Hacker News: Skwid

New comment by Skwid in "Show HN: Typeset sitelen pona and copy a PNG (for toki pona speakers)"

Skwid — Wed, 20 May 2026 10:57:51 +0000

pali pona a! ike mi wan li ni: suli pi sitelen lon lipu ni li sama ala e sitelen kama jo. ni li pona tawa sina anu seme?

Nice work! My only complaint is that the downloaded picture is lot bigger than the preview for me, is that as expected or is it maybe making some bad assumptions about DPI?

New comment by Skwid in "Why is almost everyone right-handed? A new study connects it to bipedalism"

Skwid — Wed, 20 May 2026 06:59:24 +0000

I do this once or twice a year in a borrowed/hired auto car. Usually about 10 minutes into the drive when I've got used to it, and started to drive more naturally. Approach junction, throttle back, stamp full uncoordinate force of left foot on to 'clutch' pedal, send passengers through the windscreen.

New comment by Skwid in "First tunnel element of the Fehmarnbelt Tunnel immersed"

Skwid — Mon, 11 May 2026 13:30:04 +0000

If you disable javascript it scrolls normally. There's also no text, or images, but you can scroll past all the pretty background colours

New comment by Skwid in "Website streamed live directly from a model"

Skwid — Thu, 23 Apr 2026 11:13:59 +0000

I don't know what everyone's complaining about, it seems perfectly accurate to me: https://flipbook.page/n/8e369afba8ea4563a739b58105c3c3d8

New comment by Skwid in "Parrots pack twice as many neurons as primate brains of the same mass"

Skwid — Mon, 30 Mar 2026 14:40:20 +0000

I suspect the more significant difference here is the selection pressures. Take a good look at any part of a bird and you'll see millions of years of selection for reduced weight. The cost of weight is just so much greater when you're flying. Interesting too that bats tend to have lower neuron counts than say rodents. Did dinosaurs have a more weight efficient brain before flight, or were they forced to shrink before re-evolving that complexity in a smaller package?

New comment by Skwid in "“Car Wash” test with 53 models"

Skwid — Tue, 24 Feb 2026 09:18:10 +0000

I have as much respect for Claude as any other LLM product. Which is to say, approximately none. But if I needed a spark plug I'd walk over and buy a spark plug.

Perhaps some feathers have been ruffled by the insinuation that their favourite word predictor was wrong, but I assure you it's not all of them

New comment by Skwid in "Another GitHub outage in the same day"

Skwid — Tue, 10 Feb 2026 09:07:45 +0000

When I last had the misfortune of using devops copy and pasting text from a work item would take the background colour with it, though not the text colour. Colleages in dark mode would rearrange some sentences, and I'd be left with black text on almost black background.

Genuinely baffling incompetence

New comment by Skwid in "The Duodecimal Bulletin, Vol. 55, No. 1, Year 1209 [pdf]"

Skwid — Tue, 23 Dec 2025 09:20:43 +0000

I'm standing my ground on optimal base, but I will absolutely be using those hex pronounciations in future

New comment by Skwid in "The Duodecimal Bulletin, Vol. 55, No. 1, Year 1209 [pdf]"

Skwid — Tue, 23 Dec 2025 09:07:32 +0000

I'm more of a seximal man myself: https://www.seximal.net/

New comment by Skwid in "The Going Dark initiative or ProtectEU is a Chat Control 3.0 attempt"

Skwid — Mon, 22 Dec 2025 09:14:44 +0000

Perhaps the messaging was different where you lived, but I don't believe any credible professional was suggesting those outside healthcare wear masks for their own protection. Mask mandates are to reduce the risk of others catching covid from you, a considerably easier task for which even cloth masks are usefully effective. There's a reason surgeons masks are still used.

New comment by Skwid in "Wasp Blower"

Skwid — Fri, 24 Oct 2025 13:25:32 +0000

I see a lot of advice being given in these comments, and I find it a little alarming that my own preference hasn't got a mention. Just leave them be? I've had plenty of wasp nests in sheds, roof spaces, garages etc and never had a problem peacefully coexisting with them. Almost everyone I've spoken to about it shares this sentiment, and generally wouldn't do anything about it unless it was in an especially risky location.

I get the impression most commenters here are from the US, whilst I live in the UK. Am I naive to the aggression of American wasps, or is it just more acceptable to kill creatures you find bothersome over there?

Does anyone with experience both sides of the pond have any insight?