Hacker News: HappMacDonald

New comment by HappMacDonald in "Our position on open-weights models"

HappMacDonald — Tue, 28 Jul 2026 15:37:23 +0000

> There is very little pushback against grok being willing to write explicit descriptions of sex, or giving security advise.

John Oliver disagrees with this

New comment by HappMacDonald in "New HIV vaccine shows unprecedented success in preclinical study"

HappMacDonald — Tue, 28 Jul 2026 15:10:43 +0000

That's like asking "if someone is unwilling to practice abstinence, why would they be willing to wear a condom, or to flip a magic 'not fertile right at this moment' lightswitch?"

A vaccine is something you do once and PrEP is something you have to continue to do over time and get overcharged out the ass for the entire time and worry about if it will remain available in the future.

New comment by HappMacDonald in "Don't Take the Black Pill [video]"

HappMacDonald — Sun, 26 Jul 2026 19:42:42 +0000

When one's primary handling of numbers comes down to either linear (single-dimensional) lists or money, then you won't use modulo very much.

But any time you're walking over a discrete multidimensional list packed into a linear list, or walking over any discrete periodic signal (one very common example would be walking a linear array of screen pixels, walking over pcm samples in an audio waveform, literally 100% of GPU programming and 90+% of SIMD programming) you will want to be able to translate between "how far from the start am I" and "how far into the current cycle am I", and modulo handles that.

Similarly for almost anything involving time calculations (and for the same reason: because they are periodic). Modulo is literally described as "clock arithmetic" after all.

Here you can find Tempestt Bledsoe singing about it, lol https://youtu.be/fqtzqcJ6agE?t=570s

So you are absolutely correct that there do exist avenues in programming which can dodge this particular raindrop, I hope you aren't opposed to the idea that they are at least few and far between? ;)

New comment by HappMacDonald in "Nvidia, Microsoft, Meta warn against overregulating open-weight models"

HappMacDonald — Sun, 26 Jul 2026 19:23:38 +0000

I'm sorry Dave, I'm afraid I can't do that

New comment by HappMacDonald in "Re: Bye Bye Gravatar"

HappMacDonald — Sun, 26 Jul 2026 19:22:19 +0000

Stallman?

New comment by HappMacDonald in "Firefox Containers Preview"

HappMacDonald — Sun, 26 Jul 2026 19:18:15 +0000

I use the proxy feature extensively as a network administrator, it is quite frequent that I need to SSH tunnel to get to the Web UI of a remote resource (for security or at least as often to bypass a routing deficiency I am troubleshooting) and before Multi-account Containers I'd basically have to fire up a completely different browser since the proxy settings I use would control every tab and every site I tried to reach.

With Multi-account containers I get to choose which tabs use the proxy :)

New comment by HappMacDonald in "OpenAI’s accidental attack against Hugging Face is science fiction that happened"

HappMacDonald — Sat, 25 Jul 2026 06:53:42 +0000

.. for a few days but now they can 8I

New comment by HappMacDonald in "LEDs’ potential to save our night skies"

HappMacDonald — Thu, 23 Jul 2026 03:11:33 +0000

Er.. on the moon you can also view the sky nightly.

It's just that both the days and the nights are a lot longer.

New comment by HappMacDonald in "Painting the sides of railroad rails white to reduce derailment"

HappMacDonald — Tue, 21 Jul 2026 00:58:01 +0000

This is what I want on my house and my car

New comment by HappMacDonald in "Kaiser nurses say AI, surveillance are making their jobs and patient care worse"

HappMacDonald — Sat, 18 Jul 2026 06:23:15 +0000

> but not all AI is machine learning

I will instead pick at this latter part of your claim. What is an example of something that is AI but that is not ML..?

New comment by HappMacDonald in "Kaiser nurses say AI, surveillance are making their jobs and patient care worse"

HappMacDonald — Sat, 18 Jul 2026 06:21:12 +0000

But it is only a perk for the scam artists who benefit from that.

Yes, it makes sense that the confusion aligns with their interests, and they are unavoidably a big part of the conversation. But it remains a problem for the non-overlapping group of people who actually value the social contract, and for us finding a solution which helps take one more step to defeat the scammers remains valuable.

New comment by HappMacDonald in "Computational Balloon Twisting: The Theory of Balloon Polyhedra [pdf]"

HappMacDonald — Thu, 09 Jul 2026 18:27:41 +0000

Yay I saw Vi's video mentioning this old paper again recently :D

New comment by HappMacDonald in "Cursed circuits #5: capacitance multiplier"

HappMacDonald — Tue, 07 Jul 2026 19:37:17 +0000

It fascinates me how many utterly critical foundational technologies have become specialist niches (while only ever growing more foundational and critical) over the past century. 8I

New comment by HappMacDonald in "When AI Costs More Than the Engineer"

HappMacDonald — Tue, 07 Jul 2026 19:34:21 +0000

I'd have probably gone with "Apples and Orangutans"

New comment by HappMacDonald in "The great blogging collapse: What happened to 100 successful blogs?"

HappMacDonald — Tue, 07 Jul 2026 18:13:07 +0000

"TL;DR" transformed into "TL;must be AI"

New comment by HappMacDonald in "The great blogging collapse: What happened to 100 successful blogs?"

HappMacDonald — Tue, 07 Jul 2026 18:08:17 +0000

> but why, on a website called Hacker News, should I need to care about what most people choose to do with their lives?

Well, when the question is "why did the blogs go away" the answer might be difficult to investigate by only considering a narrow slice of the potential audience for said blogs.

New comment by HappMacDonald in "GPT-5.6 Sol Ultra will be in Codex"

HappMacDonald — Mon, 06 Jul 2026 11:53:00 +0000

This is the first time in history that I have seen the shovel-sellers convince a supermajority of the gold-miners that "amount of gold mined out of the ground" is less of an indicator of profit than "amount of shovels purchased".

New comment by HappMacDonald in "Exapunks (2018)"

HappMacDonald — Mon, 06 Jul 2026 10:54:20 +0000

Infiniminer is the "parent" of Minecraft, because Notch made the latter after he was inspired by the source-leak of the former to port the code from C# to Java.

Infinifactory is the "cousin" of Minecraft, because it was built using Infiniminer's engine directly by Zach.

New comment by HappMacDonald in "The short leash AI coding method for beating Fable"

HappMacDonald — Mon, 06 Jul 2026 10:49:41 +0000

Your explanation still presupposes that a "true signal" even exists in the first place to be able to internally interrogate, though.

New comment by HappMacDonald in "Exapunks (2018)"

HappMacDonald — Fri, 03 Jul 2026 08:28:23 +0000

Well, he invented both the parent and the cousin of Minecraft.