Hacker News: AlexandrB

New comment by AlexandrB in "California's new tire efficiency rules could save drivers $1B a year"

AlexandrB — Tue, 18 Aug 2026 17:18:45 +0000

This kind of "average" nonsense in the form of CAFE[1] standards is why we have endless SUVs and crossovers on the road now. I expect that this will lead to similar unintended consequences.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corporate_average_fuel_economy

> A complicated 2011 mathematical formula was replaced starting in 2012 with a simpler inverse-linear formula with cutoff values.[10] CAFE footprint requirements are set up such that a vehicle with a larger footprint has a lower fuel economy requirement than a vehicle with a smaller footprint.

New comment by AlexandrB in "California's new tire efficiency rules could save drivers $1B a year"

AlexandrB — Tue, 18 Aug 2026 17:11:05 +0000

Yeah, it's a weird move to legislate this kind of trade-off, especially when one of the competing factors is tire wear. Making new tires takes energy too! If I was paranoid, I'd say the tire lobby was involved here and looking for an excuse to sell more lower durability tires.

New comment by AlexandrB in "On AI regulation and messaging"

AlexandrB — Mon, 17 Aug 2026 20:25:14 +0000

You say that AI is transformation layer, then list out physical things that would be necessary to transform AI into something useful such as sufficiently advanced embodied robotics. How is this different than electricity?

New comment by AlexandrB in "Marketers are Addicted to Bad Data (2020)"

AlexandrB — Mon, 17 Aug 2026 19:33:20 +0000

> A policeman sees a drunk man searching for something under a streetlight and asks what the drunk has lost. He says he lost his keys and they both look under the streetlight together. After a few minutes the policeman asks if he is sure he lost them here, and the drunk replies, no, and that he lost them in the park. The policeman asks why he is searching here, and the drunk replies, "this is where the light is".

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Streetlight_effect

New comment by AlexandrB in "Incident with Github.com [resolved]"

AlexandrB — Mon, 17 Aug 2026 18:52:05 +0000

I think you understate what a big deal the decentralization was when Git came out. Back in the early 2000s, getting internet while out of the office was hard. 3G was in its infancy and expensive so you were at the mercy of finding a WiFi hotspot. Git's predecessors, such as SVN, were unusable without an internet connection to the server. Git (and Mercurial) allowed doing version control without an internet connection for the first time, which is a massive benefit for some types of development or doing work on the road. This aspect of Git definitely became less important as always-on internet connections became ubiquitous, but it's still super helpful sometimes. I can't imagine going back.

New comment by AlexandrB in "Anthropic's War on open source AI"

AlexandrB — Mon, 17 Aug 2026 18:41:59 +0000

I think that's fair. Em-dashes are pretty innocuous and I think technically correct regardless. What bothers me is all the filler in AI writing that just makes it longer and harder to read. I'm actually not that bothered by the idea of AI writing, but don't waste my time and patience with all these "not X, but Y" digressions thrown in for flavour. Get to the bloody point.

New comment by AlexandrB in "Anthropic's War on open source AI"

AlexandrB — Mon, 17 Aug 2026 18:35:26 +0000

I'm not dismissing the argument, I'm refusing to read a bunch of filler for an idea that (I'm guessing) could fit into 140 characters. Brevity is the soul of wit.

New comment by AlexandrB in "Anthropic's War on open source AI"

AlexandrB — Mon, 17 Aug 2026 17:17:41 +0000

> That is not a tool. That is a leash.

as;dr (AI slop, didn't read)

New comment by AlexandrB in "Claude: System Prompts"

AlexandrB — Mon, 17 Aug 2026 15:58:16 +0000

> Are clearly just intended as illustrative, rather than a claim that 500,000 people in Sub-Sarah Africa will go without water as a result of AI data centres.

Let's be honest, it's meant to be emotionally manipulative. There are plenty of ways to be illustrative that would make more sense to the target audience, but invoking impoverished folks in Africa is meant to tug at the heart strings.

New comment by AlexandrB in "Apple's App Tracking Transparency treated its own apps better than rivals"

AlexandrB — Mon, 17 Aug 2026 15:40:26 +0000

> I personally also don't like that WhatsApp/Instagram/Facebook/Slack asks for access to the whole album just to display the photo picker, but I'm pretty sure some designer or product manager made a strong case for it internally.

Main reason I don't use the in-app photo pickers for these but "share" the photo I want to upload from Photos into the app. Zero trust for these companies.

New comment by AlexandrB in "Incident with Github.com"

AlexandrB — Mon, 17 Aug 2026 14:06:36 +0000

> Luckily we already have a distributed version control system that can take over github

Surprised that this wasn't just a link to Git. The biggest benefit of Git over predecessors was that it enabled decentralization. Github re-centralized the common case for the sake of convenience.

New comment by AlexandrB in "Incident with Github.com [resolved]"

AlexandrB — Mon, 17 Aug 2026 14:04:58 +0000

Boomer opinion but trusting third parties to be critical infrastructure, especially with no SLA in sight, will always end in tears. "The cloud" is very convenient, but its providers will never care about your infrastructure or your customers as much as you will.

New comment by AlexandrB in "AI Is Threatening Natural Resources for Billions"

AlexandrB — Thu, 13 Aug 2026 20:50:12 +0000

> Netflix and YouTube probably are orders of magnitude less than the alternative of driving to plays and movie theaters.

This ignores that no one drives to a movie theatre or play every day or even several times a day but this is a common usage pattern for Netflix or that Netflix is not really an alternative to these activities but just another form of entertainment piled on top.

New comment by AlexandrB in "I requested a copy of my data from McDonald’s loyalty program"

AlexandrB — Thu, 13 Aug 2026 15:35:01 +0000

What people think of these programs is often linked to the perception of the product being sold. If a cigarette company did this, people would be pissed. McDonalds is kind of an edge case - everyone knows it's not great for you, but it's not as harmful as cigarettes or drinking so you get mixed takes.

The classic case here is Target inferring that someone was pregnant before her family did[1] - so yeah, this is nothing new.

[1] https://www.forbes.com/sites/kashmirhill/2012/02/16/how-targ...

New comment by AlexandrB in "Controversial creators are benefiting from monetization programs run by Meta"

AlexandrB — Wed, 12 Aug 2026 15:14:30 +0000

I've noticed that when my partner and I look at the same Instagram post (within a few minutes of each other), we get completely different "top" comments. I suspect Instagram is ordering the comments individually for each user to maximize engagement.

All social media is drifting towards being a mirror that reflects your worst tendencies back at you. No content restrictions will fix this - the whole personalized approach to media is fundamentally rotten.

New comment by AlexandrB in "Facebook is paying controversial creators to produce rage-bait content"

AlexandrB — Wed, 12 Aug 2026 15:09:18 +0000

> And second best would be these people owning their moral vacuity.

So anyone who does not agree with you is morally vacuous? Very convenient. Prevents you from ever having to question your own morality.

New comment by AlexandrB in "Controversial creators are benefiting from monetization programs run by Meta"

AlexandrB — Wed, 12 Aug 2026 15:01:15 +0000

"Harm" is a mushy term that means everything and nothing. There are many competing definitions of "harm" based on one's cultural, religious, and philosophical priors. So what kind of harm are you talking about exactly?

New comment by AlexandrB in "uBlock Origin is giving up the fight to keep ads off Facebook"

AlexandrB — Wed, 12 Aug 2026 13:25:05 +0000

Is there any enforcement of this? Like at all? All the review bots and bots promoting random crap on reddit say otherwise. Traditional media still pays lip-service to this, but only barely.

New comment by AlexandrB in "uBlock Origin Is Giving Up the Fight to Keep Ads Off Facebook"

AlexandrB — Wed, 12 Aug 2026 13:22:26 +0000

Such naïveté. The much more likely scenario is that AI is used to add or replace ads in a website in a way that's now impossible to remove. Running your own AI on the browser will be disallowed to "ensure a safe browsing experience".

New comment by AlexandrB in "As AI eats the web, the internet’s collective memory is disappearing"

AlexandrB — Tue, 11 Aug 2026 19:41:40 +0000

And make sure "follow" means "buy their stuff on Bandcamp or directly from them". Streaming platforms send most of the money you pay to bands you probably never listen to.