Hacker News: PaulKeeble

New comment by PaulKeeble in "The United Kingdom generates less electricity per person than in the 1970s"

PaulKeeble — Tue, 13 Oct 2026 17:50:09 +0000

There is also a substantial saving in household appliances from all the EU laws as well that have pretty substantially cut power consumption, including a lot of computers and devices at idle.

The UK household has quite significantly cut its power due to all these power saving innovations, far in excess of the actual drop because industry has increased its percentage of the mix over time.

New comment by PaulKeeble in "Ask HN: Do you want a router that has DD-WRT pre-installed?"

PaulKeeble — Tue, 13 Oct 2026 16:25:36 +0000

I don't disagree, the UI is quite bad in places. Some of its straightforward but most of its not. Just adding a WAN interface is a lot harder than it needs to be with their new abstraction you end up making all these weird abstract pieces. The one that really irritates me is the replacement of the routers DNS with your own, like a pihole, that is really bad at the moment especially since IPv6 and IPv4 are in quite different places and a different style of input.

But its also really feature rich and with a bit of effort you work it out and you have that longevity and the security issues fixed long term, much further than the manufacturer is willing to support it.

New comment by PaulKeeble in "Threat of AI share crash puts world financial stability at risk, says IMF"

PaulKeeble — Tue, 13 Oct 2026 13:56:20 +0000

I keep looking at the openrouter token charts and its exponential growth. Month on month they out out more and more tokens and critically the quality of those tokens keeps increasing as well. The charts are led entirely by the chinese open weight models like deepseek v4.1 flash and Z.AI's GLM-5.3 with Claude and GPT down in 6th and 7th place.

So while I think a number of these companies are never getting their training costs back AI as a thing is growing really fast right now, in the space of a year openrouter has 100x their token creation.

New comment by PaulKeeble in "Ask HN: Do you want a router that has DD-WRT pre-installed?"

PaulKeeble — Mon, 12 Oct 2026 17:46:16 +0000

I only wish more of them were actually mainline openWRT so the updates from the project were guaranteed. There is a lot of these devices that run a custom version and never have their hardware support put into mainline. That isn't really much different to what all the major router companies do, they are all running OpenWRT underneith but with their own skinned interface over the top.

New comment by PaulKeeble in "Suits Are Better Tech Than Modern Clothes"

PaulKeeble — Thu, 01 Oct 2026 06:43:11 +0000

Slowly but surely I think modern mass manufacturing is going to move towards personalised mass manufacture. I think in the meantime the clothes industry needs to do a better job of sizing, that is providing more detailed measurements so they can be selected better. At some point I ought to be able to buy a pair of trousers where I have defined more than just waist and length and especially true for tops based on chest or generic sizing. We can do this a lot better, its not intrinsic to suits they are just worn enough that bespoke services exist in quantity.

New comment by PaulKeeble in "500k facial scans at UK stations yield no arrests, 1 false positive"

PaulKeeble — Tue, 29 Sep 2026 13:08:15 +0000

The real ROI is the change in behaviour of people constantly surveiled. We know people change their behaviour when under constant scrutiny and this why the elites want it.

New comment by PaulKeeble in "The Millennium Problems for Biology"

PaulKeeble — Sun, 20 Sep 2026 13:51:17 +0000

Its much harder to produce a good fundamental list of biology problems because we are no where near as far along, so many basic things are not understood. There are still many unknown unknowns and these particular problems are limited to the realm of verifiable in a lab, which rules out much of what makes biology interesting and hard to study, and that is the organisms themselves and the interactions between their cells. The petri dish differs from the rat differs from the human and that is a part of what makes biology harder to progress.

None of these is likely the root to the wide array of chronic illnesses we can't treat and those seem like the next step to really put a lot of research into given how many people suffer from them and where we are today they seem achievable with the right investment.

New comment by PaulKeeble in "I'm Tired of the AI Tone"

PaulKeeble — Sun, 20 Sep 2026 11:37:55 +0000

Part of the problem is that AI has been trained on all text, not just the internet but scientific papers and books of all varieties. AI style is almost certainly the average of that style approach but we use very different styles for different writing and getting it wrong grates, and AI doesn't seem to deal with these style differences well at all.

New comment by PaulKeeble in "Border agents can search cellphones without a warrant or reasonable suspicion"

PaulKeeble — Fri, 18 Sep 2026 19:49:43 +0000

The problem is it will be detectable and detected and then the password demanded and a failure to provide it will result in charges. I think unfortunately the answer is the phone has to be plausibly empty when crossing the US border, they should focus their efforts on being able to store the full state of the phone remotely and encrypted and being able to restore it easily.

New comment by PaulKeeble in "Can we stop with the uptime percentages?"

PaulKeeble — Wed, 16 Sep 2026 16:51:46 +0000

One thing that is I feel missed about uptime percentage when compared to on premise uptime is when the downtime occurs. Its far more impactful if its in the middle of the working day or during the busy period of shopping. A store that goes offline in the middle of black friday or in the run up to Christmas is harmed a lot more than some down time on a Sunday night/Monday morning at 3am.

One thing I have noted over time is a lot of these AWS, Azure et el downtimes is they occur in the middle of everyones day, millions of people are impacted by them. Same with github its getting in the way of work. Whereas when we hosted services on our own equipment the downtime was usually out of main hours. The percentages are in many ways the wrong measure of downtime because hours aren't equal in impact to businesses.

New comment by PaulKeeble in "Why the software industry needs a lot of regulation"

PaulKeeble — Mon, 14 Sep 2026 13:22:51 +0000

I am much more interested in reigning in the industry itself with top level regulation to protect human rights like privacy. Once the excesses of the industry and its thirst for personal data result in crimes for the executives then we can talk about what happens if the developers decide to go along with the regulation breaking.

New comment by PaulKeeble in "Ask HN: Can we please limit the AI news flood?"

PaulKeeble — Fri, 11 Sep 2026 16:00:07 +0000

What I fear is the future career path for manual programming is fixing AI generated systems. I suspect it will pay very well because you will be finding and fixing things the AI driven work can't. It is going to be soul destroying as reading AI code is deeply unpleasant in the same way reading the articles is.

New comment by PaulKeeble in "New York thoracic surgeon: "For many patients 9/11 is not over""

PaulKeeble — Fri, 11 Sep 2026 15:40:10 +0000

Governments and medicine tend to track deaths as the only bad outcome from events like 9/11 or Covid. But typically there are a lot more people injured who suffer for the rest of their lives with the consequences, damage and chronic conditions that these events have left them with. We do need to put a lot more research into understanding and improving the quality of life of those with chronic conditions, Historically they have been ignored and are currently highly stigmatised by governments, the press and the populace.

Diseases that lead to death have had substantially better funding over the past 100s of years and chronic conditions are often rarely diagnosed, properly recognised let alone treated. The disabled is a club almost everyone joins at some point in there life and everyone is one accident or infection away from joining it for the the rest of their life. At the moment societies recognition and treatment of those with these conditions is really bad. The 9/11 survivors will be suffering for the rest of their lives. Medicine is something we all want, but at the moment the amount invested by governments is quite low compared to the upside impact on humanity of finding real answers.

New comment by PaulKeeble in "Ask HN: Can we please limit the AI news flood?"

PaulKeeble — Fri, 11 Sep 2026 14:37:11 +0000

I miss all the programming articles. It feels like everyone has given up with the very idea of ever writing code now and the entire practice of making software has been handed over to AI.

New comment by PaulKeeble in "OpenAI might have stolen another major proof"

PaulKeeble — Thu, 10 Sep 2026 11:31:16 +0000

They have throughout this period of AI products shown to reproduce works that they were trained on. They are getting sued all over the place for the theft of content right now and it seems courts and governments want to wave copyright protection (and ignore criminal acts because the "ai did it") to see where this leads.

Its why I stopped writing open source software, my code was stolen and put behind a paywall and the license under which it was published has not been adhered to. Doing work in the public domain at all now is just stupid, these companies are allowed to steal it and call it their own.

New comment by PaulKeeble in "Copyright does more harm than good and should be abolished"

PaulKeeble — Wed, 09 Sep 2026 07:59:38 +0000

A lot of the problem with DMCA is how its been implemented by companies. There is a provision in the original law making it a crime to make false claims, but organisations like Youtube don't bother to make it even possible to counter claim in that way and trigger that side of the law. Everyone seems to have forgotten it was even part of it, I have never seen it enforced.

New comment by PaulKeeble in "Copyright does more harm than good and should be abolished"

PaulKeeble — Wed, 09 Sep 2026 07:48:44 +0000

Games are another big area where distance to copyright seems to be where the innovation is occurring. So many of the big genres of games and ultimately the "game" that started the genre begun as a mod of another game. Counterstrike from half life, the myriad of factory games from modded minecraft, Arma and DayZ spawned the survival genre and further Arma mods formed the idea of PubG as well. In sim racing mods to Assetto Corsa have influenced the successor title of Competizone which chose GT3 cars since they were the most popular online. Then the modders on AC made long journey driving modifications and this has now influenced the upcoming Evo. There are probably many more examples from Skyrim or other FPS games of ideas born first by modders.

A lot of these mods break copyright of original material but with it they create an entire genre of games far outweighing the value of the initial piece of copyright.

New comment by PaulKeeble in "The Empire of Information"

PaulKeeble — Sun, 06 Sep 2026 12:24:37 +0000

A British Comedian called Jimmy Carr made the point that up to and including WW2 the Stasi in Germany was massive, it was a huge undertaking involving a massive percentage of the population just to monitor everyone and such a large organisation is going to have a lot of problems. That level of monitoring with todays cameras and software takes a tiny fraction of what it used to and can in many ways be more effective and its getting more effective with every advance in mass data processing and cheaper sensors.

New comment by PaulKeeble in "Brits would quite like their private messages to stay private"

PaulKeeble — Sun, 30 Aug 2026 13:15:15 +0000

At least 3 parties don't that stand members almost everywhere in the country.

New comment by PaulKeeble in "France reaches 94.9% fiber coverage in 2026"

PaulKeeble — Wed, 26 Aug 2026 16:05:47 +0000

The expense for one is enormous. Getting all the rights to dig and running the job is a full time job for a long period time. In many cases its not even possible and the existing firms might tie you up in court and bankrupt you long before you complete.