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whytakaon The conflation of money and things

While financialized society is still standing, I'd much rather have money than material wealth.

Security and freedom, time, and well-being. Worth much more than another luxury t-shirt.

whytakaon Nobody knows how the whole system works

But people are expected to understand the part of the system they are responsible for at the level of abstraction they are being paid to operate.

This new arrangement would be perfectly fine if they aren't responsible when/if it breaks.

whytakaon Launch HN: AgentMail (YC S25) – An API that gives agents their own email inboxes

Can I ask how you made the animations in the Use Cases section?

whytakaon Project Genie: Experimenting with infinite, interactive worlds

They have a feature where you can take a photo and create a world from that.

If instead of a photo you have a video feed, this is one step closer to implementing subjective experience.

whytakaon Project Genie: Experimenting with infinite, interactive worlds

I think this is the key component of developing subjective experience.

whytakaon Returning to Church won't save us from nihilism

And yet still a more contemplative and responsible approach to morality.

whytakaon Returning to Church won't save us from nihilism

> I think people don’t participate in religion because it asks of them. Many people are lazy, greedy or hedonistic. It takes effort and “practice” to be virtuous or religious.

Say what you will of "wokeism" but it is an ethic that asks plenty of people. It constantly demands one to evaluate virtuous action or inaction. I don't think people are turning away from religion because it takes work. Because it requires real moral deliberation, it's actually more work than mere obedience to scripture.

My mileage does vary. Countless crimes of abuse and co-option of moral authority enabled by religion has proven to me that evil does exist and the presence of religion or the lack thereof is orthogonal to building a moral society.

whytakaon Returning to Church won't save us from nihilism

Negative press about religion, whether its corruption or its inefficacy, has led to lower participation in religion the world over.

whytakaon Returning to Church won't save us from nihilism

Surely that's more Western philosophy than Christianity. If anything, Christianity impeded social progress. Even now, the most vocal Christians would contend that moral truths owe to scripture than reason.

whytakaon iPhone Air

I want an all-screen iPod gen 2-4 as a phone.

whytakaon Aspects of modern HTML/CSS you may not be familiar with

I haven't used float in at least half a decade. CSS is easy.

whytakaon We need a new theory of democracy – because this version has failed

What is the difference?

whytakaon We need a new theory of democracy – because this version has failed

The word has many interpretations. You've touched upon just one (and the most fallacious: ad populum) of them.

The masses can be extreme if they are:

- wrong

- deviates sharply from historical norms

- undergoing mass psychosis

whytakaon The AIpocalypse is here for web sites as search referrals plunge

I've been building https://www.webring.gg . It's a webring creation and management tool that lets members vote new websites (and website owners) to join the ring.

I'm hoping that good webrings can hold the integrity of human networks on the web.

whytakaon Ask HN: How can we keep (part of) the web human?

I've been building https://www.webring.gg . It's a webring creation and management tool that lets members vote new websites (and website owners) to join the ring.

I'm hoping that good webrings can hold the integrity of human networks on the web.

whytakaon Liquid Glass – WWDC25 [video]

Two problems from what I've seen so far:

1. Browser navigation overlapping website viewport in iOS Safari. What is the real height of the viewport?

2. Floating side panel on macOS: necessitates needless extension the app body. Also, the App close button is in the side panel, which is floating IN the app body. This seems like a betrayal of their so called structure philosophy.

whytakaon Defiant loyalists paid dearly for choosing wrong side in the American Revolution

What's a general news forum with high quality commentators you think is relatively devoid of astroturfing?

whytakaon Apple introduces a universal design across platforms

This is mitigated by wrapping the main scrollable content in a container that has height: 100dvh and overflow: auto. It means that phone controls are always showing but it made a bottom anchored menu reliably static.

whytakaon Apple introduces a universal design across platforms

I only caught a glimpse but what I saw for iOS Safari concerns me.

The browser navigation overlaps the viewport. I wonder if this'll break websites/apps that anchor a menu to the bottom.

whytakaon The UI future is colourful and dimensional

"The best design is design that gets out of the way" as a maxim will probably hold.

Users may state a preference for "delight" and claim to be delighted by maximally rich graphics but I doubt it'll move the needle as a business priority.

As more AI slop pollute our digital consumption streams, my bet is that these attempts at simulacrum will quickly turn garish.

whytakaon How Does Claude 4 Think? – Sholto Douglas and Trenton Bricken

Even if one were to deny humans the will to "act", to think - as a verb, as some action being committed by a willing being or an automaton - by my definition, requires some weighing or surveying of possible answers.

If I were to ask you a question and you were to blurt out an answer by reflex or by unguided stream of consciousness, I can accuse you of not thinking. The kind of thinking I'm referring to you here is one where you take pause to let go of prejudices and consider alternatives before answering.

I'd say that LLMs are at best simulating reflexive streams of consciousness. Even with chain-of-thought, it never pauses to actually "think".

But maybe even our own pauses are just internal chains of thought. Look at me be a reflexive stream of consciousness.

whytakaon Ask HN: What are you working on? (May 2025)

Webring.GG - www.webring.gg

It's a democratic webring creator/management app where members can vote on new websites to join their ring.

whytakaon If nothing is curated, how do we find things

It's no complete solution against AI slop but I've been working on www.webring.gg which is a democratic webring manager. To join, websites are invited and voted on by current members to keep slop from polluting the integrity of the webring.

whytakaon Waymo and Toyota outline partnership to advance autonomous driving deployment

My conjecture is that when people started to see non-taxi branded cars just idle on streets without parking, forcing people to cross over lanes around them, it broke a social barrier.

whytakaon You could just choose optimism

I, for one, find joy and humor in my complaining.

whytakaon Waymo and Toyota outline partnership to advance autonomous driving deployment

I am now convinced that Uber/ride-sharing is responsible for the deterioration in our high-trust societies.

Uber made it ok for regular drivers commit road violations with impunity.

whytakaon Ask HN: What are you working on? (April 2025)

https://www.webring.gg

I've been working on a webring creation and management app with embeddable widgets for member sites.

whytakaon More than half of high-impact cancer lab studies could not be replicated

> If you can't reproduce it, it's not science.

Just a point that not all science can have empirical and reproducible study.

whytakaon Ask HN: I'm looking for a good book on the fundamentals of CS

As a self taught dev myself, check out my comment here:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29366106

whytakaon Books that changed my career as a software engineer

CODE teaches you about how computation can be structured out of circuits and switches and ultimately transistors. I now understand the fundamental nature of electronic computation.

UNIX taught me about the how an OS deals with hardware resources and the software that run on them. I now understand the environment in which my processes live as well as the structure of a process.

DDIA taught me about the structure of data, how databases operate on data through transactions, the difficulties of synchronization across databases, and the way data streaming works.