Hacker News Reader

thot_experimenton Steam Users Beg for "No AI" Filter as Vibecoders Flood Next Fest

What? The onus is not on me to wear stab proof clothing, the onus is on society to create a world where the floor is high enough that mugging isn't worth it.

thot_experimenton Ledger confirms spy chip implant behind wallet crypto thefts

Amazing, at least we have hackers stepping up to do the work the government refuses to.

thot_experimenton Flock Wants the Most Detailed Map of Its Surveillance Cameras Taken Offline

...normal and internally consistent because we do different jobs in different contexts and the impacts of oversight have a different cost/benefit analysis, do you think doctors should have the same oversight as your food delivery guy?

thot_experimenton Flock Wants the Most Detailed Map of Its Surveillance Cameras Taken Offline

What? The public/private distinction? How is that confusing? It's literally in the name.

thot_experimenton Flock Wants the Most Detailed Map of Its Surveillance Cameras Taken Offline

Selection pressure sure, but obviously worth it. Public servants work for us and we should be able to see what they're up to.

thot_experimenton Plan mode is dead

Sure and I should also have been more specific, I don't always use "plan mode" I often just do planning without explicitly activating it just via prompting, point being that the robot doesn't work for me without some time spent planning out what to do.

thot_experimenton Plan mode is dead

Fascinating! I literally never use Claude without plan mode and I find it's basically useless without it, constantly wasting tokens going in circles on irrelevant things. Fable or Opus. I feel like neither has a good sense for how to architect things and if I don't use plan mode it usually wastes hours of time chasing it's tail or implementing kludges on kludges to get something working that would be a much simple fix elsewhere, especially when working on a larger codebase.

thot_experimenton Rebuilding a 1995 GPS Time Server so I don't get Telstra'd

Yeah, I got recommended this video and felt very clickbaited and stopped watching when he mentioned that he's just replacing the innards with a Pi. Incredibly lame.

thot_experimenton TiVo to charge money for skipping commercials in your own recordings

I don't understand, how is this possibly implemented?

thot_experimenton Dimethyl Mercury Exposure Incident at MIT

Imagine thinking you'd killed yourself, and then breathing the intense sigh of relief when you realize you're bad at chemistry and you didn't manage to synthesize the compound correctly.

thot_experimenton Show HN: Laser Graffiti

https://graffitiresearchlab.com/blog/projects/laser-tag/#vid...

everything old is new again, and toys will be toys

thot_experimenton LLMs are making me lose my savviness

You don't need the "for me", it's implicit in it being an article written by someone in a casual setting. I'd argue the issue is that we as internet blog post readers treat these think pieces with more gravitas then they deserve as a baseline.

thot_experimenton LLMs are making me lose my savviness

What are you talking about lmao, tons of carpenters have said that. The subjective experience of your craft is shaped by the tools you chose to use. For some people, and I venture this is most often true for master craftspeople, not only is the journey is more important than the destination, but the limitations of the path breed the creativity needed to even arrive at the destination.

thot_experimenton The internet is kind of a predatory cesspit now

It's written in a hyperbolic way, but I don't think your characterization is right. The author isn't saying everyone is an asshole, he's saying the systemic forces are mostly aligned in a predatory direction, and that part is absolutely true. I have a good time on Instagram despite the ways the platform is structured.

thot_experimenton Show HN: My Claude quota ran out in 10 minutes, so I made a tool to find out why

Sure I get that, but the part where the robot has to read the repo and figure stuff out can be done by a weak model for near-free with no thinking. The delta isn't that big.

thot_experimenton Show HN: My Claude quota ran out in 10 minutes, so I made a tool to find out why

I genuinely don't even understand how people run out of tokens with the basic subscription. I had Claude write an entire app that has completely replaced Adobe Illustrator for my specific usecases (mostly inking sketches, and embellishing generated SVGs). It does everything exactly the way I want and has much better ergonomics (blender hotkeys ftw) and the whole thing took me like 700k tokens over the course of a couple days.

Do people just let Opus ultra extra max thinking run amok on their whole codebase with a single context? I don't even think I could even design sensible features faster, I'm the limiting factor here, the robot pretty much oneshots everything I ask for.

thot_experimenton A Looming Rare Earth Shortage Threatens Critical Tech

I'm pretty sure this is just an economic problem right? It has long been convenient to exploit countries that have low wages and make little effort to price in the negative externalities of extracting these resources. It's not like the imperial core doesn't have the minerals, we're just currently not getting them out of the ground.

thot_experimenton ChatGPT lost 22 points of web share in a year

54% to go, good work team.

thot_experimenton Closing Canario Terminal source code

There is no pretense here that closing the source is the only alternative. It's only the alternative the author has chosen.

For better or worse we live in a society. Even being perceived and having a simulacrum of you in someone's head, much less a collective simulacrum in many people's heads is restrictive. Every facet of yourself you reveal to is another string tied upon you. I'm not here to argue one way or another what you should do, but it is not self inflicted, it is a fact of social existence. Even to have the discipline to ignore an email can be taxing, especially if you view the person on the other end as a human. Just being made aware of a bug, or a different way of structuring things is an infohazard if your goal is to just have fun doing things your way. I think closing the source like this is a fairly drastic course of action, but there's plenty of things I've written that aren't open source for the same reasons, even though I'd like them to be, I'd rather be a hermit about it just because the vibe is better.

thot_experimenton Tom Stanton's supersonic trebuchet breaks sound barrier with gravity alone

In terms of safety to me and others this endeavor is far below what is societally acceptable and if you think otherwise you are bad at evaluating danger.

thot_experimenton Tom Stanton's supersonic trebuchet breaks sound barrier with gravity alone

It's absurdist to be concerned about this and be okay driving a car from a total harm to society perspective.

thot_experimenton Tom Stanton's supersonic trebuchet breaks sound barrier with gravity alone

It's shooting 3d printed balls, I imagine they don't stay supersonic for very long. Significantly less dangerous to others than driving a car.

thot_experimenton Apple is getting this wrong

"800 billion" dollar companies making callout blog posts now, truly this is the dumbest timeline. I want to get off Mr. Bones Wild Ride.

thot_experimenton Balcony Solar: $1.74/watt direct plug-in solar

Obviously not, but since the panels are >8x cheaper it's possible to buy 2x the capacity advertised here + an inverter for a one time cost of $200, so about $0.33/watt.

thot_experimenton Balcony Solar: $1.74/watt direct plug-in solar

Just for comparison buying solar panels off craigslist is about $0.20/watt.

thot_experimenton Netflix employee fired for sharing personal details in retreat trust exercise

My freedom to choose an employer is orthogonal to the incentive structures within in that relationship.

thot_experimenton Netflix employee fired for sharing personal details in retreat trust exercise

I'm vulnerable with plenty of people, just not employers (in general). The incentive structures, especially at a company that's more than a few people are such that it is in their best interest to get as much from you for as little as possible, that's the entire point of the system.

thot_experimenton Netflix employee fired for sharing personal details in retreat trust exercise

A mutually beneficial agreement can still be adversarial? If you're getting shaken down by the mafia it's beneficial for you to pay them protection money.

thot_experimenton Netflix employee fired for sharing personal details in retreat trust exercise

It always surprises me when people don't understand that the employee-employer relationship is an adversarial one. Unless you're in a democratic co-op or similar your employer is the enemy and you should never forget that. The correct move is to try to screw them in every legal way at every turn because that is what they are doing to you. Never divulge any information that increases your attack surface, always try to extract the most money for the least effort. This is capitalism 101.

You must not allow them to fool you into thinking that these aren't the rules they're playing by. David Sirlin's "Playing to Win" is a good treatise on how to be good, and perhaps the most important lesson is to play the game by the rules as written, and not by some other set of rules that exists only in your head.

(Though in this case the victim was senior enough that I suspect he was playing the game to the best of his ability, trying to humanize himself to gain the upper hand in some other manipulation game and misplayed, kicking things into the legal arena, as one does)

thot_experimenton I Reported on Flock's Cameras. Now I'm One of the System's Mistakes

I don't know that you can be absolutist about these things, we cede a lot of power to the government because it actually does make more sense to pay for and manage some things collectively. I'm deeply against surveillance like this but I don't think practically speaking we can get rid of it entirely. I think we should do our best to dismantle it as much as we can but enforcing the great responsibility part of great power on what's left is also a useful strategy.