Hacker News: CurrentB

New comment by CurrentB in "Real-time estimates of animals consumed by humans worldwide"

CurrentB — Sat, 31 Jan 2026 03:34:19 +0000

Now I'm curious. Why can't the same land be used to grow a soy bean for human consumption vs animal consumption? I would naively assume that at worst some land might yield top quality crops but that it would at least be usable as an ingredient or something?

New comment by CurrentB in "Real-time estimates of animals consumed by humans worldwide"

CurrentB — Fri, 30 Jan 2026 22:08:21 +0000

> Why is okay to kill a tree to build a home, kill a plant to eat, but not okay to kill an animal to eat? > Does the biological complexity of the organism make it more or less okay to kill it?

The ability to suffer is the distinguishing/relevant factor. We all know what suffering feels like and we know that animals have the capacity to suffer. We don't really know that trees do. I want to reduce the suffering I am responsible for.

> Is it okay to kill a cockroach or a rat in your home?

I probably would get rid of infestations in my home and feel bad about it.

It's not about having a 100% perfect record with not killing animals. It's about striving to minimize animal suffering as much as practicable. You're never going to reduce this to 0 animals. But you can get to 95% better than the average human pretty easily if you want.

New comment by CurrentB in "Real-time estimates of animals consumed by humans worldwide"

CurrentB — Fri, 30 Jan 2026 20:05:39 +0000

With what exactly?

New comment by CurrentB in "Real-time estimates of animals consumed by humans worldwide"

CurrentB — Fri, 30 Jan 2026 19:12:46 +0000

Do you want your kids to have colon cancer or heart disease because there is pretty strong evidence to suggest red meat contributes to these. And there's much stronger evidence for that than there is that suggests that vegetarian kids will be shorter and physically weaker (in fact I don't think there is much good evidence at all suggesting that).

Do you also have a problem with red meat?

New comment by CurrentB in "Real-time estimates of animals consumed by humans worldwide"

CurrentB — Fri, 30 Jan 2026 18:59:21 +0000

Someone else linked these in the replies, but that's simply not true. Most land taken up to grow plants is used to inefficiently feed livestock. Feeding humans plants only would be much much more efficient in terms of land use.

https://ourworldindata.org/global-land-for-agriculture

https://ourworldindata.org/land-use-diets

New comment by CurrentB in "Real-time estimates of animals consumed by humans worldwide"

CurrentB — Fri, 30 Jan 2026 17:48:47 +0000

Do you think it widely leads to behavior changes among people that support environmental causes?

New comment by CurrentB in "Real-time estimates of animals consumed by humans worldwide"

CurrentB — Fri, 30 Jan 2026 17:17:35 +0000

Presumably you only would acquire female chickens to lay eggs. What happened to the male ones? (I don't recommend googling this).

What do you do with the cow when its milk yield drops after several pregnancies? what do you do with the male calves? Just keep them all as pets?

I think there are situations I could contrive where I'd say yeah its fine ethically to eat these things, but the general case still has victims.

And again, since maybe the first week without them, I truly haven't missed milk or eggs or anything else after eliminating them from my diet. Plant options are pretty good too and there are plenty of plants.

New comment by CurrentB in "Real-time estimates of animals consumed by humans worldwide"

CurrentB — Fri, 30 Jan 2026 17:04:12 +0000

Personally that would be even worse for me, though I understand maybe "better" on a societal scale by some metrics. To feed a being every day and care for it, to gain its trust, to appreciate their individuality, then to have them killed when they reach some fraction of its potential lifespan, I just don't want to do that. I'm perfectly happy eating legumes.

New comment by CurrentB in "Real-time estimates of animals consumed by humans worldwide"

CurrentB — Fri, 30 Jan 2026 16:53:45 +0000

I went vegan six months ago after being exposed to numbers like this and thinking about it a bit. In particular, imagining extending the empathy I felt for my pets to all these other unseen animals that really aren't much different. I thought I'd try it for a week to see how hard it was. It was so easy that I never looked back. These numbers all could be pretty close to zero and we humans would still thrive just as much as we are now, but causing much less suffering to other beings.

New comment by CurrentB in "Eat Real Food"

CurrentB — Fri, 09 Jan 2026 20:16:30 +0000

There is no scientific evidence for this

New comment by CurrentB in "VCMI: An open-source engine for Heroes III"

CurrentB — Thu, 11 Dec 2025 18:17:34 +0000

I love homm2 and have been playing fheroes2 for a bit now. homm2 is truly a masterpiece. To me it's the peak of the heroes series. The art and music are both great and still hold up to this day. The game play is basically perfect for what it is - subsequent games in the series, to me, just are adding more and more piece types to a chess board.

Dwarkesh to donate 250k to farmkind to help prevent cruelty in factory farming

CurrentB — Sat, 09 Aug 2025 17:00:43 +0000

Article URL: https://www.dwarkesh.com/p/lewis-bollard

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44848146

Points: 1

# Comments: 0

New comment by CurrentB in "My AI skeptic friends are all nuts"

CurrentB — Mon, 02 Jun 2025 22:00:06 +0000

I agree I'm bullish on AI for coding generally, but I am curious how they'd get around this problem. Even if they can code at super human level, then you just get rarer super human bugs. Or is another AI going to debug it? Unless this loop is basically fail proof, does the human's job just becoming debugging the hardest things to debug (or at least a blindspot of the AI)

New comment by CurrentB in "It's Time to Stop Taking Sam Altman at His Word"

CurrentB — Sat, 05 Oct 2024 18:58:05 +0000

"a few thousand days away" feels like such a duplicitous way to phrase something when "a few years" would be more natural to everyone on the planet. It just seems intentionally manipulative and not even trying to hide it. I've never been an anti-ceo type person but something about Altman sketches me out

New comment by CurrentB in "Howm: Personal Wiki for Emacs"

CurrentB — Wed, 04 Sep 2024 13:22:53 +0000

I know this probably isn't the best place for a bug report/help request, but this seems cool, and the alternative to asking here, now, realistically is that I just forget about this

I'm trying howm on emacs 29.4

I try (with my config and also with emacs -Q)

  (use-package howm)

I enter `C-c , ,` I see the howm-memu pop up, but it's all plaintext with no font highlighting/decoration/"links" or anything, and I get in the Messages log:

  font-lock-fontify-keywords-region: Symbol’s function definition is void: nil
  Error during redisplay: (jit-lock-function 5328) signaled (void-function nil)

Is this familiar to anyone?

New comment by CurrentB in "Martin Scorsese's secret life as an obsessive VHS archivist"

CurrentB — Mon, 25 Mar 2024 21:52:08 +0000

I was hoping to see this exact recommendation.

New comment by CurrentB in "What is the closest to Google Keep but self hosted?"

CurrentB — Sun, 19 Nov 2023 20:26:12 +0000

Markor+syncthing

New comment by CurrentB in "Nvidia H100 GPUs: Supply and Demand"

CurrentB — Tue, 01 Aug 2023 13:17:24 +0000

Is Nvidia even able to capture a proportionately significant amount of revenue from increases in demand for GPU cycles? As the article describes, there are real bottlenecks, but how does this play out? My assumption is that Nvidia doesn't have proportional pricing power for some reason. If demand increases 10x, they can't raise prices to the same extent (correct me if I'm wrong).

How would that even play out then? Is everyone in the world simply stuck waiting for Nvidia's capacity to meet demand?

There is obviously a huge incentive now to be competitive here, but is it realistic that anyone else might meaningfully meet demand before Nvidia can?

New comment by CurrentB in "Llama.cpp 30B runs with only 6GB of RAM now"

CurrentB — Sat, 01 Apr 2023 05:59:11 +0000

Yeah, I've been using python for the first time in a while to try out some of the llm stuff and I can't believe how bad the dependency hell is. It's probably particularly bad due to the pace of change in this field. But I spend an hour getting dependencies fixed every time I touch anything. 80% of the Google Collabs I find are just outright broken. I wish there were other viable non python options to try out these things.

New comment by CurrentB in "Chex Quest"

CurrentB — Sun, 19 Feb 2023 04:53:29 +0000

Wow, I had forgotten until now about this game that I must have got from a cereal box as a child and played for countless hours.