Hacker News: Sharlin

New comment by Sharlin in "In Denmark, the spread of solar panels has become a divisive issue"

Sharlin — Mon, 13 Apr 2026 18:51:59 +0000

Building HVDC lines from North Africa to Europe, for example, wouldn't be a huge feat of civil engineering. Rather standard stuff, really.

New comment by Sharlin in "Claude.ai down"

Sharlin — Mon, 13 Apr 2026 16:05:30 +0000

Yeah, completely analogous. Physical tools aren't subscription-based and prone to outages. Except when they are, but that's – luckily – still something that people feel strongly negative about.

And if my IDE or compiler (or computer!) stopped working because it requires a connection to the mothership I'd be livid. But I guess the cloud-everything, subscription-everything model has successfully made people accept an objectively worse world.

New comment by Sharlin in "Claude.ai down"

Sharlin — Mon, 13 Apr 2026 15:59:35 +0000

Sounds incredible to me if that's actually the case somewhere.

New comment by Sharlin in "Microsoft isn't removing Copilot from Windows 11, it's just renaming it"

Sharlin — Mon, 13 Apr 2026 15:54:18 +0000

Yeah, the "3D Objects" thing is just surreal. You can't make this stuff up.

New comment by Sharlin in "Microsoft isn't removing Copilot from Windows 11, it's just renaming it"

Sharlin — Mon, 13 Apr 2026 15:45:51 +0000

Yes, "Copilot" is not the first brand that MS has tried to stick to everything while being just as confused about it as (inevitably) the consumers. Although somehow they did manage to keep .NET mostly aimed at developers - besides the actual frameworks there's Visual Studio .NET and other dev tools, but I'm actually a bit surprised that they never had "Office .NET" or "Outlook .NET" or even "Windows .NET Edition" or something like that. Maybe they still had some sane people in charge of marketing and brand management back then.

New comment by Sharlin in "Microsoft isn't removing Copilot from Windows 11, it's just renaming it"

Sharlin — Mon, 13 Apr 2026 15:32:07 +0000

It was absolutely sold as a replacement. And it's gone now because literally nobody wanted it, used it, or understood why it existed. Sure, you could still find the old Paint in a disused lavatory behind a locked door with a sign "beware of the leopard". It wasn't even installed by default, unlike the 3D version, or do I recall incorrectly? Even MS isn't so stupid as to ship two separate accessories both called "Paint" in the same OS by default!

New comment by Sharlin in "All elementary functions from a single binary operator"

Sharlin — Mon, 13 Apr 2026 15:22:09 +0000

I hope you get help. Mental health issues are not fun.

New comment by Sharlin in "Microsoft isn't removing Copilot from Windows 11, it's just renaming it"

Sharlin — Mon, 13 Apr 2026 15:20:04 +0000

It was supposed to be a third-party replacement, sure, but certainly not an official one. It started as a student project. It's just the prefix that tricks your brain to associate it with MS's own .NET branded applications.

New comment by Sharlin in "Microsoft isn't removing Copilot from Windows 11, it's just renaming it"

Sharlin — Mon, 13 Apr 2026 15:08:22 +0000

Reminder that this is the company that decided to replace Paint with something called "Paint 3D", the laggiest and bloatiest "literally nobody wanted this" drawing app I've ever seen.

New comment by Sharlin in "The AI Layoff Trap"

Sharlin — Mon, 13 Apr 2026 12:57:21 +0000

Um, I expressly said that high wages wouldn't stay? If the choices are either being jobless and homeless, or doing some menial cotton-harvesting job while still being homeless, we got a slight social problem. The GP said that there's a lot of demand for menial labor. That demand only exists if you don't have to actually pay for said labor. In other words, it's not demand at all.

New comment by Sharlin in "All elementary functions from a single binary operator"

Sharlin — Mon, 13 Apr 2026 12:52:02 +0000

Congrats, you made a hallucination machine successfully hallucinate?

New comment by Sharlin in "The AI Layoff Trap"

Sharlin — Mon, 13 Apr 2026 06:52:26 +0000

Infinite demand, maybe, but not at wages that most people are willing to accept. Of course, if there's literally no other work, then previously-middle-class people will take what's available and become homeless because the wage doesn't pay the bills (which are, in places, extremely inflated due to decades of jaw-droppingly bad housing and transport policies). Sounds like a highly desirable future.

New comment by Sharlin in "Eternity in six hours: Intergalactic spreading of intelligent life (2013)"

Sharlin — Sun, 12 Apr 2026 18:45:45 +0000

This is a study of the feasibility of launching an intergalactic colonization wave (and its implications re: the Fermi paradox), not a proposal that humans should do that (it would be just slightly ahead of its time for that!), or a discussion of the ethics or higher-level utility of doing so. It would be refreshing to see someone discuss the things paper actually discusses. To use early-2000s terminology, the paper's future shock level is higher than that of most HN readers, leading to rather banal discourse.

In any case, I'm fairly sure the authors agree that sending mindless automata to colonize the universe doesn't seem like a great idea. Nevertheless some alien intelligence (including an Earth-based AGI) might find it a completely reasonable, even imperative, goal.

But sentient machines or uploads (assuming for the sake of this this thought experiment that they are possible)? That's a different thing.

New comment by Sharlin in "Eternity in six hours: Intergalactic spreading of intelligent life (2013)"

Sharlin — Sun, 12 Apr 2026 18:35:31 +0000

Refreshing to see a technical criticism of this paper for a change.

New comment by Sharlin in "Eternity in six hours: Intergalactic spreading of intelligent life (2013)"

Sharlin — Sun, 12 Apr 2026 18:32:37 +0000

There are no answers expected. This is a colonization wave.

New comment by Sharlin in "Seven countries now generate nearly all their electricity from renewables (2024)"

Sharlin — Sun, 12 Apr 2026 17:08:33 +0000

I guess if you're not allowed to use solar in the form of chemical potentials frozen long ago into carbon-y molecules buried underground, the second best thing is to use solar in the form of gravitational potential stored in water molecules that's constantly getting replenished because the planet just happens to work like that.

New comment by Sharlin in "A Tour of Oodi"

Sharlin — Sun, 12 Apr 2026 15:50:55 +0000

Happily, Helsinkians don't agree. Everyone seems to love Oodi.

New comment by Sharlin in "Simplest Hash Functions"

Sharlin — Sun, 12 Apr 2026 13:03:42 +0000

I don't think there are any reasonable use cases for a non-constant-length hash.

New comment by Sharlin in "Simplest Hash Functions"

Sharlin — Sun, 12 Apr 2026 13:01:32 +0000

Yes, I know, it's the natural way to do it in functional programming. Honestly I doubt there are any FP languages that don't do it like that.

New comment by Sharlin in "Simplest Hash Functions"

Sharlin — Sun, 12 Apr 2026 11:03:25 +0000

Yes. But that's a known misfeature of C and no other language does it like that. Plus I kind of meant arbitrary byte strings where you can have embedded zeroes and thus have to know the length.