Hacker News: FrankWilhoit

New comment by FrankWilhoit in "Proof That the Unraveling of MAGA Has Begun [video][46 Mins]"

FrankWilhoit — Sat, 04 Jul 2026 10:32:32 +0000

Not unravelling. Refocusing. The peasant ideology will always dominate, until it takes the species down with it.

New comment by FrankWilhoit in "Microsoft commits $2.5B and 6k employees to new AI implementation unit"

FrankWilhoit — Fri, 03 Jul 2026 14:38:52 +0000

6000 people are being committed to this project today so that they can be fired day-after-tomorrow.

New comment by FrankWilhoit in "Trump Made $1B on Crypto Deals While His Fans Lost a Fortune"

FrankWilhoit — Fri, 03 Jul 2026 09:46:11 +0000

"made", or "was given"?

New comment by FrankWilhoit in "We Don't Have to Be This Bad at Improving Society"

FrankWilhoit — Thu, 02 Jul 2026 21:02:05 +0000

All while successive technological discoveries raise the minimum standard of thought: vertiginously, incomprehensibly, unattainably. Something's got to give.

New comment by FrankWilhoit in "We Don't Have to Be This Bad at Improving Society"

FrankWilhoit — Thu, 02 Jul 2026 09:12:12 +0000

"Society" (i.e. northern European and Anglophone) doesn't want to be improved.

New comment by FrankWilhoit in "They Don't Know How It Works"

FrankWilhoit — Wed, 01 Jul 2026 15:48:09 +0000

The opacity is the point.

New comment by FrankWilhoit in "(Lord) Timothy Dexter"

FrankWilhoit — Tue, 30 Jun 2026 18:47:14 +0000

Future historians -- far, far future, if at all -- will place Timothy Dexter and Elon Musk in the same category.

New comment by FrankWilhoit in "Guess what, lawmakers? The Runtime Is the Regulator"

FrankWilhoit — Sun, 28 Jun 2026 11:55:05 +0000

It is no good saying that "...engineers know how to solve distributed trust problems...." Some engineers do, but much of the code (not only AI, but across all industries) is being written by engineers who do not.

New comment by FrankWilhoit in "A Perfect Meritocracy Will Have Little Social Mobility"

FrankWilhoit — Sat, 27 Jun 2026 21:00:17 +0000

The difference between meritocracy and "meritocracy" is that the former is a training function, whose goal is to learn the set of contributors whose contributions can be ignored.

In "meritocracy", on the other hand, that set is the initial premise and the purpose of every production is to justify it post-facto.

Obviously the distinction between these two things is essential. Now think about the perspectives from which the distinction is imperceptible.

New comment by FrankWilhoit in "The Demoralization of the White-Collar Worker"

FrankWilhoit — Sat, 27 Jun 2026 16:40:21 +0000

Talk about the emotional illness of the owning and managing classes, taking the form of two paranoid delusions:

1. That all of their employees and customers are stealing from them;

2. That the purpose of "government" -- really, of civilization -- is to baulk them of direct revenge for that theft.

New comment by FrankWilhoit in "Expect RAM prices to stay high with Micron locking in deals for 5 years"

FrankWilhoit — Fri, 26 Jun 2026 18:37:42 +0000

And when demand collapses?

New comment by FrankWilhoit in "US at 250 – Why has the US been so successful and can it continue? [pdf]"

FrankWilhoit — Fri, 26 Jun 2026 14:06:34 +0000

Who says the US has been so successful? I look around and I do not see success. Of course I do not see superlative failure either; but I do see accelerating deterioration.

New comment by FrankWilhoit in "DuckDuckGo's AI Feature Is Telling Users That Trump Died of Rabies"

FrankWilhoit — Fri, 26 Jun 2026 11:17:24 +0000

The only criterion is whether it makes a good story. Would you watch that, or change the channel?

New comment by FrankWilhoit in "If Software Gets 90 Percent Cheaper, Who Captures the Savings?"

FrankWilhoit — Thu, 25 Jun 2026 14:50:49 +0000

The capital money has to be spent. But it will not be reallocated to the internal roles/activities that this article suggests, because those things are part CapEx and part OpEx. It will have to go to consultants, because they are pure CapEx.

New comment by FrankWilhoit in "A Tesla Crashed Through a Harris County Home. Is the Car to Blame?"

FrankWilhoit — Thu, 25 Jun 2026 11:00:18 +0000

The purpose of automation is to obscure responsibility.

New comment by FrankWilhoit in "Really?"

FrankWilhoit — Tue, 23 Jun 2026 11:38:31 +0000

Well, of course they can. Just look around you.

New comment by FrankWilhoit in "Ask HN: Anyone got a 43" 4K? Thoughts?"

FrankWilhoit — Mon, 22 Jun 2026 23:32:09 +0000

I (composer, Sibelius notation software on Windows) have been using a landscape 43" 4K next to a portrait 32" 4K for quite a while now. It is the ideal combination for an unusual use case. I found that I had to turn ClearType off in order to get rid of color fringing, but I suspect that was an interaction with something that Sibelius was doing.

New comment by FrankWilhoit in "Designing Firefox for the Future"

FrankWilhoit — Mon, 22 Jun 2026 16:58:37 +0000

"...more direct, more human, and sometimes more playful or fiery...."

I rejected the original Macintosh because it smiled at me.

New comment by FrankWilhoit in "Why haven't we replaced HTML/CSS/JS?"

FrankWilhoit — Thu, 18 Jun 2026 20:41:25 +0000

Are you thinking of things like Time Cube? Seriously, anything written 30 years ago could still be written today and would still run.

Standards are made by first-movers even if what they move is howling junk. Every technology has been immature when first brought to market. What we need to be looking at are the obstacles to maturation, which seem to be increasing.

New comment by FrankWilhoit in "Starmer, the Under-16s Are Smarter Than You"

FrankWilhoit — Tue, 16 Jun 2026 10:55:06 +0000

We adapt without learning.