Hacker News: 0xcde4c3db

New comment by 0xcde4c3db in "Everyone should slow down AI development except for me"

0xcde4c3db — Sun, 13 Sep 2026 02:34:08 +0000

I don't think "plateaued" is the right word, but I do feel like there's been something like a logistic curve compression in the difference between smaller and larger models as the field evolves. For inference at least, the scale of practical difference between a single high-VRAM GPU or SFF UMA box, a whole rack, and a whole data center seems to be falling far short of what we might have imagined just a few years ago. The conversations I've heard have largely turned away from breathless anticipation of the next frontier model and toward attempts at hard-nosed evaluation of which tokens are worth the cost.

New comment by 0xcde4c3db in "Fuck it, make it anyway"

0xcde4c3db — Sat, 12 Sep 2026 13:59:26 +0000

It would absolutely make sense for someone who enjoys cycling to buy a pedal-assist e-bike, especially if they e.g. moved to a hillier area, sustained an injury, or just started having their strength/stamina decline with age.

(incidentally, the proliferation of unregistered/unlicensed motorcycles marketed as "e-bikes" has done enormous damage to the viability of e-bikes as a general category)

New comment by 0xcde4c3db in "De-Brainrot Vacations"

0xcde4c3db — Mon, 07 Sep 2026 14:12:00 +0000

I doubt that's the only factor, but I agree that it's almost certainly a factor. The modern "tech" industry has filled our waking hours with unceasing demands to do something. Buy this product, watch this video, listen to this podcast, react to this social media post; even "practice self-care" has somehow turned into an obligatory virtue-cultivating task. We obviously had advertising before, but this is a different beast, something akin to living in a casino.

As Bo Burnham put it, "apathy's a tragedy and boredom is a crime".

New comment by 0xcde4c3db in "South African diamond mines are closing due to weak sales and lab-grown stones"

0xcde4c3db — Sun, 06 Sep 2026 00:49:00 +0000

True, but it's also the case that in some places and subcultures we're already at a point where meat with certain qualifications in some contexts is a Veblen good, and the rhetoric around it is very much a quasi-mystical blend of notions of purity and vitalism (see e.g. paleo/primal/ancestral diet influencers). That edge, almost by definition, can't be produced in a lab, and if we were really being purely rational/utilitarian about these things, I doubt we'd be eating as much meat as we are today.

New comment by 0xcde4c3db in "Falsehoods Programmers Believe About LANs"

0xcde4c3db — Sat, 05 Sep 2026 23:56:37 +0000

What really matters is that there's a coherent policy for assigning addresses, which is absolutely compatible with having multiple DHCP servers on the same subnet (e.g. each server configured to hand out non-overlapping IP ranges).

New comment by 0xcde4c3db in "Sony makes bold claim about game ownership"

0xcde4c3db — Thu, 03 Sep 2026 17:34:01 +0000

I'm not a copyright lawyer, but my understanding is that you do not own a license when you buy a CD or cassette, you own a copy (strictly speaking, a "phonorecord" in US law). Copyright doesn't regulate the sorts of typical uses that the owner of a copy would engage in, so a license is not required. When you see those warnings on VHS/DVD/Blu-ray that they're licensed only for private home viewing, what they're telling you is that you don't have a license to do anything controlled by copyright such as broadcasting, publicly exhibiting, or reproducing it.

Software is significantly more complicated and gets into issues of physical permanence/transience and specific exemptions/limitations to normal copyright law (see e.g. 17 USC 117).

New comment by 0xcde4c3db in "Omarchy development practices lead to predictable security issues"

0xcde4c3db — Wed, 26 Aug 2026 23:15:12 +0000

> Worse, in the context of DHHs rants, it comes off as racist - I don't get the sense he wants to throw out Norwegians from Denmark, for example.

I think "primarily" is doing some lifting in "Denmark is primarily a country for the Danes", along with his vagueness about what it means to be of "the Japanese" (Yamato/Zainichi/Ainu/Ryukyuan/Bonin) or "the Brits" (English/Scots/Welsh/Cornish/Irish/Manx/Jamaican/...).

New comment by 0xcde4c3db in "Omarchy development practices lead to predictable security issues"

0xcde4c3db — Wed, 26 Aug 2026 13:25:56 +0000

Right; it's not political in the sense of "vote for candidate/party/policy XYZ", it's political in the sense that Omarchy is distinguished by being a vehicle for DHH's opinions, and by promoting Omarchy one can promote the general idea that DHH is a respectable guy with good opinions while still remaining firmly situated in "technical" subject matter.

New comment by 0xcde4c3db in "Omarchy development practices lead to predictable security issues"

0xcde4c3db — Wed, 26 Aug 2026 13:21:59 +0000

Also, the book that popularized "hello world" was very consciously advancing a programming-first pedagogical agenda, as opposed to building up a theoretical foundation first:

> The only way to learn a new programming language is by writing programs in it.

New comment by 0xcde4c3db in "Where did all the public bathrooms go?"

0xcde4c3db — Mon, 24 Aug 2026 23:22:18 +0000

The problem is that once you draw "the line", then what? Warehouse a bunch of helpless people in overcrowded prisons? Bus them to some other less-draconian municipality? Forcibly drug them into quasi-submission and then turn them loose again until the depot injection wears off? Or perhaps we should "just kill 'em", as Fox & Friends cohost Brian Kilmeade once suggested?

New comment by 0xcde4c3db in "Semaglutide linked to lower predicted dementia risk"

0xcde4c3db — Sun, 16 Aug 2026 22:02:52 +0000

Yeah, it's almost impressive how often hypotheses for what's causing rising obesity rates simply ignore actual data. I haven't been able to find it again, but a while back I stumbled on a journal article that was basically some epidemiologists ranting about this. IIRC there are whole categories of proposed causes that you can eliminate just based on the fact that that the rise is correlated across age groups.

New comment by 0xcde4c3db in "Super Mario Derivations"

0xcde4c3db — Sat, 15 Aug 2026 00:50:45 +0000

The implementation is superficially silly, but I think this can also be read as a meditation on exactly what distinctions we're making when we use terms like "program" vs. "process" or "input" vs. "dependency". Perhaps a cousin to the idea that compression formats represent specialized instruction sets for bitstream generation, or to static single assignment. It makes explicit what is usually implicit in emulator "movies", that each frame has the state of the prior frame as a dependency, even though that relationship is normally thought of as a side effect of the passage of time.

The underlying principle of translating those implicit temporal dependencies into explicit data dependencies very well might have applications in optimizing high-accuracy computer/console emulators. The usual implementations iterate over some variable that represents the passage of time and compute all possible side effects, which is expensive. Many compilers already do a related static optimization by eliminating intermediate variable mutations that can be proven to have no side effects.

(also, if you're not familiar with the "tool-assisted speedrun/superplay" tradition of optimizing video game input sequences as a flavor of metaprogramming, see https://tasvideos.org/NewcomerCorner)

New comment by 0xcde4c3db in "More than 10 firms pay up to $100k a month for access to Truth Social posts"

0xcde4c3db — Tue, 11 Aug 2026 14:08:10 +0000

I doubt there are many dyed-in-the-wool Republicans as such, but I'll bet there are many who still identify strongly enough with the old-school Republican messaging around rugged individualism and supply-side economics that they view the median Democrat as actively destructive by comparison to the merely flawed median Republican.

I'm far from being one of those myself, but I imagine the argument would be that any regulation one could propose to address this is bound to be worse than the problem itself, in terms of chilling effects on legitimate speech and commercial activity.

New comment by 0xcde4c3db in "AI psychosis is the new leadership blind spot"

0xcde4c3db — Fri, 07 Aug 2026 14:34:10 +0000

That might run the risk of backfiring, by teaching people that hallucinations are obvious and thus easily avoided. Perhaps one of those things that only happens to other people who aren't so smart/skilled/savvy (car crashes, scams, mental illness, etc.).

New comment by 0xcde4c3db in "Pizza, pasta, potatoes, protein – how Italian children became so overweight"

0xcde4c3db — Mon, 27 Jul 2026 00:18:30 +0000

We've been doing variations of "educate the general public about healthy dietary choices" for roughly as long as the obesity epidemic has been around. Shouldn't it have worked by now, if it were going to? As purportedly modern, scientific, data-driven societies, why do we keep engaging in this impotent self-flagellation?

New comment by 0xcde4c3db in "Nintendo Wii U games running from a 1980's Bernoulli disk [video]"

0xcde4c3db — Mon, 22 Jun 2026 23:32:11 +0000

As far as I understand it in retrospect (having grown up in a strictly PC household and later investigating "retro" platforms where SCSI was standard), SCSI was not inherently expensive. It's more that for PC platforms, ATA provided a hack that was cheaper at the time, which led to a bifucation of the market. ATA roughly turned HDDs into a subset of the ISA bus, which in turn originated as a buffered version of the CPU bus. That led to SCSI being at a premium on PC platforms because the target market was limited to customers for whom ATA wasn't good enough (mainly because they wanted more drives or longer cables than the thin translations of ATA could support).

New comment by 0xcde4c3db in "CDC terminates flu vaccine promotion campaign"

0xcde4c3db — Fri, 21 Feb 2025 13:31:38 +0000

> The COVID vaccine was an example of very heavy-handed enforcement

Do you have some concrete examples of this? I recall a lot of hyperventilating about the possibility of "vaccine passports" (complete with "mark of the beast" references), and a handful of instances where people got angry about COVID vaccination being folded into (decades-old) policies covering mandatory vaccinations for school/work, but not much beyond that. I carried a mask in case places had mask policies, but it never even occurred to me that I might need to prove that I was vaccinated.

New comment by 0xcde4c3db in "Teen on Musk's DOGE team graduated from 'The Com'"

0xcde4c3db — Mon, 10 Feb 2025 01:14:22 +0000

And even supposing that an administration doesn't fully trust Congress (or its ability to execute through parliamentary gridlock), there are a bunch of people in the executive branch whose whole-ass job it is to investigate this stuff, and could legitimately be directed to shift their priorities without Congressional approval. Oops, scratch that; there were a bunch of people with that job. [1]

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2025_dismissals_of_inspectors_...

New comment by 0xcde4c3db in "Teen on Musk's DOGE team graduated from 'The Com'"

0xcde4c3db — Sun, 09 Feb 2025 21:45:24 +0000

Probably because it's implausible, trivial to fake, and there's no way to conclusively prove it's real without the original tweet still being up.

New comment by 0xcde4c3db in "The young, inexperienced engineers aiding DOGE"

0xcde4c3db — Mon, 03 Feb 2025 23:10:57 +0000

Being in bed with tax preparation companies is probably the main thing, but I also vaguely recall a statement by someone years ago (perhaps Grover Norquist or Dick Armey) that filing tax returns should be kept annoying simply for the sake of keeping people angry about taxes in general.