Hacker News: SirHumphrey

New comment by SirHumphrey in "Dopamine Fracking"

SirHumphrey — Mon, 08 Jun 2026 09:44:13 +0000

Woodland strawberries grow even better somehow. We used to have them planted at the garden, then a few years ago we removed them and planted something else and this year I was surprised to find that they somehow survived and moved a few meters away from where they originally were.

They also taste better in my opinion.

New comment by SirHumphrey in "News about Raspberry Pi 6 and Microcontroller Development"

SirHumphrey — Thu, 28 May 2026 22:24:19 +0000

I would tend to agree unless you need those gpio pins. Then there are few other good options.

New comment by SirHumphrey in "I don't think AI will make your processes go faster"

SirHumphrey — Sun, 17 May 2026 16:19:28 +0000

Most software is much simpler than a c compiler.

New comment by SirHumphrey in "I believe there are entire companies right now under AI psychosis"

SirHumphrey — Sat, 16 May 2026 09:20:07 +0000

I have recently needed to read a skill document because it was more understandable and more through than the official document.

New comment by SirHumphrey in "Frontier AI has broken the open CTF format"

SirHumphrey — Sat, 16 May 2026 08:54:53 +0000

Competitive programming scene always included offline competition and with AI they are becoming more important (and in general they were more fair even before). If CTFs are to survive, they should probably try to adopt this strategy.

You could even go so far that anything loaded on your computer is fair game, but not more than that (certain competitive programming competition for example allow unlimited amount of paper material - for CTFs you probably need much more than that, therefore electronic).

New comment by SirHumphrey in "Mullvad exit IPs are surprisingly identifying"

SirHumphrey — Fri, 15 May 2026 05:31:17 +0000

Sort of. There are a bunch of timing attacks bug in general it still works fairly well.

New comment by SirHumphrey in "The surprisingly complex journey to text-selectable client-side generated PDFs"

SirHumphrey — Fri, 08 May 2026 10:15:01 +0000

Nothing about PDF is easy. Similarly to what once Tom Scott said about time zones, every time I must deal with PDFs I pray that PDF.js can be hacked in to doing it instead, otherwise I just don’t bother.

It’s on of the few examples when converting it in to picture and chucking it in a multimodal llm is a more sensible solution than trying to parse it.

New comment by SirHumphrey in "OpenAI’s o1 correctly diagnosed 67% of ER patients vs. 50-55% by triage doctors"

SirHumphrey — Mon, 04 May 2026 05:56:44 +0000

And with the code, the closer you come to the physical world the worse LLMs fair.

Claude can’t really write Openscad and when I was debugging some map projections code last week it struggled a lot more than usual.

New comment by SirHumphrey in "Ti-84 Evo"

SirHumphrey — Fri, 01 May 2026 21:40:07 +0000

There is a certain joy in working with RPN and in using a piece of technology that was designed as a tool, not as a toy or an educational appliance.

With phone emulation, I probably need half a calculator. I have three.

New comment by SirHumphrey in "College instructor turns to typewriters to curb AI-written work"

SirHumphrey — Sun, 19 Apr 2026 07:59:01 +0000

Just because an AI can craft a decent Japanese text doesn’t mean I can. Just because AI can write x86 assembly also doesn’t mean I can.

You don’t give first graders a calculator because they will always have one in their pocket- they end up just inputting numbers in a magic box and not learning how to do this manually which will destroy their future mathematical education. It’s about the same with AI.

New comment by SirHumphrey in "AI assistance when contributing to the Linux kernel"

SirHumphrey — Fri, 10 Apr 2026 20:47:08 +0000

Quite a lot of companies use and release AI written code, are they all liable?

New comment by SirHumphrey in "Show HN: I built a small app for FSI German Course"

SirHumphrey — Sun, 05 Apr 2026 10:52:39 +0000

I don’t know what exactly the op meant by delivering a press release, but at least I after a four year high school german course can read newspaper articles in german but would struggle quite a lot to order food (granted, I wasn’t very good at it). In a more grammar heavy language understanding is a lot easier than writing which is a lot easier than speaking.

New comment by SirHumphrey in "Critics say EU risks ceding control of its tech laws under U.S. pressure"

SirHumphrey — Fri, 03 Apr 2026 21:26:32 +0000

I didn't even mention France, but if you insist:

I am using Fossil Fuel Support dataset from OECD. Latest available year is 2024: Specifically for petroleum there were 5228 million euros in tax exemptions and 586 million euros in direct budgetary transfer. For all fossil fuels there were 5 656 million in tax exemptions and 2579 million in direct budgetary transfers. So real, direct subsidies definitely exist.

New comment by SirHumphrey in "Critics say EU risks ceding control of its tech laws under U.S. pressure"

SirHumphrey — Fri, 03 Apr 2026 12:08:51 +0000

You are thinking too logically. In EU fuel is expensive because it’s heavily taxed AND there are a lot of fuel subsidies.

Or to quote an old TV show: Hacker: One of your officials pays farmers to produce surplus food, while on the same floor, the next office is paying them to destroy the surpluses. Maurice: That is not true! Hacker: No? Maurice: He is not in the next office, not even on the same floor!

New comment by SirHumphrey in "LinkedIn Is Illegally Searching Your Computer"

SirHumphrey — Thu, 02 Apr 2026 14:45:45 +0000

It’s becoming easier on iPhone (even uBlock origini is now available, if only the lite version), which is nice because internet is becoming more and more unusable without them.

New comment by SirHumphrey in "I quit. The clankers won"

SirHumphrey — Wed, 01 Apr 2026 13:18:02 +0000

Amara’s law: “We tend to overestimate the effect of a technology in the short run and underestimate the effect in the long run.”

New comment by SirHumphrey in "Slovenia becomes first EU country to introduce fuel rationing"

SirHumphrey — Fri, 27 Mar 2026 21:53:20 +0000

There was an election recently and it’s possible there will soon be another… That’s why the fuel is so cheap.

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

SirHumphrey — Thu, 26 Mar 2026 08:02:46 +0000

I think it’s more that when you have 300C thermal runaway in a cell in your battery storage bank the release of toxic compounds is the least of your problems.

I work quite a bit with batteries and the fear of battery fires hunts me in my sleep, especially with lipos.

New comment by SirHumphrey in "Why I love NixOS"

SirHumphrey — Mon, 23 Mar 2026 08:41:42 +0000

It also has very slow rebuild times.

New comment by SirHumphrey in "Western carmakers' retreat from electric risks dooming them to irrelevance"

SirHumphrey — Sat, 21 Mar 2026 15:07:06 +0000

In 2024[1]: - 37.2% in Sweeden - 51.6% in Denmark - 30.4% in Finland

of newly registered cars were BEV. Only Norway reaches 89% you are talking about. The total average of newly registered BEV cars in European Union was 13.6%.

The EV tech is here,but the grid in most EU countries is certainly not. The proliferation of heat pumps in the local area caused 3 blackouts caused by a failure of a local transformer - something that hasn't happened before or at least not as frequently. And in most countries you are looking at doubling the electricity consumption if all road transport was to switch to electricity.

[1]: https://www.eea.europa.eu/en/analysis/indicators/new-registr...