Hacker News: Mutjake

New comment by Mutjake in "ETFs now hold more than $3.1T worth of just top US companies"

Mutjake — Sun, 31 Aug 2025 06:15:19 +0000

If some business is defensively buying off all the competition, that’s an easy ATM for a serial entrepreneur, especially if the large business is price gouging: found a competitor, grow it e.g. with some like-minded funding, sell it at a premium. Wait for the clauses of the contract to run out, and rinse and repeat.

The defensive acquisitions can work on domains with gravity effects to a degree, but those are domains are far from being the total market.

New comment by Mutjake in "Economists don't know what's going on"

Mutjake — Sat, 26 Apr 2025 20:10:35 +0000

Complex systems are difficult to predict or reason about, especially in turbulent times, and when only partial information about the world is available, and only part of it is accurate. Nothing new under the sun. If you’d always know what’s going on, you could categorically beat the market or make central planning to work flawlessly.

New comment by Mutjake in "The Ozempocalypse Is Nigh"

Mutjake — Sat, 15 Mar 2025 06:17:54 +0000

Well, it’s a medication designed for diabetes (the weight loss variant has a higher dosage and different brand name, Wegowy or so), and for diabetes the usage is, by default, permanent. Unless it is replaced by other medication or if the lifestyle changes make the insulin resistance not be an issue any more.

New comment by Mutjake in "Sweden Investigates New Cable Break Under Baltic Sea"

Mutjake — Sat, 22 Feb 2025 06:16:33 +0000

The unfortunate side-effect is also that as US does not honor guarantees given in the Budapest memorandum, no country is going to give up nuclear weapons trusting contracts, and that European nation states (and possibly Canada, Mexico) will draw the conclusions on how to best get functional security guarantees ie. have own nuclear stockpile. This has been the status quo USA has bought by being a security provider, and by betraying it the downside is to returning to the nuclear armageddon scare of the cold war — if a European country nukes Russian territory, the retaliation might well bite back to the US soil. If Europe got too cozy with conventional warfare capabilities, the US got too cozy with the idea that they’re providing security out of the goodness of their hearts instead of it being a geopolitical bargain where they receive certain advantages as well.

New comment by Mutjake in "WebVM is a server-less virtual Linux environment running client-side"

Mutjake — Sat, 13 Jul 2024 08:05:24 +0000

My client dies the logging, and I can e.g. grep decade old logs. I’m not sure if you can get same level of access to Discord logs (=export them). I guess Discord bot that logs everything as a historian is a partial solution (I guess log bot cannot catch DMs).

New comment by Mutjake in "WebVM is a server-less virtual Linux environment running client-side"

Mutjake — Fri, 12 Jul 2024 08:00:42 +0000

IRC <3 Still daily driving it with some friends. I wouldn’t be surprised if my Discord chat history was unavailable in a decade, so IRC is a nice option to run on the side. There’s value in simplicity, and I admit the risk of sounding like a tech hipster.

New comment by Mutjake in "SQL is syntactic sugar for relational algebra"

Mutjake — Sat, 23 Mar 2024 14:19:24 +0000

Well, to be fair ”from foo delete” would do the same I suppose :-D Unless there’d be an explicit end to the statement to designate you really want to delete everything. Which might not be a bad idea. Or make ”where …” mandatory and bring in ”delete_all” or ”delete everything from foo” as a syntactic guardrail. This is equally implementable, whichever the order of ”delete” and ”from” would be.

New comment by Mutjake in "SQL is syntactic sugar for relational algebra"

Mutjake — Sat, 23 Mar 2024 11:52:07 +0000

I sort of feel the same…but on the other hand if you consider ”delete from” exists also, it’s not completely unsensible to consider you first tell what operation you’re about to perform to the data. Would be nice to start with the source entity name for sure. Dunno what ”select 1” would look like, I guess the from foo would be optional.

Random saturday ramblings, sorry about that :-D

New comment by Mutjake in "US developers can offer non-app store purchasing, Apple still collect commission"

Mutjake — Wed, 17 Jan 2024 12:38:28 +0000

Probably an unpopular opinion, but as an Apple user it is okay for me to pay 30% extra (which I often do instead of using Android and getting certain apps for free), so I avoid having to sideload Epic/Facebook/whatnot stuff from their own mandatory app store + having the hassle of figuring out if there's a subscription model and how difficult it is to terminate, how to handle refunds, what darkpattern analytics are included in the appstore binary etc. etc.

If you need certain amount of money per user for the product to be profitable, raise the price to account for Apple's cut. But please do not force me to install app stores from companies which have their lifeblood in data brokering my life. At least I have an understanding with Apple that if they go haywire with that stuff (like it was close with the whole CSAM scanning debacle which damaged my trust in Apple and I started considering alternatives) they will lose my hardware purchases as well.

New comment by Mutjake in "US developers can offer non-app store purchasing, Apple still collect commission"

Mutjake — Wed, 17 Jan 2024 12:20:22 +0000

I like to think this via car analogy: you have similar ecosystem with car infotainment system platforms, but there the cost of switching is often minimum tenfold. Game consoles are an analogous platform to phones with similar pricepoint in switching costs. Of course phones are much more present in our daily lives for the most part of the population. But I suppose the similar burden would easily hit those platforms if legislation would be imposed, and it would come with both upsides and downsides depending on one's viewpoint.

New comment by Mutjake in "A place where no humans will tread for 100k years"

Mutjake — Sun, 27 Aug 2023 06:01:02 +0000

In 100k years there’s much less need to process it anycase, the waste is very front-heavy in its radioactive harmfulness. Of course it’s still chemically harmful later on, but it does not differ from other heavy metals and is leagues better disposed of than all the lead, cadmium, arsenic, and other such stuff we have laying around (which does not decay at all).

New comment by Mutjake in "A place where no humans will tread for 100k years"

Mutjake — Sun, 27 Aug 2023 05:43:05 +0000

We do have large peat reserves (AFAIK some estimates compare the total amount to Norway’s oil reserves), but usage of peat has been decreasing/phased out for climate and environmental reasons.

New comment by Mutjake in "A place where no humans will tread for 100k years"

Mutjake — Fri, 25 Aug 2023 08:45:19 +0000

Yeah, and to my understanding we're not specifically looking for it as the uranium isn't really that expensive at the moment. The largest plant in Finland needs 128 tons of uranium for the fuel to be fully loaded which on a quick calculation is $57 per pound * 2.2 pounds per kilo * 128000 kilos = around $16M and based on a quick search it lasts from three to five years.

Since the fuel is cooled in water ponds for decades before it is processed, even in the case of a nuclear industry boom there's ample lead time to alter the plans if running out of materials seems to become an issue. I'd be much more worried about usage of oil as it is the base material for a lot of different things like medicines, and we're burning the stuff away (granted, we can do synthetic hydrocarbons, but the whole thing with oil is a bigger problem in my books than running out of uranium; it's still there to be retrieved if it really comes down to it).

New comment by Mutjake in "A place where no humans will tread for 100k years"

Mutjake — Fri, 25 Aug 2023 07:31:46 +0000

As a Finn I think this is the correct way. To add to some other comments here I presume uranium is so abundant even if we multiply our usage that the opportunity cost of reusing the spent fuel is not a major issue. We have a lot of spent fuel in places like the bottom of the ocean we can tap into first. There are a lot of different materials we're burning or burying even if it might be useful in the future, I'd look into repurposing those first as they carry a much bigger risk in e.g. polluting the ground water before worrying about a marginal amount of global spent fuel being buried (you need to account for the fact that we are a small country with non-optimal geography, it is less probable that it would be viable for us build processing facilities to recycle spent fuel as it is much more viable in e.g. France where there is much more raw materials available relatively close + shipping the spent fuel from Finland is probably quite expensive as especially in the current geopolitical setting we are somewhat of an island logistically).

Take what I said with a grain of salt as I am not an expert in the matters of nuclear technology, just sharing my layman's viewpoint. It's probably a complex system so I'm not sure if anyone has definitive answers as it all depends on the amount of nuclear power the world is going to build, how the reprocessing technology and know-how develops, how the alternative means for electricity production develop etc. etc. -- so we can only make educated guesses for now, but I see that we're making a good compromise here with the marginal amount of the global spent nuclear fuel we possess considering our options. For other parts of the world the equation probably plays out differently, e.g. not having suitable solid bedrock to utilize might be an obvious showstopper.

New comment by Mutjake in "Apple wins antitrust court battle with Epic Games, appeals court rules"

Mutjake — Tue, 25 Apr 2023 14:38:37 +0000

The previous main daily driver Android I owned was a Nexus 5 which lost OS updates in less than 3 years after purchasing it new. That’s one important aspect of quality Android is seriously missing on and where iPhones are exceptional compared to the competition.

EDIT: Actually it lost OS updates in three years after being introduced as a flagship product, so I guess I bought it and it stopped receiving updates after a year or so, worse than I remembered. Stuff like that ruins the brand reputation, quality-wise.

New comment by Mutjake in "Finland becomes the 31st member of NATO"

Mutjake — Tue, 04 Apr 2023 13:38:27 +0000

As General Adolf Ehrnrooth aptly put it ”Ei enää koskaan yksin”, ”We should never again defend ourselves alone” as the lesson of the Winter War. Glad that we finally acted on that lesson and got allied. Another nail in the coffin of finlandization, albeit with a heavy price the Ukrainians continue to pay every day.

New comment by Mutjake in "Finland Becomes a Member of NATO on Tuesday 4 April"

Mutjake — Mon, 03 Apr 2023 13:39:39 +0000

Long overdue, but better late than never. Although the circumstances are grim due to the war in Ukraine, I’m happy we can be in alliance with our European and Northern American kin (and hopefully Sweden will follow suit soon once the wrinkles in relations with the countries stalling get process get sorted out, so we can get on with further integrating our defences both within Nordics and the Baltian countries). Thank you for our new allies for the trust.

New comment by Mutjake in "Credit Suisse finds ‘material weakness’ in reporting, scraps exec bonuses"

Mutjake — Wed, 15 Mar 2023 05:06:43 +0000

Personally I’d probably check Patrick Boyle’s videos from Youtube as a start. IMHO he tends to do a good job in summarizing these cases (bear in mind I might not be the best judge of that, of course): https://youtu.be/hhHdtDyQD90 https://youtu.be/2t4lGmNDiHo

I’d also welcome any interesting further reading on the subject!

New comment by Mutjake in "Nord Stream leaks confirmed as sabotage, Sweden says"

Mutjake — Sat, 19 Nov 2022 17:37:32 +0000

The gas was already off, so what would’ve the US exactly achieved with it, accounting for the non-trivial risk of getting caught?

New comment by Mutjake in "Deno 1.27"

Mutjake — Fri, 28 Oct 2022 06:06:19 +0000

As a quick note, while containers offer a degree of isolation, depending on your use case you might not want to put too many eggs into that basket (Linux privilege escalation bugs do happen). E.g. Firecracker VM is a relatively easy improvement to make of course, and on cloud env the container isolation might be Amazon’s/Microsoft’s problem. Just figured it would be good to mention not to see containers as a silver bullet, while they are better than not using containers on a shared host (and a useful tool in general :-)