Hacker News: Peteragain

New comment by Peteragain in "Creating for a niche"

Peteragain — Fri, 08 May 2026 06:15:47 +0000

Some friends and I are having a conversation about "caring" - not necessarily for others but care in what you do. Wim Wenders 2023 film "Perfect Days" is relevant here.

New comment by Peteragain in "Shrdlu"

Peteragain — Wed, 29 Apr 2026 17:56:06 +0000

I'm not sure the situation has changed for AI. For a real scientific agenda we need to at least attend to the things a demo can't do, not just what they can. The trouble with such analysis of current ai systems is that the negative examples are instantly included in the training data.

New comment by Peteragain in "Sodium-ion EV battery breakthrough delivers 11-min charging and 450 km range"

Peteragain — Thu, 26 Mar 2026 07:57:49 +0000

Economy of scale is an engineer's wet dream: the biggest of everything (And a fit with the bureaucrat's dream of a bigger budget). Move fast and break things says the opposite. Set up the production line to make one small one, and the next one better. Repeat. This is a far better approach with developing tech, and applies to power provision. The challenge is to get a market for the early versions when we all know the next will be better. Saying LiPo suck, and Chinese Tech is bad? Just part of the PR sales pitch to get us to try the better alternative. I'd bet on non rechargeable mag-air batteries made with sea water and off peak wind power myself :-)

New comment by Peteragain in "ArXiv declares independence from Cornell"

Peteragain — Fri, 20 Mar 2026 07:13:47 +0000

.. and soon to be dependent on US military funding? Controlled by someone who has run-ins with universities? This'll end in tears.

New comment by Peteragain in "The “small web” is bigger than you might think"

Peteragain — Wed, 18 Mar 2026 07:18:55 +0000

The government funds some libraries, and for some publicly acceptable reason. That reason should apply to web infrastructure, and indeed the small web. Other libraries are community run. Again whatever motivates that probably applies to small web stuff.

New comment by Peteragain in "The “small web” is bigger than you might think"

Peteragain — Wed, 18 Mar 2026 07:14:42 +0000

More how they exist.

New comment by Peteragain in "The “small web” is bigger than you might think"

Peteragain — Tue, 17 Mar 2026 07:56:33 +0000

I'm very keen on public libraries. I'm fortunate in that our village has a community run one, there is the county one, and I can get to The British Library. Why do these entities exist? A real question - not rhetorical. Whatever the answer, I am sure the same mechanism could "pay for" public hosting.

New comment by Peteragain in "Gitana 18: the new flying Ultim trimaran"

Peteragain — Tue, 17 Mar 2026 07:28:23 +0000

There is indeed something beautiful about traditional boats but this is a different kind of beauty. And 40 knots in 3 metre waves? Wow! Like F1 cars don't drive like road cars the automated control means this is not a boat but something else wonderous.

New comment by Peteragain in "Allow me to get to know you, mistakes and all"

Peteragain — Sun, 15 Mar 2026 18:08:37 +0000

I love some of the crystal clear poetic expressions Pinyin speakers come out with. When Charles was a prince he was called "number one son belong missus queen". I certainly don't want that "made better".

New comment by Peteragain in "Samsung Upcycle Promise"

Peteragain — Tue, 24 Feb 2026 17:24:30 +0000

I think they missed a trick. This phone could be replaced - I think it might be time - but it works fine. I won't replace it now, but if I could use it for something else then I would likely go okay, if I get a new phone I also get a baby monitor!

New comment by Peteragain in "MIT Technology Review has confirmed that posts on Moltbook were fake"

Peteragain — Tue, 10 Feb 2026 08:15:02 +0000

I'm going to use that stat. Even if 78.4% of quoted stats are made up.

New comment by Peteragain in "Environmentalists worry Google behind bid to control Oregon town's water"

Peteragain — Mon, 26 Jan 2026 07:16:40 +0000

From a linguistics perspective "environmentalists worry" is a phrase designed to trigger a certain response. It sets up an us versus them scenario with "us" being anti environmentalists. "Concerns over" would include the reader. More interesting for the journalism for some.

New comment by Peteragain in "Why medieval city-builder video games are historically inaccurate (2020)"

Peteragain — Fri, 23 Jan 2026 07:42:05 +0000

I suspect we focus too much here with good old Methodist values around improvement and work. I seem to recall a study in Arnemland (North (wet) Australia) where the indigenous population spent about 10% of their time hunting and gathering - not an 8 hour day by any means. Two points: this was normal, but of course their numbers were controlled by inconsistent weather. The feast and famine cycle over the year mean even that 10 was not evenly distributed. The people are also of course nomadic, but not as much as you might think in that the procession follows a 'route' which looks much like the seasons in agricultural society. I suspect medieval society also partied hard, and bitched about their love life mostly, with the local brute squad creaming off most of the men for their wars, or disease or crop failure decimating the population every few generations.

New comment by Peteragain in "Think of Pavlov"

Peteragain — Sun, 11 Jan 2026 13:16:30 +0000

Nice. I was once accused of having Tourette's Syndrome for "speaking my mind". I was young then and think I am better now but this is the advice I needed :-)

New comment by Peteragain in "How Markdown took over the world"

Peteragain — Sat, 10 Jan 2026 19:01:34 +0000

I used gopher before mosaic! And yes the issue is not the tech, but the social engineering of a community. Git(hub) has a community; IMHO GitHub users need to put more cool things on there like blogs.. perhaps..

New comment by Peteragain in "How Markdown took over the world"

Peteragain — Sat, 10 Jan 2026 08:14:47 +0000

The original idea was there with html 1.0. The lesson we needed to learn was that some think you can't sell stuff to do things if doing them is simple. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Embrace,_extend,_and_extinguis...

Perhaps md is an opportunity to re invent the web: a browser for just md AND a search engine with an open algorithm that indexes just what is visible.

New comment by Peteragain in "European Commission issues call for evidence on open source"

Peteragain — Fri, 09 Jan 2026 14:11:32 +0000

Did people here see the Cory Doctorow thing a few days back about DMCA and "Article 6 of the 2001 EU Copyright Directive"? https://pluralistic.net/2026/01/01/39c3/#the-new-coalition Basically without open source, the rest of the world will have to keep paying a tithe to American companies, and hence tax in the USA.

New comment by Peteragain in "The Post-American Internet"

Peteragain — Tue, 06 Jan 2026 07:31:22 +0000

The point is the opportunity created by trump's tariff policy. Saying do what I want or I'll burn your house down, and then burning your house down - you no longer need to do what is demanded. An opportunity has appeared.

New comment by Peteragain in "The British empire's resilient subsea telegraph network"

Peteragain — Wed, 31 Dec 2025 08:09:11 +0000

My great, great grand dad carted telegraph poles for the construction of the southern half of that! Family oral history.

New comment by Peteragain in "Show HN: Z80-μLM, a 'Conversational AI' That Fits in 40KB"

Peteragain — Tue, 30 Dec 2025 09:22:25 +0000

And the Chomskybot analysis is quite enlightening..