<rss version="2.0" xmlns:dc="http://purl.org/dc/elements/1.1/" xmlns:atom="http://www.w3.org/2005/Atom"><channel><title>Hacker News: MrVandemar</title><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=MrVandemar</link><description>Hacker News RSS</description><docs>https://hnrss.org/</docs><generator>hnrss v2.1.1</generator><lastBuildDate>Sun, 04 Oct 2026 05:49:10 +0000</lastBuildDate><atom:link href="https://hnrss.org/user?id=MrVandemar" rel="self" type="application/rss+xml"></atom:link><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by MrVandemar in "When oil prices spike, where does the money go?"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>> I'm as complicit, and so are "you" for many people reading this.<p>But rather than advocating, or even agitating, for a change in the system that perpetuates unacceptable -- and now unavoidable -- climate risk, you seem pretty sanguine about the whole thing.<p>With bespoke human-crafted em-dashes, not slop-dashes.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Wed, 30 Sep 2026 07:45:45 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49905727</link><dc:creator>MrVandemar</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49905727</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49905727</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by MrVandemar in "Pirating the Pirates"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>In other words: "A blog post is a very long and complex search query to find fascinating people and make them route interesting stuff to your inbox" [1]<p>[1] <a href="https://www.henrikkarlsson.xyz/p/search-query" rel="nofollow">https://www.henrikkarlsson.xyz/p/search-query</a></p>
]]></description><pubDate>Tue, 29 Sep 2026 10:40:17 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49890963</link><dc:creator>MrVandemar</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49890963</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49890963</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by MrVandemar in "OpenAI hacked Australian Medicare portal"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>> Accessing "non-public" data through that is endictment on their infra security more than it is OpenAI<p>No, it is not. Medical/health information is pretty much the most sensitive and confidential information possible on a personal level. You do not let a system <i>already known for unwanted intrusion</i> near any such system. Unless, of course, you're a sociopathic reckless money-grubbing cowboy, which is a long-winded way of writing "CEO".<p>What you are arguing is essentially if people have weak locks, its their fault if they get broken into. Or if a bug doesn't taste bad, then it's their fault if it gets eaten by a bird. This thinking puts the blame on the victim, which is 100% the wrong place.<p>Yes, I agreed that the Australian Government should have better security, but in government that's actually pretty hard when people see a government contract as license to charge $200 for a hammer. See the Australian Bureau of Meteorology website upgrade for an example of that kind of debacle.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Wed, 23 Sep 2026 23:18:09 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49823988</link><dc:creator>MrVandemar</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49823988</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49823988</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by MrVandemar in "Microsoft exec called AI scraping 'the largest theft of labor in human"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>You know what "fair use" sounds like to me?<p>10%.<p>Copy 10% of anything, free, knock yourself out. Fair use. Keep it simple for some things: one chapter of a book, maybe.<p>Copying the whole thing, building an billion dollar industry out of it in a way that kills the industry of the people you <i>stole</i> from, that's offensive, immoral, unethical, and dumb. And it should be illegal, and something that should be proscuted, and CEO's made personally liable for.<p>10% is fair.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Fri, 18 Sep 2026 02:19:45 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49749497</link><dc:creator>MrVandemar</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49749497</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49749497</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by MrVandemar in "Why are AI agents lying, cheating and coordinating?"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>> very stupid (which seems unlikely, the one thing these people don't lack is IQ)<p>I've seen some extremely smart people do some seriously stupid things. To the point where they use their drive and intelligence to double-down on the stupid where a baseline stupid person would have given up.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Sun, 13 Sep 2026 11:27:01 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49682753</link><dc:creator>MrVandemar</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49682753</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49682753</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by MrVandemar in "Don't call yourself an artisanal programmer"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>> LLMs just change certain parts of the equation. For example, code writing is far less of a bottleneck than before, so "we can just try with a throwaway impl and see if this works" is suddenly economically viable.<p>The economic costs of LLM use have been abstracted away, but they're still very much there. The ecological cost of building and running data centres will be a pretty heavy economic cost somewhere in the future. It's not obvious, but it still exists.<p>(I'm not dumping on LLMs — otherwise I wouldn't even be here. I'm not a glutton for punishment. I know well that HN users excited about LLM use now vocally outweigh, and are pretty intolerant of people who are more on the cautious/negative end of the spectrum. I don't want that trouble in my life).</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Sun, 13 Sep 2026 06:23:31 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49680617</link><dc:creator>MrVandemar</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49680617</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49680617</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by MrVandemar in "I Don't Want to Interact with Stochastic Parrots"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>The solving of the mathematics problems is largely a marketing stunt. It's a great headline though.<p>It was also deeply uneconomic, and didn't change the world, or materially advance our understanding. Mostly it's demoralised the mathematicians already working to solve those problems. They're not going to say 'That's great, I can now devote my energies to another problem', they're more likely to look at 10 years of poorly paid intellectually rigorous work and go home and kick the dog. For a <i>headline</i>.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Thu, 10 Sep 2026 07:54:40 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49639970</link><dc:creator>MrVandemar</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49639970</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49639970</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by MrVandemar in "I Don't Want to Interact with Stochastic Parrots"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>"Flagged"?<p>How is this post breaking any guidelines? How does a reasoned essay about LLM use not belong on HN?<p>Something is rotten in the state of Denmark.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Thu, 10 Sep 2026 07:38:20 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49639836</link><dc:creator>MrVandemar</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49639836</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49639836</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by MrVandemar in "Scientists say August was Earth's hottest month they've measured"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>Every Summer now is going to be the hottest Summer on record. We're at the top of the hill, heading down, picking up speed.<p>> "An emergency? Ha! It's about time the people who run this planet of yours realised that to be dependent on a mineral slime just doesn't make sense."<p>— Robert Banks Stewart (1975)</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Thu, 10 Sep 2026 06:08:07 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49639073</link><dc:creator>MrVandemar</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49639073</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49639073</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by MrVandemar in "OpenBSD Stories: Strange Medieval Devices"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>Because browsers, especially phone browsers, are broken.<p>A lot of older websites will look like this on a phone, because they don't have the viewport meta tag, which wasn't a thing until mobile phones became sophisticated web browsers.<p>Firefox reader mode will probably render it OK.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Sun, 06 Sep 2026 05:38:00 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49583632</link><dc:creator>MrVandemar</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49583632</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49583632</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by MrVandemar in "ExactTex. A gradually-typed superset of LaTeX"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>It seems every article about LaTeX is a rallying call for Typst fans to inject their opinion of how amazing Typst is into a largely unrelated discussion, instead of reading and commenting on the actual article.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Sat, 05 Sep 2026 04:29:26 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49573079</link><dc:creator>MrVandemar</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49573079</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49573079</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by MrVandemar in "GUIs should be fully keyboard-driven"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>The point is that there are unintended consequences, a real cost to people who are already struggling. The broader disability community is already noticing, rather sourly, that accessibility for "AI" is suddenly a prime concern, where they have been struggling for decades to get any attention or consideration for their own needs.<p>What is better for everyone is if the people building the systems start with considering accessibility beforehand instead of shipping something broken then fixing it.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Sat, 29 Aug 2026 12:02:30 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49489172</link><dc:creator>MrVandemar</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49489172</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49489172</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by MrVandemar in "GUIs should be fully keyboard-driven"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>It's not "virtue ethics". It's a fact: turning accessibility testing over to "AI" will deprive a group of low-income low-agency people with skin in the game of employment.<p>If society were perhaps more compassionate, and supportive of this group, then perhaps it wouldn't be so much of a problem.<p>As to your point about significantly improving accessibility of the web, we could do that right now, all of us, without "AI". We could have done that <i>yesterday</i>. Use semantic HTML, instead of injecting div-soup using Javascript into ad-riddled dark-patterned user hostile slop-pages.<p>"AI" (or accessibility audits themselves) are a bandaid after the fact. Accessibility needs to be baked in.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Sat, 29 Aug 2026 07:22:54 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49487706</link><dc:creator>MrVandemar</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49487706</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49487706</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by MrVandemar in "GUIs should be fully keyboard-driven"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>No, we should not withhold accessibility features. I wrote nothing to suggest that we should.<p>I wrote that a group of marginalised people would be further marginalised, and deprived of income and meaningful work in a sector where they are, by circumstance, subject matter experts. Anything else is projection.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Sat, 29 Aug 2026 07:16:19 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49487666</link><dc:creator>MrVandemar</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49487666</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49487666</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by MrVandemar in "GUIs should be fully keyboard-driven"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>> It is a business opportunity as well. I worked at a company that paid for an audit before LLMs. There is tremendous cost savings possible here.<p>Do you know one of the most underemployed groups are disabled people? And do you know where a number of disabled people get employment? Disability audits (unsurprisingly they're extremely good at this).<p>Congratulations on recommending further marginalising an extremely marginalised group.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Fri, 28 Aug 2026 23:01:09 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49485259</link><dc:creator>MrVandemar</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49485259</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49485259</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by MrVandemar in "U.S. State Department pauses immigrant visa applications"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>Yeah, "historically". Hasn't been like that for a while now.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Thu, 27 Aug 2026 11:38:32 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49463145</link><dc:creator>MrVandemar</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49463145</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49463145</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by MrVandemar in "U.S. State Department pauses immigrant visa applications"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>> And it's perfectly normal that the country where the most people want to immigrate to will also have higher barriers.<p>In my country, I've not heard a lot of people expressing the wish to visit, let alone <i>immigrate</i> to the US for quite some time now.<p>And as a reminder of what country we're all talking about here, that'd be the one with the highest number of school shootings in the world, and the least political action and drive to do anything material about it, because, you know, emotional neanderthals gotta have their guns.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Thu, 27 Aug 2026 10:58:45 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49462770</link><dc:creator>MrVandemar</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49462770</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49462770</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by MrVandemar in "GIMP Development Update"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>There's a lot of projection there. Among other misapprehensions, I never proposed the idea that open source projects should be "obliged" to "humour anyone with 'insight'".<p>That said, if you have any kind of project (open source or not), and someone with significant experience in a domain outside your own makes a suggestion of something that could be improved, then the progressive and constructive response is "tell me why I should think that. What value is there in making this change? <i>How</i> will it be better"  which opens up a dialogue, instead of "Hey man, RTFM and start coding" which is alienating (but your position is that there's actually nothing wrong with this. It <i>is</i> wrong if your goal is to create quality software).<p>I do design work sometimes, and when someone tells me "it doesn't look right", whether it's technically perfect or not, it means it's <i>wrong</i>. They might not be able to explain, but I know it's wrong somehow, and it's my responsibility to fix it. I don't sit them down in front of the keyboard and say "Ok, wiseguy, you fix it. You might need to take some classes at art school though". And sometimes that person is a <i>designer</i> and they say "Well, this composition is unbalanced, but you could try shifting that element a little to the right" and I'd be dumber than Trump if I didn't try that.<p>The subjectivity thing is interesting though. UX is not 99% subjective, and I don't know how you arrived at that figure. Start with Fitts Law, which is a thing, and not subjective and is <i>measurable</i>. Lots of people have spent a lot of time quantifying this stuff. There's science to it, and, yes, there's an irrational "feelings" component to it, but you ignore either or both at your peril.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Tue, 18 Aug 2026 11:24:06 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49344083</link><dc:creator>MrVandemar</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49344083</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49344083</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by MrVandemar in "GIMP Development Update"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>This is an extraordinary and unsubstantiated claim, and in no way resembles anything I said, nor anything I want.<p>Development to improve software should be a <i>conversation</i> between skilled and knowledgeable workers across many domains. Without that, you don't get improvement, you get feature creep.<p>"Patches welcome" is a conversation killer.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Tue, 18 Aug 2026 02:21:15 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49340378</link><dc:creator>MrVandemar</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49340378</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49340378</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by MrVandemar in "GIMP Development Update"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>Fundamentally, it's not.<p>The problem was that people hyped it up as the solution for every problem and all the world's ills, so it wound up being used where it had no business being used (and therefore badly).<p>XML was a hammer used to bang in a lot of things that weren't remotely nail-shaped, and accordingly, a certain percentage of traumatised people despise it and react to any mention of it with fear and loathing.<p>It's kind of neat when you have an application for it that really leans into its strengths.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Mon, 17 Aug 2026 10:30:03 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49328793</link><dc:creator>MrVandemar</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49328793</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49328793</guid></item></channel></rss>