HNHacker News
TopNewBestAskShowJobs

dv_dt

9,310 karma · joined April 4, 2016

submissionscomments
dv_dt··on AI is a tool and using it well takes skill
In history, some of the best educated aristocrats had live tutors for education. Was their cognitive ability impaired by having expert instructors? When textbooks were generated did they impede the ability to think about problems or advance it? Does one have to expend every hour of previous effort to collect knowledge in order to understand and advance further? Does AI have the effect of tutors or textbooks, or something else?
dv_dt··on Internal files add to evidence of an ExxonMobil climate deception campaign
I wonder if governments will sue to recover climate mitigation costs
dv_dt··on I would like the value of my home to rise, while my property taxes fall
In California, most cities are behind on funding pensions. There is a de facto assumption/delusion that there will be some large scale bailout at some point.
dv_dt··on ChatGPT is adding real cartoonists' signatures to fake New Yorker cartoons
Its a huge stretch saying it's even approximating human intelligence. All llms are lossy, recombinant, compressed search indexes. There is no introspection - and what we mostly see is fairly rudimentary heuristic programming loops wrapped around them - which tells you how powerful a tool llms are, but don't mistake the capabilities of the tool for reasoning in any form.
dv_dt··on Sales of sub-€25,000 electric car models set to rise sevenfold
fuel pump meters can be altered too as well a farm diesel abuses - scofflaws trying to get around paying their fair share will always take some regulatory effort
dv_dt··on Mike Tomlin spent 12 years building a Minecraft city
The idea that successful people need to be obsessively dedicated that that one thing exclusive to everything else is unhealthy and I think a hustle culture trope.

If anything, I think successful people tend to have a range of pastimes and balanced activities in order to maintain perspective and not burnout.

dv_dt··on Ask HN: Email leaked while traveling abroad?
Is Verizon's fine for selling user location data high enough to be more of a deterrent than cost of doing business? The fine was even for selling to the wrong parties, implying that there are parties to access it legitimately.
dv_dt··on Rpi – a Rust rewrite of the Pi agent, 10× faster startup
I suppose one potential drawback is that the visibility of the logic of a plugin is inherent in the pi ts extensions, and unless it's shipped with the rpi (pi-rust) extension, it may not be the same to use it. There are instances where I've seen pi go digging around in it's own docs & code to figure out how to do something.
dv_dt··on Micron CEO Says Memory Supply Will Be Much Tighter in 2027 and 2028 Than in 2026
The samples from recent history seem to say that well regulated competitve markets are beneficial but ironically that socialism provides better competitive markets then capitalism.

I would not cheer the AI tulip craze effect on memory as a benefit of capitalism as it has several obvious unchecked violations of well regulated markets.

dv_dt··on Rpi – a Rust rewrite of the Pi agent, 10× faster startup
I wonder about adding a plugin shim for webassembly, or a Rust crate with integrated V8 engine (Bun?). But honestly, I use pi and I have yet to ask it to self-modify.
dv_dt··on Micron CEO Says Memory Supply Will Be Much Tighter in 2027 and 2028 Than in 2026
The greed and shortsightedness from both the memory makers and their big customers trying to lock out competitors from memory purchases is palpable. The first act of a Shakespearean or Greek Tragedy is where the characters take the actions that lock in the circumstances that precede their downfall. And this sets up everything for the next act where CXMT has everything it needs to establish itself on the market with buyers that would perhaps would not have considered it in other circumstances.
dv_dt··on 10-year Treasury yield climbs above 5.3% to a level not seen in 24 years
I think austerity measures are counterproductive. After seeing how they worked (or rather didn't work) when imposed on multiple nations by the world bank, and self imposed in the UK and Germany, I don't think austerity works at this state of inequality.

Perhaps short periods of austerity work in decades past when enough of the foundation was still established for public goods, but a this point of neoliberal economics, austerity just causes economies to slow or shrink

dv_dt··on Claude partial outage
You are trained now, it must be yours
dv_dt··on Analysis: EVs are now nine times cheaper than petrol or diesel to drive in UK
Has the UK decided to block or add protectionist regulations to Chinese EV imports?
dv_dt··on I was impressed by Jev, please explain why I shouldn't be
Jev does a useful thing, but to me it feels like it should be some middleware plugin available to many AI harnesses, not a standalone product. Under the hood, model tool calls were doing a similar classification to decide if a tool should be called amidst a set of tool descriptions - so for instance, it might be nice plugged into that use if it delivers faster, more accurate tool invocations.
dv_dt··on ASML says it sold 'absolutely nothing' in Europe in 2026
Nuclear failed in terms of price/megawatt and will fail because it economically doesn't pay off requiring large government subsidies for everything from large scale power purchase agreements, to security and long term waste management. Its also centralized, and more difficult to defend in a world that is threatening to descend into regional conflicts and climate driven disasters. If one were take a serious long term view about industrial progress, one would avoid nuclear, avoid fossil fuels, and install and develop decentralized renewables and battery techs
dv_dt··on ASML says it sold 'absolutely nothing' in Europe in 2026
I don't think the important part is actually one for one replication of the system in China. I think the key parts to deliver progress are diversity of investment decisions, competitiveness in markets, and stable long term goals & fiscal support.

It's too easy to get tied up in political labels, when any hybrid of public and private support for those helps growth. None of political ideas has an exclusive lock on providing the factors. At this point, I really don't think any political system guarantees the development outcomes, there are examples of all labels which fail one to all of those progress factors.

dv_dt··on Plan mode is dead
So planning mode is dead, long live planning?
dv_dt··on Ask HN: Hypothesis: Cellular providers are deprioritizing voice calls?
I use and am thrilled with US mobile. Otherwise no affiliation. Lots of different options, including which backbone network you're line is currently on, and as far as I can tell the options are all switchable online with very little fuss.
dv_dt··on California is chasing wealth that has feet
Sure, Florida doesn't have prop 13 and experiences 10x the property tax forclosure rate of California. It's not a desirable thing.
dv_dt··on California is chasing wealth that has feet
> Prop 13 has completely distorted the housing market; it is, perhaps unintuitively, a co-cause of CA's housing unaffordability issues. (Prop 13 discourages new development, and is an enabler of housing NIMBYism.)

I have heard this assertion with no proof or backing data a lot. There is an assumption but no explanation how kicking long time residents out of their homes due to tax pressure is a benefit to the community, or real estate market prices. Real estate agents and other service companies might benefit from more transactions.

There is also usually no mention that the main problem of Prop 13 is that it applies to commercial and industrial properties, not just individual primary residences. Individuals have a limited impact scoped to their life, but tax implications applied to long term corporations is what has an outsized effect.

dv_dt··on Early rogue AI agent activity and attempts to hack found on urlquery.net
In general, I'd suggest thinking about it on separate tracks, as a crime, and as liability. For crime, we are largely dependent on authorities to act, whereas as liability, that allows more independent actions.
dv_dt··on Early rogue AI agent activity and attempts to hack found on urlquery.net
The difference between manslaughter and murder has an element of intent. Cybercrime "manslaughter" is probably more treated like negligence and if one can sue for restitution of the costs for cleanup of that negligence.

Negligence would be interesting given the grand claims of capability of AI models from the AI companies and their executives. If they believe the claims, why not much stronger precautions?

dv_dt··on Feds Target AI Critics as "Foreign Agents"
That's the ridiculous part, because there is a huge range of positive, profit generating areas to invest in, and it's a tulip madness of concentrated and narcissistic wealth does things like pour trillions in to AI, but an insufficient amount of money into an electrical generation and grid infrastructure and housing. We basically have a centrally mismanaged economy under a banner of "capitalism" as the magical mythology of the era.
dv_dt··on What California is learning from solar panels built over irrigation canals
Providing healthcare alone under the US system as the state of CA vs the French system could account for a large amount of the difference.
dv_dt··on What California is learning from solar panels built over irrigation canals
California has those services but they tend to be only funded to a fraction of the need. And the gap between the need vs help is a deep gulf due to how inequality lands on all other public and private areas of society
dv_dt··on Why are AI agents lying, cheating and coordinating?
Regulation as a barrier to competition catching up to them, as well as submarine marketing for both offensive and defensive uses of ai
dv_dt··on Detailed report on the use of solar geoengineering
Setting out on a major geo engineering project is a folly or a cynical PR greenwash - maybe both. Anything to avoid change to entrenched interests. We already have a highly viable path to transition to Renewable power while optimizing all sorts of sustainability loops.
dv_dt··on Working with Git Worktrees in Magit
I don't understand why worktrees either, but to each their own.

For my purposes, the alternative with just switching branches or if parallelism is needed, full repos and remotes (including local path remotes) is just much more flexible. Clone local, branch it, optionally do anything later: push a branch back to the local repo, push it to a remote, delete local repo done.

The actual code and clean merges is much more significant than worktrees vs full clones

dv_dt··on Watch Los Angeles get built, one building at a time (1880–2026)
Yes, but I would hypothesize that in the Inland empire there was a net reduction of water use transforming agricultural acreage to suburban acreage. Water rights drives a lot of california development, anyone suggesting oh just divert water from x to y doesn't understand or is glossing over the massive fights historically and in coming up over water- as climate change has shrunk the historic supply
← PreviousPage 2 of 34Next →