Hacker News: Duanemclemore

New comment by Duanemclemore in "New Worlds: We are living in the future of J.G. Ballard or William Gibson"

Duanemclemore — Sun, 23 Aug 2026 00:27:44 +0000

Nope, he fled the draft there from South Carolina*. He has been there since '67 though.

He appears in an old CBC documentary about the Yorkville neighborhood and the hippies there from then.

https://www.cbc.ca/player/play/video/1.3202122

*ETA: Whoops I just realized he was born in SC, but he grew up in Virginia. So THAT'S where he fled to Toronto from.

New comment by Duanemclemore in "Anthropic's ‘watermark’ text adulteration in Claude is a perversion of writing"

Duanemclemore — Mon, 17 Aug 2026 16:59:12 +0000

As a university professor, back in the early days of this when students were just copy / pasting output directly I was really hoping the model builders would implement steganographic fuzzy hashes.

Not that it's the ideal solution. But it would be really neat.

New comment by Duanemclemore in "How I use LLMs to learn complex topics"

Duanemclemore — Mon, 10 Aug 2026 02:27:21 +0000

Buildings are a fantastically complicated and interesting complex problem space. I found my architecture studio students using it to ask technical and code questions about the buildings they were tasked with designing. I observed that the inaccurate information it was returning was compounding...

To be clear, I say "inaccurate" rather than "wrong" in this case because even if the information it returns is factually correct to the question being asked, students don't have an understanding of the complexity of the interdependent tectonic, regulatory, and spatial / experiential factors of a building sophisticated enough to ask their questions of the specificity and nuance necessary to get a good output that addresses the entire problem.

Anyway - with the students still learning to ask questions the right way, and the conditionally-incorrect facts making their learning more complicated rather than less, I hit on a strategy for them to use LLM's that seemed to help much better.

I suggested that instead of ask the LLM for the factual answer, or even better for the facts and an explanation, that they ask it to direct them to the proper place in the source material to find the answer themselves. Then, to treat it like a lab partner. IE:

Hey Claude I'm looking for "x."

Claude: "look at foo, bar."

Thank you - chapter (foo) part (bar) table (goo) says "car." However I notice that footnote (hoo) says there's an exception if "dar." Which is what I have. Walk me through this exception...

It seemed to have good results as a guide to understanding the disparate bodies of knowledge that they will eventually have to keep together in their heads and work synthetically and non-linearly through, rather than just as an external source of blindly trusted authority.

New comment by Duanemclemore in "The most official water costs $120k a gallon"

Duanemclemore — Sat, 01 Aug 2026 01:15:50 +0000

NIST Cigarettes are a mere $204 per carton.

Depending on what state you live in, that's not bad these days.

https://shop.nist.gov/ccrz__ProductDetails?sku=1196a&cclcl=e...

New comment by Duanemclemore in "Damaged Earth Catalog"

Duanemclemore — Mon, 06 Jul 2026 17:18:15 +0000

In line with the recent threads here on Appropriate Technology, etc. Brought back to my attention by the Advent of Computing podcast.

https://open.spotify.com/episode/21nolZRWrV8M2W28NxCMVa?si=f...

Damaged Earth Catalog

Duanemclemore — Mon, 06 Jul 2026 17:18:15 +0000

Article URL: https://damaged.bleu255.com/

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48807673

Points: 23

# Comments: 8

New comment by Duanemclemore in "Open Source Low Tech"

Duanemclemore — Tue, 30 Jun 2026 18:04:50 +0000

Victor Papanek's Design for the Real World [0] is a foundational text in the area of Appropriate Technology (cited here by others).

Essential reading alongside the Illich (also linked by others), Pye's Nature and Art of Workmanship [1], and Winner's "Do Artifacts Have Politics?" [2] for those interested in.... Let's call it an ecology OF technology?

And also the Papanek was probably the book that felt most like a forbidden text in undergraduate architecture school...

[0] https://archive.org/details/designforrealwor0000papa/page/n6...

[1] https://archive.org/details/natureartofwor00pyed

[2] https://www.jstor.org/stable/20024652

New comment by Duanemclemore in "Never Give Them Your Face"

Duanemclemore — Wed, 24 Jun 2026 07:09:39 +0000

Absolutely, if they're not asking for your information, as they were when I visited the site. The Wayback Machine snapshot here [0] shows a site identical to the one I visited.

[0] https://web.archive.org/web/20260622140511/https://nevergive...

New comment by Duanemclemore in "Never Give Them Your Face"

Duanemclemore — Wed, 24 Jun 2026 07:07:41 +0000

When I visited the page there was a field to enter your email to "sign" a pledge of refusal.

The state I saw appears to be preserved in the first Wayback Machine snapshot:

https://web.archive.org/web/20260622140511/https://nevergive...

New comment by Duanemclemore in "Never Give Them Your Face"

Duanemclemore — Mon, 22 Jun 2026 14:41:23 +0000

Who runs this site? There doesn't appear to be any information on this. A whois search returns nothing illuminating.

So... is it part of the parable they're trying to tell that they're seeing who will go against the exact sort of advice they're giving? Or does this -just happen to be- the kind of shady data gathering that they're warning against?

to quote the site itself, "We spent a generation teaching people the first rule of the internet: never give out your real identity to strangers."

New comment by Duanemclemore in "Taxonomy of the Occlupanida (parasitoids on bread bag tags)"

Duanemclemore — Thu, 18 Jun 2026 01:42:11 +0000

I distinctly remember seeing an exhibition of this work in Los Angeles in the early aughts. For the life of me I can't remember where. The photos were shot with a macro lens and blown up so that each specimen was ... 12" square? maybe bigger?

Even then there were dozens upon dozens of them on display. It was mind bending.

New comment by Duanemclemore in "Unit cell designer for 2d wallpaper groups"

Duanemclemore — Mon, 01 Jun 2026 04:46:57 +0000

Very cool!

If you're just learning about the Wallpaper Groups from this and feel like you've seen them before, it is probably from the work of MC Escher [0].

If you want a great recent survey, an episode of (the inimitable and now restarted) In Our Time from last month goes into the friendship / mutual influence of Escher and Coxeter. [1]

[0] https://eschermath.org/wiki/Regular_Division_of_the_Plane_Dr...

[1] https://www.bbc.com/audio/play/m002v19c

How a 150-year-old Japanese workshop survived the age of slop and distraction

Duanemclemore — Tue, 12 May 2026 20:58:12 +0000

Article URL: https://bigthinkmedia.substack.com/p/how-a-small-shop-in-kyoto-connects

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48114460

Points: 2

# Comments: 0

New comment by Duanemclemore in "The Free Universal Construction Kit"

Duanemclemore — Sat, 25 Apr 2026 19:43:27 +0000

Zometool rules!

I run workshops about the use of modular systems in facilitating non-expert participation in architecture. One I did (at the CAAD Futures Conference in 2023) was with Zometool. It was a blast and really successful.

In preparation I also got to interview the late great Steve Baer, inventor of the Zome (among many other things - seriously look him up, he's one of the most brilliant people of the past 100 years imo). It was a huge honor.

The book chapter the organizers were supposed to do about the conference workshops never materialized (hrmph), but I've done other little collaborative build projects since, so one day I'll document them all together.

New comment by Duanemclemore in "Larry Tesler: A Personal History of Modeless Text Editing and Cut/Copy-Paste (2012)"

Duanemclemore — Mon, 20 Apr 2026 17:16:34 +0000

Thanks for the link!

I have come to modal editors after decades of modeless, I enjoy them - but respect, understand, and appreciate Tesler's efforts, and I always enjoy reading about them.

New comment by Duanemclemore in "Adobe modifies hosts file to detect whether Creative Cloud is installed"

Duanemclemore — Mon, 13 Apr 2026 02:18:11 +0000

Our use case for After Effects was video stabilization. We have had good luck with Blender for this. I've also noticed that the old simple motion graphics I used to do - title overlays, etc - Blender can do easily. As for more intensive motion graphics, I can't speak too much to that.

As for any After Effects-style NLE capabilities - DaVinci Resolve knocks those out of the park. You'll also probably hear a lot of people singing the praises of Natron for NLE and Motion Graphics, and from our experience with that it seemed like the learning curve was non-trivial, but anything AE (and some aspects of Premiere Pro) could do, it could match... Good luck!

New comment by Duanemclemore in "Adobe modifies hosts file to detect whether Creative Cloud is installed"

Duanemclemore — Tue, 07 Apr 2026 18:52:42 +0000

Unfortunately it looks like BricsCAD has gone the SaaS way, but they are an extremely mature alternative to classic AutoCAD 2d and 3d [0]

Additionally, Rhino has always been a good drafting tool [1] but my understanding in the current WIP (which if I'm guessing will probably be released as 9.0, within the next 6-12 months) is making a huge push to include better drafting tools. McNeel, the developer, has no plans to go to a subscription model.

[0] https://www.bricsys.com/

[1] https://www.rhino3d.com/

New comment by Duanemclemore in "Adobe modifies hosts file to detect whether Creative Cloud is installed"

Duanemclemore — Tue, 07 Apr 2026 18:47:57 +0000

See my comment below, or here [0] and the same on github here [1].

[0] https://x.com/XdanielArt/status/1799474607055102257/photo/1

[1] https://github.com/KenneyNL/Adobe-Alternatives

New comment by Duanemclemore in "Adobe modifies hosts file to detect whether Creative Cloud is installed"

Duanemclemore — Tue, 07 Apr 2026 18:45:46 +0000

It's absolutely very important for students to understand what standard they'll be held to in industry. But few architects need an intricate understanding of the real publication-facing aspects of the programs. In our case, using these tools is pretty much always in support of getting the output of 3d modeling / BIM tools / photography of physical models into presentable shape. Going away from Adobe might be unwise were I teaching graphic design students, but for these students, those more sophisticated, domain-specific expertises are a lot less essential.

New comment by Duanemclemore in "Adobe modifies hosts file to detect whether Creative Cloud is installed"

Duanemclemore — Tue, 07 Apr 2026 06:53:06 +0000

No, the concepts are the same. The button you push is incidental.

For example, the GNU Image Manipulation Program now has non-destructive workflows and adjustment layers - and can easily easily be configured with photoshop-like keybinds anyway.

That's not to mention free-to-use tools like Affinity.

The things an architecture student needs it for are:

Photo adjustment:

Lightroom -> Darktable

Photo retouching:

Photoshop -> Affinity Pixel or Gnu Image Manipulation Program

Vector drawing (which for us is mostly processing from 3d modeling programs):

Illustrator -> Affinity Vector or Inkscape

Board and Book Layout

InDesign -> Affinity Layout or Scribus or VivaDesigner

Plus, for motion graphics and video processing, my partner and I have had great luck replacing AfterEffects and Premiere with Blender and DaVinci Resolve, respectively.

And ... believe it or not, I've had excellent luck with LibreOffice Draw as a PDF editor, so anything they would have needed Acrobat Pro for is covered by that (and / or PDF SAM).

The real "sticky wicket" is Revit. Autodesk has been a FAR more abusive company for FAR longer, but it's what we're stuck with - although the emergence of the BIM Workbench (Building Information Modeling) with the release of FreeCAD 1.0 [0] and the continued development of BlenderBIM (oh, now called BonsaiBIM) [1] at least gives some hope.

Anyway, for the Adobe replacements, here's more [2] based on [3]

[0] https://wiki.freecad.org/BIM_Workbench

[1] https://bonsaibim.org/

[2] https://github.com/KenneyNL/Adobe-Alternatives?tab=readme-ov...

[3] https://x.com/XdanielArt/status/1799474607055102257/photo/1