Hacker News: OroPla

New comment by OroPla in "Where's the Beef?: The lab-grown-meat revolution that wasn't"

OroPla — Thu, 24 Sep 2026 11:12:30 +0000

What I find interesting about this whole discourse is that the lived experience of animals matters to people. At all.

Just a hundred, two hundred years ago we made the Elephant rifle, because a normal gun couldn't bring it down, but it was a fun sport to go out and kill just for the heck of it. No one cared about the animals.

It seems like we are living in an age of suicidal empathy and I'm not sure how we got here.

New comment by OroPla in "Where's the Beef?: The lab-grown-meat revolution that wasn't"

OroPla — Thu, 24 Sep 2026 11:03:10 +0000

It used to be that kids as young as five year old were made to kill small animals like bunnies and chickens as a learning experience, but a bunch of people found this problematic so it isn't as common anymore.

New comment by OroPla in "Where's the Beef?: The lab-grown-meat revolution that wasn't"

OroPla — Thu, 24 Sep 2026 11:00:47 +0000

Honestly speaking, yes.

I've seen plenty of videos from slaughter houses, mostly ones activists use to point at the cruelty going on inside, but it never made me feel uncomfortable.

New comment by OroPla in "Ideas on modernizing the open-source desktop"

OroPla — Thu, 24 Sep 2026 10:54:05 +0000

There have only been two changes I experienced in the past decades that felt meaningful:

(1) Removing the mouse from as many workflows as possible

(2) Switching to a tiling window manager, in my case i3

Everything else has just been various ways of shuffling things around with no benefit to anyone.

New comment by OroPla in "The same nine streaming subscriptions cost $702/year more than in 2021"

OroPla — Thu, 17 Sep 2026 18:46:20 +0000

As far as supporting creators (or rather rights holders) goes, whether you pirate, buy a used copy or use a library makes absolutely no difference.

New comment by OroPla in "The same nine streaming subscriptions cost $702/year more than in 2021"

OroPla — Thu, 17 Sep 2026 18:40:08 +0000

Of those 2930 albums, how many can you write down from memory and to how many songs could you sing along? Getting flooded with too much information in a short time isn't necessarily a good thing for your brain. It hurts attention span and memory formation.

The calculation might look like you derive value, but it could also accidentally impact your brain negatively long term.

New comment by OroPla in "List of references on Sony websites to players "owning" their digital games"

OroPla — Thu, 17 Sep 2026 18:28:41 +0000

Since when are people digital?

New comment by OroPla in "Backups Aren't Simple"

OroPla — Thu, 17 Sep 2026 18:23:37 +0000

I've currently got two 10TB, one 14TB and one 18TB drive. I don't think what you describe is as easy for me as you expect. I've got one backup in a different city and one in cold storage.

The sizes are all over the place because I only buy a new drive when I run out of storage and then just get the largest one within a reasonable cost. It has been cost prohibitive to mirror everything and current prices aren't encouraging. Neither is the rate at which HDDs get larger. I was kinda hoping for 100TB drives under $400 by 2025 back in 2014, but that hope has been shattered.

New comment by OroPla in "Japan's book scene is moving from bookstores to libraries"

OroPla — Thu, 17 Sep 2026 11:23:44 +0000

Don't we already have rehabilitation centers? I definitely think that you have to take homeless people being a nuisance off the streets against their will.

There's already plenty of invisible homeless people living out of a car that shower in the gym. They aren't a public nuisance and there should be structures where someone like that can get help from.

But the actual homeless problem are the drug addicts and beggars that are a public nuisance. There's no solution to that problem other than moving them against their will, is there?

New comment by OroPla in "Backups Aren't Simple"

OroPla — Thu, 17 Sep 2026 11:12:25 +0000

I do use btrfs, but I don't really understand how to use it to protect against bit rot. I tried to look into it at some point, but got overwhelmed. Did invest in two backup copies, one of them off site, though.

However, looking at prices, I can see one of those backups just being dismantled to be used as more storage.

New comment by OroPla in "Backups Aren't Simple"

OroPla — Thu, 17 Sep 2026 08:44:30 +0000

Bit rot was mentioned in the article, but then no solution was offered. I also haven't found a good solution, unfortunately. If you only have a couple of Terabytes you could create check sums of everything and then verify regularly, but I feel this approach doesn't scale very well if you have lots of data.

New comment by OroPla in "EU chief opens door for Canada to become 'associate member'"

OroPla — Wed, 16 Sep 2026 13:17:26 +0000

Not sure if this is a good or a bad thing.

See: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49419237

New comment by OroPla in "Tech Fascism Has Come for American Democracy"

OroPla — Wed, 16 Sep 2026 11:16:05 +0000

Alternative take: education makes you a lot more efficient at exploiting people.

It is not education that is at the root of these things, but incentives. If the incentives are all wrong, so will be the outcomes. Take education as an institution. The way it is set up incentivizes cheating, and so nearly everyone tries to cheat.

New comment by OroPla in "Tech Fascism Has Come for American Democracy"

OroPla — Wed, 16 Sep 2026 11:14:11 +0000

In many ways, having a king was a lot better than having a bunch of people bickering among themselves without getting stuff done. At least the king was kinda tied to the country and thus the interest of the country was part self-interest.

New comment by OroPla in "LG says we're fake news [video]"

OroPla — Wed, 16 Sep 2026 08:49:59 +0000

Remember the story about the South Korean female president or whatever their title is being a brainwashed puppet of a radical feminist cult and thus had to abdicate as this came out? I don't remember how many years ago that was, but it's not like their education prevented the situation.

New comment by OroPla in "Stay discoverable in search while disallowing AI training"

OroPla — Wed, 16 Sep 2026 08:41:11 +0000

In a world where people's searches are already mostly answered by AI, is there any point to disallow the training?

I could totally see a future where Google just stops showing you links to actual web pages altogether and just gives you their chatbot.

New comment by OroPla in "Chopping up books when they're physically too big"

OroPla — Tue, 15 Sep 2026 19:56:10 +0000

Here I thought this was about shredding your books and going completely digital to save space.

New comment by OroPla in "A rough guide for going back to the Moon"

OroPla — Tue, 15 Sep 2026 14:39:43 +0000

Saddest part is that all the tech was apparently so utterly useless for anything that NASA lost it.

New comment by OroPla in "'Offensively cheap': solar power is looking up"

OroPla — Mon, 14 Sep 2026 20:41:19 +0000

The decision to not do solar was made last year, so that's how old the numbers are. It was made together with the people selling solar. It's very dependent on the direction your roof is facing and how much roof space you have. Also, installing solar is expensive (20k€ to 30k€) here in Germany, so despite power also being super expensive it still makes no sense. There's one neighbor that did it and kinda regrets it, since it's more expensive all around.

New comment by OroPla in "Does History Lean to the Left"

OroPla — Mon, 14 Sep 2026 15:28:33 +0000

Ah, yes. That's why Germany transformed from abject poverty after losing WWI into a superpower under the left wing management of the National Socialists.