Hacker News: FormerBandmate

New comment by FormerBandmate in "Notepad++ hijacked by state-sponsored actors"

FormerBandmate — Mon, 02 Feb 2026 05:11:50 +0000

You can totally say Texas should be independent. A lot of Texans have.

You can’t be against the Ukraine war in Russia because Putin is an evil dictator

New comment by FormerBandmate in "Notepad++ hijacked by state-sponsored actors"

FormerBandmate — Mon, 02 Feb 2026 05:07:16 +0000

A huge chunk of activism is pointless and annoying. Especially when every cause is lumped together into Activism (TM) and the Omnicause.

I don’t agree with them and I don’t think they should be in my software, or dealing with anything they don’t understand (for instance crime, homeless people, geopolitics, or really anything outside of overpriced vegan coffee shops). All they really do is end up getting Fox News people to vote for fascists like Trump out of spite

New comment by FormerBandmate in "Tell HN: Bending Spoons laid off almost everybody at Vimeo yesterday"

FormerBandmate — Thu, 22 Jan 2026 20:34:05 +0000

The thing about this business model is that it inevitably falls apart when things break.

Bending Spoons doesn’t care (yet), but they’re not at the point where stuff has proven unsustainable

New comment by FormerBandmate in "Free software hasn't won"

FormerBandmate — Mon, 13 Oct 2025 14:01:28 +0000

Why would that ever happen? Software is too important for people to not sell outside of communism and free software people aren’t as good as making consumer products as capitalists

New comment by FormerBandmate in "How Obama’s BlackBerry got secured (2013)"

FormerBandmate — Thu, 08 May 2025 20:59:54 +0000

Whose victory over the “empire”? I think you will find whatever empire comes next will be worse

New comment by FormerBandmate in "How Obama’s BlackBerry got secured (2013)"

FormerBandmate — Thu, 08 May 2025 20:57:04 +0000

A similar thing seems responsible for signalgate. The NSA needs better tech tbh

New comment by FormerBandmate in "xAI has acquired X, xAI now valued at $80B"

FormerBandmate — Sat, 29 Mar 2025 14:48:47 +0000

Rhis raises it back to the original level (although entirely based off the absurdly overinflated value of Grok at $80 billion. VCs…)

New comment by FormerBandmate in "Sailfish Mobile OS"

FormerBandmate — Sun, 06 Oct 2024 22:51:51 +0000

BlackBerry was a huge player. They declined, as with Nokia, entirely because they didn’t use a platform

New comment by FormerBandmate in "Did your car witness a crime? Bay Area police may be coming for your Tesla"

FormerBandmate — Sat, 31 Aug 2024 19:04:07 +0000

Honestly using it for actual serious violent crimes is way better than speeding

New comment by FormerBandmate in "Caltech, long a bastion of male students, enrolls first class of majority women"

FormerBandmate — Tue, 27 Aug 2024 16:47:58 +0000

Also there are way more women applying, to the point where you’re more than double as likely to get in as a man than as a woman. There’s a huge argument about this but no one actually looked up the data for some reason: https://www.clarkecollegeinsight.com/blog/how-to-get-into-ca...

New comment by FormerBandmate in "Caltech, long a bastion of male students, enrolls first class of majority women"

FormerBandmate — Tue, 27 Aug 2024 16:46:07 +0000

It seems like there is actually some affirmative action for men going on at Caltech, the exact opposite of what he claimed. Check out the acceptance rates, it’s double for men

https://www.clarkecollegeinsight.com/blog/how-to-get-into-ca...

New comment by FormerBandmate in "Caltech, long a bastion of male students, enrolls first class of majority women"

FormerBandmate — Tue, 27 Aug 2024 16:44:16 +0000

Actually it’s the opposite, it’s harder for women to get into college. 4.5 vs 1.9% for Caltech lmao

https://www.clarkecollegeinsight.com/blog/how-to-get-into-ca....

New comment by FormerBandmate in "Caltech, long a bastion of male students, enrolls first class of majority women"

FormerBandmate — Tue, 27 Aug 2024 16:41:37 +0000

They can just date down? A lot of the times those degrees don’t pay better anyway

New comment by FormerBandmate in "Google's 'Reimagine' tool helped us add wrecks, disasters, and corpses to photos"

FormerBandmate — Wed, 21 Aug 2024 18:36:20 +0000

AI safety people literally want the world to be a Fisher-Price version of 1984. It’s the gun emoji writ large

New comment by FormerBandmate in "Warner Bros. Scrubs Cartoon Network Website, Erasing Years of History"

FormerBandmate — Sat, 10 Aug 2024 17:57:59 +0000

We don't know tons of stuff about history because of lost information. The Library of Alexandria had tons of valuable information. The internet should be a way to get around that but...

New comment by FormerBandmate in "The Danger of Superhuman AI Is Not What You Think"

FormerBandmate — Sat, 03 Aug 2024 18:38:39 +0000

> "AI risk is a concern because less intelligent entities are not usually able to constrain the behavior of more intelligent entities" - A coarse and imperfect model indeed, but certainly a model based on observations of interactions in the real world.

Donald Trump was the president of the United States. FDR was a very smart man but Oppenheimer was smarter and FDR had him build the atomic bomb. This is just wrong, and ChatGPT is nowhere near as intelligent than a five year old (intelligence is not knowing facts)

New comment by FormerBandmate in "How Does OpenAI Survive?"

FormerBandmate — Fri, 02 Aug 2024 01:27:42 +0000

The power grid itself

New comment by FormerBandmate in "How Does OpenAI Survive?"

FormerBandmate — Fri, 02 Aug 2024 01:26:45 +0000

All of Uber's investors made money, their market cap is $124 billion. Terrible ROI but higher than all of their rounds

New comment by FormerBandmate in "Notes on Tajikistan"

FormerBandmate — Sat, 22 Jun 2024 17:52:10 +0000

Processing coffee yourself takes skill that gangsters who take over a government don't have. The most successful countries after decolonization are meritocracies

New comment by FormerBandmate in "Notes on Tajikistan"

FormerBandmate — Sat, 22 Jun 2024 17:49:46 +0000

Colonialism does not justify genocide