tejohnso

We pay extra tax on alcohol. It doesn't matter. People pay it and consume. Same with gasoline. Doesn't seem to matter how expensive it gets. Rate of complaining goes up, but road trips continue.

Alcohol is especially harmful for some people, but for others it almost always leads to a more enjoyable experience. I don't think those people would try to say it's good for them but they will say they like it, it's important to their social life, and it's no worse than junk food.

> Super shoes. Most shoes have carbon plates in them now, they act as a spring, storing energy and propelling athletes forwards.

I wonder where that leaves the barefoot movement. Hype dust?

If that's all it takes then cnn.com or foxnews.com must be excruciatingly worrying. It's worse than AI imagery. There are people who are knowingly distributing misinformation, and sometimes being paid to do so.

I think something that's at play here is that the site looks like it is meant to be authoritative and genuine, and could be unexpectedly deceptive, while many other sites are expected to be deceptive and that is accepted and doesn't cause plenty of worry. Kind of strange though. A random internet site might have some fake images on it, which causes plenty of worry, but we're okay being lied to 24/7 by official channels. Or maybe we're plenty worried about that too? Doesn't seem like people are plenty worried about it.

> Not that it actually matters but if those images were generated it would feel pointless to me

I also very much felt like it doesn't really matter, perhaps too much and without considering other potential points of view, that's why the "plenty of worries" seemed so strange to me. How could you experience plenty of worry over an internet site being disingenuous about facts or images? You'd be freaking out all the time. But I can see now that it could be serious for some people in this case.

It's not the Encyclopædia Britannica. I could see if this site was expected to be source or reference material as you suggest. Maybe I'm missing something and it's supposed to be authoritative. But I don't see why someone would be full of worry that a random web site on the internet is posting information that may or may not be accurate. Happens all the time.

Thanks for the explanation. I honestly wasn't sure what could be causing "plenty of worries" in this context. At least now I know what the issue might be.

> Plenty of worries if those images are AI-generated.

What would be so worrying about someone using AI to generate images for their site?

That's an interesting bit of detail. As you intended, it does not lessen the impact of the statement: "conditions never witnessed by us or our prehistoric relatives". It confirms it, with some additional context.

To me, it seems to make it even more significant. Because as you point out, Homo evolved under ice age conditions over millions of years. Well, here we are about to be thrust into uncharted territory, in an extremely short period of time. With very fragile global interdependencies, an overpopulated planet, and billions of people exposed to the consequences.

Yes, Y2K is a success story, similar to the alert and response related to ozone layer and CFCs.

Dissimilar to the global climate catastrophe, unfortunately.

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The 2024 state of the climate report: Perilous times on planet Earth

https://academic.oup.com/bioscience/article/74/12/812/780859...

"Tragically, we are failing to avoid serious impacts"

"We have now brought the planet into climatic conditions never witnessed by us or our prehistoric relatives within our genus, Homo"

"Despite six IPCC reports, 28 COP meetings, hundreds of other reports, and tens of thousands of scientific papers, the world has made only very minor headway on climate change"

"projections paint a bleak picture of the future, with many scientists envisioning widespread famines, conflicts, mass migration, and increasing extreme weather that will surpass anything witnessed thus far, posing catastrophic consequences for both humanity and the biosphere"

I remember reading a story from Robert C. Martin, if I recall correctly, about writing an application and trying to decide which DB to use. In the end, they put the DB access paths behind an abstraction and decided that they'd just use the file system to start with, and easily switch it out later. In the end, they shipped, and never did need to use a real DB.

Looking at the level of detail, and the thoroughness, I wouldn't have expected it to even be possible to complete it in 20 years. How much time does this guy spend driving truck? Amazing accomplishment and display of dedication and creativity.

There are places that has already begun.

https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2026/3/9/bangladesh-shuts-uni...

Impossible. Iran's army was already demolished weeks ago, and there's "nothing left". What did they take it down with, bb guns?

Understaffing is no excuse at an airport that size with that kind of airspace. Somebody high up in the food chain with integrity and authority should be closing the runway if staffing is so low that it becomes unsafe. And I'm no expert, but having enough staff for separate air and ground control seems like a minimum safety requirement unless it's a tiny airport.

Not having distraction devices in a classroom is such a basic concept. I'm surprised it required government intervention. Every half decent school principal should've banned them in their school, and if the principal didn't, the individual teachers should have banned them from their classrooms. The first time a kid had to have a question repeated to them because they were looking at their phone should've been the last time phones were permitted in that class.

I haven't used a mouse in ages, but I haven't used a trackpad - ever. I've never found one that matches the accuracy, speed, and overall joy of using TrackPoint to move the mouse cursor.

Sorry, I don't have to do it in sufficient quantity of frequency to encourage scripting. And while doing it manually, I notice that the required tweaking of levels changes depending on the content of the page and how poor the scan is. I'm not sure an automated solution would provide satisfactory results consistently.

Love GIMP. Always capable of doing anything I need done with raster images or even PDFs. Lately I've been opening PDFs and lightening the pages so that they can be printed without wasting a bunch of toner on backgrounds that are meant to be white but were scanned in as a light grey.

> Anyone is allowed to call you a moron and claim to be doing you a favor. (Which, in point of fact, they would be. One of the big problems with this culture is that everyone's afraid to tell you you're wrong

Absurd. You can point out how and why someone is wrong without insulting them by calling them a moron. Telling someone they're a moron is only stating your personal opinion in an offensive way, without any useful proof.

> profiting for having done it.

Isn't that permitted by some of the more popular licences? If you care about others profiting from your work you'd choose an appropriate licence. And then you'd temper your expectations and hope for the best because you know there will be less than perfect compliance. It's like lending money to family or friends. You can hope they pay you back, but better to consider it a gift because there's a good chance they won't.

Is it worse because it's AI for some reason? I'm having trouble pinning down exactly what the gripe is. Is it license compliance? Is it AI specific? Is it some notion about uncool behavior in what some people see as a community?

Yes but the guideline states that AI-edited comments should not be posted. It doesn't say it's okay as long as it's "human sourced" or "human-originated".

So if your layer of cleanup is AI assisted, then it's in violation.

Part of the problem I was getting at is that the requirement of "Don't post AI edited ..." is stricter than necessary to ensure the outcome that "HN is for conversation between humans" because an AI edited post is still a human post.

Anyway, I suspect a lot of people are going to ignore that guideline and will feel free to use their "layer of cleanup" whether it's a basic spellchecker or an LLM, or whatever else they choose, and most people aren't going to be able to tell anyway. The guideline is unnecessarily strict in my opinion, but it doesn't matter in the end.

I don't get it. We use tools to assist in written communication all the time. If someone wants to ask an LLM to check their grammar or edit for clarity or change the tone, it's still a conversation between humans. Everyone now has access to a real time editor or scribe who can craft their message the way they want it to sound before sending it off. Great.

> Trump could make up with Canada so those oil imports restart.

Sounds like Trump hubris. Probably just what he'd expect. And then he'd accuse Canada of "behaving terribly" if things didn't go his way, and he'd reach for his tariff paddle.

Isn't most of the text on the page grey? It's not white, it's rgb(215,215,216). And the background is not black. Some worse examples are shown, but then the message comes across as "don't use grey unless you know what you're doing, like I do, because I'm using grey while I tell you not to use grey, but mine is okay."

Maybe aside from the unset option, something more specific about a minimum contrast threshold would be useful. Ideally the author wouldn't be breaking below that threshold themselves while explaining it.

There would likely be millions of Americans celebrating the murder of their current president, should that happen. It doesn't mean it's reasonable, right, just, or civilized, nor would it indicate that it was a unanimously supported action.

I read the whole thing and thought I had very little interest in this kind of thing. I'm not sure if the writing is exceptional, or if I was captured by the idea that the style would change as I read on. Maybe a bit of both, but either way, this was very interesting. I wonder, if a similar thing were done with hand writing, whether many of us would be lost a lot sooner.

Yeah, but the stock might take a massive hit if this were seriously pursued, and it might even have further consequences in the markets. Let's keep our priorities straight.

Federal troops assassinating kneeling protesters is still not within the Overton window though.

> I’m too old to learn XYZ skill if I get laid off, it will be life changing, and for what?

If you're not already retirement aged, how is age stopping you from learning a new skill? This sounds like learned ageism.

Well, time is one aspect but we'd also need motivation and proper execution for a reasonable chance at successful adaptation. My guess is we'll coast along the boundary. I don't imagine things will move so fast as to cause the sort of general upheaval that I think you're talking about. But I do think things will move fast enough to cause significant harm on a larger scale than we've seen recently in the West.

Sounds like OP is happy to be alive at this moment, reveling in the wonder of it all, and wanting to share.