoons.

Why do we care about protecting bats? They're the #1 predator for night-flying insects, which are often crop destroying pests. Every bat we lose equals more chemical pesticide that farmers must use to efficiently grow crops.

driggs··on Microsoft May Have Created the Slowest Windows in 25 Years with Windows 11
Windows 2000 or Windows XP - with security updates and modern hardware support - is exactly what I want.
driggs··on Using fewer syllables to express numbers
Oof, "zero" is two syllables so we'll have to pronounce it "null".
driggs··on Using fewer syllables to express numbers
Because that's for half-time!
driggs··on Using fewer syllables to express numbers
This website is a useless exercise, but the idea in the submission title "using fewer syllables to express numbers" has utility.

As a musician, I frequently need to count to a rhythm, and the pesky number seven's two syllables throws my cadence off. So I count a bar of 8 like this:

> one, two, three, four, five, six, sev, eight

Occasionally I'll need to count up to as high as 16, which is especially tricky. It'd be easiest to do it in hexadecimal-style, but somehow I can't bring myself to count a part out as:

> one, two, three, four, five, six, sev, eight, nine, a, b, c, d, e, f, g

If only I could convince musicians to use zero-based indexing instead of one-based.

driggs··on Satellites reveal heat leaking from largest US cryptocurrency mining center
Have you considered that it's used as a unit to represent capacity of our power grid?

As in, we have now have the energy capacity for 300,000 fewer homes given this operating data center.

So not only is it a relatable unit, but it's an incredibly meaningful unit for those who care about ensuring that energy availability actually support something of value (families) rather than something wasteful (crypto mining).

driggs··on People keep flocking to Linux, not just to escape Windows
PS: Someone changed the title of this submission after my comment. It was originally something like "By my count, Linux has over 11% of the desktop market." This statistic is obviously clickbait and false, even if you count ChromeBooks, though ChromeBooks are not what people mean when they say "Linux desktop".
driggs··on People keep flocking to Linux, not just to escape Windows
"By my count"...

Which means pretending that every single "unknown" desktop, which is a larger percentage than the Linux desktops, are Linux.

And also by considering ChromeBooks, which also have a larger percentage than Linux, are Linux.

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