Hacker News: PaulHoule

New comment by PaulHoule in "Why Linux Still Feels Unstable"

PaulHoule — Sun, 14 Jun 2026 20:58:01 +0000

Best way to be satisfied with a Linux distribution is to not install X or Wayland and ssh into it.

New comment by PaulHoule in "Extinction-Level Capitalism"

PaulHoule — Sun, 14 Jun 2026 20:56:32 +0000

There”s a certain way people are more afraid of unfamiliar and new things and complacent about the old and familiar. Also I think environment and energy concerns about AI are overblown because of hype, like they are claiming they are building many times more data centers that are being built. A lot of the opposition to AI is based on critics being uncritical about numbers put out to justify the bubble, just like all the talk about danger similarly drives a false feeling of fomo-urgency.

New comment by PaulHoule in "Extinction-Level Capitalism"

PaulHoule — Sun, 14 Jun 2026 14:32:39 +0000

Anything to distract people from real problems like energy and the environment.

New comment by PaulHoule in "Windows 1.0 and the WinAPI, 40 Years Later"

PaulHoule — Sun, 14 Jun 2026 13:57:05 +0000

So em dash.

New comment by PaulHoule in "The redistribution of housing wealth caused by rent control (2023) [pdf]"

PaulHoule — Sun, 14 Jun 2026 03:41:48 +0000

It is a major paradigm in economics that if you change this by X% it will change something else by Y% and to estimate that ratio. It may be that people don’t really think that way: economic growth seems to be continuous and exponential in character whereas economic dislocations are discontinuous in character.

I think of how I was absolutely shocked when a Big Mac meal was $10 during the pandemic (I think it cost about $2.50 the first time I bought it) and didn’t think I was going to buy 4% less of it but rather I skipped the fries.

New comment by PaulHoule in "There is a shadow hanging over this Fable thing"

PaulHoule — Sun, 14 Jun 2026 00:02:10 +0000

AI doesn’t have skin in the game

New comment by PaulHoule in "Dangerous Technology for Americans Only"

PaulHoule — Sat, 13 Jun 2026 13:50:57 +0000

I am not a fan of the -ist and -ism constructions, see

https://ericksonian.com/reverse-meta-model-nominalizations

though there are so many pernicious language patterns that projects like E-Prime (the verb “to be” goes to together with nominalization like peanut butter goes with jelly) are doomed

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/E-Prime

New comment by PaulHoule in "There is a shadow hanging over this Fable thing"

PaulHoule — Sat, 13 Jun 2026 12:41:53 +0000

There’s a certain argument that people are just in over their heads for a society as large and complex as our and we just can’t cut it. Nothing that won’t be fixed by overshoot.

New comment by PaulHoule in "Digg"

PaulHoule — Fri, 12 Jun 2026 23:34:20 +0000

They rebooted again? I could swear somebody has an HDR profile pic.

New comment by PaulHoule in "Slightly reducing the sloppiness of AI generated front end"

PaulHoule — Fri, 12 Jun 2026 20:14:43 +0000

For years I would use free fonts and spend hours picking them out and getting depressed because they all had something wrong with them…. You get what you pay for.

For a recent project I really liked a font which was in the Adobe Fonts collection and when I had to set stuff in that font with Pillow I gladly bought the font from the foundry because it looks great and saves hours of searching for a “free” font, that is “free” as in puppy.

New comment by PaulHoule in "Slightly reducing the sloppiness of AI generated front end"

PaulHoule — Fri, 12 Jun 2026 20:11:51 +0000

Like you had to know a little HTML in the bootstrap era. I made what I thought was a pretty nifty landing page but I got endless complaints because “it looked like bootstrap”

New comment by PaulHoule in "Slightly reducing the sloppiness of AI generated front end"

PaulHoule — Fri, 12 Jun 2026 20:10:22 +0000

At this point I dunno if Win11 has an “original” UI. Up until Win 8 Microsoft kept introducing new widget sets. I think the official answer for how you are supposed to develop desktop apps is “use Electron” so far as I can tell… or better yet make a web application.